CALLED

Leaving school at 14, Ben Sockett was employed as a wire worker in a steel rolling mill in Rogerstone, a village in South Wales. Ten years later, in 1924, he graduated from Regents Park College, London with a degree and College Prizes in Greek and Hebrew, after spending two and a half years in the trenches and being commissioned in 1918. This is the remarkable story of a man transformed first by a commitment to become a Baptist pastor at the age of 8, and second by the dreadful experience of a soldier in the First World War. His first ministry in Wollaston, Northamptonshire was also a time of convalescence from PTSD enhanced by the profound friendship of an elderly lady, Margaret Keep, who had been a young friend of the poet Robert Browning. His approach to his faith was intellectual, and he took at master's degree in theology and later wrote a complex PhD thesis which had a theological and a philological base, using Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac languages. Woven into his professional life are the complexities of personal and family relationships, the challenges of raising children, and estrangements from his siblings with often bitter consequences. After moving from Wollaston to the Baptist Church in Winchmore Hill, London in 1931 where he met his wife, he joined the Anglican Church in Manchester where his impact and legacy is considerable in two parishes of Sudden and Northenden. He died suddenly at Northenden Rectory in March 1963 at the age of 66.
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