page_title: Richard Clement Moody
section_title: Birth and Ancestry
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Clement Moody / Birth and Ancestry
context_page_description: His Excellency, Major-General The Honourable Richard Clement Moody FICE FRGS RIBA was a British Imperialist, Colonial Governor, Royal Engineer, musician, and architect. He is best known for being the founder and first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, and for being the first British Governor of the Falkland Islands. He has been described by 20th-century British diplomat David Tatham CMG, as an 'Empire builder'.
  Richard Clement Moody was the founder of British Columbia as Colony of British Columbia, having been hand picked to "found a second England on the shores of the Pacific". The Colonial Office under Lord Lytton desired to send to the nascent Colony 'representatives of the best of British culture' who possessed ‘courtesy, high breeding and urbane knowledge of the world’ and decided to send Moody, whom the British Government considered to be the archetype of the 'English gentleman and British Officer’, as Commander of the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment, Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for British Columbia, and the first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia.
  Moody is considered to be the founding father of British Columbia.
context_section_description: Richard Clement Moody was born at St. Ann's Garrison, Barbados, West Indies. He was the third of ten children of Colonel Thomas Moody, Knight of the Order of Military Merit, a scion of a prominent British imperialist family, and Martha Clement (1784 - 1868), who was the daughter of Richard Clement (1754 - 1829), a Dutch landowner of land in Barbados, after whom Richard Clement Moody was named, and through whom he was related to the cricketer Reynold Clement. 
  Richard Clement Moody's siblings included Major Thomas Moody (1809 - 1839); Reverend James Leith Moody (1816 -1896), Chaplain to Royal Navy in China and to the British Army in the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Malta, and Crimea; Colonel Hampden Clement Blamire Moody CB (1821 - 1869), Commander of the Royal Engineers in China during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion; and Shute Barrington Moody MICE (b. 1818), an expert on sugar cultivation. His paternal grandmother was Barbara Blamire, a member of the Blamire family of Cumberland and cousin of the politician William Blamire MP and of the poet Susanna Blamire.
caption: Richard Clement was born, in 1813, at St. Ann's Garrison, Bridgetown, Barbados.
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