Author: Colmer, John
Biography:
COLMER, John (1764-1832: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 28 June 1764 at Plymouth, Devon, the son of John Colmer (1734-68) and his wife Maria Croft (1736-64), who had married in 1762. His mother died in childbirth and his father four years later so he was brought up by guardians and educated at Plymouth and Cambridge (although there is no record of him at the university). In 1785 he took possession of his mother’s fortune and Colmer property in Ashburnham, Devon, and toured Europe in 1787 for four years, spending two years in Paris. Returning to England in 1791, he married Ann(e) Cross on 17 Dec. 1793 at St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, London. They went on to have twelve children. They moved to Plymouth where his gambling resulted in the loss of all his inheritance. He then became variously a schoolmaster at Bow near London and clerk in an import firm and a newspaper. When Napoleon Buonaparte was held on board the Bellepheron in Plymouth Sound from 26 Jul. to 4 Aug. 1815, Colmer acted as translator. He then became Controller of the Turnpike Trusts in Plymouth. He briefly edited the Plymouth Chronicle but after its failure went to London in 1820 where he worked sporadically as a journalist and as editor of the London Mirror. He applied to the RLF and was awarded £10 in 1820 and £5 in 1822. He died at 10 Tothill Street, off Grays Inn Lane, and was buried on 19 Aug. 1832 at St. Andrew’s Holborn. Anne Colmer applied to the RLF and was awarded £10. She died at the home of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, at Devonport in 1852. Colmer’s claims in his applications to the RLF to have published other works (“books of moral and religious tendency”) are to some extent corroborated by the independent reports of Worth, Knight in West Country Poets, and William Colmer, but some of the titles he refers to are likely to have been contributions to newspapers or magazines. Robert Inglish possessed a copy of his Sacred Dramas (Plymouth, 1821) in 1861 (N&Q) but no extant copy has been located. (ancestry.co.uk 23 Jul. 2022, including Family History Note by William Colmer, 15 Mar. 1914; findmypast.co.uk 23 Jul. 2022; RLF 1/415; N&Q 21 Dec. 1861, 501; Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections [1858], 70; West Country Poets; R. N. Worth, Plymouth Athenaeum [1870], 225, 229, 230) AA
Other Names:
- J. Colmer