James Wheeler Birch was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford and ordained in 1826. Before being appointed to the living of Great Sampford and Hempstead, he had been, briefy, a curate in five parishes: Brampton Abbots in Herefordshire; Sheepscombe, Glos; Wooton, Northants; Calbourne on the Isle of Wight and finally Hutton, near Brentwood.
Although the Church of England database does not show him as having moved anywhere after Hempstead, he did not stay long here either. Boase’s Modern English Biography of 1892, which gives ‘concise memoirs of persons who have died since the year 1850’, lists a James Wheeler Birch as Vicar of All Saint’s, Hertford.
If, as seems likely, this is the same person, then his eldest son James Wheeler Woodford Birch served in the Ceylon Civil Service from 1846 to 1870 and was later the Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements and the British Resident in the Malay state of Perak, where he was assassinated by the Malays on 2 November 1875.
Curtis relates that Birch also derived an income by preparing boys for the public schools. He lived in Great Sampford, in a house now called The Grange, belonging to General Sir William Eustace who had the right of presentation to the living. Among the pupils tutored there by Birch were the Generals two sons John, a soldier who commanded a batallion in the Crimean War and Robert, later to become the longest serving Vicar of Hempstead and Great Sampford.