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 and/or life:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)