Author: Gale, Gustavus
Biography:
GALE, Gustavus (1766-99: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 15 July 1766 at St. Bartholomew by the Exchange, City of London, the youngest of five children of Robert Gale (1721-68) and Mary Senhouse (1733-78), who had married at Cross Canonby, Cumberland, in 1760. He was educated at Clitheroe Royal Grammar School, Lancashire, and entered Peterhouse College, Cambridge, on 6 Jan. 1785, but was rusticated by college order 16 Jan.-10 Oct. 1787, probably because he had eloped with someone. The elopement (which was probably not with his future wife) also led to a temporary estrangement from the Senhouse family and his grandmother barred him from her house in Carlisle. He would later marry a widow, Elizabeth Gent (formerly Bass) (1754-1811) on 3 June 1793 at St. Margaret’s, Lowestoft, Suffolk. She was already the mother of two of his sons, Gustavus (1790-1865) and Robert (1792-1843); two further sons were born after the marriage. He returned to Carlisle and published Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1794) with around seven hundred subscribers. Various members of the Senhouse family took multiple copies. It was also well supported by his Cambridge contemporaries. Nevertheless, he struggled financially and started an infant school in High Friar Street, Newcastle, in about 1796, but with little success. He later opened another school at Whitehaven, Cumberland, but was probably forced to serve in the local militia to make ends meet. In a letter dated 13 June 1799, Fergus Graham reported to Humphrey Senhouse, Gale’s uncle, that he had died in York, adding “I truly hope that all his faults are forgiven and that he is now happy.” He had died at the hospital in York and was buried on 5 June 1799 at the church of St. Maurice. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Apr. 2023; William Whelan, ed., The History and Topography of the Counties of Cumberland Westmoreland [1860], 326-8; Senhouse Family Papers, Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle, D Sen 5/5/1/ 8, 9, 19; Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century [1965], 2: 314) AA