Author: SHEPHERD, Richard Herne
Biography:
SHEPHERD, Richard Herne (1775-1850: Memoir)
He was born at Bicester, Oxfordshire, on 25 Aug. 1775, one of nine children of Richard Shepherd and Martha Harvey who had married on 22 Mar. 1759 at St. Clement Danes, Westminster. As a child he moved with the family to London where his parents worshipped at Spa Fields under the ministry of Thomas Mills. He was instructed by the Rev. Thomas Scott, chaplain of the Lock Hospital, from 1790 to 1803. He also prepared for Oxford but eventually prepared for the ministry and was ordained at Ranelagh Chapel on 14 Jan. 1814 and was minister there 1818-48. The chapel was predominantly Calvinist with Wesleyan Methodist influences. He contributed to the Evangelical Magazine from 1798 under the signature “S-, Westminster” and edited the Home Missionary Magazine 1829-38. He was a director of the London Missionary Society (LMS) (est. 1795), secretary to the London Annuity Society for the benefit of widows (est. 1765) and active in the British and Foreign Bible Society (est. 1804), London City Mission (est. 1835), and the Church Pastoral Aid Society (est. 1836) He also helped to set up the Western Grammar School at Brompton, Chelsea (1828) and Pimlico Grammar School, Westminster (1830). He married Elizabeth Shropshire on 11 May 1796 at Saint Mary Woolnoth, City of London, with Rev. John Newton (q.v.) performing the ceremony. They had two sons and three daughters. He died on 16 May 1850 at his house at 9 Palace Street, Pimlico, Westminster, and was buried at Norwood cemetery, south London. His widow, Elizabeth, died on 16 Sept. 1856. Besides the work listed here, he published a more extensive collection of poems, Gatherings of Fifty Years (1843), and a number of separately published sermons. (Richard and Samuel Shepherd, Memoir [1854]; “Memoir,” Imperial Magazine Aug. 1831, 345-7; ancestry.co.uk 21 Jan. 2024; Morning Post 20 May 1850; Evangelical Magazine June 1850, 298, and Dec. 1856, 723; additional information from Michael Kentish) AA
Other Names:
- R. H. Shepherd