Author: Blackley, Thomas
Biography:
BLACKLEY, Thomas (1782-1842: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 5 Jan. 1782, at Canterbury, Kent, the son of John Blackley and his second wife Elizabeth White, who had married the previous year. Nothing is known of his education except that from 1826 he styled himself “A.M.” He did not attend Oxford or Cambridge and may have had Wesleyan sympathies. (His son Frederick Rogers Blackley was baptised at Holy Cross West Gate, Canterbury [Wesleyan] in 1808 and later went to St. John’s Cambridge.) It seems likely therefore the A.M. award was from a Scottish university. He married Mary Rogers on 6 May 1802 at St. Mary the Virgin, Dover, Kent. They had at least one child. In 1814 he was appointed curate at Bingley, West Riding, Yorkshire, and under the patronage of Richard Howard, Earl of Effingham, became curate at Rotherham from 1816 and vicar from 1826. He was ordained priest in 1816. He was the officiating vicar at the burials of many of the 64 victims (including many children) of the Masbrough boat disaster of 5 July 1841. The event was commemorated in a poem by Mary Hutton (q.v.). He died on 26 Jan. 1842 at Vicarage House, Rotherham, of typhoid fever. In addition to The Hallowed Harp (1833), listed here, he published Plain Sermons (1822) and Practical Sermons (1826); a charming essay on swallows in Rotherham, The Swallows(1816); and an essay on the duty of Christians to instruct and convert gypsies,The Gypsies (1822). (Newsam, 160-1; ancestry.co.uk 27 May 2023; findmypast.co.uk 27 May 2023; Kentish Gazette 14 May 1802; York Herald 29 Jan. 1842; Johnson, item 99; GRO death cert.) AA