Author: Mends, Herbert
Biography:
MENDS, Herbert (1759-1819: ancestry.com)
He was the son of a Welsh convert to Methodism, Christopher Mends, and his wife Anne Twyning, who had married at Prendergast, Pembrokeshire, Wales, on 27 Nov. 1745. Christopher Mends became first an “exhorter” preaching to gatherings at his home, before being appointed as an independent minister at Brinkworth, Wiltshire (1749) and then (1761) as minister of the Batter Street Chapel in Plymouth, Devon, where he remained until his death in 1799. Herbert was baptised at Batter Street on 13 Dec. 1759. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was ordained at Sherborne, Dorset, in July 1778 and began his pastoral career there. In the same year he married Martha Jolliffe in her home parish of Crewkerne, Somerset, on 13 Oct. by licence, with the permission of their parents; they went on to have at least seven children. He soon joined his father as joint pastor at Batter Street and carried on there after the death of the latter. They founded the Batter Street Benevolent Institution in 1785 for the education of girls and infants, which grew and flourished for a century or more on the basis of voluntary subscriptions from donors of various religious denominations. After the death of his first wife, Mends married Anna Eliza Fowler at Cullompton, Devon, on 27 June 1796; they had one son, Herbert Fowler Mends. Mends died “suddenly” at home on 8 Jan. 1819. According to the newspaper account, he had been looking at the sky, felt unwell and lay down, asked his wife for a handkerchief, and died while she was getting it. Besides the poem on the death of the Plymouth merchant from his congregation, he published little: a tract on infant baptism (1799) and a sermon against the slave trade. (ancestry.com 24 May 2023; findmypast.com 24 May 2023; Richard Nicholls Worth, The History of Plymouth [1873], 190; British Mercury 27 Jan. 1819) HJ