sketcher, carver, architect and civil servant, was born on 2 December 1818, eldest son of Edward Ayshford and Henrietta n ée Langham. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, Sanford was appointed colonial secretary of Western Australia; he arrived in the Anna Robertson on 18 December 1851. Du Cane , who was also on board, summarised his fellow passengers in a letter to his mother. Sandford’s entry reads: 'Colonial Secretary – light complexion – weak – gentlemanly – clever, 35 – Magistrate – S.of England – Trin. Coll. Cam.’
Sanford remained Colonial Secretary until July 1855 and he was also Chairman of the Board of Education. An amateur architect committed to the Gothic Revival through membership of the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society, he designed Perth Boys School on St George’s Terrace (1853: extant as National Trust Centre). Archdeacon John Ramsden Wollaston , a 'broad’ rather than 'high’ churchman, considered Sanford eccentric presumably because of personal traits. It was not because 'architecture is his hobby, on which he lectured last night at the Mechanics’ Institute’ (it was Wollaston’s too), nor because of the font he was then carving that he had invited Wollaston to inspect. Both were perfectly respectable hobbies for English gentlemen.
Sanford also had expertise in the even more fashionable pastime of natural history, in particular zoology. As a result, Robert Austin invited him to classify the animals collected on Austin’s 1854 exploring expedition to Shark Bay (Murchison). Sanford wrote to Austin in July 1855: 'As you request, I send you a list of the mammalia and birds, the skins of which you have forwarded me, as far as I am acquainted with them, with a few reservations on the distribution of the species’. His drawings after Austin’s and J. Tatton B. Fraser 's sketches were used for most of the plates in Austin’s published Journal ; the remainder appear to have been lithographed directly from the explorers’ original, less skilled sketches.
After returning home to Nynehead Court, Somerset, Sanford married Sarah Ellen Seymour on 14 May 1857; they had at least two sons. Sarah Elizabeth Harriett Hervey, daughter of the bishop of Bath and Wells, became his second wife on 5 December 1874. He died on 28 October 1902.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
