Author: Gooch, Richard
Biography:
GOOCH, Richard (1792-1849: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 18 Sept. 1792 at Wymondham, Norfolk, the second son of Thomas Gooch and Elizabeth Payne, who had married in 1789. It is not known where he went to school. He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge (Sizar 1819, matric. 1827, Pensioner 1827) and was then admitted to the Inner Temple on 12 Nov. 1827. While still at Cambridge, he published, under the pseudonym “Socius,” The Cambridge Tart (1823) and a collection of miscellaneous prose, Facetiae Cantabrigienses (1825). He married Ann Hitchon (1804-83) on 28 Apr. 1829, at St. Giles in the Fields, Holborn, London. They went on to have five sons and a daughter. He appears not to have practised law but to have pursued journalism instead, editing and co-owning (not very successfully in financial terms) a number of conservative-orientated newspapers: Bolton Chronicle (1835), Chester Courant (1837), Hereford County Press (1840), Ludlow Standard (1841), and Norwich and Norfolk Times(1841-2). In this period he published the volume of religious poems Redemption (1832) and acquired some fame for his analysis of the voting records of MPs after the passing of the Great Reform Act (1832): The Book of the Reformed Parliament (1834). Sometime after 1842, he went to London and took up an appointment in the Custom House. He died of cholera on 4 Sept. 1849, aged 58, at 45 Blackfriars Rd, Southwark, and was buried at Nunhead cemetery. His widow, Ann, died at Bolton, Lancashire, in 1883, at the home of their eldest son, Frederick Mackellar Gooch. (ancestry.co.uk 18 May 2024; findmypast.co.uk 18 May 2024; N&Q July 1897, 3-4; Hereford Times 6 Oct. 1849; GRO death cert.) AA