Author: Dagley, John
Biography:
DAGLEY, John (1766-1840: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in 1766 (Grace Abounding pt. 2, 29), probably at Stockingford, and was baptised on 12 July 1767 at Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the seventh of eight children of John Dagley, silk ribbon weaver, and Hannah Topp, who had married in 1759. He received an elementary education locally and underwent a conversion experience on Good Friday, 1786, which he later termed “a second birth.” Although his family was of the established church, the intensity of his conversion experience brought him into contact with dissenters (who often worshipped in small gatherings in private houses) and open-air Methodist preachers. Still working as a ribbon weaver, he began open-air and chapel preaching, giving his first sermon on 11 Sept. 1797, and ministered to a small mostly mining congregation at Baddesley for the next twenty years. He was ordained on 11 Sept. 1804. He became active in the building of local independent chapels at Baddesley, Dadlington, Chapel-end, and Ansley. From 1807 he was minister at Chapel-end, Hartshill, and remained there until his death. He married Ann Kelsey on 29 Jan. 1787 at Ansley. They had at least four children. She died in 1822. Three daughters died in the 1830s. He then married Mary Goode (1777-1834), widow, on 1 Apr. 1824, at Earl Shilton, Leicestershire. He married Ann Walton, widow, on 14 Mar. 1835, at Leamington, Warwickshire. He died on 2 Feb. 1840 at Tuttle Hill, Nuneaton, and was buried there. He left property in Chapel-End, Stockingford, and Nuneaton to an array of relatives, mostly grandchildren. In addition to the verse listed here, he wrote in prose Cottage Dialogues between Two Churchmen, Mr Moral and his Neighbour (1829-30). (ancestry.co.uk 29 Mar. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 29 Mar. 2023; John Sibree, Eminent Usefulness in Humble Circumstances. A Brief Memorial of . . . the Late Rev. John Dagley [1857]; Gordon Chilvers, John Dagley of Chapel-end [1990]; Leicester Chronicle 17 Apr. 1824; Coventry Herald 11 July 1834; Leamington Spa Courier 4 Apr. 1835; GRO death cert.; Lichfield Will, Nuneaton, 4 July 1840; Johnson, items 246-7; portrait, Evangelical Magazine, Supplement Dec. 1815, 520v.) AA