Ella Chaffey was the daughter of Caleb Elias English, a Toronto lawyer, and his wife Harriett (or Henrietta) Jane (nee Taylor). She was the third of four children. She started school when she was nine years old, attending a Dame's School run by an Englishwoman and learning the '3 Rs' and deportment. Her family travelled to Europe when she was eleven, journeying to England and then on to France in 1872. They settled in Switzerland, living near Lausanne, and Ella had private tutoring (in French) before going on to attend the École Supérieure. In her teen years she travelled to Italy for a summer, accompanying an uncle who had consumption, and here she had daily lessons in Italian. Her family lived for a while at Carlsruhe and then in Zurich, while her brother attended the Polytechnics there, and while living in the German-speaking areas of Switzerland Ella and her sister became proficient in German.
In 1875 their parents decided that the girls would go to school in Paris, while the boys would return to Canada, where their future lives would be spent. The girls attended the Pensionnat Bachelier. Ella had hopes of achieving a Teacher's First Matriculation at the Sorbonne, but she was diagnosed with 'congestion of the lungs' (tuberculosis) and doctors advised her to return to Canada before she died. The family were thus all re-united in Toronto, where Ella's health improved. In 1878-1879 the family again toured Europe. In 1879-1880 Ella attended a Ladies' Academy in Hamilton, Ontario, which her mother had earlier attended. The family moved around America with the seasons, travelling to Florida in winter, then to California via the Panama, and on to Los Angeles, where her father bought an orange orchard.
Ella met Charles Chaffey in 1884, and within ten days of their meeting, he proposed. They were engaged for 18 months, then Charles' two older brothers were invited to go to Australia to set up an irrigation plan. Ella and Charles married before the brothers left, and took up a lemon orchard in Ontario. Their first child was born in 1886. When Ella was pregnant with their second child, Charles was summoned to join the rest of his family in South Australia. They arrived in Renmark in 1888 and lived there until 1904, taking up 100 acres of land and introducing the Washington navel orange in SA. Two more children were born in Adelaide, and two more at the house they built, 'Olivewood', which is maintained today by the National Trust. Her book Youngsters of Murray Home (1897) was written about life in Renmark. In 1900 Ella went to California to visit her mother, then returned to Renmark where her sixth child was born.
In 1904 Ella and her husband and children moved back to the United States. They lived in British Columbia, Canada, for a period, moving several times from one venture to another. Two of their sons, and their daughter's newly-married husband joined the forces in World War I and all three were killed. After their deaths both Ella and her daughter Harriett became obsessed with communication with spirits through the use of a ouija board. By the 1930s Ella and Charles were living in modest quarters in or near San Gabriel, California. Charles Chaffey died in 1938.
Ella wrote several children's books after her return to North America, including The Adventures of Prince Melonseed (1916) and The Young Pilgrims (1925) amongst many others. Her unpublished memoirs, 'Seven Decades', written when she was 79 years old and recently widowed, are held at 'Olivewood', in Renmark, as is a transcript of of an oral history recorded by her daughter Harriett in 1978.
