Author: Martindale, Miles
Biography:
MARTINDALE, Miles (1756-1824: ODNB)
He was probably born at Moss Bank, near St. Helens, Lancs., in late 1756, the son of Paul Martindale and his wife Ann Winstanley, who had married at Wigan in Jan. 1756. His father died in the West Indies in 1758. The fate of his mother is unknown. He received little in the way of formal education but taught himself French and Latin and later Greek (in order to read the New Testament). In 1776 he went to Liverpool and became a Methodist. He was a local preacher in the Wirral, Chester (1786-9), where he preached in houses and barns and helped to establish Sunday schools. He was ordained as a Wesleyan minister in 1789. He then became an itinerant preacher until 1816 when he was appointed Governor of Woodhouse Grove School near Bradford, Yorkshire, a Methodist boarding-school. He married Margaret King on 31 Mar. 1777 at St. Nicholas, Liverpool. They had at least five children; three daughters survived him. He died of cholera, aged 68, at Grove Terrace, Leeds, the house of his son-in-law, on 6 Aug. 1824, having attended a reunion of his students who had become ministers and who delivered eulogies to him in Latin, Greek, and English. He was buried at the Old Chapel (Wesleyan), Leeds, on 9 Aug. 1824. His daughter, Sophia Matilda, wrote his obituary. She later married Rev. John Farrar, Wesleyan minister and theologian, in 1826. In addition to the works listed here, he published A Dictionary of the Holy Bible (1818) and several sermons, including Methodism Defended (1816). (ODNB 20 Mar. 2023; DNB; Arminian Magazine10 [1797], 3-9, 53-60; Sophia Matilda Martindale, “Memoir,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 48 [July 1825], 433-442; MH 16 Aug. 1824; Stamford Mercury 20 Aug. 1824; GM Aug. 1824, 188) AA