Thomas Flight

Thomas Flight (1726-1800) was a prominent London Baptist layman who, in 1783, after serving many years as the London agent for the Worcester China Factory, purchased the factory, placing primary operations of the Worcester branch into the hands of his two sons, Joseph (1762-1838) and John (1766-1791). They opened a retail shop at 45 High Street, Worcester, in July 1788. The next month they wer visited by George III, a visit that resulted in the factory receiving a royal patent. By 1790 Flight and his sons were operating a china factory in London (22 Bread Street), one in Worcester, and the Worcester China Warehouse at 1 Coventry Street in the Haymarket, London, selling primarily French porcelain that John Flight had purchased for purposes of imitation during his frequent visits to France between 1785 and 1791. After Flight’s untimely death in 1791, Martin Barr (former business partner of Thomas Gillam, the father of John Flight’s young widow), a devout Calvinist and member of the Independent congregation at Angel Street in Worcester, became Thomas Flight’s new partner. By 1800 the business was listed as “Flight & Barr, Worcester China Warehouse,” in the Haymarket. Tom Flight, as well as his sons, Joseph and John, and a third son, Bannister, all attended the Baptist congregation at Maze Pond, Southwark. Tom Flight joined the church in 1756 and served as a deacon for nearly 27 years. On many occasions he served as the messenger of the church to the Particular Baptist Fund and the Body of Protestant Dissenting Deputies.  He was a wide supporter of Baptist causes throughout the kingdom, as well as the more ecumenical aims of the Sunday School Society, to which he generously subscribed £21 in 1789. Like many Baptists in the late 1780s and early 1790s, Flight was an active supporter of the French Revolution and the efforts to enact political reform in England. Among his close friends was the radical editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, Benjamin Flower (see entry below), at that time a member of Robert Hall’s congregation at St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge. In his will Flight left £200 to the church for the relief of the poor. See Maze Pond Church Book, 2: ff. 118,190, 192; The Merchant and Tradesman's London Directory for the Year 1787 (London: R. Shaw and W. Lowndes, 1787) 60; Universal British Directory, 1/2:146; Kent’s Directory for the year 1800 (London: Richard and Henry Causton, 1800), 69; Plan of a Society Established in London, Anno Domini 1785, for the Support and Encouragement of Sunday-Schools in Different Counties of England (London: Sunday School Society, 1789), 25; “A Diaconal Epistle, 1790,” Baptist Quarterly 8 (1936-1937), 216.