Collection MSG 404 - Henry S. Chapman Collection

Henry Samuel Chapman was born on July 21, 1803, in Kennington, London, England. He was an Australian and New Zealand judge, colonial secretary, attorney-general, journalist, and politician. After attending schools in Bromley and London, he emigrated to Quebec, Canada, in 1823. Following ten years of reasonable success in business, he turned to journalism. In 1833, he co-founded the radical Montreal Daily Advertiser, the first daily paper published in Canada. Chapman returned to England in 1835 as a salaried intermediary between the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada and its friends in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. He studied law in the late 1830s and was admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1840. The same year he began publishing the New Zealand Journal. In 1843, he sailed to New Zealand where he held the position of judge of the supreme court for the southern district (1843-1852). In 1857, he was named Attorney-General and retained this office until 1859. In 1860, Chapman was a lecturer in law at the University of Melbourne. In 1864, he was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of New Zealand, at Dunedin. He retired in 1875 taking up commerce and sheep farming in Central Otago. In 1840, he married Catherine (Kate) Delancey Brewer (1810–1866). In 1866, she and two of his six sons and his only daughter drowned when the passenger ship SS London was wrecked in the Bay of Biscay. In 1868, he remarried Selina Frances Chapman (1823-1902). He died on December 27, 1881, in Dunedin, New Zealand.