William Hawes

Dr. William Hawes (1736-1808), of London, was a physician noted primarily for his pioneering work with the resuscitation of drowning victims and other causes of asphyxia -- a preoccupation that led in 1774 to the founding of the Humane Society. His wife was the former Sarah Fox (d. 1815), sister of the radical bookseller/pamphleteer William Fox. Dr. Hawes’s son, Benjamin (1770-1860), married Ann Feltham (d. 1847) and became a successful London soapboiler, in 1796. Another daughter, Sophia (1761-1828), married Russell Scott (1760-1834), pastor of the Unitarian meeting at High Street in Portsmouth from 1788 to 1834. The Scotts would later become close friends of the Flowers. Sophia’s sister, Harriet (d. 1822), like Eliza Gurney, never married; she too became a close friend of Eliza Gould Flower. Sarah Hawes (1773-1866), another daughter of Dr. Hawes, also appears in the Flower Corres­pondence. Dr. Hawes apparently remained in the Anglican church (a memorial tablet in his honor can be found in the church at St. Mary’s, Islington), but given the fact that two of his daughters married Dissenters and that he maintained close friendships with the Gurneys and the Flowers, it seems reasonable to assume that he was no stranger to Dissenting churches like Maze Pond or the Gravel Pit (Unitarian) congregation in nearby Hackney, where Richard Price and Joseph Priestley ministered in the late 1780s and early 1790s and where Flower’s friend, Robert Aspland, would later pastor. As with the Gurneys, Benjamin Flower also knew of William Hawes before he met Eliza.  He published a letter from Dr. Hawes written on behalf of the distressed weavers of Spital Fields in the Intelligencer on 14 December 1793; other announcements and articles concerning the Humane Society appeared on 13 February 1796, 25 February 1797, and 7 September 1799. Sarah Hawes (1773-1866), another daughter of Dr. Hawes, also appears in the Flower Corres­pondence (letters 7, 8, 93, 103). Flower, along with John Gurney, served as a special attendant at William Hawes’s funeral in 1808. For more on Hawes, see his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1808, Part 2): 121-24; also Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).