▶Date of birth:   22 March 1802       Place of birth: Ashley, Wiltshire

▶Father: John Marshall Collard      Mother: Elizabeth Lysons

▶Spouse(s):  (1) Ellen Mary Gray; Sarah Stansfeld     Date(s) of marriage: (1) 6 September 1836; 10 August 1864       Place(s) of marriage: (1) Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire; Kensington

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican)

▶Lifestory: John Marshall Collard served for several years as an Anglican clergyman before joining the Plymouth Brethren. He was born in Ashley, Wiltshire, in 1802, the only son of John Marshall Collard, a militiaman and property-owner in Jamaica, and his wife Elizabeth (née Lysons), both latterly of Wiltshire; his mother owned the inherited slave-worked estate of Stoney Gutt on Jamaica.

Collard went to university in England, matriculating at Exeter College, Oxford in 1820, BA 1824, MA 1827. He was ordained Deacon in 1826, and Priest (both Gloucester) in 1827. In 1826 he was licensed Curate of the united parishes of Whaddon and Brockthrop in Cheltenham, adjoining the emerging estate of Pittville, from where he moved to a parish in Herefordshire.

But in the early 1830s he left the Church of England and joined the Plymouth Brethren, renouncing his Anglican status. He married Ellen Mary Gray at Charlton Kings in 1836; the couple had two sons and six daughters. In 1844 he is recorded in the Cheltenham Annuaire as living at 14 Pittville Villas (now 40 Prestbury Road). His family lived in the later 1840s in his father’s old house at Tuffley in Gloucester, and he opened the Old Friends’ Meeting-house in Park Street, Gloucester. In 1850 he lived at 2 Clarence Street in the city.

He also formed another primitive Church fellowship at Corse, and about the year 1857 moved to Bristol. By 1861 he lived there at 2 Apsley Villas, Kingsdown. His wife had died in 1853 and shortly before his death he re-married, to Sarah, second daughter of Thomas Wolrich Stansfeld, of Burley Wood, Yorkshire, in August 1864; he died suddenly in Bristol three months later, at the age of sixty-two, and his estate was valued at probate at under £12,000. Some three hundred Plymouth Brethren attended his funeral, from Gloucester, Cheltenham, and elsewhere.

▶Moved to Pittville from:  (uncertain)      Moved from Pittville to: Tuffley, Gloucester

▶Date of death:   19 November 1864     Place of death:  Cotham, Bristol

▶Date of burial:  24 November 1864       Place of burial: St Arno’s Vale cemetery, Bristol

▶Notes: Bristol Daily Post 22 November 1864; Gloucester Journal 26 November 1864       ID: 8346

Contributor(s):  John Simpson