Author: Gauthern, William
Biography:
GAUTHERN, William (c. 1757-1840: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born into a Quaker family at Adderbury, Oxfordshire; his father’s name may have been Caleb. No birth record has been located, including under variant spellings of his surname, but his uncle was John Gauthern (1727-1801), a paper mould maker to whom William was apprenticed. In a 1786 advertisement he stated that, having served his uncle for fifteen years in North Newington, near Banbury, he was moving to Birmingham where he set up business as a paper mould maker in Kenyon Street. (North Newington is the correct name but Gauthern’s title pages use North Newton.) Gauthern is listed in the Birmingham directories for 1791-92 but he must then have moved back to North Newington where he began training apprentices and publishing works targeting the Quakers. Almost certainly he was the William Gauthern who married Mary Harris in Broughton, Oxfordshire, on 29 Sept. 1777 although a death notice for his wife, from 1847, gives her first name as Ann. His other works—some of which include snatches of verse—include The Bang-Up Inquisitor, Or An Odd Fellow’s Scheme (1823), The Prophetic Signs of the Times (1826), and Old Gauthern’s Singular Novel for Rational Youth (1827). He claimed to have printed The Prophetic Signs on a makeshift press at his home. He died at North Newton on 31 Aug. 1840. His death notice commented that he was “an eccentric character” and the one for his wife described her as “the eccentric relic of the eccentric William Gauthern.” (ancestry.co.uk 9 Sept. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 9 Sept. 2024; Friends’ Books; Gloucester Journal 29 May 1786; Oxford Journal 12 Sept. 1840; Oxford Chronicle 20 Feb. 1847; N&Q 17 May 1856) SR