The South African mission stations of Buntingville and Old Bunting, founded in the Eastern Cape in the nineteenth century, were named after Sidney Percival Bunting's great grandfather, Dr Jabez Bunting. Born in 1779 to humble parents in Manchester, England and noticeably bright, Jabez Bunting attended Manchester Grammar School and entered the Wesleyan Methodist ministry in 1799. Convinced of his own rectitude, he sought to change the world around him. Over three decades he built an impressive reputation as a preacher. He moved to London in 1833 and rose up the Wesleyan hierarchy to become the dominant figure in orthodox Wesleyan Methodism. He zealously led the Wesleyan Missionary Society as it spread its tentacles around the globe, reaching from North America to South Africa. Rigid and authoritarian, ‘a born disciplinarian’ who centralized control by expelling critics and dissidents, Jabez Bunting broke Methodism from its Anglican base and established it as an independent self-governing church.

The Wesleyan tradition in which Jabez Bunting raised his family promoted the ideal of service to worthy causes. This reflected the personage of its founder, John Wesley, whose message to his followers was unequivocal: ‘You have nothing to do but save souls’. Yet, by attracting the upwardly mobile and economically successful, Wesleyan Methodism was very much ‘a religion for the poor’. In contrast, Methodism's working-class strand, known as Primitive Methodism, was ‘a religion of the poor’ – but most working-class Methodists preferred compromise and conciliation to class struggle and socialism. Methodist societies were insular and strictly disciplined; marriage to those outside the fold was frowned upon, and a ‘spiritual police’ kept careful watch for signs of moral slippage.