William Johns

William Johns was a chemist and surgeon by trade. He attended Carter Lane in Southwark and became a member on 7 October 1804. He left England for India in 1810 with John Lawson to join William Ward at Serampore, raising £1200 for the Serampore Mission during their stay in America before arriving in India in 1813. He was to become the medical officer at Serampore during Nathaniel Wallich’s furlough in England; however, his application to the East India Company for residence in India was rejected, the last missionary to be so treated before the renewal of the Company’s charter that same year. He was forced to return to England immediately, and in December 1813 sent a letter to the Baptist Magazine about a service he attended during his brief stay at Serampore. In January 1814, he participated in the designation service of Eustace Carey at Northampton. He also published the first pamphlet in England on the practice of the sati (suttee), titled A Collection of Facts and opinions relative to the Burning of Widows with the dead bodies of their husbands, and to other destructive customs prevalent in British India (1816). He eventually returned to Serampore as a civilian and, like several of the other junior members working in Serampore, became disenchanted with the work of the Mission there, especially disliking the Marshmans. After failing to establish a medical practice at Serampore, coupled with poor health and the deaths of his wife and son, he returned to England in 1819. He published an account of his experiences in India, The Spirit of the Serampore Mission, in 1828, a work that contributed greatly to the split between the BMS and the Serampore group. His wife was Mary Blakemore, the sister of Martha Pearce, who was the wife of William Hopkins Pearce, the son of Samuel Pearce and BMS missionary in Calcutta. See Baptist Magazine 6 (1814): 124-125; “Calendar of Letters,” Baptist Quarterly 7 (1934-1935): 42; R. W. Butt-Thompson, “The Morgans of Birmingham,” Baptist Quarterly 1 (1922-1923): 267.