Author: Wimberley, William Clark
Biography:
WIMBERLEY, William Clark (1790-1861: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 12 Mar. 1790 and baptised on 17 Mar. at St. Wulfram’s, Grantham, Lincolnshire, the third of seven children of Thomas Peete Wimberley (1761-1833), linen-draper, grocer, sometime bankrupt, and later Secretary to the Royal Mail Coach Company, and his wife Mary Clarke (1769-1847), who had married in 1785. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital on the nomination of the Duke of Rutland. As a young man he went to Gibraltar where he traded as a merchant. He contributed to the building of an Exchange and is commemorated by a stone wall tablet. He married Maria Rosa Vasquez (1784-1827) in Gilbraltar in 1817. They had four children, all born in Gilbraltar 1818-27. She may have died due to childbirth complications after giving birth to her third son. He returned to England where he married Sarah Elizabeth French on 9 Apr. 1829 at St. Mary Abbot, Kensington, London, and published the work listed here which reflects his experience of Spanish themes and culture. A further seven children followed. They moved to Doncaster where he took over his father’s coach business. He also set up a private press where he printed his Sonnets on the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Doncaster 1841). In the same year he gave three lectures at the Literary and Philosophical Institution, Cheltenham, on heraldry and blazonry. His poem Bolingbroke’s Oath (1838), originally read to the Doncaster Lyceum, formed part of an “Essay on Ballad Poetry.” He contributed to The Casket: A Series of One Hundred Sonnets (Doncaster 1838). The collection of his papers now at the University of Miami includes a play in MS, Atala. They stayed in Doncaster for almost fifteen years but the transfer of traffic from coach to railway and steamboat led him to move to Lincoln where he became collecting clerk and later district auditor for the Great Northern Railway. His wife, Sarah Elizabeth, died in Lincoln in 1853. He then appears to have moved to London where he is recorded at various addresses in Hackney and Islington. He died on 24 Aug. 1861, aged 71, at 33 Halliford Street, Islington, and was buried at All Souls, Kensal Green. (ancestry.co.uk 21 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 21 Nov. 2022; Douglas Wimberley, Memorials of Four Old Families [1894], 23-4; Newsam, 226; Sheffield Independent 12 Mar. 1853; Stamford Mercury 13 Dec. 1833, 6 Sept. 1861; GRO death cert; Papers at University of Miami, MS ASM0462) AA