Thomas Blundel, Sr. and Jr.

Thomas Blundel, Sr. (1752-1824) was admitted to Bristol Academy from Andrew Fuller’s church at Kettering in 1790. He left Bristol in 1791 and began supplying for the Baptist meeting at Arnsby, where Robert Hall, Sr. had ministered. After a year and a half of trial ministry, Blundel was ordained at Arnsby on 3 April 1793, remaining there until the spring of 1804, when he removed to Luton. During his tenure at Luton, he published a volume of sermons as well as An Essay on Revelations (1810).  He was excluded at Luton for adultery, but remained in the ministry. His final pastorate was at Keighley (1812-1823), after which, due to ill health, he returned to Luton, where he died in 1824. Like his father, Thomas Blundel, Jr. (1786-1861) also studied at Bristol Academy (1804-1809). Upon leaving there in 1810, he became pastor at College Lane in Northampton, where he remained until 1824. He formed the College Lane Sunday School in 1810. The younger Blundel was a member of the BMS committee (1815-1828), secretary of Stepney College (1827-1828), and chaplain of Mill Hill School (1821-1831). He later opened his own school at Totteridge and ended his days, strangely enough, as an Anglican clergyman. See Fuller to Ward, 4 February 1812 (BMS Archives, I, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford; C. E. Shipley, ed., The Baptists of Yorkshire: Being the Centenary Memorial Volume of the Yorkshire Baptist Association (London and Bradford: [n.p.], 1912), 188; John T. Godfrey and James Ward, The History of Friar Lane Baptist Church, Nottingham (Nottingham:  H. B. Saxton, 1903), 177-179; Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (London: Baptist Historical Society, 2006), 226; Ernest A. Payne, College Street Church, Northampton, 1697–1947 (London: Kingsgate Press, 1947).