Author: Tapner, John
Biography:
TAPNER, John (1730-87: ancestry.co.uk)
He may have been the son of John Tapner and Mary Harvest who married in Chichester in 1729 but there is no recorded baptism. He married a widow, Elizabeth Rushton (formerly Marklew), on 25 Aug. 1755 at Boxgrove, Sussex, where he was a schoolmaster, probably at the charity school established in 1741. He was also parish clerk and sometime surveyor. They had three sons and three daughters. He published an unusual alphabetical list of one-line verses and other pedagogical aids, The School-Master’s Repository: or, Youth’s Moral Preceptor (1761), which was well received. This was followed by another pedagogical work, A New Collection of Fables in Verse, listed here. The Preceptive Moral Poem of Phocilides . . . Translated from the Greek. To which are added, A Few Select Poems: Divine and Moral (1785?) may well be his. It was printed for him by Dennett Jacques at Chichester and concludes with a notice advertising his surveying services with his son Charles. It contained thirty-six pages of his moral and sacred verse. It is not known where he acquired his knowledge of Greek. He died at Boxgrove and was buried on 27 Apr. 1787 at St. Mary and St. Blaise. (ancestry.co.uk 29 July 2023; findmypast.co.uk 29 July 2023; John Caffyn, Sussex Schools in the 18th Century [1998], 51-2, 338; Calendar of Sussex Marriages [1926], 229) AA