From Sheep Farmer’s Son to Theologian

Thomas Scott, The Commentator

Tenth of thirteen children born to a Lincolnshire sheep farmer, Thomas proved a precocious child. At the age of ten, having learnt to read at home followed by some local private schooling, he was sent to the well-respected Scorton Grammar School, some 150 miles distant where, for five long years, he hardly saw his parents. He was only an average pupil who profited from the school’s library to read voraciously and to compose nonsense verses.

On his return his father paid an indenture for him to become apprenticed to a local surgeon apothecary. Pupil and master swiftly fell out and the ensuing lawsuit prevented Thomas from continuing the medical studies for which his father had destined him. After ten years working as a labourer, with little to read other than a Greek grammar, he discovered that his eldest brother was destined to inherit the family farm and resolved to leave.

Thomas’s mother, who originated from Boston, then Britain’s second port, came from an established local family with an ancestor MP who had voted for Charles I’s decapitation. She suggested that he go to London and ask her brother-in-law the gardener Lancelot Brown to promote the ‘Capabilities’ of his nephew’s case. Thomas walked the 140 miles to London, lodging on the way at farms where he sheared the sheep by means of payment, and obtained the necessary dispensation.

Thanks to the unanimous support of the rest of the family, he also obtained the formal
approval of his father, a man of ‘small and feeble body, but of uncommon energy of mind, and vigour of intellect; by which he surmounted, in no common degree, the almost total want of education’

Continue Reading Part 2

In an age where reinvention is key, Scott’s life reminds us that true success belongs to those who dare to rewrite their own narrative. Do you ?