Sir Edward Eyre Williams

Sir Edward Eyre Williams (1813–1880), judge and barrister, arrived in Port Phillip in 1842 having been admitted to the Bar in London nine years earlier. The son of a sugar plantation owner resident in Trinidad, Williams is said to have intended to become a colonial landowner himself, but within a few weeks of his arrival in Melbourne was persuaded by fellow lawyer Andrew McCrae to return to practising his profession. With his wife Jessie, whom he had married in London in March 1841, and their eldest two children, he settled initially in Fitzroy before moving to Como, a riverside property at South Yarra, in 1847. He thereafter became active in various charitable and community affairs: helping to found the Diocesan Society, for instance; serving on the committees of the Mechanics’ Institute and the Melbourne Hospital; and as a member of the Bourke District Council. In 1852, after a period during which he had been commissioner of the Court of Requests, chief commissioner of Insolvent Estates, chairman of Quarter Sessions and Solicitor-General, Williams was appointed to the bench of the Victorian Supreme Court, formed following Victoria’s formal separation from New South Wales the previous year. Serving alongside Redmond Barry and William Stawell, Williams was heavily occupied with circuit court hearings, occasionally attracting criticism for the haste with which he attended to matters in one regional courthouse so as to be on time to preside over hearings in another. Eventually, his workload began to compound his already poor health, and he retired from the bench on doctor’s orders in April 1874. In May that year, he and Jessie returned to England, settling eventually in Bath. Williams was knighted in 1878 ‘in recognition of the services he had rendered to the colony in the various public positions that he had filled’, and died in Bath, aged 67, in May 1880.

Gift of Ross and Judy O'Connell 2016