Author: Veal, T. G.
Biography:
VEAL, Timothy George (b c. 1795: ancestry.com)
Timothy George Veal, the author of Oswald, a Tale: with Other Poems, was master of Stoke Cottage Academy, near Gosport. His life dates, parentage, and education are unknown. On 11 Jan. 1819, he married Martha (bap. 1797), a daughter of Robert Guy of Portsmouth and his wife, also Martha. There are no recorded children by the marriage. For nearly three years, from about 1815, he was an instructor at High Beech Collegiate School, near Waltham Abbey, Essex, under William Williams (d 1841). Williams was an architect, surveyor, and mathematician, “late Professor at the Royal Military College,” and author of New Mathematical Demonstrations of Euclid (1817). Veal dedicated Oswald to him. Having conducted a small school at Fareham, Hampshire, for a year or two, in July 1818 he leased or purchased a twelve-bedroom house, part of an estate called Stoke Cottage, a half-mile from Gosport. Several weeks later, he announced he would open an academy there on 1 Oct. His pupils, he advertised, “will be considered as Parlour Boarders, and their treatment in every degree consonant with that term. Emulative rewards will be established, instead of unnecessary severity.” His stint as master was short lived. He presumably sold his academy at Stoke Cottage in 1821, to John Henry Bignell, who conducted a school there until his death in 1838. Following the sale, there is no further trace of him. In the “just published” announcement for Oswald, he promised to publish “An Assistant to a Schoolmaster, a Domestic Pamphlet.” The volume did not appear. (ancestry.com 14 Sept. 2023; Le Miroir Politique, 8 July 1815; Hampshire Chronicle, 21 Sep. 1818; Monthly Magazine 47 [1819], 95) JC