Mills Terrace, North Adelaide is named after Samuel Mills – and not John Stuart Mill as some have concluded. Nevertheless, both men played significant roles in the early attempts to give life to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan for systematic colonisation in southern Australia. Samuel Mills began to show interest in the project when Robert Gouger and Colonel Robert Torrens put together the South Australian Land Company in late 1831. This was their second attempt to attract supporters and investors to a project in South Australia.
Samuel Mills probably joined because of the enthusiasm and encouragement shown to him by Gouger, whose father, George Gouger, he had known since 1799. Both George Gouger and Samuel Mills served on the inaugural committee of the Religious Tract Society in 1799 and thereafter for many years. This organisation was dedicated to taking small, inexpensive ‘farthing tracts’ of a religious nature to their Sunday schools and to the world. Both the Gouger and Mills families were strong evangelical Protestants and part of a community more commonly described as dissenters.
At the time when Gouger began gathering support for the Wakefield scheme, Samuel Mills was in his late 60s, described as a retired financier and ‘a person of great weight from his high character and millions of money’.
At the close of 1833, with the prospect of a more liberal government coming to office in the wake of the Reform Bill, those who had become committed to the idea of a new colony formed themselves into the South Australian Association. Samuel Mills joined this body and was attracted to the idea for at least three reasons. He was rich and prepared to support any colonial proposition where religious dissent was not only permitted, but also actively encouraged. The freedom to worship without stricture and without any obligation to a state-based Anglican Church held much appeal for him. Secondly, the projected principles of the colony were in keeping with the charter of the Religious Tract Society, whose brief it was to disseminate the gospel in foreign lands. Thirdly, it was an attractive investment opportunity, even for men with a prudential track record in business.
In the weeks leading up to the departure of the first ships to South Australia, there was general agreement on the pluralistic nature of religious needs in the colony. The dissenters even went so far as to contribute financially to the proposed Anglican organisations in the colony, even though they were ideologically opposed to the concept of state religion. Privately, they were not amused when it was learned that C.B. Howard, the first chaplain of the Holy Trinity Church in Adelaide, was to be paid a stipend by the Colonial Office. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently ecumenical to give generous financial support to any of the proposed associations, churches or congregations. They were quite naturally also vitally interested in the preservation of their own church in the colony, and within the weeks before departure there was a flurry among Congregationalists to ensure that their own methods of worship were preserved.
Brown as Emigration Agent drew up a prospectus for a society for the instruction of colonists based on the Congregational principle. It didn’t arouse enough financial interest until it was absorbed into Binney’s Colonial Missionary Society. The Reverend Binney was the Secretary and Samuel Mills the Treasurer. At last the dissenting Protestants had a voice through which they could argue the case for the separation of powers between church and state.
Samuel Mills’ support for the colonial experiment never wavered, even unto his death in 1847. He was privately called upon to support the Congregational flock in the colony and had a strong reputation for supporting such initiatives in London. Apparently it was nothing for him to donate £50 to the Metropolis Churches Fund for the building or purchase of an endowment of fifty new churches in London.
The Mills family was of French Huguenot extraction who settled firstly in Yorkshire, before moving to London. The name ‘Mills’ is a derivation of the name Milne from much earlier times. Samuel Mills was born in 1769, the first child of Benjamin Mills and Sarah Savage. They were married on 26 January 1767 in St Leonard’s, in the Parish of Shoreditch. Samuel’s paternal grandfather was also called Benjamin. Both his father and his grandfather were weavers of fine silk, a family tradition which may have extended back to the time when the family lived in Yorkshire. In 1732 Benjamin Mills Snr (Samuel’s grandfather) was living in St Saviour, in Southwark, where he took on a number of apprentices in the weaving trade, including his own son Benjamin who, as he grew in wealth and stature, was subsequently admitted to the Worshipful Company of Weavers, possibly by family accession. The family acquired great wealth unlike so many of the weavers in and around Spitalfields who suffered deprivation at the hands of imported products from France and elsewhere – legally and illegally and sometimes under smuggling conditions. This may account for the fact that the family weaving business was sold to Samuel Courtauld following the Napoleonic wars.
In 1793 our subject Samuel married Mary Wilson, a cousin of Bishop Daniel Wilson of Calcutta, India. They married in Moorfields, close to the current-day Barbican in London. The Wilson family was extremely rich, which certainly accounts for some of Samuel’s wealth at the time Adelaide was settled.
Samuel and Mary had four sons in succession before their only daughter, Maria, was born. These children were born between 1794 and 1799. Unfortunately, the couple’s son Samuel Jnr died at the family home in Finsbury Place on 16 December 1814. He was only 17.
Who was Samuel Mills? For much of his life he lived at No. 20 Russell Square in London. The accounts of the treasury of Middlesex reveal he was a magistrate for that county, a position in society usually associated with high status and respectability. Mills also belonged to a number of other organisations, mostly of a religious nature. These included the Sunday School Society (in 1801), a body first formed in 1785 with a strong evangelical commitment to children and their religious education; the Religious Tract Society (1800–1807, 1810), which was dedicated to the printed distribution of the gospel in all lands; the British and Foreign Bible Society, where he was a member for more than forty years; and the Hibernian Society, an organisation committed to taking the Protestant gospel to Catholic Ireland. He was both Vice President and Treasurer of this organisation, which also boasted William Wilberforce and Lord Glenelg among its patrons.
Samuel Mills can be described as a seriously busy man who had the means and the wherewithal to make a difference. To explain his religious commitment, which was so deeply integrated with his wealth, prudence, community status and business acumen, it is important to tease out what was happening among some religious dissidents of the day.
Samuel Mills was accepted into the Fishmongers’ Company on 22 April 1800. On the face of it this would seem to be a strange move for Samuel to be making, given that his father Benjamin was a bona fide member of the Weavers’ Guild before he was born, and that this entitled Samuel to automatic membership of the same company, should he so wish. Why then did he seek to transfer his birthright to the Fishmongers’ guild?
A closer inspection of William Herbert’s book on the twelve livery companies of London reveals that in 1800, after a long period when no more than eight newcomers were admitted to the livery annually, 400 men were taken into the Fishmongers’ at the one time. Samuel Mills was among this large intake. This was unusual, perhaps even unprecedented. What is unique about these men was that there were barely any real fishermen at all among them, but a significant number of them were Protestant dissenters. It is estimated that the intake for the year 1800 boosted the numbers of this guild to approximately 1,400.
This Worshipful Company of Fishmongers was governed by one Prime Warden, five Wardens and 28 assistants, making up the governing court known formally as the Worshipful Court of Assistants of Fishmongers. Mills became one of the five Wardens in 1826. In this governing body, which exercised all the power in the organisation, were almost all Protestant dissenters, many with an anti-papal commitment to Jesus Christ and an especially florid passion to bring all ‘heathens’ to salvation.
Herein lies the unusual connection between Mills’ proselytising life through the Religious Tract Society, the Hibernian Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society and his strangely unusual need to seek membership of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. A cursory glance at the charitable and benevolent works undertaken by the guild gives some meaning to his Christian witness. The allusion to the biblical reference where Christ calls upon his disciples to become ‘fishers of men’ on the sea of Galilee is inescapable. The guild had a history of bequests stretching back hundreds of years, which were dedicated to distributing money to the poor through alms houses, the granting of educational scholarships to the underprivileged and the distribution of monies to charitable hospitals.
This type of work was entirely consistent with Mills’ Christian work in the various societies to which he belonged. The cornerstones of his charitable works were built on a commitment to education and the extension of charity to the poor, the sick and the infirmed. Further examples include his membership of the London Library Society, Vice Patronage of Christ’s Hospital (1829) and donations through the British and Foreign School Society to build schools in far off lands, including Greece. He was a life member of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
By the 1820s the march of the dissenting communities in Britain was irresistible. They were a powerful voice against the Roman Catholic Church and they resented how much their lives were governed by the state church Anglicanism. They also abhorred the growth of secularism in some quarters. The Protestant dissidents were passionate about protecting their schools from both a secular and a Catholic influence. Mills was especially militant on this issue.
There is little doubt that Samuel Mills was a seriously wealthy man. As could be expected, he provided for his family in a way which gave them a good start in life. In 1834 he purchased Tolmers Park, in Hertfordshire, a substantial manor with a classic Ionian porch that had been in the hands of Sir Frances Vincent since 1761. It adjoined some of Mills’ land in Cuffley. The property passed successively to four of his descendants before eventually being handed on to two of his great-granddaughters, one of whom was the novelist Mary Cholmondeley.
Highly respected until the last, Samuel Mills continued to serve the Christian community and society generally. In his last years he and William Henry Savage were appointed as tax commissioners for the district of Bloomsbury in the County of Middlesex. Mills also maintained a healthy interest in business matters, purchasing a substantial holding in The London and York Railway.
In 1839 his wife Mary predeceased him by eight years. Samuel finally passed from this life in 1847, fully expecting to meet his maker. He is buried in the family vault at Finsbury Place.
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