Author: Winter, Richard
Biography:
WINTER, Richard (1783?-1814: fndmypast.co.uk)
His birth and baptism cannot be established with any certainty. His burial record in 1814, aged 30/30th year, gives a 1784/5 birth. The 1828 Whitby Magazine notice states that he was born in 1782. A memoir of his nephew gives a brother, William, also a schoolmaster in Whitby, Yorkshire. Another possibility is that he was the Richard Sweeting Winter born on 14 Oct. 1783 and baptised on 26 Dec. at St. Mary the Virgin, Whitby, the natural son of Isabella Sweeting (1761-85). There are other possibilities. Nothing is known of his education. He married Mary Bird on 23 Apr. 1805, at her parish of Brough upon Stainmore, Westmorland. He was Clerk to the Alum works in Sandsend, near Whitby, from where he published a scientific paper in William Nicholson’s Journal (April 1810, 241-257), “A mineralogical Outline . . . with the entire Process practised in the Manufactory of Alum.” Since manufacturing and industrial processes were closely guarded secrets at the time, he was dismissed and subsequently became a schoolmaster. He published The Harp of St. Hilda, which contains a descriptive account of Whitby and its environs. It was first published anonymously in 1814 but he subsequently put his name to it. A second edition appeared in 1827. He also began to collect materials for a History of Whitby. This was left unfinished at his death and his notes passed to the Rev. George Young (1777-1848), minister of Cliff Lane chapel (Presbyterian), who completed the work in two volumes in 1817. Winter also wrote a play, The Phoenix Revived, and a farce, Hero and Leander, which he failed to get staged in London. (The manuscript of The Phoenix Revived was sold by Pickering and Chatto in the early twentieth century to an unknown buyer; the manuscript of Hero and Leander was not returned to him.) He died at Whitby on 8 July 1814, leaving a widow and five children. His wife, Mary, died at Whitby in 1819. (findmypast.co.uk 11 Aug. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 11 Aug. 2023; Hull Packet 19 July 1814; GM Aug. 1814, 195; Whitby Magazine, ii, Aug. 1828, 222-224; Whitby Authors, 51-52; John Ripley, The Young Convert: Being a Brief Memoir of the Late George T. Winter, of Whitby [1837], 1) AA