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‘We Claim our Part in the Great Inheritance’: the Message of Four Congregational Buildings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
It is religious Nonconformity’s fate to be misknown. Where it truly non-conforms the historian of the mainstream must find it an irritant, a tiresomely indispensable footnote to his thesis. For other historians it is its eccentricities which appeal—its Muggletonians and Southcottians, its Ranters too. What is less appealing is its most insistent theme and its chief continuity, the constant fight for due recognition (which means parity) in constant tension with the natural urge to conform. For who is to say when Nonconformity has served its purpose or when conformity is indeed reconcilable with that higher conformity to which each Nonconformist witnesses?
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990
References
1 Julian, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, b.1916, educ. Ampleforth and Balliol (1st class in Greats): Asst. District Commissioner, Palestine, 1942–8; Adviser to Prime Minister of Libya, 1952; Administrative Secretary, Zanzibar, 1955; Governor of Seychelles, 1962–7: Who’s Who.
2 This is the theme of Binfield, C., ‘Asquith: The Formation of a Prime Minister’. JURCHS, 2, 7 (April, 1981), pp. 204–42, esp. 204–10Google Scholar.
3 I am indebted to Mrs M. P. Skinner for access to this notebook and information about her grandmother, Edith Hall nee Firth, third wife of Revd Frederick Hall (1839-1917) of Bradford, Heckmondwike, Wimbledon, and Scarborough, for whom see Congregational Year Book (1918), p. 132.
4 Alice, Marchioness of Salisbury, thus described Asquith; the ‘most Catholic place in Oxford’ is ascribed either to Frederick Heiler (A. L. Drummond, The Church Architecture of Protestantism [Edinburgh, 1934], p. 293) or to Albert Schweitzer.
5 The ‘disintegrative’ thesis has been most recently and persuasively advanced in Johnson, M. D., The Dissolution of Dissent, 1850–1918 (New York and London, 1987) and the tensions within Mansfield can be followed in Kaye, E., C.J. Cadoux, Theologian, Scholar and Pacifist (Edinburgh, 1988), esp. pp. 28–70, 141Google Scholar et seq.
6 For Champneys (1842-1935) see DNB; Girouard, M., Sweetness and Light. The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement 1860–1900 (Oxford, 1977), pp.49, 60–76, 84Google Scholar; Maddison, J., ‘The Champneys Buildings, Mansfield College, Oxford’, Mansfield College Magazine, no. 185 (1982-3), pp. 28–32Google Scholar.
7 For William Weldon Champneys (1807-75) see DBN.
8 For Sir Francis Henry Champneys (1848-1930) see DNB.
9 Maddison, ‘Champneys Buildings’, p. 29.
10 Mansfield College, Oxford: its Origin and Opening (1890), p. 45.
11 Congregational Year Book (1887), p. 258.
12 ‘Mansfield College Chapel. Notes on the Decorations’ unpaginated typescript leaflet.
13 Congregational Year Book (1887), p. 258.
14 Mansfield College… Opening, p. 48.
15 ‘Mansfield College Chapel. Notes on the Decorations’.
16 Elizabeth Fry, Philip Doddridge, Thomas Chalmers, Alexander Vinet, John Brown (of Haddington), and Frederick Schleiermacher can each be justified, but as a collectivity? Similarly with the six Victorian Congregationalists, James Legge, David Livingstone, Thomas Binney, Alexander McKennal, R. W. Dale, and Alexander Hannay.
17 ‘Mansfield College Chapel. Notes on the Decorations’.
18 Fairbairn, A. M. to Dale, A. W. W., 23 May 1908Google Scholar. Selbie, W. B., The Life of Andrew Martin Fairbairn DD, DLilt, LLD, FBA, etc. (London, 1914), p. 430Google Scholar. The windows were by Powell and Sons, Whitefriars.
19 Mansfield College… Opening, p. IX. For Blackie (1809-95) see DNB.
20 Mansfield College… Opening, p. 66. For Dale (1829-95) see DNB.
21 Mansfield College… Opening, p. 69.
22 Ibid., pp. 74, 76–7.
23 In 1869. Henry Robert Reynolds D. D His life and Letters Edited by his Sisters (London, 1898), p. 226. For Reynolds (1825-96) see DNB.
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26 Ibid., p. 68.
27 For Fairbairn (1838-1912) see DNB.
28 Selbie, Fairbairn, p. 75.
29 Ibid., p. 368.
30 Ibid., p. 257.
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35 Ibid., p. 241.
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41 For James Ward (1843-1925) minister 1870–72, see DNB. For W. B. Selbie (1862-1944), minister 1902–9, see DNB.
42 For Courtney Kenny (1847-1930), see DNB. For Henry Bond (d. 1929), son of William Bond (1818-1904), see Who Was Who.
43 Ethel Mary Conder (1859-1942), second headmistress of Milton Mount College, the school for Congregational ministers’ daughters; daughter of Eustace Rogers Conder (1820-92), who had succeeded Henry Robert Reynolds as minister of East Parade Chapel, Leeds, and for whom see Congregational Year Book (1893), pp. 214–16.
44 For John Conder (1714-81), see DNB.
45 Evangelical Magazine (October 1795), pp. 393–4; see also Spufford, M., ‘A Note on the Conder Family’, TCHS, 21, 3 (1972), pp. 77–9Google Scholar.
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48 Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 85 (1988), p. 188. Kate Bradbury, of Ashton, married Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934) for whom see DNB. It was Brad bury money which made possible the Ashmolean’s Griffith Institute.
49 Thus Albion’s minister, Hutchison, J., argued in October 1896: ibid., p. 184Google Scholar.
50 For Brooke (1853-1914), see R.I.B.A. Journal, 21 (1914), p. 653.
51 Ashton-Under-Lyne and District Congregational Magazine (February 1896), pp. XV-XVII, quoted in Binfield, ‘Albion’, pp. 190–1.
52 Russell, G. Stanley, ‘The New Church at Fairhaven’, Supplement to the British Congregationalist, 17 (October 1912), p. 748Google Scholar.
53 Walmsley, L. S., Fairhaven Congregational Church, Lytham, Lancashire: the Story of the Stained Glass Windows: A Handbook (St Anne’s-on-the-Sea, 1920), p. 13Google Scholar.
54 Fairhaven Congregational Church: Souvenir and Programme of the Opening, October 1912, pp. 2, 3.
55 For F. G. Briggs (b. 1862) and (Sir) Arnold Thornely (1870-1953), see Pike, W.J.. ed., Liverpool and Birkenhead in the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Biographies (Brighton, 1911), pp. 249, 273Google Scholar. For Thornely, see also Service, A., Edwardian Architecture (London, 1977), p. 210Google Scholar. For Wolstenholme, H. V. (1863-1936); see R.I.B. A Journal (23 May 1936), p. 768Google Scholar.
56 Fairhaven … Souvenir, p. 15. For James Moffatt (1870-1944), see DNB.
57 For L.S. Walmsley (1841-1922) see Blackburn Weekly Telegraph (29 April 1922). I am indebted to B. Dean Walmsley, Esq. for information about his father.
58 Walmsley, L. S., Fighters and Martyrs for the Freedom of Faith (London, 1912), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.
59 Walmsley, , The Story of the Stained Glass Windows, p. 8Google Scholar. The windows, designed by Charles Elliott, were executed by Abbott and Co. of Lancaster. The supervisory eye of Walmsley was as relentlessly correct as those of Fairbairn and Selbie.
60 Ibid., p. 14; Congregational Year Book (1906), p. 185.
61 The Story of the Stained Glass Windows, p. 81.
62 Ibid., p. 14, 15, 22.
63 Ibid., pp. 16, 22.
64 Ibid., p. 15.
65 Ibid., p. 16.
66 Ibid., p. 19.