Author: McKenzie, Andrew
Biography:
MCKENZIE, Andrew (1780-1839: ODNB)
The principal source of information for his life is an account by John Fullarton published in the Ulster Magazine in 1861. McKenzie was one of six children born to a farmer and his wife in Dunover, County Down. At fourteen he was apprenticed as a linen weaver. Fullarton describes how he composed at the loom, writing down his poems afterwards. He married and had children; Robert Anderson (q.v.), a friend, wrote “Addressed to the Infant Son of Gaelus, the Bard of Dunover” (published in Anderson’s Poetical Works) about one of McKenzie’s children. “Gaelus” was the name he used for his submissions to the Belfast Newsletter and McKenzie named his house in Dunover “Mount Gaelus.” On 5 May 1808 he was admitted as a freemason to Lodge 447 at Newtown Clanaboy. One of Anderson’s poems, published in the London Courier 30 Sept. 1809, celebrates McKenzie’s recovery from illness. McKenzie’s 1810 Poems and Songs has an impressive list of subscribers and includes separate sections for subscriptions from Scotland and Jamaica. Details of McKenzie’s connection to Jamaica are not known but his son was later to die there while on military service. He suffered from increasing poverty particularly after the loss in a storm of his fishing boat and of his house in Dunover where he had failed to secure a lease for the land. In later life he lived in Belfast where he died on 10 May 1839. He was interred in the Shankill Cemetery (his funeral was likely paid for by his Lodge) where William McComb (q.v.) had a monument erected for him and wrote the inscription. (ODNB 22 Sept. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 22 Sept. 2021; Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Ireland Membership Registers 1733-1923; London Courier 30 Sept. 1809; Belfast Newsletter 20 Apr. 1830; Belfast Newsletter 27 July 1830; John Fullarton, “Sketches of Ulster Poets: Andrew McKenzie,” Ulster Magazine and Monthly Review of Science and Literature 2 [1861] 374-78; Goodridge)