Author: De Verdon, Thomas K.
Biography:
DE VERDON, Thomas Kerwin (1800-82: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 5 Nov. 1800, the fourth of nine children of Edward De Verdon (1774-1848), solicitor, and his wife Mary Ann Galway (1775-1813), who had married in 1795. He went to a school run by a Mr. Martin and proceeded to Trinity College Dublin in Nov. 1826. There is no record of his being awarded a degree. His two elder brothers, Edward and William, were also educated at Trinity and then entered the Established Church. Thomas, however, dissented and became a Congregational Minister. He had an itinerant career in England spanning forty-four years, and was minister at Clare, Sudbury, (both Suffolk); Collier’s Rents Congregational Chapel in White Street, Borough, Southwark (London); Ullesthorpe, Lutterworth (Leicestershire); Leytonstone (London); and Nayland (Suffolk). He also spent two years as a missionary in Turkey during the Crimean War (1853-56) and wrote up his experiences in Footsteps of War: A Poem, in Five Cantos. Written at Scutari (1858). He claimed to be “the last man who wandered through the solitary streets of Sebastopol” in ruins after the siege of 1855. He also wrote a poetic tribute to J. P. Smith who served as theological tutor at Homerton College for fifty years, The College Jubilee (1850). His other works are eccentric: Phrenotypic Sketches of History (1847), The Veil Lifted from Israel (1872). He married Ann Vincent (1797-1853) in May 1827 in Dublin. They had three children. He later married Matilda Scotton (1839-1917) on 15 Sept. 1860 at Wigston Magna, Leicester. They had a son and three daughters. He died at Chapel Street, Berkhamsted, on 25 June 1882, and was buried 3 July at Southwark, south London. He lived in straitened circumstances in old age and in 1867 applied to the RLF for assistance but his claim was deemed insufficient. (ancestry.co.uk 15 Jul. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 15 Jul. 2022; Evangelical Magazine Nov. 1838, 554; RLF 1/1721; Cork Constitution 17 May 1827; Coventry Standard 28 Sept. 1860; Bucks Herald 1 Jul. 1882; Hemel Hempstead Gazette 1 Jul. 1882) AA