WM draper, was born at Tipton, Staffordshire, youngest of eight children of David Jevons, draper and class leader and trustee of the WM society in Tipton. At the age of twelve Solomon was apprenticed to Messrs Farnell & Cattell, hosiers and haberdashers of Worcester Street ,Birmingham. Attendance at the Birmingham meetings of the revivalist American preacher James Caughey in 1845 led to his conversion.

He joined one of his former employers in the partnership of Farnell & Jevons at the corner of Worcester and Phillip Street, Birmingham. In the next fifteen years he expanded the business by adding a wholesale warehouse, visiting Paris and Berlin to secure his supplies of wools and fancy goods. Postal orders significantly increased his trade. . He bought out the ageing Farnell and moved house to Edgbaston and his WM membership from Cherry Street chapel to the new one in the Bristol Road. A breakdown in health persuaded him to move to Erdington where a near neighbor Sir Josiah Mason allowed Methodist services in the hall of his first orphanage at Erdington. Later a separate WM chapel was built. Despite forming a partnership with John Mellor, the demands of business wore down his health and in 1878 he retired prematurely. Thereafter he devoted himself to religious and philanthropic concerns. Practising systematic and proportionate giving, he reportedly laid a foundation stone at eighty places of worship, as well as donating to many other causes in the home and foreign mission fields. His largest gift, £10,000, was made in 1878 to the Wesleyan Thanksgiving Fund, providing that the Fund matched it, for the establishment of the Princess Alice Orphanage, particularly for the children of church-going parents.

In pursuit of warmer weather Jevons moved to Moseley, where he died in 1904, leaving an estate of £32,154.

Entry written by: DJJ
Category: Person
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