Author: Onyon, Henry Bristowe
Biography:
ONYON, Henry Bristowe (1803-40: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised at Alverstoke, Hampshire, on 31 Mar. 1803, the ninth of at least twelve children of David Onion, a Clerk in the Gun-Wharf, Portsmouth, and his wife Mary Mason, who had married at Gosport in 1786. Nothing is known of his education or early life. It is not known why he published The Minstrel Wanderer (1833) under the name of Onyon. He married a music teacher, Marianne Camsell (1799-1885), on 27 May 1835 at St. Martin in the Fields, London. They had two children in England before arriving on 17 Apr. 1838 on the Morning Star at Colombo, Ceylon, where he took up a post as a Clerk in the Royal Ordnance Service. Two further children were born in Ceylon. He died on 1 May 1840 in Colombo. His wife and four children sailed for England on 19 May 1840 aboard the Fairy Queen and returned to Alverstoke, Hants., where she worked as a teacher of music. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Jul. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 28 Jul. 2021; J. Penry Lewis, List of Inscriptions on Tombstones and Monuments in Ceylon [1913] 396; Bell’s New Weekly Messenger 20 Oct. 1833; Bombay Gazette 12 June 1840; Morning Post 18 Dec. 1885) AA