John Ludd Fenner

John Ludd Fenner (1751-1833) attended the Dissenting academy at Daventry in 1766, where his fellow student was Thomas Belsham, who later ministered at the Gravel Pit Unitarian congregation in Hackney. Another fellow student was Habakkuk Crabb (1750-94); Fenner would marry Crabb’s sister in 1781. His nephew was the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867). Fenner already had Arian leanings when he became pastor in 1778 of the Presbyterian congregation in Devizes. “Controversy over the ‘Deity of Christ’--Unitarianism--had surfaced generally in the country in the mid 18th century, and Devizes was no exception. Mr. Robert Sloper and others left the Church; they met at first in his house  . . . and in 1776 they opened St. Mary’s Congregational Chapel in Northgate Street.  Rev. Fenner is described in the Annals of Devizes as ‘ . .. schoolmaster & Presbyterian Minister.  At his school was Sir Thomas Lawrence, then a lad’” (John Hurley, Two Hundred Years New; The New Baptist Church, Devizes [Devizes, 1996], 7). In 1795 Fenner became pastor of the Tancred Street Unitarian chapel at Taunton, where he would remain for the next twenty years, maintaining a school as well as his church duties. See Christopher J. Wright,  “Crabb Robinson’s School Days: Daily Life in a late Eighteenth Century Unitarian School,” Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 16 (1975), 1-11.