Author: Crocker, Charles
Biography:
CROCKER, Charles (1797-1861: ODNB)
He was born in Chichester, Sussex, on 22 June 1797 and baptised on 29 June in the church of St. Peter the Great, Chichester. His parents were Henry Crocker (1767-1824) and Elizabeth Gardener who had married in Brighton on 9 Oct. 1793. The brief account of his life that Crocker included in the preface to his book states that his parents could not afford schooling for him after the age of seven but friends enabled him to attend the Chichester Grey Coat school. At twelve he was apprenticed to a shoemaker and, after the required seven years of training, he became a journeyman shoemaker. He read widely, studied a book of English grammar, and attended a lecture on Milton and Shakespeare by John Thelwall (q.v.) who he credited with teaching him the art of versification. Crocker published verse in newspapers and became very popular particularly in and around Chichester and Brighton. He married Phebe Woolgar in St. Peter the Great church on 12 April 1818. Their daughter, Frances, was born in Mar. 1819 and baptised privately because she was very ill (she survived until 1891), and Phebe died in Apr. 1820. Crocker married Mary Heath on 31 Aug. 1825; they had at least two daughters and three sons but two of the sons died in childhood. In 1839 he gave up shoemaking for bookselling with the firm owned by William Hayley Mason and in 1845 he became the sexton and, later, bishop’s verger of Chichester cathedral. His popular handbook A Visit to Chichester Cathedral was first published in 1848. He died at home in South Street, Chichester, on 6 Oct. 1861; there is now a blue plaque on the house commemorating Crocker as a “much respected Cicestrian.” He was buried in the subdeanery of the cathedral. Crocker’s other works are Kingsley Vale and Other Poems (1837) and Collected Poems (1860). (ODNB 14 Mar. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 14 Mar. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 14 Mar. 2024; Goodridge; C. Croker, “Preface,” The Vale of Obscurity [1830]; Hampshire Advertiser 21 Mar. 1835; Sussex Advertiser 4 Jan. 1841; Brighton Gazette 9 Jan. 1845)