John Hemmings 

 John Hemmings (1760-1825?) was the son of John Hemmings who was a linen-draper at 38 High Street, the Borough (Lowndes’s [1780]: 80; Wakefield’s[1790]: 160). Hemmings would become a merchant in Bearbinder Lane, the Mansion House, and at one point would be a broker on the Stock Exchange. He experienced at least two bankrupticies between 1792 and 1802. The Hemmingses attended the Baptist congregation in Maze Pond, Southwark; Mrs. Hemmings was the daughter of Henry Keene, one of the churches leading deacons at that time. The Hemmingses lived on Keene’s Row, Walworth (a street named for Henry Keene), just a few doors down from the home of Joseph Gurney. He supported Baptist endeavors, being one of the largest subscribers (£10) to the Baptist Missionary Society in 1800-1801; his subscription was considerably less in 1804-05 (he was listed then as living in Walworth), though still quite generous at £3.3 (BMS Periodical Accounts, 2.205; 3.133). Hemmings, along with William Hawes, Joseph Gurney, Michael Pearson, and John Vowell, served as a Director of the Humane Society in 1788 (see Milne 7-15). Flower may have had a previous connection with Hemmings, for in 1796 Hemmings, then listed as living in Westwood, subscribed to Benjamin Flower’s edition of Habakkuk Crabb’s Sermons. Hemmings’s son, John Hemmings, M.A. (1794-1847), pastored the Baptist church in Kimbolton, Huntingtonshire, from 1817 to 1847. See Samuel Couling, “A Biographical Dictionary of Baptist Ministers of Great Britain & Ireland Deceased from 1800 to the close of 1875,” MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 230; also Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).