Daniel Bell Wakefield

Daniel Bell Wakefield (born February 27, 1798 in Burnham Wick , Essex , England ; † January 8, 1858 in Wellington , New Zealand ) came from the Wakefield family and was a lawyer in Wellington, attorney general for New Munster and brief judge at the Supreme Court in New Zealand .

Live and act

As the third child of Edward Wakefield (1774-1854) and Susanna Crash (1767-1816) he grew up after the father lost his farm in 1807 and lived in Westminster , London , mainly with his grandmother Priscilla Bell in Tottenham .

With his older brother Edward Gibbon and the two younger brothers William Hayward and Arthur , he attended Tottenham Grammar School. He was seen there as a slower and little initiative showing student. In the later years of school he stayed with Francis Place , an English social reformer and friend of his father's. At Christmas 1815 he put a spanner in the works of planning to learn bookkeeping and agriculture after finishing school . Because of some booby, his father sent him to Amsterdam to work in a merchant's office. Francis Place described him as lazy, moody, and dishonest, but believed he was going to become a decent man.

In November 1816, at the request of his father, his older brother Edward decided to bring him to Turin . His brother worked there at the British Embassy and was able to find him a job. Instead of working, however, he preferred to travel around Italy and decided that pleasure came before work. Although the age difference was only two years, Daniel and Edward lived intellectually in two different worlds. In February 1818 he went back to London under pressure from his brother. In the following years he worked with his father, took over a large part of his business activities and in 1823 married his first wife Selina Elizabeth de Burg (1802-1828).

From 1827 on he attended the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn , one of the four English bar associations, and studied law until he graduated in 1831. With the establishment of the National Political Union in November 1831, chaired by his protégé Francis Place, he was committed to the concerns of the working class and never missed a session from day one.

In 1832 he was admitted to the bar, was involved in the Parliamentary Candidates Society and stood for election in December 1832 for the newly reformed parliament. Publicly blamed for his brother Edward's mistakes through character assassination campaigns, he missed the election. After this frustration and inspired by his brother Edward in matters of colonization, he became involved in the South Australian Association founded on November 27, 1833 and helped as a lawyer on the Charter of Constitution . On September 1, 1835, he married his second wife, Angela Attwood, daughter of Thomas Attwood , economist and advocate of electoral reform in Great Britain .

Daniel Bell Wakefield planned to go to South Australia with his family and tried to become Chief Justice there, but was turned down. After his brother Edward withdrew from the colonization project in South Australia and under pressure from his father-in-law Thomas Attwood not to go to Australia , he finally lost interest and stopped working for the South Australian Association.

Daniel Bell Wakefield practiced as a lawyer in London until 1841. After separating from his wife and owing 4,000 pounds , he escaped to New Zealand in 1843 with the help of his brother Edward . Under the pseudonym "Mr. Bowler ”he came to New Plymouth , but gave up his identity again when his brother Arthur Wakefield was killed on June 17, 1843 in the so-called Wairau tumult and he went to Wellington to attend his brother's funeral . He stayed there and went back to work as a lawyer. In May 1844 he was sent to Otago by the New Zealand Company to moderate a dispute between Frederick Tuckett and John Jermyn Symonds over the purchase of the so-called Otago Block concerning the Dunedin settlement .

In March 1848, after five years of separation, his wife finally came to Wellington with their two children, Charles Markus and Selina Elizabeth. Selina died in August 1848 and Alice Mary was born the third child in the family in October 1849.

On September 1, 1848, Daniel was appointed attorney general for New Munster , a position he held until 1853. Not agreeing with the land distribution policy and the treatment of the Maori by the new governor George Edward Gray , he quit his job and was only once again active as chief judge in representation from 1855 to 1856. Daniel Bell Wakefield died in Wellington on January 8, 1858.

literature

• Philip Temple : A sort of conscience - The Wakefields . Auckland University Press , Auckland 2002, ISBN 1-86940-276-6 (English).

Web links

• Bernard John Foster : Wakefield, Daniel . In: An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand . Alexander Hare McLintock , April 22, 2009, accessed May 25, 2016 .