Daniel Gunn

Background

Gunn was born at Wick in Caithness in 1774,the son of Ingram Gunn, and his wife Elizabeth Miller(or Millar).

Education

He was educated at the high school, Edinburgh, and trained for the ministry by Greville Ewing at Glasgow.

Career

In 1800 he was sent to be an itinerant minister in Ireland, where he is known to have preached in Waterford and to have assisted J Kelly in Dublin. He may have married, and been widowed, while living in Ireland. In 1810 he became pastor of a small congregation there.

He removed in 1813 to Bishop"s Hull, near Taunton, and in 1814 to Chard.

Yet his preaching was entirely unemotional. Number one was allowed to preach emotional religion in his pulpit, and the laymen whom he used to despatch into the neighbouring villages were strictly enjoined to abstain from adding anything to the printed discourses with which he provided them.

He was almost equally successful in maintaining a day school which he established, and regulated with military precision. Ann Taylor (poet),who met him at Ilfracombe, tells of his laboriously teaching a lad how to hand a chairman

He would pitilessly call back a little boy on an unmanageable pony to make him take off his hat to Mistress

Gunn if he had omitted to do southern Yet his personal influence was extraordinary. Even in the matter of subscriptions his will was law.

If the collection on Sunday was not what he considered sufficient, he would put in a five-pound note, and send the plates round again.

Ann Taylor"s enthusiasm for "the noble highlander" seems to have been shared by all who met him. He was three times married, and lived like a country gentleman at Burton, near Christchurch.

He died at Burton on 17 June 1848, in the seventy-fifth year of his age.

Achievements

• His Sunday school, which was attended by upwards of four hundred children, attained a very high reputation, and attracted visitors from all parts of the country, even from America.