Henry Morgan Godwin: The Fareham Shipowner Who Sent Ships to Australia

Henry Morgan Godwin was born in 1809 and became part of Britain’s nineteenth-century merchant shipping world, owning vessels that carried both emigrants and convicts to Australia.

By the 1830s he was in business with Charles Lee as a London shipowner. Their firm owned interests in several vessels, including the John Renwick and the Spartan. Shipping records show Godwin and Lee acquiring the John Renwick in 1836 and using her on long-distance voyages between Britain and Australia.

The voyages reveal the extraordinary variety of nineteenth-century shipping. In 1837 the John Renwick carried around 140 emigrants from London to Adelaide. In 1838 she sailed to Sydney carrying 172 female convicts. In 1841 she carried more than 200 assisted emigrants, and in 1842–43 she transported 161 male convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.

Godwin was therefore connected directly with one of the great population movements of the nineteenth century. His ships carried people travelling willingly in search of a new life alongside prisoners being transported across the world under sentence.

His business career was not entirely successful. By the early 1840s the partnership had run into serious financial difficulties. Shipping registers record the assignees of Godwin and Lee as bankrupts disposing of their interests in vessels in 1844.

Godwin nevertheless lived for several more decades and later became associated with Brighton. At his death in 1882 he left £1,000 to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The RNLI formally recorded the legacy among the major gifts received following his death.

There is something fitting about that final gift. A man whose working life had depended upon ships crossing some of the most dangerous seas in the world chose to leave part of his estate to an organisation dedicated to saving lives at sea.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul connects Fareham with the merchant shipping routes that carried settlers, prisoners and cargo between Britain and Australia. It also introduces a different side of nineteenth-century maritime history: alongside the admirals and warships remembered elsewhere in the church were businessmen whose ships helped move thousands of ordinary people around the growing British world.