Author: Paul, John Dean
Biography:
PAUL, John Dean (1775-1852: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in London on 26 Dec. 1775, the son of John Paul, MD (1745-1815), and Frances Snow (1755-94), who had married in London on 28 Jan. 1775. (In some sources, newspapers among them, his name appears as John Deal Paul, but that is an error.) His father’s family were landowners in Gloucestershire and bankers in London; his mother was the daughter of one of the partners in the banking firm. Like his father, John Dean Paul attended Westminster School (King’s Scholar, 1788); but he followed other members of the family into the bank. He undertook philanthropic work and sat on the boards of various institutions. On 2 Apr. 1799 he married Frances Eleanor Simpson (1774-1833) at St. Marylebone, Westminster. They had six children. Their eldest son, also John Dean Paul (1802-68), in due course became a partner in the bank but contributed to its collapse in 1855 by systematic fraud for which he and two partners were sentenced to transportation; he however was released and became a wine merchant. Paul was made the first Baronet of Rodborough (Gloucestershire) in Sept. 1821 and DCL at Oxford in 1834. On 28 Sept. 1835 he married a widow, Mary Napier (not Rapier), at East Pennard, Somerset, by licence. The 1841 Census shows them living in their London house on the Strand with her 20-year-old daughter and ten servants. After Mary Paul died, aged 47, in 1842, he married Elizabeth Hallifax, a daughter of the Bishop of St. Asaph, at Brighton, Sussex, on 9 Apr. 1844. He died at his Gloucestershire estate near Stroud on 16 Jan. 1852 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London, with a mausoleum. Paul was a capable amateur painter, mainly of landscapes, horses, and hunting scenes. His publications are few: an illustrated Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris in the Month of August, 1802 (1802); the anonymous Man of Ton, a Satire (1828), and a short prose narrative, Massaniello, or, The Revolt of Naples (1829). The Evening Telegraph in 1919 summed him up, not unfairly, as “a banker who dabbled in art and poetry.” (ancestry.com 29 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 29 Aug. 2023; “Paul, John Dean, 2nd Baronet” [son], ODNB 29 Aug. 2023; “Paul, John Dean,” collections.westminster.org.uk; ACAD [father]; John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage [1845], 779; Evening Telegraph 10 July 1919)
Other Names:
- John Deal Paul