Edward Blanckley
British Royal Navy officer (1791-1845)
Captain Edward Blanckley (c. 1790 – 4 May 1845) was a Royal Navy officer, and director of Kollmann's Railway, Locomotive and Carriage improvement company. His first wife, Harriet Matcham, was the niece of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson.
Early life
Edward Blanckley was born in Mahón, Menorca, Spain in about 1790 where his father, Henry Stanyford Blanckley, was formally appointed British Consul to Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza in the year of Edward's birth. Edward had three older living siblings: Ann, Henry Stanyford and Maria. Edward Blanckley's mother, Mary née Rogers died, following a long illness, in the spa resort of Bristol Hotwells on 10 March 1798. His father remarried Mary Richards in Sulham, Berkshire, England on 13 March 1800, resulting in Edward having two younger half-sisters, Elizabeth (who later authored Six Years Residence in Algiers, a biographical account of their father's time as British Consul to Algiers,) and Henrietta. Increasing Spanish hostility towards Britain during the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the Spanish governor of Menorca imposing increasingly strict sanctions on the Blanckley family, first by issuing a public order forbidding native families to visit or communicate with them, then by placing Edward's father, Henry Stanyford Blanckley, under house arrest. The guards posted at their front door stabbed the family's butler in the arm with a bayonet when they misidentified him as Edward's father. Edward joined the Royal Navy as midshipman on 17 January 1805 shortly before his family evacuated Menorca in a "wretched boat".
The public source identifies “Edward Blanckley” as british Royal Navy officer (1791-1845). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Edward, Blanckley and British.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Blanckley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.