People Australia

Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy (1816–1880), surveyor and amateur ethnographer, was born on 21 June 1816 at Datchett, Buckinghamshire, third child of William Snell Chauncy (1781–1845) and his wife Rose Therese, née Lamothe (1784–1818). In his memoirs, Philip wrote that his father ‘never practised any profession or business but derived his income from his father.’[1] Philip’s father was also known as William Brown and was the illegitimate son of William Snell Chauncy (1756–1829) and Eunice Brown (1753–1836), whose family came from the Isle of Man.[2] His mother Rose was the daughter of Dr Dominique Pierre Lamothe of the Isle of Mann.[3] He had two elder sisters, Theresa Susannah Snell and Martha Maria Snell. His mother died in 1818; the next year his father remarried, and a further five children were born.[4]

Chauncy’s paternal great-grandfather, William Snell (1720–1779), owned a large number of estates and enslaved people on the islands of Grenada, St Vincent, and Dominica. His son was born William Snell but was granted the right to use the name Chauncy in 1780 in his grandfather Charles Chauncy’s will.[5] As Charles’ sons had no sons of their own, this allowed the Chauncy name to continue. William Snell Chauncy Snr (1756-1829) lived at the Manor House on an estate in Winkfield Row, Berkshire.[6] He also had a house in Dublin, considerable property, and owned estates and enslaved people in Grenada. On his father’s death, he was left a half share of the Cape Sale estate in Grenada—a sugar plantation of 243 acres with 130 enslaved people, along with various annuities derived from estates on St Vincent, Tobago, and Grenada.[7]Ten years later he sold his share of the estate to William Pearce of St Swithin’s Lane for an unknown sum.[8] 

As well as his illegitimate son with Eunice Brown, William Snell Chauncy Snr had two daughters, Sarah and Catherine, with his wife Sarah Toulmin (1757–1834).[9] William and Sarah separated in 1789. In his will he left £11,000 in trust to his son and made provision (described by Philip as a ‘liberal bequest’) for his son’s children and for Eunice Brown.[10]

In 1820 the Chauncy family travelled to live in Angoulème, France; after two and a half years the family moved to Mont D’or. It is not certain whether the move was prompted by the lower cost of living in France or from a desire to experience a different culture. The children were mostly tutored at home by their father. Throughout his life Philip was often ill, suffering from what he referred to as ‘a distressing stomach complaint, accompanied by extreme and continual weakness.’[11] He was unwell during his time in France and he wrote later with affection of his eldest sister Theresa, who ‘did her best to supply the place of a mother to me.’[12] In 1825 the family returned to England: Philip and Theresa travelled first to Geneva and then rejoined the family before travelling to Llaugharne, where their youngest sister was born. They moved to Monmouth and then, following the death of their grandfather in 1829, to Worcester.[13] Philip received a year’s schooling at Monmouth Grammar School before attending a small school in Worcester run by the Reverend George Redford for a short time.[14]

It had been planned that Chauncy would be trained in medicine by his stepmother’s brother, John Harrison Curtis, but when he became ill with abscesses, in the early 1830s, his treating physician recommended that he be trained in an outdoor career, such as a land surveying, instead. Consequently, when he was seventeen years old Chauncy was articled for five years to surveyor Joseph Jackson of Cambridgeshire, where much of his work consisted of enclosing open land in accordance with the enclosure acts.[15]

In 1836 Chauncy’s sister, Martha, married Captain Charles Berkeley of the 60th Rifles, and shortly afterwards Berkeley, Martha, and Theresa embarked on the John Renwick for South Australia.[16] The sisters sent enthusiastic letters back to their family, sparking Chauncy’s interest in the new colony. Once he had completed his articles he made the decision to migrate and set about raising the money he would require, including the purchase of an order for 80 acres of land for £80 from the South Australian commissioners. To do so he used his portion of the money left to him by his grandfather.[17] In 1839 he followed his sisters to South Australia per Dumfries, selecting land in November.[18] The following year, Chauncy’s father, brothers William and Hugh, William’s wife, and their sister Sophia all came out.[19] Chauncy’s father returned after twelve months; William travelled to Britain in 1842, returning to South Australia in 1848; and Hugh went back to Britain around 1844, also returning around 1849.[20] The Chauncy family’s move to South Australia was made possible by the wealth they inherited from their grandfather.

Chauncy married Charlotte Kemmis (c.1816–1847), a fellow passenger per Dumfries, in Adelaide in 1841.[21] Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of the Reverend Thomas Kemmis of Ireland and Mary Humphries.[22] Shortly afterwards the couple departed for Western Australia, where he had received an appointment as assistant-surveyor. They lived in Guildford and Chauncy bought land, intending to build a house.[23] When Charlotte died in 1847, he was overwhelmed with grief and took six months’ leave, travelling to South Australia, the Portland Bay District, New South Wales, and Melbourne before returning to Western Australia.

The next year Chauncy married Susan Mitchell (1828–1867), the daughter of the Reverend William Mitchell, in Western Australia, with whom he would have nine children: Theresa Snell (1849–1886), Philip Lamothe (1851–1854), William Snell (1853–1903), Auscher Philip (1855–1890), Annie Frances (1857–1883), Constance (1859–1907), Amy Blanche (1861–1925), Frederick Philip Lamothe (1863–1926), and Clement Henry (1865–1902).[24] Chauncy and his family moved to King George’s Sound, two years after his marriage, where he took charge of the survey department. The family returned to Perth in 1852. The following year, Chauncy resigned his position and the family moved to Victoria, where he took up a position as surveyor-in-charge of the McIvor district. He was responsible for laying out the towns of Heathcote and Echuca and conducted other surveys. He was also responsible for all the land sales in his district. Chauncy bought a number of parcels of land in Heathcote and had a farm named Datchet, after his birthplace, about six miles out of town. During this time he was also made a magistrate.[25]

Chauncy had a deep and abiding interest in the First Nations peoples of Australia. He took opportunities to learn about Indigenous cultures wherever he travelled, attempted to learn different Indigenous languages and made lists of words from languages in Western Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania, and contributed to Robert Brough Smyth’s The Aborigines of Victoria. In Smyth’s book Chauncy described finding a Ballardong Noongar man to take him and his wife to see rock art in a large cave in the Avon Valley, east of Perth, Western Australia.[26] He questioned the local Ballardong people closely after this visit in an attempt to learn more about the art.[27] In approximately 1847, while living in Western Australia the Chauncys took six-year-old Wengal, the son of Whadjuk man Weeban, into their household.[28] Chauncy wrote that Wengal was consigned to them by his mother, Bukamjeen.[29] Wengal was educated not only in ‘spelling, English and Latin Grammar, geography, catechisms, arithmetic’ but also worked for the family and could ‘cook, wait at table, attend to horses, groom saddle them etc., work in the garden and perform many other services.’[30]

Chauncy also described visiting Menang woman Rachel Warndekan in Ebenezer, Victoria, in 1863, who had previously lived in the Annesfield Institution for Native and Half-Caste Children, run by Anne and Henry Camfield, in King George’s Sound. Chauncy had helped prompt the foundation of Annesfield when he mentioned Kojonotpat, a young Menang girl whom Chauncy assumed to have been abandoned, to Anne Camfield, in 1852.[31] Following its formation that year, Menang children living at the institution were indentured to the Camfields for ten years, tying them to the school.[32] Removing First Nations children to missions and reserves and controlling their mobility was a fundamental mechanism of missionisation across Australia; under the management of Anglican Bishop Mathew Hale during the 1860s, young First Nations converts to Christianity were sent to other missions across Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. In Victoria, Chauncy noted that he was able to speak with Rachel about King George’s Sound, and the institution, in her own language.[33]

Chauncy’s siblings also made their mark on the Australian colonies. Theresa married Lieutenant John Walker in Tasmania and the couple built a house on land she had bought in Hindley Street, Adelaide.[34] The couple also purchased a farm, which they named Havering, on the upper Torrens River. Chauncy described this as a ‘pretty little estate ... to which they used frequently to take little pleasure parties to eat the fruit and enjoy the scenery.’[35]Theresa is acknowledged as colonial Australia’s first female sculptor.[36]

William Snell Chauncy had trained as a civil engineer.[37] In South Australia he worked for the Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay railway line, supervising the construction of Australia’s first steam railway from Melbourne to Sandridge, although he was forced to resign in 1854 when his work on the Sandridge pier was found to be unsatisfactory.[38] As a government superintendent of roads in NSW he was responsible for the construction of many the state’s roads and bridges; ‘Chauncey’s Line [sic],’ which runs from Hahndorf to Wellington in South Australia, was named after him.[39] Hugh Chauncy worked as a surveyor and estate agent in South Australia, Victoria, and NSW.[40] Sophia Chauncy married Conrad Wornum in 1852 in Melbourne, who also became a licensed surveyor in South Australia.[41] Martha was one of South Australia’s early professional painters, known for her large watercolours of Adelaide and as a gifted portraitist.[42]

In Western Australia, Chauncy Spring in Chidlow is named after Philip Chauncy, as is Chauncy Street in Lancefield, Victoria: a town that he surveyed.[43] He was sixty-three when he died in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1880.[44] Much of his life had been spent surveying and selling land to the colonists of Western Australia and Victoria. The wealth that allowed Chauncy and his siblings to emigrate to the Australian colonies was derived from his family’s involvement in the slave economy in the West Indies from the early eighteenth century over four generations. They not only bought land in the colonies themselves but also enabled colonisation by surveying and selling land.

References

[1] Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy, Papers 1839–1878, F BOX 1036-1036(a), 1037, Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV).

[2] Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy, Memoirs of Mrs Poole and Mrs Chauncy (Kilmore: Lowden Publishing, 1976), 1; Will of William Snell Chauncy, PROB 11/1795/182, National Archives, Kew (TNA); Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy, Papers 1839–1878, F BOX 1036-1036(a), 1037, PROV; Non-conformist registers, New Bunhill Fields Burial Ground Islington, B/NBF/001, London Metropolitan Archives, via Ancestry.

[3] Chauncy, Memoirs, 1; John Corlet LaMothe, Family of LaMothe (1895), transcription at Family of LaMothe, accessed 28 May 2025, http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/famhist/families/lamothe.htm.

[4] Chauncy, Memoirs, 2.

[5] William Snell Chauncy ne Snell, Legacies of Slavery, accessed 11 June 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146645369.

[6] Chauncy, Memoirs, 1.

[7] William Snell Senior, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 4 June 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146645367.

[8] William Snell Chauncy ne Snell; Indenture, Cape Sale works and Sugar Plantation, 1789, https://www.hwph.de/stocks-bonds/losnr-auktnr-pa22-657_grundw_en.html.

[9] William Snell Chauncy ne Snell.  

[10] Will of William Snell Chauncy, 2 February 1832, PROB 11/1795/182, National Archives, Kew (TNA); Chauncy, Memoirs, 7.

[11] Chauncy, Memoirs, 55.

[12] Chauncy, Memoirs, 2.

[13] Chauncy, Memoirs, 3.

[14] Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy and Theresa Walker, Papers 1839–1878, MS 9287, State Library Victoria (SLV).

[15] Chauncy and Walker, Papers 1839-1878, MS 9287, SLV.

[16] Chauncy, Memoirs, 7.

[17]  Chauncy and Walker, Papers 1839-1878, MS 9287, SLV.

[18] ‘South Australian Gazette,’ Southern Australian (Adelaide), 6 November 1839, 4; Chauncey, Memoirs, 28.

[19] ‘Shipping Intelligence,’ Adelaide Chronicle and South Australian Literary Record, 21 October 1840, 3; ‘Shipping Report,’ Southern Australian (Adelaide), 24 November 1840, 2; Chauncy, Memoirs, 28.

[20] Chauncy, Memoirs, 8; ‘Shipping Intelligence,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 10 November 1849, 3.

[21] ‘Family Notices,’ Southern Australian (Adelaide), 19 March 1841, 2.

[22] Will of Reverend Thomas Kemmis, 1828, PROB 11/1740/381, TNA.

[23] ‘Colonial Secretary’s Office, 23 May 1844,’ Western Australian Government Gazette, 7 June 1844, 1.

[24] Chauncy, Memoirs, 28; Chauncy, Charlotte Humphries, East Perth Cemeteries, accessed 28 May 2025, https://eastperthcemeteries.com.au/index.php/explore/burial-search/burialsites; Chauncy, Memoirs, 28, 36, 37, 39, 49, 50, 51, 62, 66; Sir Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny (1882–1952), People Australia, accessed 14 May 2025, https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/de-crespigny-sir-constantine-trent-champion--5550/text9461; ‘Death of Mr. W. S. Chauncey,’ Wellington Times (NSW), 10 September 1903, 4; ‘Death of Mr. A. P. Chauncy,’ Ovens and Murray Advertiser (Beechworth), 23 August 1890, 4; ‘Family Notices,’ Western Mail (Perth), 2 November 1907, 31; ‘Family Notices,’ Argus (Melbourne), 6 January 1886, 1.

[25] Chauncy, Memoirs, 36, 38, 42, 47, 51, 49.

[26] Philip Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes of the Aborigines of Australia,’ in Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1878), 222; Chauncy, Memoirs,35.

[27] Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes,’ 222.

[28] Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes,’ 275–76.

[29] Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes,’ 273.

[30] Chauncy to Colonial Secretary, 8 December 1846, AU WA S2941 cons36 147 142, State Records Office of Western Australia.

[31] Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes,’ 259.

[32] Joan Groves, ‘The Camfields: “The Comforts of Civilisation” in Early Colonial Western Australia’ (Honours thesis, Edith Cowan University, 2006), 42.

[33] Jane Lydon, ‘Photographing Kooris: Photography and Exchange in Victoria,’ in Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies, ed. Jane Lydon (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014), 116–18.

[34] ‘Family Notices,’ Launceston Advertiser, 24 May 1838, 2; Chauncy, Memoirs, 7.

[35] Chauncy, Memoirs, 8.

[36] Theresa Walker, National Portrait Gallery, accessed 28 May 2025, https://www.portrait.gov.au/people/theresa-walker-1807.

[37] Chauncy and Walker, Papers 1839-1878, MS 9287, SLV.

[38] ‘Domestic Intelligence,’ Argus (Melbourne), 30 July 1853, 5; ‘South Australian Register. Adelaide: Monday, June 19, 1854,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 19 June 1854, 2.  

[39] ‘Arrival of the Californian Mail,’ Goulburn Herald and Chronicle, 6 July 1878, 4; Geoffrey H. Manning, A Compendium of the Place Names of South Australia, accessed 28 May 2025, https://published.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/placenamesofsouthaustralia/C.pdf.

[40] ‘Advertising,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 1860, 1; ‘Advertising,’ South Australian Gazette and Mining Journal (Adelaide), 28 February 1850, 1.

[41] ‘Family Notices,’ Argus (Melbourne), 3 November 1852, 10; ‘Death of Mr. C. N. Wornum,’ Chronicle (Adelaide), 29 March 1902, 14.

[42] Martha Maria Snell Berkeley, Design and Art Australia Online, accessed 28 May 2025,https://www.daao.org.au/bio/martha-maria-snell-berkeley/biography/.

[43] ‘Chauncy Spring,’ Inherit, 14 May 2025, accessed 28 May 2025, https://inherit.dplh.wa.gov.au/public/inventory/details/ffed4d44-76d4-4af5-b8e4-5141012629b6; ‘Chauncey Street [sic], Lancefield,’ Lancefield Mercury, August 2015, accessed 14 May 2025, https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5f11835e58162fcd6c43de48/65178e4164de3f026b295156_August%202015.pdf.

[44] ‘The Late Mr. Philip Chauncy,’ Church of England Messenger and Ecclesiastical Gazette for the Diocese of Melbourne and Ballarat, 7 June 1880, 6.