Author: SUTER, Alexander
Biography:
SUTER, Alexander (c. 1756-1817: ancestry.co.uk)
Contemporary death records (burial, newspaper, journal) give his age at death as 60, 61, or 63, thus giving a birth sometime in the mid 1750s. The earliest report of him records him in London so he may have been the Alexander Suter born on 23 June 1763 and baptised on 15 July at Queen Street, Ratcliffe, Stepney (Independent), son of Alexander Suter and his wife Margaret English--but this requires corroboration and the wide discrepancy of dates needs to be explained. He was brought to Methodism by Rev. Thomas Oliver (1725-99), whom John Wesley (q.v.) had appointed superintendent of printing in London in 1775. He was soon given the role of class leader by Wesley and became an itinerant Methodist minister in 1779, travelling widely on the northern circuit in England and further afield for thirty-three years, until his retirement at the Leeds Conference in 1812 due to ill health. He removed to Bradford and in 1814 to Halifax, Yorkshire, where he continued to minister, teach, and visit the sick. He died on 9 Mar. 1817 at Halifax, with his burial recorded at South Parade Chapel (Wesleyan). He married Mary Grills/Grylls on 26 Apr. 1790 at St. Just in Penrith, Cornwall, the most westerly town in England and with a strong Methodist congregation. They went on to have at least six sons who were born while he was a minister preaching variously at Wolverhampton (1792), Norwich (1794), Sunderland (1796), Leeds (1798), Birmingham (1800), and Chester (1802); his wife, Mary, must have accompanied him on his travels. He baptised most of his sons personally at Leeds. In addition to the poem listed here, he published Thoughts on the Sabbath and its Duties: Being the Substance of Four Sermons on Exodus xx. 8 (Bradford 1813). (ancestry.co.uk 20 Dec. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 20 Dec. 2024; The Methodist Magazine 40 [1817], 639, 708; Leeds Intelligencer 17 Mar. 1817; George Osborn, Outlines of Wesleyan Bibliography [1869], 183) AA