George Fife ANGAS

ANGAS, GEORGE FIFE (b. Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, 1 May 1789; d. Angaston, SA, 15 May 1879). Baptist businessman.

Son of Caleb Angas (a coachbuilder and trader) and his second wife Sarah Jameson (née Lindsay), George Fife's childhood was impaired by sickness, so that his schooling was intermittent, and led him to claim that he was largely self-taught. He was then apprenticed to his father's firm and eventually became an extremely successful merchant, coachbuilder, mahogany trader and shipowner.

During his school years he testified to a definite faith in God and became attached to the Baptists: good works in society ensued. At eighteen he established a savings bank and provident fund in his father's factory to provide for the workers. He was also the principal mover in the establishment of Sunday schools in the north of England, primarily the Newcastle Sunday School Union.

His religious motivations and social activism were enhanced by the work of his brother William, who encouraged an interest in the Serampore Mission. Later the brothers became involved in the work of the evangelisation of seamen and William was ordained as a missionary for the work in 1822. In December 1822, George Angas accepted the office of President of the Newcastle Seamen's Society.

Angas had become the senior partner of the family firm by the early 1820s. At this time, the firm’s work in Central America was characterised by aggressive evangelicalism combined with commerce. He strove to effect the freedom of slaves in the Honduras and in 1821 convinced the Baptist Missionary Society to send a missionary to the area. This work made him known to many of the evangelical politicians and administrators of the day. Sir George Arthur (q.v.), superintendent of the settlement at Belize and later Lt Governor of Van Diemen's Land, became a long-standing friend and supporter.

Involvement in the anti-slavery movement continued, but by the early l830s he was convinced that his future work lay in advancing the spiritual and material welfare of British nonconformists. He hoped for the establishment of a British colony where young dissenters could live and 'Bible truth should be given unfettered and without State aid'. After 1833, he left the coachbuilding works to others and concentrated on a mercantile business based in London. Here he came into contact with the promoters of South Australia. He added to their largely financial precepts the notion that this colony should possess a base of civil and religious liberty. Moreover, he saw South Australian settlement as a critical means of promoting the future welfare of Australian aborigines.

While the British government eventually agreed to the formation of SA along principles that appealed to Angas, it was also necessary to obtain advance land sales to satisfy government conditions. When the sales proved sluggish, he was instrumental in the creation of the South Australian Company, a vehicle for purchasing the title to the requisite amount of land. He was also a founder of the South Australian Banking Company, and the Union Bank which had offices in other parts of Australia.

Much of his time and money became tied up in the formation of the new colony. In order to advertise its merits to the nonconformists of England, Angas embarked on a series of whirlwind visits to major centres, speaking or preaching at churches, Sunday schools, and meetings. He published pamphlets, newspapers and books on the colony; fought accusations that the settlement was yet another bubble wrote continually to the press about the progress that was being made; and lobbied evangelical politicians and church and community leaders on the subject. He tried also to establish a South Australian School Society and a college for the technical and further education of workers, but these schemes met with mixed success. He was more successful in gaining zealous Christians to the service of the South Australian Company and felt reason to be pleased with the work of David McLaren and William Giles, two of the early colonial managers. His obsession with South Australia and the amount of work he did for the colony often left him in poor health and emotional depression.

After SA was established in 1836 and though Angas continued to be one of its greatest and most vociferous proponents in England, he was not altogether satisfied with the early government and administration of the colony. Neither was he always impressed with the activities of those who looked after his land and investments in the colony. When, in the crash of the early 1840s, the decisions of his colonial managers nearly ruined him, he railed against their lack of faith. Until his last days he believed that the SA environment had a perverse effect on English religious principles.

His suppositions about the actions of men he had trusted were sometimes without foundation. It was more often a matter of the 'tyranny of distance' and lack of his direct oversight, rather than the backsliding of fellow Christians. Many of the things that he so dearly hoped for in SA, such as civil and religious liberty, came to pass. What he considered in the early 1840s to have been tragic commercial decisions taken by his agents, most notably the purchase of large tracts of land in the Barossa Valley, were later the basis of an enormous personal fortune.

His most conspicuous effort in encouraging pious dissenters to make the colony their home occurred not with English emigrants, but with German. In 1837 Angas befriended a Silesian Lutheran pastor Augustus Kavel (q.v.) and sent his confidential clerk, Charles Flaxman, to negotiate with Kavel's congregations. Many of these folk and other elders of the church were persuaded to emigrate. After much wrangling with Prussian authorities, numbers left Europe and made SA their home. His sponsorship of these Lutherans and their settlement upon his lands in the colony were to have long-term beneficial effects on both the colony and Angas' finances. Angas also supported the government plan to bring the Lutherans Clamor Schurmann (q.v.) and E G Teichelmann (q.v.) to SA as missionaries to the Aborigines.

The lowest ebb of Angas' personal financial affairs, in the early l840s, corresponded with the ill fortune of SA. He took it upon himself to lobby and publicise what he felt was the truth of the situation. Again he rode throughout England preaching and lecturing on the colony's merits. When the British parliament appointed a Select Committee to enquire into the colony's financial circumstances, it was Angas who lauded the progress and promise of the colony. In 1843, he sent his son, John Howard Angas, to SA to take control of his affairs and in the following year sold his Newcastle mahogany and copperas business. In 1846, he suffered further reverses from severe shipping losses and poor repayment from his own debtors; his health failed and he had an emotional breakdown. The remedy for this depression was another lecturing-preaching tour throughout England. He returned from this trip to find that his affairs had turned for the better.

George Fife Angas arrived in SA in 1851, with his wife Rosetta (née French), to join many other members of his family already there. A public career followed. He became a member of the nominated Legislative Council and was also successful at the first parliamentary elections in 1857. He resigned from parliament in 1866 after his health failed. He was not a popular politician: he was overbearing in his opinions, and saw politics, in personal, not party, terms. Yet people from all persuasions agreed that he held to his views without fear or favour and then often admired his persistence against the tide of opinion. In all his dealings he held to principle and religious truth above all things. Some in politics and the press saw him as an obstruction to the progress of the colony when he opposed railway development bills and other measures. To a degree he was disenchanted with the laxity of colonial politics, religion and society, for the early nineteenth century radical nonconformity he had held to in England was coming to be the conservatism of Australia.

After his retirement from politics he settled at Lindsay Park, his estate near Angaston. In these years, his financial and moral support for religion and evangelical projects in SA was well known. He contributed to the support of schools, Sunday schools, missions, churches, pastors, benevolent institutions, the Aborigines' Friends' Society, Bible and tract societies, libraries in prisons and the Bushmen's club. He gave £2000 towards the Union Theological College in the 1870s. Originally intended to train pastors for Baptist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches, it came to focus on training workers for evangelism and Sunday School work. He was also taken with the idea that the spread of Roman Catholicism was the great danger for the protestant churches. He put large sums of money into the spread of anti-Catholic propaganda and fervently denounced popery whenever possible. It is likely that this crusade was influenced by his private secretary, Henry Hussey (q.v.), whose own sectarian leanings were obvious.

Angas' death was seen by the press and many South Australians as the passing of an era. His role in the formation of SA as a supposed haven for evangelicals was pivotal, yet his character, embedded in English nonconformism, was increasingly inconsistent with colonial life and manners.

ADB 1; E Hodder, George Fife Angas, Father and Founder of South Australia (London, 1891); D Pike, Paradise of Dissent (Melbourne, 1967, 2nd cd); W R Johnson, A History of Christianity in Belize: 1776-1838 (Lanham MD, 19SS)

ROB LINN