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Author: Bird, Richard

Biography:

BIRD, Richard (1805-36: ancestry.co.uk)

He was the second son of Richard Bird (1775-1831), solicitor, of Birmingham, and Lucinda (Lucy) Payne (1774-1830), who had married in London at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1795. His record of baptism has not been located. She died in 1830 and is eulogised in the “Introduction” to Achmet’s Feast. He was educated at Birmingham school and proceeded to St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1824 but migrated to Magdalene College in 1825 (BA 1829). He was also admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1825 and later practised as a solicitor in Birmingham. The family may have suffered from consumption. His elder brother, Charles Henry, died in July 1828; his mother, Lucinda, in Nov. 1830; and his father, Richard, in Jan. 1831. He died 18 Apr. 1836 at the family house in the Crescent, Birmingham, and was buried at St. Philip’s. His will left most of his property and effects to his sole surviving brother, John, with bequests to three sisters and his aunt, Elizabeth Payne. The house (including library and contents) together with a carriage house, stables, and servant’s dwellings was sold off later that year. Achmet’s Feast contains a poem “On the Loss of the Rothsay Castle Steam Packet” which sank in a storm in August 1831 with great loss of life, “Lines on the Death of Lord Byron,” and two poems on Polish liberty. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Apr. 2023; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 28 July 1828, 29 Nov. 1830, 31 Jan. 1831, 25 Apr. 1836, 18 July 1836; GM June 1836, 677) AA

 

Books written (1):

London/ Birmingham: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman., [1832?]