Skip to main content

Author: Bunting, William Maclardie

Biography:

BUNTING, William Maclardie (1805-66: ODNB)

He was born on 23 Nov. 1805 at Manchester, the eldest of at least eight children of Dr. Jabez Bunting (1779-1858), a well-known Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Sarah Maclardie (1782-1835), who had married in Jan. 1804. He was educated at Woodhouse Grove School and St. Saviour’s Grammar School, Southwark. At sixteen he underwent conversion and in 1824 became a probationary Methodist minister. In 1828 he was confirmed in full connection after serving in the Salford and Manchester circuits. He served as itinerant minister in several Lancashire towns and London until 1841, when declining health led him to move to London permanently. He became a supernumerary minister in 1849. He was active in the Evangelical Alliance and several missionary societies, including the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. He married Harriet Bentley (1808-91) on 10 Apr. 1829, at Aldmondbury, York. They had two daughters. He died at his residence, 8 Highgate Rise, Kentish Town, London, on 13 Nov. 1866, and was buried at Highgate Cemetery. A posthumous collection of his sermons, letters and poems was published as Memorials of the Late Rev. William M. Bunting (1870) and included a memoir by his younger brother, Thomas Percival Bunting. The volume printed his sacred poetry but also included his “Domestic” verse with occasional poems to his mother, wife, and children, and reprinted the work listed here. He contributed thirty-five hymns to John Leifchild’s  Original Hymns (1842). Several of his hymns were also included in a number of later nineteenth-century hymnals. (ODNB 6 Mar. 2023;  DNB; ancestry.co.uk 6 Mar. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 6 Mar. 2023; Julian, 193; G. Stringer Howe, ed., Memorials of the Late Rev. W. M. Bunting [1870], 1-61; Morning Post 12 May 1829; MA 19 Nov. 1866; An Alphabetical Arrangement of all the Wesleyan-Methodist Ministers, Missionaries, and Preachers on Trial [9th edn. 1862]) AA

 

Other Names:

  • W. M. B.
 

Books written (1):

[Manchester]: [printed by Henry Smith], [1832]