Paul Amsinck

Amsinck, Paul, ?—1814

by Benjamin Colbert

Paul Amsinck’s origins are uncorroborated, but he is likely to have been born in Oporto, Portugal, the son of William Amsinck, of Hamburg, and Norberta Rosa Amsinck, and naturalized as a British citizen by royal assent on 20 December 1759.

He went into partnership with Henry Walters as Bath wine merchants on 9 October 1788. Later that year on 20 December, he married a daughter of James Still (d. 1803) of East Knoyle, Wiltshire. On 16 February 1792, Amsinck dissolved his partnership and Walters carried on the business.

He next appears in the role of Master of Ceremonies at Tunbridge Wells, from 1805 to 1814. The memoirist Mary Berry (1763-1852) described him in 1807 as ‘The only one of his kind I ever saw very like a gentleman, and not at all a coxcomb’ (290). Subscribers to Tunbridge Wells, and Its Neighbourhood (1810), his only known publication, included several members of his wife's family.

Amsinck died at Bath on 19 April 1814.

Sources:

Bath Chronicle, no. 1454 (9 Oct. 1788). Gale Databases: 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. Web. 5 Oct. 2017.

The Berry Papers Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry (1763-1852). Comp. Lewis Melville. London: John Lane, 1914. Print.

‘Deaths’. Jackson's Oxford Journal, no. 3184 (Sat., 30 April 1814). Gale Databases: British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900. Web. 5 Oct. 2017.

Farthing, R. Royal Tunbridge Wells. A Pictorial History. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 1990. Print.

‘Married’. World, no. 621 (Thurs., 25 Dec. 1788). Gale Databases: 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. Web. 5 Oct. 2017.

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