Hedley John Sutton (staff 1923–32) was born in Hawthorn in 1876, the son of John and Lucy Sutton (nee Clay). He was a well known Baptist teacher, missionary and chairman of the Australian Board of Baptist Foreign Missions for six years.

Hedley Sutton’s influence on the formation of Carey’s earnest moral tone was at least as strong as Harold Steele’s. A former missionary, Hedley Sutton filled the role of de facto chaplain and spiritual guide while he taught at Carey. Just as James Bills had before him, he continued, unofficially, the association of the chaplaincy or the leader of the school’s religious identity with the second most senior position. A remarkable student at Wesley College and at university, Hedley Sutton taught for five years at Brighton Grammar School before he took up missionary work in India. Serving there for twenty-five years, he became an expert linguist in Bengali. He continued to exert a deep influence on Baptist foreign missionary work while a member of Carey’s staff.

Known as ‘Blossom’, he taught Latin, English, Greek to a select few, junior Mathematics, Scripture and Biblical History. His nickname, according to Lindsay Newnham, dated from the day Hedley Sutton ‘made all students go outside to pick up rubbish. One boy returned with a couple of branches of blossoms and received a detention’. Another version of the story, from Wilton Eady (OCG 1933), is that when some students wore flowers in their buttonholes, he told them to remove the blossoms and throw them away and ever after was known as Blossom.

Hedley Sutton was a warm man who, outside the classroom, led the Debating Club, edited the Carey Chronicle and established the Christian Union in 1928. For some students like Basil Swanton (OCG 1932), he exerted more influence on their learning of the Bible than those who taught them in their Sunday School classrooms.

Instruction in the scriptures ‘and the spiritual application thereof are stressed according to the age and capacity of those under instruction. How necessary a bulwark against the flood of cynical unbelief that threatens society!’, declared Hedley Sutton in 1934. Despite this strong sense of purpose, Alec Jamieson (OCG 1931), who became a Presbyterian minister and served as a chaplain on migrant ships from Britain, did not recall being ‘hammered or urged; we didn’t feel we were being made into good boys or good Christians, but it was happening all the same’.