Edward Dewhirst
Edward Dewhirst (30 August 1815 – 4 February 1904) was a well-known South Australian minister of religion and educationist, born in Suffolk, England. His five children were also prominent in business and public life. Early years Edward Dewhirst was born in 1815, the third son of Rev. Charles Dewhirst, Independent (as Congregationalists often styled themselves) minister of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. He was educated there at King Edward VI Grammar School, having classics instruction from the headmaster John William Donaldson. In 1833 he was articled to a surgeon and started studying medicine, but in 1836 sailed for Jamaica in the West Indies where he worked for two or three years, and made the acquaintance of Rev. Matthew Henry Hodge. He suffered from a fever, and returned to England, where he studied to become a Nonconformist minister under John Pye-Smith at Homerton College, Cambridge. In 1849 Dewhirst married Mary Ann, the eldest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Jarvis of Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. In Australia He emigrated to Victoria in 1853, where he worked as a Baptist minister, moving to South Australia in 1855 as a minister, first Baptist then Congregational at the Ebenezer Place church and filling in