William Valpy

‘Judge’ William Valpy was a key figure in early Otago. After a career in India as a judge he had retired to England in 1836. Poor health prompted him to emigrate to the fledgling settlement of Otago in search of a healthier climate. He arrived with a full retinue of servants on the Ajax in early 1849. His wife, Caroline, and four of their five children came with him. Members of their extended family, the Jeffreys and the Fultons also came to Otago.

Valpy was supposed to be the wealthiest man in New Zealand on his arrival and it was a huge coup for the embryonic Otago settlement that he chose to come here. He brought with him such useful colonial accessories as a sawmill, a flourmill and a large supply of money – all of which were vitally needed in the struggling settlement. Judge Valpy was the first settler on the south Dunedin flat, taking up large areas of land there. He named his properties ‘Caversham’ and ‘Forbury’, after places in Reading, England, associated with his family, and these names survive today as suburbs of Dunedin.

Valpy’s farms were an important source of employment for many early settlers. The Scottish labourers recruited by the Otago Association needed employers like him to give them work and let them save the money they needed to buy their own land. He also paid for the construction of the first road to the beach at St Clair, establishing a branch line off the main road south to his home. His privately funded road endures to the present as Forbury Road.

Valpy stood out as an Englishman and an Anglican in Dunedin, founded as a Scots Presbyterian settlement. When the colonial governor George Grey appointed him to a seat on the Legislative Council in Wellington, overlooking the leaders of the Otago Settlement, Valpy came in for sustained attack. Captain Cargill was incensed that the Scottish settlement would be represented by an Englishman and mounted a bitter attack on the Judge through the newspaper. Greatly shocked by the abuse directed at him, and with no respite from the ill-health that had brought him to Otago, Valpy died in September 1852, without ever taking up his seat on the Council in Wellington.