Author: Plomley, Mary Ann
Biography:
PLOMLEY, Mary Ann, later KETLEY (1804-77: ancestry.co.uk)
There is no easily available record of her birth or baptism (if it exists) in Church of England or Non-Conformist records and she was not registered at Dr. Williams’s Library. Two church books of Northiam Unitarian Chapel which include births and baptisms are held at East Sussex Record Office (ESRO) and may or may not contain the answer. She was probably born in 1804 at Hole Farm, Northiam, the eldest daughter of John Plomley (1774-1839), hop planter and prominent local Unitarian, and his wife Hannah Croft (1776-1855), who had married at Northiam in 1801. Nothing is known of her education but the subscription list to Rural Lays (1826), published by Darton and Harvey in London and Samuel Dobell (q.v.) in Cranbrook, Kent, reads like a list of local Unitarians--Aspland, Clout, Coveney, Cox, Frewens etc.--and included her father (25 copies) and her brother John Foulis Plomley. She married Joseph Ketley (1799-1857), Unitarian minister of the Old Meeting House, Nicholas Street, Ipswich, at Northiam on 8 July 1833. They went on to have at least three children. He caused controversy in 1836 when he publicly recanted his Unitarian views and subscribed to the Church of England. It is not known how Mary Ann and her father responded to this. After marriage he went to Queen’s College Cambridge and won four prizes for theological essays. A son was born at Cambridge in 1839 but by 1851 they had moved to London, where Joseph Ketley held a number of clerical positions. He died at Kensington House, Kensington, in 1857. (He is sometimes confused with another Unitarian minister, Joseph Ketley [1802-75], who was a Demerara missionary, anti-slavery campaigner, and agitator.) She remained in London and moved to the St. Marylebone area. She died on 1 Nov. 1877 at 10 Portsea Place, Connaught Square, Marylebone, leaving an estate of under £3000. Her volume contains the usual Unitarian combination of nature poetry and religious contemplation and includes poems on “The Pleasures of Solitude” and “The Negro Slave.” She is not thought to have published further. (ancestry.co.uk 9 Oct. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 9 Oct. 2022; Ipswich Journal 13 July 1833; Whitby Authors, 81; ESRO, NU 4/1/1 and AMS 6034/1; Valerie Smith, Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-Century England [2021], 191-3) AA