Author: Holliday, John
Biography:
HOLLIDAY, John (1730-1801: ODNB)
John Holliday almost seems to have taken deliberate steps to conceal his origins. No information has come to light about his birthplace or parentage. The date of birth has been calculated by counting back from a GM obituary notice according to which he died in his 71st year. On his first appearance in public records, at his admission to Lincoln’s Inn on 5 May 1759 to enter upon his training in law, Halliday gave his residence as Lincoln’s Inn and his status as Gentleman. When he married an heiress, Elizabeth Harrison (1743-1826) of Dilhorne Hall, Staffordshire, at her parish church of All Saints, Dilhorne, on 20 May 1769, his residence was still Lincoln’s Inn. (They had an only child, Eliza Lydia, born in 1774, who died in 1851. All three names are memorialized in the Dilhorne church.) He was called to the bar in London on 23 Apr. 1771 and established a successful practice there, specializing in conveyancing. He was active in philanthropy as a governor of both Bridewell and Bedlam hospitals, and as a supporter of the Foundling Hospital. His literary talents were exercised occasionally in verse, more often in prose, notably in his biography of Lord Mansfield (1797); he was said to have left in manuscript a translation of the first eight books of the Aeneid, and to have published anonymously a monody lamenting the death of his friend Thomas Gilbert, MP (1720-98), of which no extant copy is recorded. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1786; as a member also of the Society of Arts and Manufactures, he won a gold medal in 1792 for having planted 118,000 mixed timber trees on his Staffordshire estates—including Cheadle Park, which he celebrated in The British Oak. He died at his London home on Great Ormond St. on 9 Mar. 1801 and was buried at St. Andrew, Holborn, on 18 Mar. (ODNB 4 Oct. 2022; ancestry.com 5 Oct. 2022; findmypast.com 5 Oct. 2022; Sun [London] 10 Mar. 1801)