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Author: Downey, Thomas

Biography:

DOWNEY, Thomas (1768-1816: ancestry.co.uk)

He was baptised on 19 Mar. 1768 at Crediton, Devon, the son of Thomas Downey and Ann Skinner, who had married in 1759. In 1783 he was apprenticed to a surgeon, George Gale Snelling, in Crediton. He went on to study in Edinburgh, attending extramural classes conducted by Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons. He married Ann Hole (1769-1851) on 29 June 1790 at Crediton. They had seven children. He practised for a few years in Crediton but in 1795 joined the Royal Navy as surgeon’s mate and later as surgeon on HMS Abergavenny in the Caribbean. He survived outbreaks of typhus and yellow fever on this ship and on HMS Daedalus. An account of his experiences was given in the second volume of Thomas Trotter’s Medicina Nautica (1797-1803). On Christmas Eve 1799 he was on board HMS Ethalionwhen she ran aground and was wrecked off the coast of Brittany. Unusally, all the crew survived. He then served in the East Indies and the Mediterranean, and was present at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). He was appointed surgeon to HMS Thisbe in 1810 and HMS Adamant in 1811. In Mar. 1810 he was awarded an MD by the University of St. Andrews. On his return to England he was appointed surgeon at Mill Prison hospital, Portsmouth. He published Naval Poems (1813), listed here, which was much praised for its descriptions of naval life and contained an excellent glossary of naval terms. His friend Thomas Harrall (q.v.), cited in GM, thought the volume the best of its kind since William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762). In 1811 he sold property in Crediton, including the Royal Oak Inn and various tenements, but his financial situation is unclear and after his death his widow applied to the Charity for the Relief of Officers’ Widows. He died on 5 July 1816 in Covent Garden, London, and was buried on 10 July at St. James’s, Piccadilly, Westminster. (ancestry.co.uk 27 Oct. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 27 Oct. 2023; Watkins, 98; William N. Boog Watson, “Two British Naval Surgeons of the French Wars,” Medical History 13 [1969], 213-25; medicalgentlemen.co.uk/thos-downey; Hampshire Telegraph 29 July 1816; NA, ADM 6/354/61/321-6; GM May 1818, 440) AA

 

 

Books written (1):

London: C. Cradock and W. Joy, and J. Hatchard, 1813