in December 1803, to the Etna bomb, which he took out to the Mediterranean. He was posted on 22 Oct. 1805 to the Bellerophon, from which he was moved to the Queen as flag-captain to Lord Collingwood, with whom, in the Ocean and the Ville de Paris, he continued till Collingwood's death in March 1810. He remained in the Ville de Paris, as a private ship, till December, and in February 1811 was appointed to the Undaunted, in which he co-operated with and assisted the Spaniards along the coast of Catalonia. In February 1813, after nine years' continuous service in the Mediterranean, he was obliged by the bad state of his health to return to England. In 1822–5 he was captain of the ordinary at Portsmouth, and in the same capacity at Plymouth in 1834–7. He became a rear-admiral on 10 Jan. 1837, was commander-in-chief in the Pacific from 1841 to 1844—a time of much revolutionary trouble and excitement, was promoted to be vice-admiral on 8 Jan. 1848, admiral on 11 Sept. 1854, and died at Stonehouse, Plymouth, on 21 Aug. 1857. He married, in October 1827, Gratina, daughter of Lieutenant-general Robert Williams of the Royal Marines, and left issue.
[O'Byrne's Nav. Biogr. Dict.; Gent. Mag. 1857, ii. 468.]
THOMAS, SAMUEL (1627–1693), nonjuror, born in 1627 at Ubley, Somerset, was the son of William Thomas (1593–1667) [q. v.], rector of Ubley. He graduated B.A. from Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1648–9, and was incorporated at Oxford on 20 Aug. 1651. He became a fellow of St. John's College, and graduated M.A. on 17 Dec. 1651, being incorporated at Cambridge in 1663. In 1660 he was deprived of his fellowship by the royal commissioners, and was soon after made a chaplain or petty canon of Christ Church, where in 1672 he became a chantor. He was also vicar of St. Thomas's at Oxford, and afterwards curate of Holywell. In 1681 he became vicar of Chard in Somerset, and on 3 Aug. of the same year was appointed to the prebend of Compton Bishop in the see of Wells. On the accession of William and Mary, Thomas was one of those who refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and he was in consequence deprived of his prebend in 1691, and in the following year of the vicarage of Chard. He died at Chard on 4 Nov. 1693, and was buried in the chancel of the parish church.
Thomas was the author of:
- ‘The Presbyterians Unmask'd, or Animadversions upon a Nonconformist Book called the Interest of England in the Matter of Religion,’ London, 1676, 8vo; republished in 1681 under the title ‘The Dissenters Disarmed,’ without the preface, as a second part to the ‘New Distemper’ of Thomas Tomkins (d. 1675) [q. v.] The ‘Interest of England in the Matter of Religion’ was written by John Corbet (1620–1680) [q. v.] Baxter terms Thomas's reply ‘a bloody invective’ (Works, xviii. 188).
- ‘The Charge of Schism renewed against the Separatists,’ London, 1680, 4to. A pamphlet written in reply to ‘An Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon on the Mischief of Separation’ by Stephen Lobb [q. v.] and John Humfrey [q. v.]
- ‘Remarks on the Preface to the Protestant Reconciler [by Daniel Whitby, q. v.] in a Letter to a Friend,’ London, 1683, 4to. Thomas also wrote a preface to Tomkins's ‘New Distemper,’ in which he assailed Richard Baxter and other nonconformists.
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 390; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Allibone's Dict. of Engl. Lit.; Nelson's Life of Bull, pp. 23, 211; Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 5882, f. 39.]
THOMAS, SIDNEY GILCHRIST (1850–1885), metallurgist and inventor, born on 16 April 1850 at Canonbury, London, was son of William Thomas (1808–1867), a Welshman in the solicitors' department of the inland revenue office, and his wife Melicent (b. 1816), eldest daughter of the Rev. James Gilchrist, author of the ‘Intellectual Patrimony’ (1817). Thomas, who was mainly educated at Dulwich College, early manifested a strong bent towards applied science. The death of his father when Thomas was still at school and not yet seventeen led him to resolve to earn at once a livelihood for himself. For a few months he was an assistant master in an Essex school. Later in the same year (1867) he obtained a clerkship at Marlborough Street police-court, whence in the summer of 1868 he was transferred to a similar post at the Thames court, Arbour Square, Stepney. Here, at a very modest salary, he remained until 1879. Meanwhile he had, after office hours, pursued the study of applied chemistry, and the solution of one special problem became, about 1870, the real purpose of his life. This problem was the dephosphorisation of pig-iron in the Bessemer converter. A sentence used by Mr. Chaloner, teacher of chemistry at the Birkbeck Institution, in the course of a lecture which Thomas heard, seems to have imprinted itself deeply on Thomas's mind: ‘The man who eliminates phosphorus by means of the Bessemer converter will make his fortune.’
