John Hemmings 

 John Hemmings (1760-1825?) was the son of John Hemmings who was a linen-draper at 38 High Street, the Borough (Lowndes’s [1780]: 80; Wakefield’s[1790]: 160). Hemmings would become a merchant in Bearbinder Lane, the Mansion House, and at one point would be a broker on the Stock Exchange. He experienced at least two bankrupticies between 1792 and 1802. The Hemmingses attended the Baptist congregation in Maze Pond, Southwark. The Hemmingses lived on Keene’s Row, Walworth (a street named for Henry Keene), just a few doors down from the home of Joseph Gurney. He supported Baptist endeavors, being one of the largest subscribers (£10) to the Baptist Missionary Society in 1800-1801; his subscription was considerably less in 1804-05 (he was listed then as living in Walworth), though still quite generous at £3.3 (BMS Periodical Accounts, 2.205; 3.133). Hemmings, along with William Hawes, Joseph Gurney, Michael Pearson, and John Vowell, served as a Director of the Humane Society in 1788 (see Milne 7-15). Flower may have had a previous connection with Hemmings, for in 1796 Hemmings, then listed as living in Westwood, subscribed to Benjamin Flower’s edition of Habakkuk Crabb’s Sermons. Hemmings’s son, John Hemmings, M.A. (1794-1847), pastored the Baptist church in Kimbolton, Huntingtonshire, from 1817 to 1847. See Samuel Couling, “A Biographical Dictionary of Baptist Ministers of Great Britain & Ireland Deceased from 1800 to the close of 1875,” MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 230; also Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008).