Revd Robert Rashdall (1811-1881) graduated MA from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1836 by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. After serving a curacy in Devon he was appointed to be the first Vicar of St John’s in 1841, a position he held for almost 30 years. In 1870 he became Rector of Teversham in Cambridgeshire, a very small village which could boast two archbishops of Canterbury among its former rectors, John Whitgift and his successor, Richard Bancroft.
Rashdall’s wife, Mary Ann (1836-81), whom he married in 1858 when in his late forties, was the third daughter of the Rev Richard Johnson, sometime Rector of Lavenham. Rashdall died in 1881, just five days after his wife. They had two sons.