Edgar William Fenner

I was born in Posen, Prussia on 4 November 1859, the second child and only son of Rev William Fenner and his French wife Cecile. In April 1860, the family moved to Tunis where my father was the English Chaplain and Missionary to the Jews until his death in 1874. At that time I was attending the City of London School and subsequently completed a course in civil engineering. In the early 1880s I worked on the construction of trans-continental railroads in USA before deciding to emigrate to Australia. I arrived in Sydney on 11 April 1882 per "City of New York" from San Francisco and secured employment with the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd.

I was appointed an assistant cane inspector at Chatsworth Mill on the Clarence River in May and was transferred to the brand-new Homebush Mill near Mackay, Queensland in December 1882 where I met my future wife May Kemmis whose family lived at "The Chase", located just 5 miles from Homebush. In March 1884 I was sent to Fiji as deputy manager Nausori Mill and returned to Mackay the following January for my wedding. My wife and I had settled in Fiji by March and I had then been promoted to Manager of Rarawai Mill on the Ba River where we remained for the next 15 years, during which I acted as CSR's Manager in Fiji for a period of 15 months in 1895/96.

In 1900 I was transferred to Lautoka as supervising manager of a large new mill to be built there which began operations in 1903. I stayed on as Manager until 1905 when I returned to Nausori and served there as Senior Manager in Fiji until my retirement in 1918. During 1910-11 my wife and I had taken long-service leave of 20 months for a grand tour of Europe.

Retiring to Sydney, we first lived in Onslow Avenue, Potts Point before taking up residence in Thornton St., Darling Point in 1925 and lived there until my death on 1 September 1937. My wife survived me by 15 years.

NOTE: Details of my ancestry can be found in the pages leading up to p213 of "English Origins of the Fenner Family" in the Media section of this profile. On that page in the last sentence of the paragraph headed 11.WILLIAM, my mother is referred to as "the lady from Mulhausen".