John Beddome

John Beddome (1674-1757) was originally a member of the Baptist meeting in Horsleydown, Southwark, prior to the time of John Gill. In 1697 he moved to Alcester, Warwickshire, where he assisted John Willis, pastor of the Alcester Baptist church. While in Alcester, Beddome founded a school at nearby Henley. He took over as pastor in Alcester upon Willis’s death in 1705, and in 1711 invited Bernard Foskett, then living in London, to become his assistant; the two men thereafter remained lifelong friends and colleagues. Foskett left Alcester in 1720 to become pastor at Broadmead in Bristol and Principal of the Bristol Academy. In 1724 Beddome followed his friend to Bristol, succeeding Emmanuel Gifford at the Baptist meeting in the Pithay, first as assistant pastor to William Bazley from 1725 to 1736, and then as pastor until his death in 1757, when he was replaced by John Tommas. Foskett would live in Beddome’s home in Bristol for nearly 40 years. See Jacqui Snowdon, The Alcester Baptist Story 1640-1990 (Alcester: Warwick, 1990), 18-19; Robert W. Oliver, The Strict Baptist Chapels of England:  The Chapels of Wiltshire and the West (London: Fauconberg Press, 1968) 100; Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (London: Baptist Historical Society, 2006), 64-67.