Author: JOHNSTON, Andrew Gregory
Biography:
JOHNSTON, Andrew Gregory (1785-1850: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 11 Aug. 1785 and baptised on 20 Sept. at St. Mary’s, Fetcham, Surrey, the eldest son of Thomas Gregory Johnston and his wife Elizabeth Anna Maria Storer, who had married at St. James’s, Westminster, London, in 1783. Nothing is known of his education. His father had been educated at Westminster School and later owned the Anchovy Valley Estate, a sugar plantation with rum production at Portland, Jamaica; on his death in 1787 it passed to his wife. She died in 1791 and the estate passed into trust. The Portland slave registers record 174 slaves in 1817, 74 in 1819, 78 in 1829. Following the abolition of slavery in 1834, Andrew Gregory made an unsuccessful compensation claim in 1837 to the value of £2774 18s 2d for the loss of 147 slaves. He purchased Fritton Hall, Suffolk, in 1819 and was sometime resident there until 1830 but spent most of his time in Jamaica, where he was a member of the Assembly for the Parish of Portland and sub-agent for immigration for Morant Bay. He acquired a reputation for his scientific interests, winning a £50 prize for his essay “The Natural and Political History of Portland,” published in the Literary and Scientific Journal(1848), and his assistance was acknowledged in Philp Henry Gosse’s Birds of Jamaica (1847). The full extent of his literary and scientific interests in Jamaica is not yet known. In addition to the poem listed here, he had earlier published Letters to a Nobleman (1816), claiming that William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland (1738-1809), had been the author of the Junius letters. (The modern consensus favours Sir Philip Francis [1740-1818] but there are other candidates.) With Elizabeth Jones, he baptised a daughter, Jane Elizabeth, at Marylebone, London, on 9 Apr. 1816 and a son, William Gregory, the following year. On her marriage in 1849, his daughter gave her name as Jane Elizabeth Jones and her father as Andrew Gregory Johnston, planter, so it seems likely they did not marry. In the 1830s he had at least five further children (1833-41) at Portland, Jamaica, with Mary Ann Cunningham. No marriage record has been found. He died in Jamaica on 17 Mar. 1850 and was buried at St. Thomas-in-the-East the following day. (ancestry.co.uk 2 Nov. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 2 Nov. 2024; LBS; Shipping and Mercantile Gazette 27 Apr. 1850) AA