Author: Purdy, Victory
Biography:
PURDY, Victory (1747-1822: ancestry.com)
The man who became known as “the Kingswood Collier” or “the Walking Bible” was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, and baptised at St. Philip and St. Jacob on 2 Mar. 1747. His father, an early follower of John Wesley (q.v.), was a tailor and a Methodist preacher who named his son not for any military victory but for his own victory when he was confronted by a mob on the day of the child’s birth. Both his father and his mother Mary Highnam died, in 1755 and 1757 respectively, when Victory was still a child. He can hardly have been entirely “untutored”--the epithet applied to him by his early biographer George Pocock (1774-1843)--for he became a clerk in a colliery office and like his father a Methodist preacher. He gave his first sermon in 1771 and gained local renown for exceptional feats related to his itinerant preaching, first the number of miles he covered, mostly on foot, in the next 49 years, and secondly the act of memory by which he could cite the Bible, chapter and verse, scores if not hundreds of times in a single sermon. His own records show that he read the Bible through forty times and had reached Isaiah on the forty-first in the year of his death. He is said to have composed 1853 hymns but few of them appear to have been published with his name. On 13 Jan. 1774 he married Mary Milsom (who signed the register with a mark) at Holy Trinity, Stapleton, Bristol, the church at which they baptised their eight children and at which he was buried on 2 Jul. 1822. Towards the end of his life, probably in 1820, he left the Bristol Methodist Society to join George Pocock’s Tent Methodists. He died at Stapleton on 28 June 1822. Pocock brought out The Life, Ministry, and Writings of Victory Purdy in the same year and provided the memoir for the later Poetical Miscellanies. (ancestry.com 26 Nov. 2023; findmypast.com 26 Nov. 2023; Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland: dmbi.online; Somerset Guardian and Radstock Observer 25 Jan. 1924)