Captain George Thomas Maitland Purvis: Fareham, the Royal Navy and the Austen Family
Captain George Thomas Maitland Purvis was born in Fareham on 10 June 1802 into a family already deeply connected with the Royal Navy. His father, George Purvis, had served as secretary to Admirals Howe and St Vincent, and the family lived at Blackbrook, just outside the town.
George entered the Navy in 1815, aged thirteen. He first served aboard HMS Pique at Portsmouth and then on HMS Amphion and HMS Magicienne. After studying at the Royal Naval College, he returned to sea and served in the Mediterranean aboard ships including HMS Rochfort, HMS Ganymede and HMS Glasgow.
He eventually rose to the rank of commander in 1842. By the middle of the century he was living at Blackbrook in Fareham and was sufficiently prominent locally to appear among the area’s magistrates and leading residents.
His family connections are especially interesting. In 1828 he married Mary Jane Austen, daughter of Admiral Sir Francis Austen and therefore niece of the novelist Jane Austen. Through that marriage, the Purvis family of Fareham became directly connected with one of the most famous literary families in England. Mary Jane died in 1836.
Two years later George married Esther North Harrison, daughter of the Revd William Harrison, Vicar of Fareham. This second marriage tied him even more closely to the life of St Peter & St Paul and to another prominent local family.
George lived a long life, dying on 7 October 1883 at the age of eighty-one. By then, the world in which he had grown up had changed enormously. He had entered the Navy during the final months of the Napoleonic era and lived into the age of steamships, railways and the mature Victorian Empire.
His memorial at St Peter & St Paul brings together several strands of Fareham’s history: the Royal Navy, Blackbrook, the parish clergy, local civic life and, through his first wife, the family of Jane Austen.
Few people connected with the church sit at the meeting point of so many different stories.
