sketcher, schoolmaster and clergyman, was born at Corfu, second of the eight children of Benjamin Kane, a royal engineer who was assistant clerk of works for the British Ordnance Department at Corfu in 1826/30, and his first wife Caroline Charlotte, née Plow. His mother died at Portsmouth (England) on 10 May 1838 as the result of childbirth and a month later his father married Elizabeth Margaret Plow, presumably her sister or cousin. Henry was the eldest of the six surviving children under 12 from the first marriage and there were at least three from the second. He migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in about 1845 and found work as tutor to the son of a Launceston merchant, William Barnes, until becoming headmaster of the new Launceston Church Grammar School at the beginning of 1846.

H.P. Kane was ordained deacon and licensed as a Church of England minister in July 1846. On 8 May 1847, Rev. J. Fereday married him to Caroline Jeannette Neilley at her father’s house, Rostella, East Tamar. Kane resigned the headmastership of Launceston Church Grammar School in December 1848 and took up the living of Patterson’s Plains. When his father-in-law died, he and Caroline moved to Rostella, where they raised some of Henry’s younger brothers and a sister as well as their own two children. Kane’s teaching was recognised by the Lambeth degree of Master of Arts in 1854 and Bishop Nixon ordained him priest at Holy Trinity, Launceston, on 11 May 1857. From 1854 to 1859 he was assistant secretary, then secretary, to the Launceston branch of the Tasmanian Royal Society. He had a private church school for boys at Rostella from the late 1860s to about 1873.

For a short time the Kanes lived in Victoria where Henry had the charge of several small Melbourne parishes. After their only son died at the age of 15 they left for England. Caroline Kane died there in 1882. Retiring from the church and leaving his daughter Emily with relatives, Henry returned to Melbourne. There, on 1 May 1883, he married Alicia Bradish of Dingley (a former parishioner) and set up in business. This ended in bankruptcy. Kane died on 11 November 1893 at his home, Rhyll, in Wellington Street, Brighton, Victoria.

Despite little obvious talent or interest in sketching, Kane is responsible for the only known illustration of the first St Peter’s Church of England at St Leonard’s (1846 47, replaced 1869), a simple Gothic Revival chapel designed by the Tasmanian architect William Archer to which Kane was appointed missionary chaplain on its completion in June 1847. No other drawings have been located.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011