Henry Smithers

Henry Smithers was a member at Maze Pond, Southwark. There were numerous Smithers among the members of Maze Pond.  Martha Keene (Henry’s Keene’s sister) joined on 3 May 1752, afterwards marrying a Joseph Smithers, who had joined the church on 7 July 1750 and eventually became a deacon in April 1773.  He was suspended from communion, however, on 21 July 1783 for “immoral conduct,” shortly after the death of his wife.  A Mary Smithers, most likely his daughter, joined on 2 August 1767, but she died in 1783 (Maze Pond 1.155, 376, 523).  Henry Smithers was probably Joseph’s son and therefore Henry Keene’s nephew.  Apparently, after the death of Keene in 1797, Smithers was appointed one of the executors of Keene’s estate. In 1807, he published a book of poems, Affection, with other Poems (London: Printed for the author, by T. Bensley, and sold by W. Miller, 1807). He was a coal merchant in St. Mary’s, Overys’s Stairs, Southwark, in partnership for many years with his uncle, Henry Keene. Both Keene and Smithers were deacons in the Baptist church at Maze Pond, Southwark. Smithers served on the Committee of Protestant Dissenters for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the late 1780s, and was present at a meeting on 4 December 1789 when a letter was presented to the Committee by a group of leading dissenting laymen and ministers from London, requesting a public meeting be held for all interested dissenters supporting the repeal efforts.  Among the signers of the letter were Henry Keene and Smithers. As evidence of the radical political bent of the church at Maze Pond in the early 1790s, Smithers, along with Keene and the rest of the deacons, signed a diaconal epistle in October 1790 praising the ‘wonderful Revolution’ in France and complaining of religious persecution in England, requesting their pastor, James Dore, to commence a series of lectures on the ‘principles of nonconformity, and of civil and religious Liberty’ and thanking him for his ‘repeated exertions to advance the cause of Humanity and Universal Freedom’. See Universal British Directory, vol. 1, p. 199; Maze Pond Church Book, 1744-1783, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, ff. 155, 376, 523; Thomas W. Davis, Committees for Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London: London Record Society, 1978), p. 40; and ‘A Diaconal Epistle’, Baptist Quarterly 8 (1936-37), 216.