Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Martindale, Miles
MARTINDALE, MILES (1756–1824), Wesleyan minister, son of Paul Martindale, was born in 1756 at Moss Bank, near St. Helens, Lancashire. He had as a youth only a slender education, but taught himself French, Latin, and Greek, the last in order that he might read the New Testament in the original. When quite young he was given to meditating on serious things, and as he grew up passed through various stages of doubt to firm belief. In 1776 he went to live at Liverpool, and in the following year was married to Margaret King. About the same time he became a methodist. From 1786 to 1789 he occupied himself as a local preacher, chiefly at Scorton in the Wirral district of Cheshire, where the people were ‘the most ignorant he ever laboured among.’ In 1789 he was received as a Wesleyan minister, and remained in the regular itinerancy twenty-seven years, when he was appointed governor of Woodhouse Grove School, Yorkshire (1816). In the conduct of that establishment he was eminently successful, and was thanked by the conference for his services.
He died of cholera on 6 Aug. 1824, while attending the Wesleyan conference at Leeds, leaving a widow, who died in 1840, and three daughters, one of whom married the Rev. John Farrar; another was the wife of the Rev. James Brownell; and the third became matron of Wesley College, Sheffield. His portrait is given in the ‘Wesleyan Magazine’ for August 1820.
He published, besides sermons: 1. ‘Elegy on the Death of Wesley,’ 1791. 2. ‘Britannia's Glory,’ a poem, 1793. 3. ‘Original Poems, Sacred and Moral,’ 1806. 4. ‘Grace and Nature, a Poem in twenty-four Cantos,’ translated from the French of the Rev. J. Fletcher, 1810. 5. ‘Dictionary of the Holy Bible,’ 1810, 2 vols. 6. ‘Essay on the Eloquence of the Pulpit,’ translated from the French of the Abbé Besplas, 1819.
[Arminian Mag. January and February 1797; Methodist Mag. 1825, p. 233; Wesleyan Takings, ii. 328; Slugg's Woodhouse Grove School, 1885; Minutes of Methodist Conferences, v. 472; Osborn's Wesleyan Bibliogr. p. 140.]