Frederick Standish

Captain Frederick Charles Standish (20 April 1824 – 19 March 1883 ), often referred to as "Captain Standish", was a Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria (Australia).

Biography Standish was born in 1824 at Standish Hall, Wigan, Lancashire, the second son of Charles Strickland Standish (1790-1863), Lord of the manor of Standish, and Émilie (Emma) Conradine Matthiessen (1801-1831). He was educated at Prior Park College, Bath, and then entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He subsequently obtained a commission in the Royal Artillery, in which he served for nine years, and retired at the rank of captain.

Standish wrote of his experiences as a senior figure in the administration of early Victoria in The Leader, a Melbourne newspaper under the bylines "The Contributor" and "An Ex-Official" in a series of sixteen informative and historically valuable articles in 1887.

Standish's association with Marcus Clarke and his membership of the Yorick Club are discussed in Michael Wilding, 'A Friend of My People a Home: Marcus Clarke and Captain Frederick Standish', Quadrant, 56, July–August 2012, and in Wilding, 'Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: A Documentary', Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014.

He died, unmarried, at the Melbourne Club on 19 March 1883.

He appears in the 1963 TV play Ballad for One Gun, played Walter Sullivan

In the 1970 film Ned Kelly, he is played by Nigel Lovell.

In the 1980 miniseries The Last Outlaw (1980) he was played by Paul Clarkson.

A fictionalized Standish appears in the 2021 gold rush drama New Gold Mountain, where he was played by Dan Spielman.