Author: Clinckett, Mary Abel
Biography:
CLINCKETT, Mary Abel, later BARTRUM (1797-1830: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born 28 Dec. 1797 in Saint Thomas, Barbados, the daughter of Abel Clinckett, a slave-owner and publisher and editor of The Barbadian, and his wife Mary Als. He married several times and had at least sixteen children. (Mary Clinckett recorded the death of her mother in 1803 in her collection Early Attempts for which her father wrote the preface and gave a brief account of his daughter's life.) At her school in Clevedale, near Bristol, there were several daughters of slave-owning Barbados familes: Sarah Eliza Gaskin, Sarah Applewaite, and Sara Jane Cumberbatch. Clinckett married Alfred Bartrum on 25 May 1816. He was employed in the office of the Commissariat in Barbados but was later appointed to a government post “on a modest salary” in Mauritius, where she joined him. He died in Mauritius in 1826 and she returned to England with two young daughters. She wrote up an account of her life in Mauritius in Recollections (1830). Although her family had Bristol connections and she had been educated there, as a young widow with two young children her only means of survival in England would have been remarriage or the family network. She therefore returned to Barbados with her children in the vague hope of remarriage. However, she died on 5 Apr. 1830, not long after her arrival. She appears to have published nothing after her marriage, confirming the earlier prediction by her father that “her visits to Castalia’s founts will be less frequent.” (ancestry.co.uk 23 Jul. 2020; Vere Langford Oliver, Caribbeana [1909-19], Monumental Inscription . . . of Barbados [1915]; Joan Mcree Sanders, Barbados Records, Baptisms 1637-1800 [1984]; The Barbadian 8 Apr. 1830, 17 May 1834) AA