Author: Streatfeild, T.
Biography:
STREATFEILD, Thomas (1777-1848: ODNB)
He was born on 5 Jan. 1777 at Long Ditton, Surrey, and baptised on 26 Jan. at St. Michael Bassishaw, City of London, the eldest of eight children of Sandeforth Streatfeild, merchant and banker, and Frances Hussey, who had married in 1773. His early education is not known but he proceeded to Oriel College, Oxford (matric. 1795, BA 1799). He then entered the established church and served as curate at Long Ditton from 1799 to at least 1811 when he preached the funeral sermon for his mentor and rector Rev. William Pennicott (1726-1811). He wrote a number of plays for family theatricals at the “Long Ditton Theatre” (LDT): The Guardian (1797), The Jew (1799), The Road to Ridicule (1799), The Ton and Antiquity (1799)--with the last two privately printed at Oxford where he also collected the verse Prologues and Epilogues(1799) to these prose plays. He was later curate at Tatsfield, Surrey, until 1842, where he altered and repaired the church at his own expense. He bought a forty-acre estate and built a house of his own design at nearby Chart’s Edge, Westerham, Kent, in 1822. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1812 and assembled a vast collection of materials for the history of Kent for which he issued a prospectus, Excerpta Cantiana (1836). Only a small part of the work appeared in 1886 and the fifty-two volumes of materials eventually went to the British Museum (now the British Library): Add. Mss. 38878-33929. He married a wealthy heiress, Harriet Champion (1776-1814) on 8 Oct. 1800. They had five sons and three daughters. She died on 10 Nov. 1814. He then married a widow, Clare (Harvey) Woodgate (1793-1886), on 30 Sept. 1823 at South Bersted, Sussex. They had four sons and two daughters. In 1842 he suffered a stroke and was thereafter in ill health. He died at Chart’s Edge on 17 May 1848 and was buried at St. Mary’s, Chiddingstone, where there are memorial tablets in the church to him and his first wife, Harriet. (ODNB 23 Mar. 2024; DNB; CCEd 23 Mar. 2024; LES 19 May 1848; GM July 1848, 99-101; Lambert Blackwell Larking, “The Late Rev. Thomas Streatfeild of Chart’s Edge,” Archaeologia Cantiana [1860], 3: 137-44; ancestry.co.uk 23 Mar. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 23 Mar. 2024) AA