John Geard

John Geard (1749-1838) was originally a member of the Baptist church at Montacute, Somerset. Geard was one of the first students to enter Bristol Academy after the formation of the Bristol Education Society in 1770. While at Bristol, he supplied the fledgling Falmouth and Chacewater meetings in 1773. He began his official ministry as the successor to Samuel James at Tilehouse Street, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in 1774; he was ordained in April 1775, and remained at Hitchin until 1831. He was a strong supporter of the BMS as well as a pioneer in village preaching in such places as Shillington, Bendish, Breachwood Green, and Langley. Geard, like many of his Baptist brethren in the late 1780s and early 1790s, was not averse to politics. The church book notes that in 1788, on the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, a collection of £1.15 was taken for the building of a memorial pillar to Runnymede. When that scheme fell through, the money was sent instead to the Abolitionist Society in London “that this nation which boasts so much of liberty may not expose itself to the reproach of the inconsistency as well as the cruelty of enslaving others.” Geard was a strong supporter of the BMS from its inception in 1792, as well as Sunday schools, which began at Tilehouse in 1812. Geard’s last seven years were spent in retirement. See James McCleery, The History of Tilehouse Street (Salem) Baptist Church, Hitchin (Hitchin UK: Carling and Hales, 1919), 30-35; David Watts, A History of the Hertfordshire Baptists ([Hertfordshire]: Hertfordshire Baptist Association, 1978), 14; Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (London: Baptist Historical Society, for Roger Hayden, 2006),  234.