John Barrow (1764 - 1848)

Born 19 Jun 1764 in Dragley Beck, Ulverston, Lancashire, England

Husband of Anna Maria (Truter) Barrow — married 26 Aug 1799 in Stellenbosch, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

Descendants

Died 23 Nov 1848 at age 84 in London, England, United Kingdom

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Biography

Sir John Barrow was a member of the aristocracy in England.

John Barrow is Notable.

An English statesman and writer, John Barrow was born in the village of Dragley Beck in the parish of Ulverston in Lancashire. He was baptized on the 14 July 1764. A memorial to him in the church at Ulverston, erected in 1850, gives his birthdate as 19 June 1764. (See the page by Ulverston Town Council on The Sir John Barrow Monument)

John Barrow was an only child, and his father, Roger Barrow was a tanner in the village. He was educated in Ulverston up to the age of 13, when he left school. He excelled at mathematics, and was employed as a superintending clerk in 1765 and appears to have embarked on his first adventure overseas when he was 16 travelling with a whaling expedition to Greenland. He was also a teacher of mathematics at a private school in his 20s.

He travelled to China, attached to the Embassy, where he learned Chinese, one of several languages he was to become competent in. In 1797, Barrow accompanied Lord Macartney on a diplomatic mission, as private secretary, to the newly acquired colony of the Cape of Good Hope. He married local botanical artist Anna Maria Truter on 26 August 1799, and bought a house in 1800 in Cape Town.

Barrow returned to Britain in 1804 and was appointed Second Secretary to the Admiralty by Viscount Melville, a post which he held for about forty years. In remaining in his post through changes of government, Barrow started a trend where civil servants no longer needed to surrender their posts after political changes, but could consider their roles more permanent. John Barrow was a respected holder of his office which became known as Permanent Secretary. He was very much involved in policy and decisions involving the Royal Navy during the years of the Napoleonic Wars and after.

In his position at the Admiralty, Barrow was a great promoter of Arctic voyages of discovery, including those of John Ross, William Edward Parry, James Clark Ross and John Franklin. Later in life he devoted himself to writing a history of the modern Arctic voyages of discovery, as well as an autobiography.

A baronetcy was conferred on him by Sir Robert Peel in 1835, and he became First Baronet of Ulverstone.

He was the author of numerous works and articles, and a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the forerunner of the National Geographic Society.

Sir John Barrow retired from public life in 1845 and died suddenly on 23 November 1848 in London, aged 84 years. His grave can be found in the burial ground of St Martin’s in the Fields, Camden Town. His parents are buried in St Mary’s Parish Churchyard in Ulverston.

Additional Biography

— additional biography and additional sources by Jonathan Cutmore, author of John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807-1843 (Liverpool University Press, 2019), from his Writing and Reading the Quarterly Review (manuscript, 2015), used by permission. Jonathan Cutmore (c) 2021

Born in Dragley Beck, parish of Ulverston, Lancashire, and educated there at Tower Bank School, Barrow’s early employment was as a clerk in an iron foundry in Liverpool. A stint on a Greenland whaler gave him a taste for adventure and the sea and influenced his later interest in Arctic exploration. His first break in life came when he obtained a position as tutor in mathematics at Greenwich, which was then, as now, strongly associated with the Admiralty and the British navy.

At Greenwich, Sir George Staunton took notice of him and convinced Lord Macartney to employ him as comptroller for the first British embassy to China (1792-1794). Upon their return to England, Barrow assisted Staunton in preparing the embassy’s official account. When Macartney was appointed governor of the newly acquired Cape Colony, in 1797, Barrow accompanied him as his private secretary.

He continued to impress his superiors with his intelligence, energy, and adaptability: he undertook an extensive survey of the colony’s resources while acting as a negotiator between the British, the Boers, and the indigenous population.

Also while at the Cape, in 1798 he married Anne Maria Trüter, the daughter of Petrus Johannes Trüter, who had been an official of the Dutch East India Company’s trade office (Memoir of Petrus Borchardus Borcherds, p. 42). When the treaty of Amiens removed the Cape of Good Hope from British control, in May 1803 Barrow was obliged to return to England.

His impressive performance in South Africa and his excellent connections positioned him for a plum senior appointment, Second Secretary to the Admiralty (the non-political executive administrator), a post he took up at the age of forty, in 1804, and relinquished only in his very old age, in 1845 (there was a single break during the Ministry of All the Talents, 1806 through 1807).

Perhaps upon a suggestion made by Barrow’s future superior at the Admiralty, John Wilson Croker, in the summer of 1809 the Foreign Secretary, and future prime minister, George Canning, invited the Second Secretary to submit an article to William Gifford, the editor of the eminent conservative periodical the Quarterly Review (Auto-biographical Memoir, p.499). He became one of the journal’s most prolific writers, contributing over a period of thirty or so years about two-hundred articles, mainly on geographical subjects. Barrow published around one-hundred and fifty of his submissions under the Quarterly’s first two editors.

On matters pertaining to the journal, including negotiations over his own articles, Barrow corresponded primarily with the journal’s publisher, John Murray, not with Gifford. This practice limited his influence over editorial direction -- it, and the fact that Barrow had no feel for or interest in imaginative literature, meant he had almost nothing to do with the journal’s day-to-day operations -- but the number and popularity of his articles greatly determined the Quarterly Review’s character in any case (quoted from J. Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review). Gifford sometimes submitted other men’s articles to him for sub-editing, but for the most part neither the publisher nor the editor habitually sought his advice.

Murray did however consult Barrow on Gifford’s successor, first in 1822, when the editor’s retirement seemed imminent, and again in 1824, when Gifford resigned. Barrow argued strongly against offering the post to the poet and prose writer Robert Southey, whose politics and temperament he distrusted. Murray’s final choice of John Taylor Coleridge met with Barrow’s approval, in part because both men looked for what they called ‘morality’ in reviewing, by which they meant the avoidance of invective and personal attack (despite Southey’s opinion of Barrow’s own work as overly censorious).

Too, Coleridge’s piety appealed to Barrow. Though the Second Secretary was distrustful of religious enthusiasm, there is good evidence that he had a personal faith and that he adhered to the forms and rituals of the established church (Auto-biographical Memoir, p.12).

In the last decade of his life, Barrow deserted the Quarterly for its rival, the Edinburgh Review, when, as J. M. R. Cameron points out in his recent essay on Barrow (in Conservatism and the Quarterly Review), Lockhart declined to publish an unsolicited review of one of his sons’ book of travels.

He had been tempted earlier to write for other journals. When in July 1829 Macvey Napier invited him to become an Edinburgh reviewer, he explained his reasons for not wishing to do so: ‘I was thoroughly pressed by my friend [Nassau] Senior to assist him in Blanco White’s [London] Review, but I declined for two reasons 1st: Because I had promised Gifford that while the Quarterly existed and was conducted on principles with which it started, my trifling offerings should be confined to it and secondly that I really did not feel myself at all competent to the labor of writing Articles for Reviews after the daily labor of the office’ (BL Add. MSS. 34614, ff. 110-11, 8 July 1829).

As Cutmore wrote in Contributors to the Quarterly Review: “Barrow’s impact on the nineteenth-century frame of mind is under appreciated. What he wrote in one of his articles about a remote group of islands could equally apply to the unwarranted neglect in historical and literary studies of his works: ‘This very extensive group is yet to be visited and described, and would, no doubt, afford an interesting field to the geographer, the moralist, and the natural historian’ (article #664, pp.345-46). For two generations of chair-bound explorers, he was a geographical oracle, the diviner of new worlds. Barrow’s Quarterly Review articles and the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was the chief founder, played a significant part in creating the nineteenth-century mania for exploration literature and, indeed, popular and official interest in world exploration itself. Through books, various articles, and via his influence at the Admiralty, Barrow renewed the search for an Arctic Northwest Passage and he helped drive interest in African exploration. By speculating on the personalities and motivations of Bligh and Christian, he took a relatively minor naval incident, the Bounty mutiny, and turned it into an enduring element in the collective imagination of the West. Because of his closeness to the centre of imperial power, Barrow’s geographical and exploration articles were widely believed to reflect, if not official policy, certainly policy under official consideration. His participation in the Quarterly therefore added weight to its reputation as a repository of authoritative government information, in the matter of exploration of course, but also whenever the journal addressed naval and colonial affairs.”

Although the number of his reviews was great, the range of topics he covered was small. In some articles he set himself up as a standards association of travel writing, debunking an author’s claims of discovery or defending a writer from accusations of fraud. It was a valuable service, for an aim of Barrow’s geographical articles was to support government in its encouragement of emigration, an enterprise hurt by unscrupulous promoters peddling a fool’s paradise. More generally in these articles he was protecting the reputation of a genre, travel writing, and public confidence in an important imperialist and scientific activity, exploration.

Barrow wrote close to a dozen articles on a critical problem for the navy -- dry rot in ship timber. When war required the rapid expansion of the British fleet, in bringing ships quickly into service the navy used green timber, a disastrous practice as the ships soon needed expensive repairs. Barrow used the Quarterly to deflate harebrained solutions to the problem and to float better ones. While it was not his intention thus to raise the power of public opinion, articles of this sort were a kind of public consultation.

Barrow’s articles that received the greatest press coverage were on African exploration and the search for a Northwest Passage. The exploration of Africa, in particular tracing the course of the Niger River, was the subject of a long series. He used the Quarterly to advertise his stubbornly held conviction that the Niger connected with the Nile and to drum up support for government-sponsored expeditions to Africa.

Barrow is most famous for reawakening British interest in the search for an east to west passage through the Arctic, the so-called Search for a Northwest Passage. He began to push such voyages of discovery following the end of the Napoleonic wars when the Admiralty needed to find employment for supernumerary sailors. Barrow also pursued this course because he ambitiously wished to gain a portion of the fame and respect enjoyed by his scientific mentor, the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks.

The popularity of Barrow’s contributions gave him independence from editorial interference that no other Quarterly reviewer besides Croker enjoyed under Gifford. In the last years of Gifford’s tenure, if not earlier, Barrow bypassed the editor by sending his articles directly to the printer and by editing the proofs himself. While Gifford sometimes assisted him by forwarding his articles to a sub-editor, mutually agreed upon, Barrow did not otherwise permit the editor to tamper with his submissions.

There were two exceptions to this rule: Gifford exercised his editorial prerogatives whenever Barrow addressed political matters and whenever he contradicted the Quarterly’s already-published position on a topic. When in 1823 Gifford told William Haygarth about this arrangement, Murray was appalled that the secret was out. He instructed the editor to tell Haygarth that he had not meant quite what he had said. Murray saw what Gifford apparently did not. Should Barrow’s behaviour become widely known, Gifford’s stature would be diminished, and with it that of the Quarterly Review. Damaged too would be the idea that the Quarterly’s editorial cabal spoke Cabinet-like with a single voice (quoted from Cutmore, Contributors).

Barrow’s arrogance seriously threatened the Quarterly’s fortunes when in 1818 he insulted the eminent scientist Thomas Young, a steady contributor to the Quarterly. Gifford had recently cancelled one of Young’s submissions, which made him perhaps overly sensitive, for when Barrow ignored Young’s request that he keep his name out of an article then about to be published, the great scientist permanently withdrew his services from the Quarterly Review.

Barrow’s systematic coding of his reviews so that they might be recognized as his, his careful recording of a list of his articles in his copy of the first number of the journal (the whereabouts of this volume, supposing that it still exists, is unknown), his directing his son to write to the Gentleman’s Magazine to correct a conjectural list of his articles recently published therein, and the self-consciously restrained pride he took in the bulk and popularity of his contribution in a chapter in his autobiography, suggest Barrow the self-promoter.

According to Virginia Murray, the Murray family long retained the bad opinion the second John Murray formed of Barrow because of his posturing. Southey’s view of him, too, was not flattering; he thought him intolerant of inferiors, that he treated authors ‘scurvilly’ and with ‘unjustifiable severity’, and while he allowed that his papers were ‘always valuable’, regretted that he often expressed himself with ‘gratuitous incivility’ (JM MS., Southey to Murray, 10 Feb. 1815; 20 Jan. 1816; 6 Nov. 1821). Barrow’s will should be read in detail. In it, he exposes his self-preening and his overbearing personality.

Sources

• England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915^[1]

• 1841 England Census ^[2]

• Wikipedia biography ^[3]

• John Barrow mentioned in the baptism record of George Barrow^[4]

• John Barrow in the marriage record of South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives)^[5]

• UK and Ireland, Find A Grave Index, 1300s-Current, Memorial #168618734 ^[6]

• https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Barrow,_Sir_John 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Sir John Barrow]

• Ulverston Council biography of Sir John Barrow

• National Biography via Ancestry.com. ^[7]* The Baronetage and Knightage Page 31: Barrow

• The Baronetage and Knightage Page 31: Barrow

1. ↑ FreeBMD. England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. Original data: General Register Office. England and Wales Civil Registration Indexes. London, England: General Register Office. Name: John Barrow; Registration Year: 1848; Registration Quarter: Jan-Feb-Mar; Registration district: West London; Inferred County: London; Volume: 2; Page: 220
2. ↑ Class: HO107; Piece: 739; Book: 3; Civil Parish: St Martin in The Fields; County: Middlesex; Enumeration District: 8; Folio: 48; Page: 18; Line: 15; GSU roll: 438840; Source Information: Ancestry.com. 1841 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc, 2010. Name: John Barrow; Age: 75; Estimated birth year: abt 1766; Gender: Male; Civil Parish: St Martin in The Fields; Hundred: Westminster; County/Island: Middlesex; Country: England; Piece: 739; Book: 3; Folio: 48; Page Number: 18
3. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_John_Barrow,_1st_Baronet#Private_life
4. ↑ "England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J3G7-GTB : 30 December 2014), John Barrow in entry for George Barrow, 05 Mar 1805; citing , reference 2:2P1RV7P; FHL microfilm 1,042,309.
5. ↑ "South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives), 1660-1970 ," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VFTM-1VH : 4 December 2014), John Barrow and Anna Maria Miter, 26 Aug 1799, Marriage; citing p. , Stellenbosch, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, State Archives, Cape Province; FHL microfilm 2,214,092.
6. ↑ Name: John Barrow; Birth Date: 19 Jun 1764; Death Date: 23 Nov 1848; Cemetery: St Martin in the Fields Camden Town Cemetery; Burial or Cremation Place: Camden Town, London Borough of Camden, Greater London, England; Has Bio?: Y [1]
7. ↑ Dictionary of National Biography, Volumes 1-20, 22 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. This collection was indexed by Ancestry World Archives Project contributors. Original data: Stephen, Sir Leslie, ed. Dictionary of National Biography, 1921–1922. Volumes 1–20, 22. London, England: Oxford University Press, 1921–1922. Name: Sir John Barrow; Birth Date: 1764; Birth Place: Dragley Beck, Ulverston; Death Date: 23 November 1848

Additional Sources

• British Library Add. MSS., Macvey Napier papers; Barrow papers.

• National Library of Scotland, John Murray Archive.

• National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Barrow letter books.

• Will of Sir John Barrow, PRO PROB 11/2084.

• [J. Barrow II], Letter on the subject of Barrow’s articles in the Quarterly Review, to the editor of Gentleman’s Magazine, 3rd ser., 1 (1844), pp.137-38.

• J. Barrow, An Auto-biographical Memoir of Sir John Barrow (1847).

• [G. T. Staunton], Memoir of Sir John Barrow, Bt., and Description of the Barrow Monument (c. 1852).

• P. B. Borcherds, An Auto-biographical Memoir of Petrus Borchardus Borcherds. (1861).

• C. J. Lloyd, Barrow of the Admiralty (1970).

• M. L. Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), pp.119-43.

• M. J. Ross, Polar Pioneers: a Biography of John and James Clark Ross (1994).

• F. Fleming, Barrow’s Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude and Outright Lunacy (1998).

• T. Fulford, D. Lee, and P. J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (2004).

• J. M. R. Cameron, ‘Sir John Barrow, the Quarterly Review’s Imperial Reviewer,’ in Conservatism and the Quarterly Review, ed. J. Cutmore (2007).

• Priv. corr. with A. J. G. Barrow, J. M. R. Cameron, J. F. Maggs, and Ronald Solomon.

See also:

• 'Michael Faraday - a Sandemanian and Scientist' by Geoffrey Cantor