Benjamin Davies (1814-1875)
Artist unknown
Benjamin Davies was born on 26th February 1814, at Wern, near St Clears in Carmarthenshire, Wales. His father was Silvanus Davies, a farmer from the area, “much respected for [his] probity and piety”. Davies began preaching at the age of fifteen, in both Welsh and English, and soon studied for the Baptist ministry at Bristol Baptist College in 1830, then at Glasgow and at Leipzig. He obtained a PhD from Germany in 1838 and subsequently moved to Montreal where he trained missionaries for the Canada Missionary Society.
In Portland, Maine, he married Eliza Try, a lady born to an English family in America. The couple were married for thirty years, having several children, and Eliza was remembered very warmly by the students of Stepney College and Regent’s Park, where she and her husband soon resided. Davies became a tutor and the principal of Stepney College in 1844. Notable pupils of Davies included Alexander McLaren, who later became a famous preacher, and whose portrait is also in the hall of Regent’s Park College. Davies left Stepney in 1847 and accepted a professorship at McGill College in Montreal, Canada. He spent ten years there before returning to London, and to the now-named Regent’s Park College, where he stayed on for eighteen years.
Davies had been experiencing ill-health for some time before he fell down the students’ staircase at Regent’s on 19th June 1875. Following this accident, he was removed to his son’s house in Frome, Somerset, where on 19th July he died from a brain haemorrhage. Davies was remembered in his funerary oration as an excellent Hebrew scholar, and, as a religious man, was praised for his “simplicity of character, chastened and elevated by his unaffected piety, which added a higher lustre to his mental gifts”. He was buried along with his wife on a quiet hillside in Somerset, in sight of the Westbury White Horse.