John Hothersall Pinder was born on the 27th of April 1794 to a white Barbadian family. The Pinders were a well-established family of slave-owners in Barbados in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John’s father Francis Ford Pinder owned the Hothersal slave plantation, and before that John’s grandfather William Pinder had been both Chief Justice of Barbados and owner of the Ashford slave plantation in the parish of St. John. The labour of enslaved Africans on these family plantations generated the wealth for young Pinder to study in Britain at Charterhouse School and the University of Cambridge, where he became ordained as a deacon and priest.

In 1819, Pinder returned to Barbados having been appointed chaplain to the enslaved people on the Codrington sugar plantation by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). In his position as catchiest for the SPG, Pinder wielded significant power and control over the lives of enslaved people on Codrington. Pinder coerced enslaved people to attend his Sunday sermons through a ticket system, which forced enslaved people to request a ticket of absence if they did not want to attend. In a private correspondence to the SPG, Pinder admitted to often denying these tickets in order to identify which enslaved people were resisting his attempts to Christianise and discipline them:

As I most rarely refuse permission of absence, I know by the frequency of application, who are the least serious in their profession of Christianity, besides the occasional opportunity it affords of conversing with different members.

During these sermons, Pinder preached against disobeying slave-owners and castigated those who did not follow his precepts. Pinder was also a vehement defender of slavery as an institution and published a set of proslavery lectures in 1824. In 1829, Pinder was appointed as Principal of Codrington College, a religious educational institution for the sons of white Barbadian elites, where he remained until his resignation in 1835 due to poor health.

Throughout his time in the Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s, Pinder himself owned six enslaved people: Duke, Cato, William Davis, Latita, Fabricius and Joe. Duke, Cato and William Davis were all adult men in their 30s and 40s, while Fabricius and Joe were 14 and 11-year-old boys at the time Pinder purchased them. Latita was a 20-year-old woman when she was “gifted” to Pinder by a J. H. Gibbons, who may tentatively be the Reverend John Gibbons listed in the 1830s slave compensation records. Against oncoming abolition in the mid-1830s, Pinder had manumitted Duke, Latita and Fabricius in 1832 while Cato and William Davis died in enslavement. Joe’s fate remains unknown after 1832.

We also know enslaved people actively resisted Pinder’s missionising and the brutal exploitation they faced throughout their lives on Codrington. In many cases, for example, enslaved people simply refused to attend missionary sermons on Codrington despite the pressure they faced from Pinder, or alternatively used their own religious and spiritual belief systems inherited from West Africa, such as obeah, as a means to survive and keep their faith against a violent system of dehumanisation.

Returning to Britain in 1835, Pinder used his slavery-derived wealth and his prominence within the SPG to establish himself on the religious scene of Wells. Drawn into the network of figures like the Archdeacon of Bath William Thomas Parr Brymer and major Cathedral patron Francis Henry Dickinson, both with their own connections to Caribbean slavery, Pinder became the inaugural Principal of Wells Theological College in 1840. This position allowed Pinder and the wider Cathedral to develop significant ties between Wells and the Caribbean, including visits from the Bishop of Antigua, the Bishop of Jamaica and the Bishop of Barbados, William Hart Coleridge, whom Pinder had known personally through his time at Codrington. Students at Wells Theological College, who studied in Vicars’ Close and used the Chapel in the nineteenth century, also funded the creation of “Pinder Scholarships” to train students at Codrington to become colonial missionaries in West Africa.

Upon his retirement in 1865, a memorial fund for Pinder with an initial value of £2500 was set up to provide an additional endowment for Wells Theological College. This fund, which seems to have been initially partially supported by Pinder’s own private slavery-derived wealth, was used for the purchase of four houses in Vicars’ Close together with a property standing in the Cathedral close itself. Pinder also left the Theological College £1000 upon his death in 1868.

Clark, James, ‘Wells Cathedral & Transatlantic Slavery: The Cathedral Community’s Connections to the Trade in Enslaved People and the Plantation Economy, c. 1750-c.1904’ (Wells and Transatlantic Slavery Conference speech recording, 16 March 2023)

Entry for Revd. John Hothersall Pinder, Legacies of British Slavery database

Glasson, Travis, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press: 2012)

McLean-Farrell, J., and Clarke, M. A., ‘Missions in Contested Places/Spaces: The SPG, Slavery, and Codrington College, Barbados’, Mission Studies, 38, 3 (2021) 325-349

‘Peter Brathwaite on John Hothersall Pinder’, National Portrait Gallery, July 2020

Turner, Revd. Dr. Carlton J., ‘Re-thinking African Enslavement’ (Wells and Transatlantic Slavery Conference speech recording, 16 March 2023)