James P. Hewlett 

James P. Hewlett was the son of an Anglican minister. Hewlett was the initial pastor at the Baptist congregation at Salem Chapel, Dover, which formed in October 1839. Hewlett completed his ministerial studies at Rawdon College, Bradford, in 1835. He ministered at Kingsbridge, Devon, before accepting the call to Dover late in 1839. The church immediately organized a Sunday school and began supporting the BMS, contributing £25.11 its first year. In 1841 the church joined the East Kent Association of Baptist Churches, with Hewlett serving as moderator that year and as general secretary from 1842 to 1849. During his tenure at Dover, the church grew considerably and expanded its ministries with the addition of a choir, a Tract Society, a Sunday school library, as well as an itinerant preaching ministry among various nearby villages. Hewlett retained some vestiges of his Anglican upbringing during his ministry at Dover, even wearing a Genevan gown in the pulpit. In 1842 he was sought by Baptist leaders to serve as Joseph Angus’s assistant at the Baptist Mission House, but he declined. He remained at Dover for ten years before removing to the Beechen Grove Baptist Church in Watford in December 1849, where he continued his practice of wearing the Geneva gown, as well as expanding the service of praise (an organ was introduced in 1852) and moving the church from open communion to open membership. After nine years, he became a District Secretary for the British and Foreign Bible Society. He retired in 1874 to Wiltshire. See Frank Buffard, Kent and Sussex Baptist Associations (Faversham, Kent: E. Vinson, [1963]), 154; Beechen Grove Baptist Church (Beechen Grove: printed for the church, [1947]), 10; Walter Holyoak, Dover Baptists. A Brief History (Dover: Dover Express Office, 1914), 17-21; Ernest Payne, The First Generation: Early Leaders of the Baptist Missionary Society in England and India (London: Carey Press, [1936], 18; Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1992), 213.