Author: Wilcocke, Samuel Hull
Biography:
WILCOCKE, Samuel Hull (c. 1766-1833: DCB)
He was born at Reigate, Surrey, about 1766. His father was a clergyman, Samuel Wilcocke, and his mother most probably Rebecca Leaf, who married a man of that name at St. Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, Surrey, on 27 May 1763. His father served a congregation at Middelburg in the Netherlands; the son had a good classical education and was besides fluent in several modern languages. On 29 Apr. 1792 he (the son) married Sara Jacoba Du Moulin at Middelburg. They went on to have at least seven children. Both families returned to England following the French invasion of 1794. Samuel the younger earned his living as a writer for periodicals and as a translator. A major project was his “new and complete” Dutch-English dictionary (1798). He settled in Liverpool, where he translated works of interest to the city’s traders and catalogued the collection of the Lyceum Library. But his income could not keep up with his expenses and he made four successful applications for relief to the RLF between 1808 and 1815. The application in 1812 was made from the King’s Bench prison. Marital discord may have contributed to Wilcocke’s decision to accept an offer from the North West Company in 1817 to move to Upper Canada to support their side in a dispute with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Several publications followed, starting with A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries (1817). He was arrested in Burlington VT in 1820 and brought to Montreal to face charges of forgery which were eventually dropped. From prison he started a newspaper, The Scribbler, about life in Montreal. When he was forced into exile in the US, he carried it on and started other shorter-lived periodicals. His wife died in Bermondsey in 1822 and was buried as a Wesleyan Methodist. Wilcocke married Ann Lewis of Lambeth, London, who had followed him to Canada in 1819 and assisted him during his imprisonment: he said there had been a clandestine marriage in Montreal in 1821 and there was an official one at Rouse’s Point NY on 22 Sept. 1825. Wilcocke was back in Montreal and working as a parliamentary reporter by 1828. He died in Quebec City on 3 July 1833 and was buried at the Anglican cathedral, Holy Trinity Church, on 5 July. (DCB 4 June 2024; ancestry.com 4 June 2024; findmypast.com 4 June 2024; RLF #225) HJ