Thomas Dennis

Thomas Dennis (sometimes spelled Dennys) lived with his daughter at Great Wilbraham, near Bottisham, Cambridgeshire.  In the 1780s, Andrew Fuller, Baptist minister at Kettering and first Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, began preaching at Bottisham in a farmhouse where Fuller’s father had once lived. A small Dissenting interest continued to meet until Thomas Reynolds, a Baptist, organized meetings in his house at Bottisham Lode in 1800. In 1810 the group began meeting in a large barn owned by Thomas Dennis; they would meet there for the next twenty-two years. Reynolds eventually was ordained in 1817, presiding over a mixed congregation of Baptists and Independents. The Dennises had definite Baptist connections; both father and daughter subscribed to Robert Robinson’s posthumous tome, Ecclesiastical Researches (1792).  Miss Dennis also subscribed to the Baptist Missionary Society in 1800 (BMS Periodical Accounts, 2.204). Between 1800 and 1804, Flower preached regularly in a Baptist meeting at nearby Fulbourn and Waterbeach, at which the Dennis’s were frequent attendants. Miss Dennis married John Paul, ironmonger of St. Ives, in October 1802 (Cambridge Intelligencer, 16 October 1802).