Rebecca Gurney

Rebecca Brodie Gurney (1747-1814) was born at Mansfield, Nottingham, to Scotch Presbyterian parents. Because the local Presbyterian minister was an Arian, her father traveled three miles to attend services in a Calvinistic meeting at Sutton Ashfield.  Abraham Booth, before he came to London to minister to the Baptist congregation at Little Prescot Street, ministered for a time at Sutton and often preached in Mr. Brodie’s warehouse, as did numerous Evangelical ministers of several denominations. Rebecca Brodie married Joseph Gurney of London on 7 April 1766. Between 1768 and 1784, she bore 10 children, of whom only 3 survived into adulthood—John, Elizabeth, and William Brodie.  Like many women of her day, Rebecca Gurney was actively involved in benevolence work. In 1785, she, along with several other ladies, helped form a girl’s school in conjunction with the Protestant Dissenters’ Charity School at Horsley-down, Southwark, which since 1714 had been exclusively educating boys. In 1790 the school was moved to Maze Pond in Walworth, and by the mid-1790s, the school was educating approximately thirty girls (see Brief Account). Mrs. Gurney may have been one of the seventy-three women who assisted in founding a similar school for girls in Southwark at Shakespeare’s Walk, Shadwell, in 1792  (Protestant Dissenter’s Magazine [1799]: 164).  Other charity schools for girls were dev­eloped about the same time at Newington and Camberwell. See Thomas Walter Laquer, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 26; William Henry Gurney Salter, Some Particulars of the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and his Immediate Ancestors. Written Chiefly by Himself (London: Unwin, 1902). 47-50.