Author: REECE, Samuel
Biography:
REECE, Samuel (1770-1843: ancestry.com)
The compiler of the 1799 volume A Selection of Evangelical Hymns may be Samuel Reece, son of Samuel Reece and his wife, Margaret, who was baptized 3 Oct. 1770 in St Michael Parish, Barbados. (Several Reeces from Barbados were resident in Stoke Damerel, Plymouth, where the compiler lived.) His only other publication is his 1800 annotated edition of the Rev. David Cudly’s The Glory of the Two Crown’d Heads, Adam and Christ, Unveiled. His friend and parishioner John Kent (q.v.)—witness to his 28 Dec. 1802 allegation of marriage—anonymously contributed, he stated, “above twenty” hymns to A Selection. Reece was a widower when on 23 Jan. 1803 at Stoke Damerel parish church he married Elizabeth Sloggett (1772-1845), the widow of William Harris. Samuel and Elizabeth had two children, Alicia (1810-1865) and Mary (b 1811). Elements of his mother-in-law Susanna Sloggett’s 1814 will prove that he was the Samuel Reece who from 1798 to 1816 conducted a classical school at Saltash, Plymouth. (One of his pupils there was the notable actor and theatre manager Samuel Phelps.) Crushed by the need to support a large family—including Elizabeth’s children from her first marriage—in 1815 he was briefly imprisoned for debt. The grammar school he established in 1817 at St Austell, Cornwall, failed to reopen in July 1818 as planned. He then accepted employment in Oct. as master at the “Camborne New School.” In the 1830s he returned to preaching, now as minister of the Primitive Methodist chapel in Bethesda Street, Ramsgate, Kent. There he died, 24 Jan. 1847, age 77, and was buried in St George’s churchyard. Reece subscribed to the poems of N. T. Carrington (q.v.) of Plymouth Dock. (ancestry.com 1 Jan. 2024; findagrave.com 2 Jan. 2024; Southwest Heritage Trust swheritage.org.uk 2 Jan. 2024; PROB 11/1563; Sherborne Mercury, 31 Jan. 1803 and 13 July 1807; R. Polwhele, Civil and Military History of Cornwall [1806], 57; Exeter Flying Post, 7 Sept. 1815; West Briton, 9 Jan. and 3 July 1818; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 19 and 28 Sep. 1818; J. Kent, A Collection of Original Gospel Hymns [1827], ix; J. Robins, Watering Places of Great Britain [1833], 238; W. M. Phelps, The Life and Work of Samuel Phelps [1886], 33) JC