,
Chennai George Uglow Pope was born on 24 April 1820 in
Bedeque,
Prince Edward Island in
Canada. His father was John Pope (1791–1863), of
Padstow,
Cornwall, a merchant who became a missionary, who emigrated to
Prince Edward Island in 1818, and Catherine Uglow (1797–1867), of
Stratton, north
Cornwall. The family moved to
Nova Scotia, St. Vincent's before returning to
Plymouth,
England in 1826 where John Pope became a prosperous merchant and ship-owner. George Uglow Pope's and his younger brother
William Burt Pope studied at the Wesleyan schools in Bury and Hoxton and at the age of fourteen George joined missionary service in southern India. He left for
South India in 1839 and arrived at
Sawyerpuram near
Tuticorin(now Thoothukudi) with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Pope started studying Tamil as a teenager in England and during the voyage to
India and Pope later turned into a
scholar of
Tamil,
Sanskrit and
Telugu. In 1841 he was ordained by the
Church of England and he married Mary Carver, daughter of another
Anglican priest. Pope worked in the
Tirunelveli region where he also interacted with other missionaries like
Christian Friedrich Schwartz. In 1845, Mary died at Tuticorin and Pope moved to
Madras(now Chennai). He married Henrietta Page, daughter of G. van Someren and they left for England in 1849. During this period he worked with many figures in the Oxford Catholic movement including such as Cardinal
Henry Edward Manning,
Archbishop Trench, Bishop
Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop
John Lonsdale,
E. B. Pusey, and
John Keble. He also founded
Holy Trinity Church in
Ooty. Pope became famous for his strictness and in 1870 he was made principal of Bishop Cotton Boys' School at
Bangalore. In 1881, Pope left
India and settled in Oxford where he made a mark as a
lecturer in Tamil and Telugu (1884). He received an
honorary MA in 1886 and a Gold Medal of the
Royal Asiatic Society in 1906. He died on 11 February 1908. He delivered his last
sermon on 26 May 1907. Pope was buried at
St Sepulchre's Cemetery, located in Jericho, central Oxford, England. After his death, his second wife, Henrietta, and two daughters received pension. Henrietta died on 11 September 1911 and is buried beside Pope. Three of their sons continued to work in India. John Van Someren Pope worked on education in Burma, Arthur William Uglow Pope served as a railway engineer in India and China; while
Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Henry served in the medical service as a professor of
ophthalmology at the
Madras Medical College. ==Contributions to Tamil studies==