Benjamin Webb (clergyman)

In 1828 he was admitted to St Paul's School under Dr John Sleath, and proceeded with an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1838.

He was ordained deacon in 1842 and priest in 1843, and served as curate first under his college tutor, Thomas Thorp (who had been the first president of the Cambridge Camden Society), at Kemerton in Gloucestershire, and afterwards at Brasted in Kent, under William Hodge Mill, who, as Regius Professor of Hebrew, had countenanced and encouraged his ecclesiological work at Cambridge, and whose daughter he married in 1847.

[2] In that year Lord Palmerston, on the recommendation of Mr Gladstone, gave him the crown living of St Andrew's, Wells Street, London, which he retained till his death.

Under him this church obtained a wide celebrity for the musical excellence of its services, and became the centre of an elaborate and efficient system of confraternities, schools, and parochial institutions, in establishing which his powers of practical organisation found a congenial field of exercise.

[1] Clement Charles Julian Webb wrote: "Webb was throughout his life a consistent high-churchman, although his policy in matters of ritual differed from that of many of his party.... His refined artistic culture, and his deep conviction that the best of everything should be offered in God's service, prevented him from sharing the prejudice felt by many who otherwise agreed with him against the performance of elaborate modern music in church.