Henry Edward Hickmott (17 May 1853 – 18 January 1931) was an Australian farmer. He served as the Member of Western Australian Legislative Assembly for Pingelly from 1914 to 1924.
Life and times in South Australia and Victoria
Henry Edward Hickmott was born at Mount Barker in South Australia on 17 May 1853, the only son of Henry Hickmott (1825–1914) and Sophia Goldsmith (1828–1853). His parents and two older sisters, Emma and Eliza Hickmott, had sailed from London to Port Adelaide on the Emily in 1849 and then travelled to Mount Barker where Henry Edward's father worked at the local brick works. Another daughter Rebecca was born 1851. Henry Edward's paternal grandfather, Samuel Hickmott (1799 – c.1872) had earlier been transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1840 for sheep-stealing. There is some evidence that Samuel may have travelled to South Australia to join his youngest son and his family there.
Henry Edward's mother, Sophia, died not long after his birth and his father quickly remarried, to Harriet Waters in Adelaide in 1853 under the name of Henry Richards. They lived for a time with Harriet's family in the rural settlement of Meadows. In 1854 Henry and Harriet and their family travelled to Melbourne in Victoria and thence to the gold-rush town of Clunes where they lived for the next twenty years. While at Clunes Henry Edward, like his father, worked as a miner, labourer and brick-maker. It seems that although he had no formal education he was well-learned. In her memoir I Loved Teaching Frances Elliott notes that Henry Edward, who had been invited to adjudicate a classroom debate "… had never attended school, and yet he could write a very good letter. Having a stepmother, he had to go out and earn his living at an early age. He told us that the different people he worked for were always very willing to help him in his willingness to learn. He made a very satisfactory adjudicator". She concluded by adding that he "later became a Member of Parliament in Western Australia".
In 1872, Henry Edward moved with his parents and step-siblings to the Wimmera township of Charlton where his father had purchased a farm, and would also establish a brickyard overlooking the river on Olive Street. On 27 October 1877, he married Elizabeth Ann Owen, the sister of a close friend and fellow local cricketer John Richard Owen, at Kingower near Bendigo. Elizabeth was born at Emerald Hill in 1855. Her parents, Edward Owen and Elizabeth Evens, were both from Wales. They met and were married at Liverpool in England in 1850 and sailed from there to Victoria in 1852. Lured by the news of fresh discoveries of gold in the Kingower/Inglewood region, Edward, or Taffy as he was known, and his family moved from Melbourne to Bet Bet near Dunolly around 1857 and then on to Kingower. The old couple remained there through the town's boom and bust periods - the population of Kingower peaked at around 8,000 in the 1860s, before declining to just 100 by the time of Edward's death in 1908. His wife Elizabeth died in Kingower in 1893. They are both buried in unmarked graves in Kingower's fast disappearing cemetery.
In the same year he was married, Henry Edward's stepmother, Harriet Hickmott née Waters, was killed when she was struck by lightning at her home in East Charlton. The incident was recorded in the St Arnaud Mercury on 17 February as follows:
'About 5pm on Wednesday a severe thunderstorm burst over East Charlton, and an hour later Mrs Hickmott and her son Samuel (a youth of 18 or 20) had just returned to their home in that township after a visit to a selection belonging to the family at Watson's Lakes, when a flash of lightning struck them both dead in the doorway of their house … Mrs Hickmott was thrown several yards out of the building, the apparel around her chest and shoulders being set ablaze, and her face much disfigured by the electric current, which appears to have struck her on the head and traveled down her right side. Her son Samuel was smitten on the right shoulder the current passing diagonally across his body until it came to his heart, his clothing being burnt even to the undershirt. Another son, named James, who was indoors at the time, was struck on the left forearm and hip, and for a time was paralysed, but has since recovered.'.
