Noah Delahay Symonds 

Noah Delahay Symonds pastored the Baptist Church at Bampton from 1777 to 1781, between the ministries of Samuel Rowles (1768-76) and William Clarke (1787-91).  During the mid-1760s Symonds lived in London, working for Charles Say, a printer at the corner of Ivy Lane and Newgate Street, who “witnessed a good Confession” of Symonds’s faith, enough to warrant his baptism on 5 January 1766 by Andrew Gifford, pastor of the Baptist church at Eagle Street, the church Symonds’s family attended (Eagle Street f.123v). Noah does not appear, however, as an apprentice to Say (see D. F. McKenzie, Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701-1800, 307-08). Nevertheless, given his working connection with this London printer and the similarity in their names and ages, it may be that this Symonds was the younger brother of Henry Delahay Symonds (1741-1816), a radical London printer of the 1790s and early 1800s and friend of Benjamin Flower.  Noah Symonds trained for the ministry at Bristol Baptist College in the early to mid-1770s and was ordained at Bampton in 1777. During his tenure at the church, the Church Book (recorded in Symonds’s hand) reveals that he was frequently at odds with certain members of the congregation, once for allowing some Presbyterians (Unitarians) to worship in the church and take communion there. He was asked to leave the church in 1781 because his preaching was not “agreeable” (f. 203), which may suggest that he had adopted some heterodox positions, possibly Arianism.