George Uglow Pope (24 April 1820 – 11 February 1908), or G. U. Pope, was an Anglican Christian missionary and Tamil scholar who spent 40 years in Tamil Nadu and translated many Tamil texts into English. His popular translations included those of the Tirukkural and Thiruvasagam.
He later took to teaching, running his own school in Ootacamund (now Ooty) for while and then moving to head the Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore and after returning to England worked as a Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. A statue on the Chennai beach recognizes him for his contribution to the understanding and promotion of the Tamil language.
Biography
thumb|left|Statue of G. U. Pope in [[Triplicane, Chennai]]
George Uglow Pope was born on 24 April 1820 in Bedeque, Prince Edward Island in Canada. His father was John Pope (1791–1863), of Padstow, Cornwall, a merchant who became a missionary, who emigrated to Prince Edward Island in 1818, and Catherine Uglow (1797–1867), of Stratton, north Cornwall. The family moved to Nova Scotia, St. Vincent's before returning to Plymouth, England in 1826 where John Pope became a prosperous merchant and ship-owner. George Uglow Pope's and his younger brother William Burt Pope studied at the Wesleyan schools in Bury and Hoxton and at the age of fourteen George joined missionary service in southern India.
He left for South India in 1839 and arrived at Sawyerpuram near Tuticorin(now Thoothukudi) with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Pope started studying Tamil as a teenager in England and during the voyage to India and Pope later turned into a scholar of Tamil, Sanskrit and Telugu. In 1841 he was ordained by the Church of England and he married Mary Carver, daughter of another Anglican priest. Pope worked in the Tirunelveli region where he also interacted with other missionaries like Christian Friedrich Schwartz. In 1845, Mary died at Tuticorin and Pope moved to Madras(now Chennai). He married Henrietta Page, daughter of G. van Someren and they left for England in 1849. During this period he worked with many figures in the Oxford Catholic movement including such as Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop Trench, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop John Lonsdale, E. B. Pusey, and John Keble. He also founded Holy Trinity Church in Ooty.
Pope became famous for his strictness and in 1870 he was made principal of Bishop Cotton Boys' School at Bangalore. In 1881, Pope left India and settled in Oxford where he made a mark as a lecturer in Tamil and Telugu (1884). He received an honorary MA in 1886 and a Gold Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1906.