John Roche Dasent

Attorney-General of St Vincent. Married first Harriet Frances Irwin, daughter and coheiress of Alexander Bury [Burrowes] Irwin of St Vincent, and then her sister Charlotte Martha (q.v., under Charlotte Martha Dasent nee Irwin). His son with Harriet was John Bury Dasent and his children with Charlotte included Bury Irwin; Alexander; Charles Underwood; and George Webbe.

1. Will of John Roche Dasent His Majesty's Attorney General of Ightham Kent proved 16/02/1833.

2. Sir George Webbe Dasent was Assistant Editor of The Times, and has an entry in the ODNB as 'Scandinavian scholar.' His son, another John (later Sir John) Roche Dasent (1847-1914) was the author of A West India planters family: its rise and fall (London, 1914).

3. John Bury Dasent (1806-1888), a county court judge in England, the son of John Roche Dasent (1773-1832) and his first wife Harriet Irwin, married in 1838 Jane Camden French, the daughter of Mark Dyer French (q.v.).

T71/892 St Vincent nos. 485 & 486; Vere Langford Oliver, History of Antigua Vol. I pp. 190-191; Thomas Seccombe rev. John D. Haigh, 'Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896) Scandinavian Scholar' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn, May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7178?docPos=1 [accessed 31/10/2012].; http://svgancestry.com/index.php/dasent-of-st-vincent/ [accessed 25/03/2011]; FreeUKGen, England and Wales Free BMD Database, Deaths, 1837-1983 [database online]; Warwickshire England Burials 1813-1910.

1. PROB 11/1811.

2. Thomas Seccombe, op. cit. The entry says of George Webbe Dasent" He was the third son of John Roche Dasent (1773–1832), attorney-general of St Vincent, and his second wife (who was the younger sister of his deceased first wife), Charlotte Martha (d. 1863), younger daughter and coheir of Captain Alexander Burrowes Irwin of the 32nd foot, who settled in the island and died there in 1806, leaving extensive estates. The Dasent family had long been prominent in the West Indies, and included early settlers and administrators of St Kitts, Nevis, and Antigua. Charlotte Martha Dasent unexpectedly became heir to the entire Union estate on St Vincent, and by paying off mortgages and ending leaseholds John Roche Dasent acquired sole ownership of both the land and the enslaved people who worked it (numbering 563 in 1829). The family regularly visited England where they had houses in London and in the country. Their arrangements with commission agents for the sale of sugar from the St Vincent plantations proved disadvantageous and by 1831 John Roche Dasent owed them £74,000. The estates were mortgaged to the commission agents, to whom the compensation unsuccessfully claimed by Charlotte Martha Dasent for 485 slaves was awarded after emancipation, and who foreclosed the estates in 1843.

3. http://svgancestry.com/index.php/dasent-of-st-vincent/ [accessed 25/03/2012].