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Nicholas Joachim POGOSE (1852–1872)
St Mary Magdalen section: Row 7, Grave D60

This stone is made of Carrara marble, and stands prominently near the entrance to St Sepulchre's Cemetery.

Nicholas Joachim Pogose was born in Calcutta on 9 February 1852 and was a Bengal Armenian.

His father Joachim Gregory Nicholas Pogose of Dhaka, Bengal was a zamindar, a merchant, and a partner of the Dhaka Bank (the first bank in Bangladesh) and his paternal grandparents were Gregory Nicholas Pogose and Elizabeth Sarkies. Nicholas's father married his second cousin Mariam Avdall (born in Bengal in 1825/6), who was known as Mary, and her father Johannes Avdall was the headmaster of the Armenian College & Philanthropic Academy in Calcutta from 1825 to 1870.

Nicholas’s parents Joachim and Mary Pogose had four sons:

• Gregory Joachim Pogose (born in Bengal in 1845/6)
• John Avdall Pogose (born in Bengal in 1850/1)
• Nicholas Joachim Pogose (born in Calcutta on 9 February 1852)
• Paul Pogose (born in Bengal in 1853/4).

Nicholas's father, who was known as Nicky Pogose, belonged to the Armenian community of Dhaka. He founded the Pogose School there in 1848, and was its headmaster until 1855.

The family came to England when Nicholas was seven: The Times reported on 15 April 1859 that among passengers arriving from Calcutta were “Mr. and Mrs. Pogose, Master Pogose, three children, and two servants”. Nicholas’s father probably went back to Bengal on his own, as at the time of the 1861 census Mrs Mary Pogose (35), who described herself as a landowner’s wife and the head of the household, was boarding at 26 Queen’s Terrace, Paddington with her four schoolboy sons – Gregory (15), John (10), Nicholas (9), and Paul (7) – and only one servant.

By the following year, 1862, both of Nicholas's parents had moved back to Dacca, and he was sent to Eton to board, presumably in about 1864. His older brother John had been sent to Kings College School in London.

Nicholas’s eldest brother Gregory was matriculated at the University of Oxford from The Queen’s College on 26 April 1865, and on graduation was called to the Bar on 17 November 1868.

On 19 May 1869 at the age of 17 Nicholas himself was matriculated at the University Oxford by Christ Church. On 8 February 1870, the day before his eighteenth birthday, he was summoned before the Vice-Chancellor’s Court for riding a bicycle on the footpath opposite the University Museum in Parks Road; but the police officer who swore to the offence “did not notice that anybody was endangered by the defendant’s velocipede”, and he was fined 10s. and 11s. costs. This velocipede was probably an old bone-shaker, with rotary cranks and pedals mounted to the front wheel hub, rather than the pennyfarthing of the later 1870s, so its speed would have been limited.

At the time of the 1871 census (taken during the university vacation), Nicholas (19), described as “Commoner Ch Ch Oxford”, was lodging in London at 5 Boyle Street, Westminster with a porter and his family; and the only other member of his family who appeared to be in England at the time was his brother Paul (17), who was boarding at Rugby School.

Near the end of Hilary Term 1872 when Nicholas would have been in his third year at Oxford he evidently went to Hastings, as he died of typhoid there on 18 March. His death was announced in The Times. He was initially buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London on 22 March, but 7½ months later his body was exhumed and he was reinterred in Oxford. The grave marker in St Sepulchre's states, “buried here at his special request”, and a note in the Kensal Green burial register reads:

The body of Nicholas Joachim Pogose was removed from the Cemetery for reinterment at St Sepulchre's, Oxford on the 13 Nov 1872 by Faculty granted on the 7 Nov 1872.

† Nicholas Joachim Pogose died at 25 Eversfield Place, Hastings at the age of 20 on 18 March 1872 and his body was reinterred in St Sepulchre's Cemetery on 13 November (burial recorded in parish register of St Mary Magdalen Church.

He was buried in the St Mary Magdalen section of the cemetery because his last residence in Oxford had been at Beaumont Street in that parish.

Family of Nicholas Joachim Pogose

Nicholas's family remained in Bengal, where his father was one of the nine commissioners of Dhaka Municipality in 1874/5.

Nicholas’s younger brother Paul Pogose died in October 1876 at the age of 22, and just two months later on 3 December 1876 his father Joachim Gregory Nicholas Pogose also died: they are both buried at the Narinda Christian Cemetery in Dhaka.

Nicholas's surviving older brothers Gregory Joachim Pogose and John Avdall Pogose both became “mentally incapacitated”, and by 1893 their mother Mary Pogose was providing both care and financial support for them. She died in Calcutta in March 1893 and is buried in the Holy Nazareth Armenian Church there.