Fanny Simmonds

Biography contributed by Dennis Dawson ([email protected]), great great nephew of Fanny Simmonds.

Fanny Hodgkinson was born in September 1855 in the town of Litchurch just south of the city of Derby, Derbyshire. She was the fifth of seven children of John and Harriet Sarah Hodgkinson (nee Radford). About 1860, the family shifted to Hendon just outside of greater London where John was a gardener and Harriet ran a grocery shop. Not much is known of her early life in England.

Fanny’s brother John Hodgkinson, born 1849, emigrated to New Zealand in 1874 where he married in Napier and started a large family from which I am descended.

Harriet was widowed when husband John died in London in 1883. Son John had written many letters favourably describing life in the new colony suggesting that his mother join him. Harriet, Fanny and her younger brother Edward duly emigrated to Napier, New Zealand in 1886.

Fanny married Edmund Simmonds, a widower, in October 1888 in Napier. They had five children from 1889 to 1900. Sadly, four of them died in infancy. One daughter, Harriet Ethel survived into adulthood.

Edmund died in October 1935 and was buried with his first wife. Fanny died the following February aged 86 and was interred in the same grave.

As a teenager, my mother used to clean Fanny’s house once a week. They talked of course and those conversations were an invaluable source of recollections about the Hodgkinson family and their journey to New Zealand.

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Fanny Simmonds (Private collection)

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