Johnson Gedge

Johnson Gedge (1799-1863) was a respected newspaper proprietor and editor in Bury St Edmunds. At the age of 17, after just one year’s employment at the paper, he took over the reins of the Bury and Norwich Post from his father, Peter Gedge, who had founded it in July 1782. He remained the editor and proprietor of the paper until his death 46 years later.

Gedge was born in Bury and was an important figure in the town, not least as a benefactor and supporter of good causes. Politically he was a Liberal, his paper suggesting he was ‘somewhat timid and hesitating in forming his opinions [but] not a man, when they were formed, to shrink from their expression and temperate defence.’ He was also respected in the wider community of newspaper owners. When the Provincial Newspaper Society, which represented ‘a large proportion of the most influential Editors in the kingdom’, was formed in the early 1830s, Gedge was immediately appointed its honorary secretary, a post he held until his death. After ten years’ service he was presented with an heirloom by his fellow-members ‘in acknowledgement of his truly valuable and most efficient services’.

Although his father and other family members are remembered in memorials at St Mary’s Church, Johnson Gedge worshipped regularly at St John’s from its consecration in 1841, serving for a time as a churchwarden. An obituarist in his paper described in some detail his religious convictions. Gedge ‘was long a painfully anxious enquirer after Divine truth, judging himself most severely as an unprofitable servant, and not knowing God’s way of peace’, the paper reported, noting also that its late proprietor did receive consolation from God and ‘closed his life in perfect peace with God and man, leaving to those he loved the rich inheritance of a good name, the example of a Christian life, and the remembrance never to be effaced of his triumphant anticipation in death of eternal rest and glory in Heaven.’ Several members of the Gedge family were clergy, including his younger brother Sydney (1802-83), sometime vicar of All Saints’, Northampton.

Such was the respect in which Gedge was held, shops in Abbeygate Street and elsewhere in the town partially closed for his funeral, which the entire staff of his newspaper attended. The service was conducted by the Revd Robert Rashdall, vicar of St John’s, in the presence of the Mayor, the Town Clerk and other dignitaries.
Gedge is honoured in the church by a window in the Lady Chapel.