George Uglow Pope was born on 24 April 1820 in Bedeque, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

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.

[2] He left for South India in 1839 and arrived at Sawyerpuram near Tuticorin(now Thoothukudi) with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

He founded a seminary at Sawyerpuram for training Anglican Tamil clergy but this too ran into trouble and he decided to move to Ootacamund (Ooty) in 1859.

Stonehouse cottage was then used to house the male asylum inmates and the Grammar school moved to new premises in Lovedale on 1 April 1869.

[5] In 1881, Pope left India and settled in Oxford where he made a mark as a lecturer in Tamil and Telugu (1884).

John Van Someren Pope worked on education in Burma, Arthur William Uglow Pope served as a railway engineer in India and China; while Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Henry served in the medical service as a professor of ophthalmology at the Madras Medical College.

[2] Pope was along with Joseph Constantius Beschi, Francis Whyte Ellis, and Bishop Robert Caldwell one of the major scholars on Tamil.

He had, by February 1893, translated Naaladiyaar, a didactic work of moral sayings in quatrains, 400 in number in 40 chapters, each by a Jain ascetic, according to a Tamil tradition.