Pryor, Henry

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Philip Girard, “PRYOR, HENRY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/pryor_henry_12E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, militia officer, politician, and magistrate; b. 3 July 1808 in Halifax, son of John Pryor and Sarah Stevens; m. there first 8 March 1831 Eliza Phoebe Pyke (d. 1858); m. there secondly 3 Feb. 1863 Charlotte McKie; there were no children; d. 10 Oct. 1892 in Halifax.
    • Henry Pryor was orphaned at age 12 but inherited some £6,000 under the will of his father, a Halifax merchant and mha. He descended from a loyalist family which had arrived in Halifax in 1783 and become prominent through commercial success and office holding. Henry’s elder brother John would later be a founder and the first president of Acadia College, and his sister Louisa would marry future premier James William Johnston. Henry was educated at Halifax Grammar School and King’s College, Windsor, where he received a ba in 1828, an ma two years later, and a dcl in 1858. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1831.
    • Elected to the House of Assembly as a Conservative member for the western division of Halifax County in May 1859, he won a second term, which ended in 1867.
    • By 1867 Pryor faced a rather bleak prospect. He was nearing 60, and much of his capital seems to have been lost in unwise speculations. Thus he began a search for financial security in the form of a judicial post. A bill to provide for Halifax’s first stipendiary magistrate had been defeated in 1864, denounced in the Presbyterian Witness as “an arrangement by which Henry Pryor could be snugly provided with £500 a year.” Three years later the legislation met with success, and Pryor was appointed on 15 May 1867.
    • SThe stipendiary magistrate inherited the civil and criminal jurisdictions that had been vested in the mayor and aldermen by the Halifax charter. The civil side of Pryor’s authority, covering mainly small debts, occupied only a few days a month. The criminal side demanded his presence six days a week year-round. He was thus brought into intimate contact for nearly twenty years with the under-side – and under class – of Victorian Halifax. Drunks, prostitutes, and vagrants, many of them recidivists, were his daily companions. Family disputes were often before him, as were prosecutions for violations of the liquor licensing laws. After one such successful prosecution in 1884 Pryor received a death threat.
    • He treated all these offenders with an unpredictable mixture of severity and mercy. Untroubled by the finer points of precedent, procedure, or statute-book, he tailored the punishment, or lack of it, to fit the person not the crime. For this he was increasingly castigated in the newspapers, which portrayed him as arbitrary, unprofessional, and irascible. His clientele, however, probably perceived a certain moral economy to his decision making. His essential legitimacy in their eyes is demonstrated by their continued recourse to him for the settlement of personal and familial disputes.
  • Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6806
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/232611504/henry-pryor