Fred Whibley

Fredrick George Whibley
Fred Whibley, Island trader on Niutao 1898 to 1909 (Fred Whibley c.1888)
Born	1855 Sittingbourne, Kent, England
Died	1919 Funafuti, Tuvalu, (Then known as the Ellice Islands)
Other names	Fred Whibley
Occupation	island trader
Parent(s)	Ambrose Whibley and Anne Parkes

Fred Whibley (Fredrick George Whibley, 1855-1919) abandoned a career as clerk in a London bank to escape from the constraints and social expectations of respectability in the Victorian era. He ended up as a copra trader on Niutao in Tuvalu in the central Pacific Ocean.

Whibley was born in 1855 in Sittingbourne, Kent, England, the youngest son of Ambrose Whibley, silk mercer, and his first wife, Anne Parkes. Educated at Bristol Grammar School.

After the death of Anne in 1855 Ambrose Whibley married Mary Jean Davy, the daughter of John Davy, an iron merchant of Bristol. Fred Whibley was the half-brother of Charles Whibley, journalist and writer and Leonard Whibley, classical scholar and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1899-1910. Fred’s sister, Eliza Eleanor (Lillie) Whibley, married John T. Arundel, owner of John T Arundel and Company which operated in the Pacific.

From 1873 to 1888 Fred Whibley worked as a clerk in a bank. In 1888 at the aged of 33, Whibley left England for the United States of America. From his letters to his brother Charles Whibley he appears to have been involved in gold mining. The Klondike Gold Rush began in 1896 although clearly Whibley did not find success as in 1898 he wrote to Charles Whibley asking whether his brother had repaid $15 to Gordon T Legg, who was the manager of the Union Steamship Company of British Columbia. Fred Whibley had borrowed the money to travel from Vancouver B.C., to Sydney, Australia, where his sister Eliza was living with her husband John T. Arundel.

Fred Whibley had the reputation as the black sheep of what was otherwise a respectable Victorian era family. Not always the gentleman, while in Vancouver Fred appears to have fallen out with a Mrs. Machin as he writes to his brother Charles Whibley about “dirty letters from Vancouver, but let them go. Mrs. Machin is a b-tch from B-tchville, and invents the most impossible lies. She is only fit for Bedlam. I say so much and finish with her and Vancouver for good.”