▶Date of birth:  4 December 1829        Place of birth:  Manchester

▶Father:   John Addison Coombs      Mother:  Elizabeth Wilson

▶Spouse(s):  (1) Charlotte Clapperton; (2) Lucie Jacquet-Bouvier; (3) Emily Gale; (4)  Martha Hendewerk      Date(s) of marriage:  (1) 14 June 1859; (2) 6 October 1880; (3) 7 March 1894; (4) (uncertain)      Place(s) of marriage: (1) Edinburgh; (2) Geneva; (3) Geneva; (4) (uncertain)

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Independent minister); Bookseller, Geologist, Author

▶Lifestory: John Wilson Coombs was an Independent pastor with a capacity for fundraising and an interest in climate, who lived out his later years abroad. He was born in Manchester in 1829, the second son of dissenting minister John Addison Coombs, and his wife Elizabeth (née Wilson), of Albion Place, Salford. In 1851 he lived with his family at 34 Great King Street in Edinburgh, where he was employed as a bookseller. In 1855 he matriculated at New College, University of London (formed from the merger of three dissenting academies), BA 1858.

Armed with his degree, in the same year Coombs became the Pastor of the Congregational Chapel at Portobello, near Edinburgh, and in 1859 he was married to Charlotte, daughter of Alexander Clapperton, in Edinburgh; together they had three daughters and a son. His health was poor, and after a year he had to resign his pastorate at Portobello and went “to reside on the continent for some time”.

By 1862 the family was back in Edinburgh, at 23 Nelson Street, where they had their first child, and in 1863 he felt well enough to accept the Co-Pastorate of Plaistow in Essex. By 1867 he set about raising funds for a new chapel, which became Trinity Chapel, Stanstead Road, Forest Hill in London, replacing a chapel at nearby Catford Bridge, Kent, which had become too small for the congregation; he was responsible for raising £4,000 for the construction.

A popular preacher, Coombs became involved with the South London Education League, opposing aspects of the 1871 Education Act; he also published The ‘real presence’: a lecture in 1867, a short piece on “The Temptation of Our Lord” in the Pulpit Analyst of 1868, and ‘Let us keep the feast’: an address in 1871. He remained in Forest Hill until 1876 or 1877, when the family moved to Cheltenham, though apparently without a pastorate. It was in Cheltenham that his wife died, in 1877, and he was there when his article on “The changes of climate during geological periods” was published in the Midland Naturalist (volume 3, 1880). Between 1877 and 1883 he lived at 10 Wellington Square, Pittville.

Changes happened in his life in his later years, and he seems mostly to have lived abroad. In 1880 he remarried, to Lucie, the daughter of the Revd. Louis Jacquet-Bouvier, Pastor of the National Church of Geneva. After her death he married for a third time, at the British Consulate in Geneva, to Emily Gale, daughter of Christopher Spashelt Esq.; she had lived in Vevey in Switzerland, and he in Geneva. His final years seem to have been spent in Nice in southern France. The newspapers note that his daughter was “massacred” in China in 1900, and he married for a final time, to Martha Hendewerk before his death in Nice in 1911, at the age of eighty-one.

▶Moved to Pittville from:        Moved from Pittville to:

▶Date of death:    12  June 1911    Place of death: Nice, France

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial:

▶Notes:        ID: 8417

Contributor(s):  John Simpson