Llewellyn David Bevan

Llewellyn David Bevan (11 September 1842 – 19 July 1918) was a Welsh Congregationalist minister whose pastorates included New York City and Melbourne, Victoria. He was the first principal of Parkin College, the Congregational seminary in Adelaide, South Australia.

Bevan was born in Llanelly, Carmarthenshire, to Hopkin Bevan, an actuary, and his wife Eliza née Davies, daughter of a Congregationalist minister. His father came from a family with a long Nonconformist history: he claimed descent from the Independent minister Lewis Rees (1710–1800) and his wife Esther Penry, a descendent of John Penry, the Nonconformist martyr in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

He was brought up in an intellectual household and enjoyed the public lectures on science and literature that were regularly held at the mechanics' institutes of the day, and he and his young friends dreamed of one day becoming lecturers themselves. He was later educated at University College, London, whose head master was the philologist T. H. Key. Bevan was boarding in a religious household with a number of eager young ministers. In this environment he decided against Law and for a religious life, influenced by the preaching of Henry Grattan Guinness. He next went to New College, one of the associated colleges of the University of London, where he took the arts and law with first-class honors in 1863. His instructors included Edwin Lankester, father of Professor Ray Lankester.

After ordination he became assistant minister to the Rev. Thomas Binney, pastor of Weigh-house Chapel, then in 1869 accepted the pastorate of Tottenham Court Road Chapel, built for George Whitefield. In 1874 he took two months off for a pulpit exchange with the minister of the Central Church, Brooklyn, and from 1876 to 1882 served at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York. In 1882 he returning to England to take charge of the newly erected Congregational chapel at Highbury Quadrant. While in New York Mrs. Bevan suffered a back injury which ever afterwards made sitting in an ordinary chair uncomfortable for her, which may have influenced Dr. Bevan's final acceptance of a call to the Collins Street Independent Church, Melbourne. Bevan had declined previous invitations in 1876 and in 1879 following the resignation of the Rev. Thomas Jones, another Welshman.

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