Author: Hanmer, John
Biography:
HANMER, John (1809-81: ODNB)
He was born at Hanmer, Flintshire, into a Welsh family that dated back to the Norman Conquest. The eldest son of Arabella Charlotte (Bucknell) and Thomas Hanmer (d 1818), he was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford (matric. 1827), where he became a lifelong friend of the future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) but did not proceed to a degree. He succeeded his grandfather in the baronetcy in 1828 and went into parliament, serving various constituencies off and on between 1832 and 1872. Gladstone made him Baron Hanmer of Hanmer and Flint in 1872. On 3 Sept. 1833 he married Georgiana Chetwynd; they had no children, and on his death his peerage became extinct. He made his name as a poet of the early Victorian era with Poems on Various Subjects (1836), Fra Cipolla and Other Poems (1839), and Sonnets (1840); some of these poems were also included in an appendix to his final work, a Memorial of the Family and Parish of Hanmer (1877). His wife died in 1880 and he on 8 Mar. 1881 at Knotley Hall in Kent, where he was visiting. (ODNB 28 Jan. 2022; ancestry.com 28 Jan. 2022; Morning Post 11 Mar. 1881; Alumni Oxonienses) HJ