Chenery, THOMAS

Chenery, THOMAS, journalist and orientalist, was born in Barbadoes in 1826, and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He was called to the bar, but was soon after sent out as Times correspondent to Constantinople, where he remained during the Crimean war. Afterwards he was constantly employed on the Times staff until 1877, when he became its editor, a post which he laboriously filled till within ten days of his death. But this was only one side of his life. As a singularly thorough Hebrew and Arabic scholar he had few equals among his contemporaries, and his translation of the Arabic classic, the Assemblies of Al Hariri (1867), led to his appointment to a chair of Arabic at Oxford in 1868. He was one of the company of Old Testament revisers, and besides other works, published an edition of the Machberoth Ithiel (1872), a Hebrew version of the 'Assemblies.' He died 11th February 1884.