Author: Webber, Thomas
Biography:
WEBBER, Thomas (1783-1851: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 31 May 1783 and baptised on 14 Jan. 1784 at St. Peter’s, Tiverton, Devon, the son of William Webber and his wife Elizabeth Edgley, who married in 1780. He was apprenticed to a woolcomber and moved to the North of England. He was employed by Joseph Peas & Co. of Darlington from 1806 for several years before moving to Stockton-on-Tees in 1814. He married Ann Todd on 26 Dec. 1815 and they had several children. She died in Aug. 1832 and two daughters, Fanny and Sarah, are recorded as living with him in the 1841 Census. Four daughters were born in the 1820s but it is highly likely there was other issue 1816-22. In 1832 he was active in the Reform Bill movement and was described by Henry Heavisides as “a fierce declaimer in public against all despotic governments, but gentle and amiable at his own fireside, where I frequently spent a happy hour with him” (Annals, 160-1). He lived at 11, The Passage, Skinner Street, Stockton-on-Tees, where he is recorded a few months before his death as a widower, woolcomber, and pauper in the 1851 Census. He died on 17 July 1851, aged 68, and was buried on 20 July at Holy Trinity, Stockton-on-Tees. (ancestry.co.uk 16 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 16 Aug. 2022; York Herald 19 July 1851; Henry Heavisides, The Annals of Stockton-on-Tees [1865], 160-1; George Markham Tweddell, The Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham and the Vicinage [1872], 233-37; Johnson, items 952-3) AA