Author: Brundish, John Jelliand
Biography:
BRUNDISH, John Jelliand (1752-86: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 18 Feb. 1752 at Northwold, Norfolk, the son of the Rev. John Brundish and his wife Ann Towerson who had married at Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, on 12 Jan. 1746. He was named after his grandmother Jane Jelliand who had married his grandfather, the Rev. John Brundish, on 27 Sept. 1723 at Northwold. She had died in June 1751. Like his father and grandfather (and later his younger brother Benjamin), he was educated at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler, won the Smith Prize and the Chancellor’s medal, and became a Junior Fellow in 1776. After the deaths of his mother in 1775, his sister Anna Maria (1755-1777), and his brother Benjamin (1753-1779), he wrote An Elegy on a Family-Tomb (1782) which was reprinted the following year with an Italian translation by his friend and fellow boffin John Barlow Seale (1753-1838). (Only Elizabeth, the eldest child, born in 1747, would survive to become the principal beneficiary of her father’s will in 1786.) Brundish had long entertained hopes of marrying Margaretta Phillipina Wale, the daughter of Thomas Wale of Shelford, and although they obtained parental approval, he was unable to match the £4000 settlement her father proposed. He was ordained priest in 1780 but failed to obtained a church living sufficient to enable him to marry. Possibly melancholic after the family deaths and his failure to marry, he had an unsuccessful spell as Master at the Perse School 1781-1782 before returning to college where he died on 28 Feb. 1786 “after about 10 or 14 days’ Illness and obstructions, that brought him to an Insanity” “to ye mortification of yor. Sister Margrtt. and all our Friends. And this disaster hapn’d just whilst they were on the very brink of their hapiness, by a special Living I had secure[d] for him” (Thomas Wale, Diary, Letter to his son.) His burial record confirms his age as 34. His father died, aged 64, on 30 July the same year. All family members were buried in the family vault at Didlington referred to in the poem. Margaretta never married and died on 19 Mar. 1841, aged 91. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Sept. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 28 Sept. 2020; DNB; ODNB 28 Sept. 2020 ; CCEd; European Magazine Jan. 1786, 49-50, Mar. 1786, 210; Norfolk Chronicle 11 Mar. 1786; Cambridge Chronicle 27 Mar. 1841; Memorial Tablets, St. Michael’s Didlington and All Saints, Little Shelford; H. J. Wale, My Grandfather’s Pocket-Book [1883]; John Venn, Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College [1897-1912]) AA