James Backhouse

English botanist and missionary (1794–1869)

See also for two other James Backhouse botanists and nursery owners of York. James Backhouse (8 July 1794 – 20 January 1869) was a botanist and missionary for the Quaker church in Australia. His son, also James Backhouse (1825–1890), was also a botanist.

James Backhouse was born in 1794, the fourth child of James and Mary Backhouse a Quaker business family of Darlington, County Durham, England. He was the third after his father and grandfather to be called James Backhouse. His grandfather died as a Quaker prisoner and martyr at Lancaster Castle in 1697. His father, James, (together with his father and brother), founded the Backhouse's Bank in Darlington. His mother was Mary Dearman of Thorne, Yorkshire, also a devout Quaker. His father died when he was a child and his mother brought him up in a religious atmosphere. He was educated in Leeds and began work in a grocery, drug and chemical business, but he developed tuberculosis and became too delicate to pursue a sedentary occupation. Coming from a family of botanists, he was encouraged to spend time in the open air and study botany. They visited Port Phillip in 1837, and the states of South Australia and Western Australia just before they left. They visited penal settlements working for and interceding for prisoners, and deeply concerned by the cruelty and rigours they found. They wrote to Elizabeth Fry about the condition of women prisoners on ships and to the Governor of Van Diemen's Land on the prisons. Death of prisoners was often by murder from other prisoners in appalling conditions. Backhouse and Walker issued a lengthy address to the prison population of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land pleading for prisoners to find salvation in religion. They were tireless campaigners for temperance and thrift. A third of wages paid in spirits was mentioned at a temperance meeting in Perth and they felt 'the prevailing immorality' was fuelled by drink. They also looked at the policy towards Aborigines 'this injured race of our fellow men'. Alongside their work with prisons they set up and visited Quaker meeting houses. On his travels, James Backhouse also collected plants and seeds which he sent back to the York nursery, to Kew Gardens, and to Professor William Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow. His works published on his return, "A narrative visit to the Australian colonies" (1843) and "A narrative visit to the Mauritius and South Africa" (1844) are detailed accounts of his travels with engravings from his original sketches of indigenous vegetation, aborigines, chain gangs of prisoners, and numerous missionary stations, with appendices of letters sent to officials, Christian evangelical writings and speeches.

Backhouse returned to England and arrived at London on 15 February 1841. In York, his safe return was greeted fervently by the York Quarterly and Monthly Meetings.