Alfred Sturge (5 May 1816 – 25 January 1901) was a Baptist missionary and minister who served in Devon, India and Kent. Ancestry and early life Alfred Sturge was born to Jeanette née Emeric de St. Dalmas (b.1788 d.1874) and Nathan Sturge (b.1789 d.1864) at Bishopsgate in London on 5 May 1816. He came from a family among the Society of Friends from the days of George Fox. His grandfather, Thomas Sturge, was one of the founders of the British and Foreign Bible Society. George Sturge, one of his uncles, left £500,000 to charity, and another uncle, Thomas Sturge, was an intimate friend of Lord Macaulay. Both were active in the movement for the abolition of slavery, as was his relative Joseph Sturge. On his mother’s side, he was descended from a noble French family, and Count Emerie de St. Dalmas was his maternal grandfather, whose eldest son converted to the Protestant Christian faith, and was consequently prevented by the law of those times from inheriting his father’s title and estates. He was educated at a Quakers’ School, but found the long and sometimes silent meetings very trying, being only a small boy. The visit of some Quaker Missionaries from America seems to have been the chief factor in him committing his life to Christ. On leaving school, he sat under the ministry of Rev. George Clayton (b.1783 d.1862), and sometimes heard such men as John Leifchild (b.1780 d.1862), an independent minister, and Thomas Binney (b.1798 d.1874), a congregational minister. Subsequently, he moved to Plymouth, where he sat under the ministry of Samuel Nicholson of the George Street Baptist Church (1845–1941), which he joined when he was about twenty-five years old. In 1841, he married Margaret Tait Stove (b.1819 d.1913), with whom he had twelve children: Esther Eliza (b.1842), Alfred Robert (b.1844 d.1904), Margaret (b.1845 d.1908), Thomas Stove (b.1847 d.1911), Lydia (b.1849 d.1908), Emily Jane (b.1850 d.1924), Samuel George (b.1852), Herbert (b.1854), Maria Frances (b.1856 d.1860), Henry Havelock (b.1858 d.1942), Agnes Ellen (b.1860 d.1951) and Ernest Brainerd (b.1862 d.1882). Ministry He began to preach in the villages around Plymouth, and was eventually invited to become pastor of the church at Modbury. After some hesitation he accepted the call, and finally abandoned business for the life of a Christian minister. After several years at Modbury, a Mr. Page of Plymouth asked him to become the pastor of the Baptist Church at