Gravestone of Mark Docker Source: SGCT
Mark Docker was a Congregational minister who served as the Nonconformist chaplain to the General Cemetery from 1848 to 1853, dying in office at the age of 74. He was born in the Birmingham area and in 1805 married Hepzibah Heathcote. She died and as a widower Docker moved to Sheffield in around 1810. He became the pastor at Garden Street Congregational church and remained there until 1829, during which time he married Maria Bramwell. After periods living in Thorne, near Doncaster, and in Broadway, Worcestershire, Mark Docker moved to Sheffield and became Chaplain to the Dissenter’s portion of the General Cemetery.
Docker was one of the first ministers to hold regular services of Christian worship in the Chapel; previously only funeral services had been held there. He had sought the permission of the Cemetery Company Directors to do this, with the caveat that he would not do so in winter ‘because the building had no heating’. It was reported that these services were well-attended.
During his time in Sheffield Docker conducted himself as would be expected of a prominent Nonconformist and member of town society. He sometimes preached at the workhouse and, among many worthy causes to which he donated, were the Relief of the Peasantry in Ireland and the Religious Tract Society. This Society’s aim was to counteract the ‘millions of publications issued by the infidel press’ by ‘producing their own which were cheap in price and popular in character’.
Docker documented his own life and beliefs in Memoir of Mark Docker. This book contains an account of his childhood and career and is now recognised for its cultural importance.
In the 1851 census Mark Docker, now in his early 70s, is recorded as living with his wife Maria, who was some 15 years younger, in the household of a brother and sister in law and several of that couple’s children. By this time Docker was feeling his age and decided to give up preaching. He died in 1853 at the age of 74. His obituary in the Sheffield Independent (19 February 1853) records ‘a man who shed a steady and equal light on the generation in which he lived […..] His character will come under that of the “just” whose “memory is blessed”. He is gone to his reward’. He was commemorated in a hymn by James Montgomery who is also buried in the Cemetery.
Mark Docker was buried in the Nonconformist area in plot KK 65, together with Maria who died in 1873 and is described as his ‘relict’ on the memorial inscription, a sister and one of his nephews.