Alfred Barrett Sackett, Benjamin's great-grandson, writing in the 1960s, recorded that, Benjamin's mother having died in childbirth, Benjamin was brought up by his grandparents Jeremiah and Hannah Newing Sackett. He continued:
"Benjamin was converted by the Methodists and began the work of a local preacher which obviously absorbed the thought and energy of his life. Jeremiah apprenticed him to Mr Hudson at the Northwood windmill, an apprenticeship he served to the last day. Then at once he married and to earn his bread he left in 1834 for what were to him “foreign parts” and found employment in Hythe. While he looked for it, he stayed at the Red Lion, still there as it was. The details of his employment as a millhand with the Hortons water-mill, Albion mills, now gone, first with Mr Benjamin Horton, with his sons and grandsons later, until his death, will not much interest you, perhaps, and you may find the language and piety of his religious memoirs out-dated. Read it and see. Two things are clear:- first his religious sincerity and the wholly laudable way in which, surmounting the initial disadvantage of little education of an academic kind, he made his way by hard thinking and reading though this is not mentioned much, to his own theology. This is Arminian, following Wesley rather than Whitefield, commonsense rather than ranting. He has mastered the arguments for free will unexpectedly well. He has a literate pen and a clear style and evidently, as his son Jabez says, a fund of theological readings and knowledge: he is broad minded, liking to help other denominations “especially the Baptists, independents and bible Christians”, courageous and determined. These qualities were shown not only in the persistence of his preaching and the hardness of his reasoning, but in his experience. Jabez culls from his father’s memoirs how his head was once jammed in between the millsweep and “the post of the head window through someone moving it forward at the bottom”. Then his presence of mind saved him. On Christmas day he lost his way in deep snow and found his way back from his preaching after “having walked over a wood filled with snow”. His first wife, Mary Ann Cooper of Whitstable, died in 1842: his second, Lucy Lee, whom he married about 1844, died in 1868: his third, Emily Day, married in 1871, survived his death in 1885.
My grandfather, Jeremiah, has spoken of him in the all too short memoir he has left: evidently he was a man of immense energy and courage. He seems to have had no leisure. When the arduous task of the mill was over, his preaching began. This was nearly every Sunday and his son tells how he never missed an appointment but would think nothing of a twenty mile walk to and from preaching; how if locally an appointed preacher failed to come he would “doff his garments of whiteness and dust and be ready in ten minutes to preach in the little sanctuary to a handful of people and afterwards return to his place in the mill”. This happened often and it made the deeper impression on my grandfather’s mind because he was “left to fill his place in the mill during his temporary absence - which I proudly did”. His physical and mental courage and energy he certainly left to my grandfather who, I judge had all his qualities but at a higher level."