Author: Ind, Edward
Biography:
IND, Edward (1751-1808: ancestry.co.uk)
He was probably born at or near St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, the son of Robert Ind of Needingworth, a grocer and wool-comber, and his wife Anne Ralph, who had married in 1749. There were at least four children (excluding infant deaths) and Edward would later be largely responsible for the family’s well-being after his father’s death in 1768. Around 1766 he was employed in Richard Foster’s counting-house in Cambridge for a number of years before taking up the post of clerk at Thomas Seymour Hide’s brewery. He eventually went into partnership with Hide. His brother James (1753-1810) also became a brewer who with his son formed part of what was later to become the Ind Coope brewery. The elder sister, Mary Whitehead (1750-1817), ran the Black Bear Inn, Cambridge, which was probably owned by Edward or his brother. He became a much-respected alderman and member of Cambridge society, albeit on the radical fringe. He was described by the Rev. Robert Hall as “pure as a seraph, and gentle as a lamb” (Works 6:36). He was a member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave-Trade (SEAST), founded by Thomas Clarkson and others at Cambridge in 1787. He was joint-executor with fellow-member John Audley of the black abolitionist writer Olaudah Equiano’s (a.k.a. Gustavus Vassa’s) will in 1797 and was charged with the responsibility for the welfare and maintenance of his two orphaned daughters, Anna Maria (1793-7) and Joanna (1795-1857). On Anna Maria’s death later the same year, he wrote the inscription at St. Andrew’s, Chesterton (first identified in the Scots Magazine [1809] shortly after his death and later reprinted by Thomas Mott in 1822). He was also Treasurer of the Benevolent Society founded in Sept. 1801 by Eliza Flower, the wife of the Rev. Benjamin Flower. He died on 7 Mar. 1808 at Cambridge and was buried at Holy Trinity in the family vault. Thomas Mott (q.v.), a Cambridge solicitor, edited his poems in 1822 and gave a brief account of his life. (Mott may have been connected by the marriage of James Ind’s son to a Maria Mott in London in 1802.) In addition to the epitaph on Equiano’s daughter, Ind wrote two sonnets on reports of Charlotte Smith’s death; numerous elegies; and a neglected poem, "Ode to the Genius of Solitude." Mott, however, noted that few of his poems had survived. (ancestry.co.uk 30 Dec. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 30 Dec. 2020; Scots Magazine Nov. 1809, 812; Robert Hall, Works [1831] 1:112, [1833] 6:36; Northampton Mercury 26 Dec. 1807, 19 Mar. 1808; GM Apr. 1808, 361; Stamford Mercury 15 Aug. 1817; N&Q July 1977, 309-310; Mott in Ind, Posthumous . . . [1822] [iii]-vi) AA