Author: Brock, Thomas
Biography:
BROCK, Thomas (1777-1850: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 3 Apr. 1777 in Guernsey, one of perhaps thirteen children of Rev. Henry Brock (1740-1818) and Susan Saumarez (1743-1812), who probably married in Guernsey in 1764. He was educated at Hyde Abbey school, Winchester, and Pembroke College, Oxford (matric. 1794, BA 1799, MA 1801), and entered the church. He was first Garrison Chaplain in Guernsey and then rector of St. Pierre du Bois, Guernsey (1802-50), and from 1832 Dean of Guernsey. After 1815 he seems to have undergone a renewed conversion experience, became increasingly evangelical, and was active in the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, and several others. He married Mary Judith Carey (1779-1864) on 23 Aug. 1802. They had twelve children. Four sons also entered the church. He died on 29 Dec. 1850 and was buried at St. Pierre du Bois. Besides the work listed here, he published a number of now forgotten sermons and Remarks on the Views of Infant Baptism (1849), an important but now forgotten work on the Victorian dilemma of comparatively weighting election, conversion, and “second birth” experiences, and their relation to church institutions and dogma. (ancestry.co.uk 31 May 2023; Henry Carey, A Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Brock MA[1851]; John Jacob, Annals of Some of the British Norman Isles [1830], Second Part, 209-16; Salisbury and Winchester Journal 6 Sept. 1802; Church and State Gazette 10 Jan. 1851; GM Mar. 1851, 325) AA