Author: Burnby, John
Biography:
BURNBY, John (1747-1805: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 5 Mar. 1847 at St. Andrew’s, Canterbury, the son of William Burnby and his wife Mary Larkins, who had married at Dover in 1771. Nothing is known of his education until he was articled to an attorney, Thomas Hammond, at Canterbury in 1764. He married Mary Pickering on 10 July 1770 at St. Margaret’s, Canterbury. They went on to have at least four children. After her death in 1786, he married Eve Johnson on 7 Aug. 1796 at St. George’s, Canterbury. There may not have been further issue. His poem The Kentish Cricketers (1773), reprinted in Summer Amusements (1783), has always been well known for being an early poem on cricket, but in his lifetime he was probably better known for his Historical Description of the Metropolitical Church of Christ, Canterbury (1772, 2nd edn. 1783) and two interventions on increases in the Poor Rates in 1778 and 1800. As an attorney he skilfully defended Colonel Nicholas Bayly of the West Middlesex Regiment at his court-martial in 1796 for striking a fellow officer in the face; but his Gentleman’s Magazineobituary noted that he was a “very eccentric character, imprudent, intemperate, and, of late years, in distressed circumstances” (GM, 385). It also mentioned that he had separated from his first wife before she died in 1786. He died on 8 Mar. 1805 at Canterbury and was buried at St. Stephen’s, Hackington. His second wife died on 11 May 1807 at Whitstable and was buried there. (ancestry.co.uk 11 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 11 June 2023; GM, Apr. 1805, 385; Kent Gazette 11 July 1786, 6-7 Dec. 1796, 22 Dec. 1807) AA