Author: Pote, Benjamin Edward
Biography:
POTE, Benjamin Edward (1798-1862: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 11 Apr. 1798 at Bankypore, Patna, India, the youngest son of Edward Ephraim Pote (1750-1832) and his wife Donata Johnson (1755-98) who may have died due to childbirth complications. His father, an EIC merchant, donated his collection of over 550 volumes of Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Oriental manuscripts to Eton and King’s College Cambridge where he had studied. Benjamin later claimed knowledge of such subjects from the age of nine. With the poems on Oriental and Arabic subjects listed here, he acquired a reputation as an expert on these topics and was briefly (1838-40) editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review (FQR) to which he was a regular contributor. He took the FQR in an increasingly Tory stance just as it was moving towards the more liberal Westminster Review and was soon removed, partly one suspects because his mental health had become an issue. Earlier, in the 1820s and 1830s, he had worked as a clerk in the Post Office and Foreign Office. He may have married a woman named Mary (maiden name unknown) but no marriage record has been traced. Two children were baptised on 5 Apr. 1827 at St. Mary’s, Frittenden, Kent, with him recorded as a Foreign Office Clerk resident in Lambeth. As early as Jan. 1833 he was sued for debt and had lived at many addresses: Lambeth, Bloomsbury, Haymarket, Euston, Fitzroy and Leicester Squares, and finally Francis Street off Tottenham Court Road. Insolvency notices were issued many times in the 1830s and 1840s and continued until 1851. Financial distress and scholarly delusion persisted and on 4 May 1862 his daughter, probably Emily Mary, wrote to his cousin, Rev. Edward Pote Neale, vicar of Horsley Norfolk, seeking his assistance because her father was labouring under the delusion that England and Europe would be destroyed on 23 May and he would be tortured and executed the previous day. Neale arrive on the 6th but by then Pote had already cut his throat and was in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He recovered sufficiently to be moved to Heigham Hall lunatic asylum on the outskirts of Norwich on 10 May but died the following day from exhaustion. (ancestry.co.uk 16 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 16 June 2023; Bengal Past and Present [1910], 174-6; London Gazette[multiple issues]; Wellesley Index, 2: 133-4) AA
Other Names:
- B. E. Pote