Hampden Clement Blamire was born in 1821 on 10 January at Bedford Square, London. He was the eighth of ten children of Colonel Thomas Moody, Knight, and of Martha Clement, who daughter of Richard Clement, a major Dutch landowner of Barbados, through whom he was related to the cricketer Reynold Clement. Hampden Clement Blamire's siblings included Major Thomas Moody ; Major-General Richard Clement Moody, the founder of British Columbia and first British Governor of the Falkland Islands; James Leith Moody, Chaplain to Royal Navy in China and to the British Army; and Shute Barrington Moody , an expert on sugar cultivation. Through his brother Richard Clement, Hampden Clement was the uncle of Colonel Richard S. Hawks Moody and Captain Henry de Clervaux Moody. Moody married Louise Harriet Thompson, daughter of Samuel Thompson, at Belfast. He had two daughters, Sophia Louise and Harriet Maud Maria, and one son Hampden Lewis Clement, who was a Captain of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment.
Career
Canada
Moody entered the service in 1837, became a Lieutenant in 1839, and served with the Royal Engineers in Canada from 1840 to 1848. He was based at Fort Garry, the trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company, of which he was a member, and for which, between 1844 and 1846, he performed confidential service, probably behind United States border. In 1845, Moody assisted Edward Boxer and Lieutenant-General William Cuthbert Elphinstone Holloway to investigate Canada's defences and lines of communication against the United States. The following year, he became a Captain and began two years of special service in Hudson Bay Territory. For his efforts, Hampden and associated troops received "favorable notice" of the Secretary of State and Commander-in-Chief. Hampden Clement's brother, Richard Clement Moody, the founder and first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, was also a member of the Royal Engineers. Moody was a Freemason, a member of St. Paul's Lodge No. 12 in Montreal. He was also an accomplished artist: his paintings typically depict Canadian landscapes, and are in The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Public Archives of Canada, and Provincial Archives of Manitoba.
Kaffir War
Moody fought in the Kaffir War of 1851 to 1853, during which he received a medal and a notice, for gallant conduct on 13 June 1852, when he had led a detachment of Royal Engineers in Koonap Pass whilst significantly outnumbered. In 1852, he was Senior Royal Engineer on the Waterkloof and Transkei expeditions with Sir George Cathcart.
China
Moody was the Commander of the Royal Engineers across all of China during the Second Opium War and, from April and May 1862, during the Taiping Rebellion, near Shanghai. The Royal Engineers were an elite military force who performed "reconnaissance work, led storming parties, demolished obstacles in assaults, carried out rear-guard actions in retreats and other hazardous tasks." During that time, Moody was made Major in October 1858, Lieutenant-Colonel on 28 November 1859, and Colonel in November 1864. During the period in which Moody was the Commander of the Royal Engineers in China, Nichol Latimer, the uncle of the wife of Hampden Clement's nephew Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody and the manager of Russell & Company's Shanghai Steam Navigation Co., was the publisher of the North China Herald, the most influential British newspaper in China.
