Early Life
Rhodes-Moorhouse was born at Rokeby, North Yorkshire. His mother Mary Ann Rhodes (born c 1850) was the daughter of William Barnard Rhodes and Otahi, a member of the Taranaki (Tuturu), Ngati Tama and Te Āti Awa Māori iwi in the Wellington area of New Zealand. When Rhodes married Sarah King, the very young child Mary Anne was "gifted" (Whaangai) to the newlyweds. After his first wife died, Rhodes married Sarah Ann Moorhouse, the sister of William Sefton Moorhouse, a prominent Canterbury politician and settler. She adopted Mary Ann Rhodes.
Mary Anne's father had been a whaling captain who became a prominent Wellington settler, businessman and politician. On his death, Mary Anne Rhodes received a legacy which made her the richest woman in New Zealand.
She married her second stepmother’s younger brother, Edward Moorhouse, in Wellington in 1883. They moved to England and raised four children, including Rhodes-Moorhouse who went to Harrow School and (briefly) Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Leaving university in 1909 Rhodes-Moorhouse took private flying lessons and gained his pilot's certificate in that year. Besides designing aircraft he competed in aviation races and was the first to cross the English Channel, from Douai to Ashford, Kent, with two passengers, his wife and a London Evening News journalist, in a biplane.
He changed his surname to Rhodes-Moorhouse in 1912, shortly before he married, as required by the will of his grandfather. His wife, Linda Beatrice Morrit, was also a flying enthusiast. She died in 1973 aged 86.
Read more about this topic: William Barnard Rhodes-Moorhouse
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)