Papers of William Henry Archer

Description: William Henry Archer was born in England on 14th November 1825. His early years were spent at Clapham with his parents and his well-beloved younger brother Alfred who sailed for Australia in April 1850. From about 1842 to 1849 he was employed as clerk, under the direction of the Actuary FGP Nelson, in the Medical, Invalid and General Assurance Society, London; from 1850 to 1852 he was Managing Actuary in the Catholic Law and General Life Assurance Company. However, in March 1852, demoted by the Company to the financially insecure position of Consulting Actuary, Archer decided to follow his brother to Victoria.

He arrived in Victoria at the end of 1852 and, with his appointment as Acting Registrar-General in July 1853, began a career in the Civil Service. In January 1854 he was made Assistant Registrar-General; in 1859, Registrar-General; in 1868, Registrar of Titles; and on 11 May 1874, Secretary for Lands. But he was to climb no higher: a victim of the 'Black Wednesday' dismissals of January 1878, he was from this time on without regular employment. His attempts to establish himself first in the political, then in the legal world met with failure, as did his candidature in 1881 for the librarianship of the Public Library. He was thus forced to turn to the interests he had cultivated earlier in life. As well as being an eminent statistician, Archer was a would-be political reformer, an amateur microscopist and agronomist, a literary critic and linguist. Converted to Catholicism in 1848, he was, too, one of Victoria's leading Catholic laymen, prominent in the cause of Catholic education. In 1870 he received the papal Decoration of Gregory the Great and in 1884 was made Knight Commander of the Order of Pio Nono. He organised a Testimonial to Cardinal Newman from the Catholics of Sydney in 1879. He was the author of many pamphlets on statistics, education and Catholicism and edited the journal Facts and Figures: Or Notes of Progress, Statistical and General for Australasian Circulation. He married Mary Charnley Pitt Nind at St Francis Cathedral, Melbourne, on October 10, 1855. They had five children, only one of whom survived. This was Grace, later the wife of Philip Gavan Duffy through whose daughter these papers came to the Archives. WH Archer died in 1909. An account of part of his life is given in Men of the Times, Victorian Series (second edition, 1882), compiled by Captain H Morin Humphries."

Dates Covered: 1842 -- 1910

Holding Institution: University of Melbourne

Archive: University of Melbourne. Archives