Author: Dine, William
Biography:
DINE, William (1723-1803: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 16 Feb. 1723 at Hellingly, Sussex, the son of John Dine and his wife Elizabeth Bishop. He received little education and worked initially as an agricultural labourer and seasonally in the Hop Excise before becoming master of a little school in Chiddingly and the parish clerk. “All his other Learning, he acquired by his own Study and Application, having never been put to any School. He was always in low Circumstances, on account of a large Family which he had, and still has, partly to support . . . . Having a natural Taste for POETRY, he would borrow what Books he could, of that Sort, of his Friends, and read them by Night” (“The Printer to the Reader,” Poems on Several Occasions). He married Anne Turle (1722-1811) on 12 Apr. 1748, at Chiddingly. They had around eleven children. He was buried on 24 Mar. 1803 at All Saints, Waldron, about four miles north of Chiddingly, where two of his children lived. His wife survived him and died in Dec. 1811 at Chiddingly. (ancestry.co.uk 5 Sept. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 5 Sept. 2022; John Caffyn, Sussex Schools in the 18th Century [1998], 96, 295; Poems on Several Occasions [1771]) AA