Thomas Dunscombe 

Thomas Dunscombe (1748-1811) came from Tiverton to the Bristol Academy in 1770. His brother, Samuel, was the Baptist minister at Cheltenham, 1768-1797, during which time the latter became a close friend of Robert Robinson. Samuel was also one of the signatories at the founding of the Bristol Education Society in 1770. Thomas Dunscombe supplied at Cote [Coate], Oxfordshire, in 1772, where he was ordained in 1773. He itinerated in chapels at Buckland and Bampton in Oxfordshire, and at Farringdon between 1773 and 1797. He preached the sermon for the annual meeting of the Bristol Education Society in 1792. In 1797 he married the poet Mary Steele and moved to Yeovil for a time before returning to Broughton. He died at Farrington in 1811, shortly after preaching at James Bicheno’s installation service at Cote. See An Account of the Bristol Education Society: Begun Anno 1770 (Bristol: M. Ward, 1776), p. 19; Coate [Cote] Church Book, 1684-1885, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford; Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers Trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (Chipping Norton UK: Roger Hayden and Baptist Historical Society, 2006), 230.