Fred Whibley

Who was Fred Whibley?

Fred Whibley abandoned a career in a 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.

Fred 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 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 Whibley, married John T. Arundel, owner of John T Arundel and Company which operated in the Pacific.