Bakewell, John

Author

b Brailsford, nr Derby 1721, d Lewisham, Kent (SE London) 1819. He was converted at the age of 18 through reading the classic Human Nature in its Fourfold State (1720, 1729) by the Scots Calvinist Thos Boston (1676–1732). Having turned to Christ he began in 1744 to preach Christ, and on moving to London met John Fletcher, Toplady (qv), the Wesleys and Martin Madan who was dramatically converted on hearing John W announce his text, Amos 4:12. Bakewell became Director of the Greenwich Royal Park Academy but later resigned to be a full-time relief Methodist preacher, content to fill gaps caused by illness or death. It was at his Westminster home in 1770 that Thos Olivers (qv) wrote no.199—a text, like JB’s own most celebrated hymn, much altered by later editors. His few other hymns have not endured. A notably humble man, he lived to be 98, and his City Rd tombstone records that ‘He adorned the doctrine of God our Saviour eighty years and preached His glorious Gospel about seventy’. No.483.