Arthur Edward Kennedy

Arthur Edward Kennedy

Sir Arthur Edward Kennedy GCMG KCB (born April 5, 1809 in Cultra , Ireland ; † June 3, 1883 on the ship Orient ) was a British colonial administrator and in this capacity governor of the British colonies of Sierra Leone , Western Australia , Vancouver Island , Hong Kong and Queensland .

Life

Arthur Edward Kennedy was born in Cultra , a town in County Down , Ireland . He was the fourth son of Hugh and Grace Dorothea Kennedy (née Hughes) and was raised by a tutor until he attended Trinity College in Dublin from 1823 to 1824 , where he met his predecessor as Hong Kong Governor Richard Graves MacDonnell . From 1827 to 1837 he fought as an officer in Corfu and in British North America . In 1839 he married Georgina MacCartney, who died on October 3, 1874.

In 1851 Kennedy applied for a colonial office. He was appointed governor of Gambia in May 1852 , but shortly afterwards he was appointed governor of Sierra Leone , so that he basically did not perform his first office.

In 1854, Kennedy was promoted to governor of Western Australia . He accepted this position the following year. However, he was viewed by many Western Australians as an arrogant despot . To protest against him, a public meeting was held in Perth in August 1856 . Kennedy resigned from office in 1862. Back in London, he was accepted as a Companion in the Order of the Bath in 1862 .

In 1863 he was reappointed governor of the Vancouver Island colony . Because Vancouver Island was insignificant compared to Western Australia, Kennedy found this transfer to be a degradation. He reached the colony in March 1864 and left office in October 1866 after uniting the colony of British Columbia and Vancouver Island into the United Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia .

Kennedy returned to London and was knighted as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in December 1867 . From 1872 to 1877 he was the seventh governor of Hong Kong . In this role he introduced the Hong Kong dollar , which is still Hong Kong's currency today. Kennedy was Governor of Queensland from 1877 to 1883 . In 1881 he was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George . He died on June 3, 1883 on the way back from Sydney to London on the ship Orient in the Red Sea and was buried at sea.

The Kennedy Town district in Hong Kong is named after Arthur Edward Kennedy.

literature

• Robert L. Smith: Kennedy, Sir Arthur Edward. In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Volume 11, University of Toronto / Université Laval, 1982 ( online ).

predecessor	Office	successor
Richard Graves MacDonnell	Governor of Gambia 1851-1852	Luke Smythe O'Connor
Norman William MacDonald	Governor of Sierra Leone 1852–1854	Robert Dougan
James Douglas	Governor of Vancouver Island 1864–1866	-
John Jennings Kendall	Governor of Sierra Leone 1868–1872	Sir John Pope Hennessy
Richard Graves MacDonnell	Governor of Hong Kong 1872–1877	John Pope Hennessy
William Cairns	Governor of Queensland 1877–1883	Anthony Musgrave