Author: Spry, Edward
Biography:
SPRY, Edward (1727-1795: Burke)
Born at Plymouth, Devon, in 1727 and baptized that year on 26 Feb. at St Germans, Cornwall, Spry was a son of Elizabeth Binney (1798-1745) and her husband, a shipwright in the royal naval yard at Plymouth, Edward Spry (1695-1789). In London in the 1750s and 1760s he attended medical lectures, observed medical and surgical practice at the borough hospitals, and completed a five-year apprenticeship with George Woollcombe. Following a Grand Tour of Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, and Italy, he set up as a surgeon at Plymouth. Though he retired from surgery in 1762, he continued in general practice to the end of his life. He was admitted extra-licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in Nov. 1767 and proceeded MA and DM at Leyden in Jan. 1768. Before returning permanently to Plymouth, he practiced for three or four years at Totnes. Having spent a session at Edinburgh, in May 1774 he was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians there. He died unmarried at his residence, Old Abbey, Plymouth, in Sept. 1795 and was buried on 3 Oct. in the family plot at St Mary and St Julian church, Maker, Cornwall. He was an enthusiastic Mason, a self-promoter, and in certain respects an eccentric. A brother of Lodge No. 86 at Plymouth, he wrote and published several masonic songs. In 1786 he advertised himself as a “Candidate of Divinity, Bachelor of Musick, Dr of Philosophy, Laws and Medicine, Royal College of Physicians, London and Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, Knight Templar, Oriental Star.” It was said that he “lived upwards of two years upon a gooseberry a day in summer, an oat cake and three glasses of wine the rest of the season per day.” Spry subscribed to the Poems of Ann Thomas (q.v.) probably because she was a resident of Millbrook, Cornwall, his father’s hometown. A mezzotint portrait of Spry wearing the Templar cross, printed by Isaac Jehner, is preserved at the British Library. His sister Elizabeth married a son of chronometer-maker Zachariah Mudge, the friend of Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. (ancestry.com 8 Jan. 2025; Cornwall Record Office FP134/15; F. Barret, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer [1801], 119; J. Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland [1838], 4:697; Western Antiquary 7 [1891], 35-37) JC