Author: Beck, Thomas
Biography:
BECK, Thomas (1752-1844: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 7 Jan. 1752 and baptised on 19 Jan. at St. Mary Magdalene, Woolwich, Kent, the son of John Beck and his wife Jane Hill, who had married in Rochester, Kent, in 1746. Nothing is known of his education. He married Ann Foot on 11 Dec. 1780 at St. Botolph, Aldgate. They had at least nine children, most of whom survived into adulthood. He began as a minister in George Whitefield’s Connexion in London. He became minister in Gravesend in 1780 and served for eight years and then at Bury St., St. Mary Axe, London, before finally moving to Deptford, where he built Midway Place Chapel in 1790 and established a school in 1794. He continued his association with Bury Street, however, and frequently preached there. He was also one of the originators and editors of the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle in 1793. He died on 11 Apr. 1844 at Midway Place, Deptford, and was buried at the Independent Chapel, High Street. The range of his poetry is perhaps surprising for an evangelical with missionary interests. Poems to the deaf and dumb, chimney-sweepers, milkmaids, and his old boots are slight performances but refreshingly unstilted, as are two topographical poems on St. Vincent’s Rocks and the river Avon at Bristol. His more ambitious poems on social issues--The Age of Frivolity (1806), Modern Persecution (1811), and The Triumph of the Sons of Belial (1820)--are of greater significance but will have few modern readers. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Jan. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 4 Jan. 2022; Bucks Herald 20 Apr. 1844; Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle June 1844, 295; Nathan Dews, The History of Deptford [1884], 129-30; Spenserians) AA