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'The world is my parish'

John Wesley (1703-91) preached often in the East End throughout his long life and ministry. According to his diary, on Sunday 1 October 1738 he was at St George-in-the-East for both the morning and afternoon services, and adds that on the following days I endeavoured to explain the way of salvation to many who had misunderstood what had been preached concerning it. He records that he was with his brother Charles in the early morning singing and reading letters. They walked together and breakfasted at Mr Parker's in Wapping at 9am. At 10am he read prayers, preached and administered holy communion at St George's; dined at Mr H's [name left blank] before returning to St George's to read the prayers, preach and baptize. His schedule for the rest of the day was full: At 4.30 at Mrs Ironmonger's, many tarried, tea, conversed, prayer; 5.30 Mr Sims' singing &c; 7.15 Mrs Sims', singing, supper, prayer; 8.45 at home, singing &c; 11 prayer, conversation; 12. 'Home' probably refers to Mr Bray's in Little Britain, where he and Charles were staying.

This was shortly after his return from the United States, and several months before he submitted to be more vile (as he put it) and follow Whitefield's example of 'field preaching' in the open air - from which point he began to attract large crowds. 

In 1742 he preached at Ratcliffe Square [now Ratcliffe Cross Street], and on ten occasions at St Paul's Shadwell. The last was on 24 October 1790, at the age of 87, five months before his death; his Journal records St Paul's Shadwell was....crowded in the afternoon, while I enforced that important truth 'One thing is needful' and I hope that many even then resolved to choose the better part. George Wolff of Wellclose Square, the Danish-Norwegian consul and a convert to Methodism, was one of his executors - see here for more details.

On 4 February 1739 George Whitefield preached at St George-in-the-East. He, like Wesley, was an Anglican minister, and in some ways a fellow-founder of Methodism, responsible for the 'Great Awakening' in the United States, but they had a fundamental theological disagreement - Wesley was Arminian and Whitefield Calvinist (and so allied to the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion - see below). Here is the account from his diary (as edited by Luke Tyerman in the 19th century) of a momentous day, before he returned to the USA:

* There are alternative versions of what happened here, most of them involving more confrontation, and violence, that Whitefield acknowledges, and resulting in opposition to his preaching elsewhere.

St George's Wesleyan Methodist (Centenary) Chapel 

A society of worshippers in the East End was established in 1746. In 1812 they built a chapel, seating 1100, to the east of where St George's Town Hall now stands in Cable Street, and the burial ground soon after. Right is an 1840 advertisement for 'St George's East Cemetery' ['New Road' was then part of Cable Street, rather than the northern extension of Cannon Street Road]; it stresses the security of the site, with high walls and railings, and resident minister and sexton. Exclusive and perpetual rights of burial in any plot could be purchased, with moderate terms for common interments. But, as with the parish churchyard, burials ceased in 1854 following the 1852 Metropolitan Burial Act which created public cemeteries. In 1876 the Vestry bought the burial ground for £2,700 and incorporated it into St George's Gardens.

In 1845 Zilpha Elaw [left], a black American woman preacher, visited the church. A day school was established in the schoolroom; McGill's 1861 census states that it had about 150 pupils. Until the mid 19th century it was a flourishing chapel, but encountered difficulties as the neighbourhood changed. From time to time they had to ask for some financial help from other circuits, though they did manage to install, and pay for, hot water and toilets in 1876, when George Curnock (1817-87) was the minister. As a young man in Bristol he had become a keen advocate of temperance - he would later say that he found being teetotal hard at first, and had been advised to take stimulants to continue with his work. He produced The Railway Navigator: Or, Recollections of Robert Blake, who was Killed by a Fall of Earth on the Tiverton Road Line, March 8th, 1847, which was later distributed as a Wesleyan Temperance Tract. Before coming to London, Curnock had ministered in Hulme, Manchester (where he acted as 'precentor' at the District Synod, starting the hymn tunes), Huddersfield, and Leicester - whence he organised a trip to Rome, where the group met Ferdinando Bosio, an Italian Methodist minister, and held a service in his mission room. He became a popular Wesleyan preacher.

In 1874 the new Metropolitan Lay Mission provided a worker, to undertake district visiting; Curnock set up a Mission Band and in 1882-3 they visited 520 houses every Sunday. He held open air services and class meetings, and set up a mothers' meeting. When the grant was withdrawn in 1884, the congregation managed to pay him for a further year. In 1881 he was a committee member organising a major Œcumenical Methodist Conference (with American participation) at City Road Chapel. Nehemiah Curnock (1840-1915), right, transcriber and editor of the standard abridged edition of John Wesley's Journal, was a relative (? uncle).

In the 1886 Religious Census of London, which lists Thomas Dixon as the minister, attendances were listed as 281 in the morning and 399 in the evening.

In 1885 Conference established the London Wesleyan Methodist Mission, as a response to the spiritual destitution of London and the need for new ways of working in the light of George Mearn's 1883 broadside The Bitter Cry of Outcast London - which included many local references, including women and young children making sacks for a farthing a time. One controversial provision was the waiving of the normal 'itinerancy' rule that ministers should move on every three years, to enable continuity in areas where lay leadership was weak. They chose the well-nigh forlorn hope [despite the above figures!] of St George's Wesleyan Chapel as their base, and the Revd Peter Thompson [left] was stationed here, living at 242 Cable Street. (Charles Edward Robb, living with his family in Pell Street, was the housekeeper.) Although in the coming years there was pressure for radically new patterns of mission and ministry – such as Hugh Price Hughes' Forward Movement – for the most part existing structures were retained and strengthened. The range of activities - including a Boys Brigade branch (meeting in Wellclose Square), a Dorcas Society, a girls' sewing class, a maternity society, a training home for girls, reading rooms, and the distribution of soup, coffee and clothing, as well as renewed worship - was impressive, but not new in principle (and mirrored Anglican provision). Weekly rather than quarterly collections were introduced, a quarterly morning communion was introduced for those who could not attend in the evening, and temperance work continued. Thompson was instinctively a paternalist, but he was a member of the Anti-Sweating League, and preached during the 1895 elections on 'Am I my brother's keeper?' 

A major innovation, however, was to hire secular premises as new-style mission halls, and in 1891 the Mission took over Wilton's Music Hall, whose story is told here. It was known as the 'Old Mahogany Mission'. For further details, see Margaret Jones, 'New Creation' in the East End Mission 1885-97. She uses the record books, and the Mission's magazineThe East End (started in 1894) as evidence. The mission also took over 'Paddy's Goose', as the White Swan public house and music hall along The Highway was popularly known. Frederick James Edwards was assigned to the Mission for a time during this period.

A generation later, St George's was one of several East End missions to provide cinematographic entertainment, introduced by the Revd Frederick William Chudleigh [left]. There were few entertainments available to working-class youngsters, and motion pictures proved more popular than magic lanterns! See Luke McKernan, 'Diverting Time: London’s Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906–1914' in The London Journal, vol.32 no.2 (July 2007). See here for details of Cable Picture Palace (1913-40), at 101-105 Cable Street.

As Warden of the East End Mission [advertisement right, fromThe Children's Newspaper 28 March 1931], Fred Chudleigh (1872-1932) was a well-known and popular missioner, with thousands of East Enders lining the route at his funeral - see his biography by R.G. Burnett Chudleigh:  A Triumph of Sacrifice (Epworth 1932). He was a socialist, and member of the Independent Labour Party, writing the foreword to a collection of essays on Christ and Labour (Jarrold 1912), edited by Charles George Ammon, Labour MP for Camberwell and later Baron Ammon; he was also a scoutmaster with the National Peace Scouts, who had broken away from the 'militaristic' Baden-Powell organisations (compare the Woodcraft Folk, which had similar origins within the Co-operative movement). Initially he supported, and the Mission housed, the work of Pastor Kamal Chunchie, who had worked with Lascars in the area, in setting up a centre, the Coloured Men's Institute, for the black and Asian communities, but they disagreed over strategy (the centre was somewhat separatist), and new links developed with the Presbyterian church in Canning Town. 

Sister Doris, a Deaconess, came to work here in 1940, when the Revd Tom Collins was working at the Old Mahogany Bar (ironically for a Methodist, his name was that of a popular cocktail of the time!) and the Revd Edward Harland was in charge of St George's Chapel. Here are some memories of her arrival, and the following is an account of a later incident:

Most of the premises [left - next to the Town Hall] collapsed in the early 1960s, but the congregation continued to care for those in need locally, especially the homeless and dispossessed. They offered a kitchen and soup run, and medical care, and the premises were used for a film on homelessness. The Revd Eugene (Gene) W. Morse, from Missouri, was stationed here from 1974-78; before his arrival, he was minister of Winchester United Methodist Church, and received a Bahelor of Divinity degree from St Paul's School of Theology, Kansas City. Having lived in the Mission at 583 Commerical Road and working particularly at the Men's Care Centre on Cable Street, Gene and his wife Lettie, now living in St Louis, Missouri (where until retirement in 2005 he was executive director of Kingdom House, providing child care facilities), have recently been in touch. On a recent visit to London they spent three nights at their former home - now a hotel - and found that much had changed, but some things had not!

Ronald (Ron) Gibbins was the Superintendent of the East End Mission from 1964 [right, greeted on appointment by Mgr Derek Worlock - on the right - then of SS Mary & Michael, Commercial Road, later Archbishop of Liverpool, a keen ecumenist working closely with Bishop David Sheppard]. In 1949 Gibbins, born in 1922, formerly an RAF gunner, had ran a 'back to church' campaign, and was apparently banned from various pubs and working men's clubs in the north-east and London because, said the Licensed Victuallers Association, he was likely to cause breaches of the peace, and also interfere with business ... he had been drinking lemonade in public houses, handing round religious leaflets, and singing hymns at the piano. At the height of Beatlemania, Gibbins told reporters that a Fab Four version of 'O come, all ye faithful' might provide the church with the very shot in the arm it needs. From 1979 he was minister of Wesley's Chapel, the 'mother church of world Methodism' in the City, and active in international Methodist affairs (and also commenting on freemasonry - Methodists are not barred from joining, he said, but secrecy of any kind is destructive of fellowship). In 2012, aged 90, he gave an address 'Hopes for Marriage' at the wedding of his grandson Seth Lakeman (a folk music star)'s wedding in Cornwall. He died in September 2015.

The day centre building failed in 1989, and with it most sources of statutory funding and trust giving. One of their final projects, in 1992 (when Ian Hamilton was the minister) was the Cable Street Club for up to 16 latchkey kids. Eventually, the site was sold for private housing. Baptismal registers for 1812-37 and burial registers for 1828-54 are held at the Public Records Office, and baptismal registers for 1838-1910 at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Footnote: a Methodist quack
In the 1850s Richard Talbot, a schoolmaster, became a Wesleyan local preacher, but only preached one sermon, finding that the cure of bodies was more lucrative than the cure of souls. He set up as a 'Surgeon and Apothecary' in Watney Street, and later elsewhere, offering galvanism (electrical treatment that was seriously studied at the time, but also exploited by quacks, some of whom claimed it could bring the dead back to life) as a cure for toothache, rheumatism, tic douloureux, and other ailments - "Gone in a moment!" He was successfully prosecuted under the Medical Act for deception and for claiming false (German) qualifications, and fined £10.

John Wesley predicted that there would be many splits and regroupings within Methodism once it became a separate denomination, and so it proved - see the diagram left! Most were on matters, not of doctrine, but of church order and worship (including one over the use of organs). The Protestant Methodists split in 1827 (Leeds was their centre), and in 1836 the Wesleyan Methodist Association (with 20,000 members, centred on Manchester). These two groups amalgamated under the latter title, and in 1857 joined others who had seceded in 1849 under the leadership of James Everett, following the expulsion of some ministers on a charge of insubordination; they then took the name United Methodist Free Church. Their chapels tended to be quite imposing, on a par with the Wesleyan ones, and often had grand organs (they produced their own hymnal in 1889) and 'graded' pews; their ministers were well-educated, and served on a pattern similar to the Wesleyans - an initial twelve months, extended to 3-4 years by invitation of the local quarterly meeting; see here for a note on their college in Manchester. They were active in foreign missions, especially in China.

St George's Wesleyan Free Church was established in the late 1850s in the former Trinity Episcopal Chapel (which has been built as a Congregational chapel). McGill's 1861 model census says that 'Trinity Methodist' seated 500, with 30 in the Sunday School; but this report from the 1861 Sunday School Teachers' Magazine & Journal of Education: suggests that either he was referring to another building (but which?) or had greatly under-estimated the size of the Sunday School:

In 1864 the AGM of the Wesleyan Methodist Local Preachers' Mutual-Aid Association was held at the chapel, reporting on its usual course of usefulness as an almoner of the Methodist Churches; it had 2254 members (416 honorary) and made total payments in the year of £2055 (sickness, annuities and funeral costs).

Primitive Methodists

the seafarers and fishermen of the East coast where most of his 43-year ministry was exercised, but whom (like others just-mentioned) Conference sent to London, where he was Superintendent of the London mission, and also general superintendent of home missions (a new, undefined, role which did not last). Back in Hull, he became Editor from 1857-62, and in that year was President of Conference. In 1861 he produced the Primitive Methodist Revival Hymn Book, 'compiled from the large and small hymn books [of Bourne in 1825]', which went through various editions. He was a keen total abstainer and supporter of the Band of Hope. Liberal in politics, he was conservative in church polity.

[John Flesher's edition of the hymnbook - based on Bourne's work and other sources - was produced at Sutton Street in 1865 under the publisher's name of William Lister. A further version - which attempted a more thoroughgoing return to Bourne's work - emerged in the late 1880s [left], edited by Dr George Booth JP of Chesterfield, and issued under the publisher's name of

The 1872 map [right] shows that the 'Prims' built a chapel on the site at 6 Sutton Street, just east of Christ Church Watney Street, whose vicar G.H.

In 1876 the forereunner of the Whitechapel Mission was launched, as the 'Working Lads' Institute and Home' (WLI), at the Mansion House, with the Lord Mayor of London presiding and Henry Hill, a City banker, its chief benefactor. It rented premises at The Mount on Whitechapel Road until 1885 when a new building, at 285 Whitechapel Road, was provided for its work (hitting the headlines when it was used for one of the 'Ripper' enquiries). In 1896, when WLI was short of funds,

Jackson [left at various periods in his life, plus 1931 painting by Frank Beresford, bought for the Memorial Room at WLI by his successor on behalf of Revd W. & Mrs Potter] was one of the great figures of Methodism in this period. Born in Belper in 1850 (where he attended a Unitarian Sunday School), he served in the East End for 56 years until his death in 1932 (the year of Methodist

Thomas Jackson's succcessor was James E. Thorp (1919-46) [left - note the wing collar of earlier years, which Jackson had also worn]. He was from Sowerby Bridge (where he attended the Primitive Methodist Sunday School) and had previously ministered in the south west. He brought several of Jackson's ideas and projects to fruition - he too was a recognised probation officer - including the acquisition of  Windyridge, at Thorrington near Colchester, as a farm colony and hostel qualifying as 'conditional residence' for those serving probation orders. A group of lads had camped in the grounds some years before, and Mrs Atterton, a retired teacher, gave effect to her late husband's dying wish that their house should be used for this purpose.

John Jackson [right] was Superintendent from 1970-74. He was a fourth-generation railwayman from Winsford in Cheshire, working in signalling and telegraphy, and was ordained in 1945 (studying at Richmond Theological College in Surrey - a Wesleyan college founded in 1843 which closed in 1972), and had served in Stroud, Yorkshire, Stoke on Trent, Darlington, the Victoria Hall Mission in Bolton and then as Superintendent of the Albert Hall, Nottingham (also the city's main concert hall at the time) where Sunday morning worship had been televised.

Dr John Henry Chamberlayne was the minister until 1981 [ith his deaconess wife Mary - left]. He was originally a scholar of ancient Hebrew religion (Man in Society; The Old Testament Doctrine, Epworth 1966), but became a lecturer on world religions and sociology at Natal University in South Africa, and Atlanta University in the USA, and a missionary teacher at Central China University. Back in England, he was an Open University tutor, teaching the course 'The [originally Man's] Religious Quest', with The Quest of Faith: an introduction to contemporary religions (REP 1969) as a source book; he was a member of the British Association for the Study [previously History] of Religions. His London doctorate on 'The People's Religion of China' was the basis of

In 1996 (by then retired to Croydon) he provided the Horniman Museum with 48 'Chinese objects'. He died in 2003.

He left in 1990 to become a superintendent minister in Ilford.

His successor at the Mission was John Lines MBE (1990-95) [first left]. John was a Metropolitan Police motorcyclist before ordination, and his hobby the preservation of old buses (see p11 of this link); he is now honorary vice-president of London Stedfast Association, for former members and supporters of the Boys' Brigade.

Methodist New Connexion, Bethesda Chapel, Watney Street

The New Connexion was the first of the Methodist splits, led initially by Alexander Kilham (1762-98) [right], a minister in Sheffield, not on any doctrinal issues but over the rights and representation of lay people in church governance. It was a democratic movement, giving an equal voice to ministers and elected laity - for which the 'Kilhamites' were denounced as revolutionary sympathisers of Tom Paine. A 1795 'Plan of Pacification' failed to resolve the issue, and they broke away in 1797, founding their own chapels throughout the next century. 

Ordination training colleges of the non-Wesleyan 'strands'
In 1847 the New Connexion appealed for £20,000 to build a college, but only a third of this sum was raised. In 1864

The United Methodist Free Church college was built in 1871 in Victoria Park, Manchester. From the 1980s the Bible Christians had tailor-made courses at Shebbear for their ministers, but they moved to this site after the 1907 union that created the United Methodist Church - the New Connexion, as noted above, joining them a few years later. Student group [left] in 1926.

Primitive Methodist training began in 1863 at Elmfield House, near York, moving to the Sunderland Theological Institute in 1868, and to Manchester in 1881, to link with the new Victoria University of Manchester (formerly, from 1851, Owen's College). Here in 1878 a grand college was built in Alexandra Road South, and extended from 1893-98 (see this description of the early years) and subsequently; in 1906 it was named Hartley College after Sir William P. Hartley (of jam fame). Its most famous tutor (from 1892-1929) was Arthur Samuel Peake, author of the famous one-volume bible commentary, first Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism in Manchester University and a Pro Vice-Chancellor. In 1934, after Methodist reunification, it became Hartley Victoria College when nearby Victoria Park College (above) joined it [college chapel window right]. In 1973, when training moved to the new Luther King House, it became a hall of residence for the Royal Manchester (later Royal Northern) College of Music, and in 2001 Kassim Darwish Grammar School for Boys, an independent Muslim school.

The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion was (and is, for a few chapels remain, mostly in the south-east) a group of Calvinistic Methodist churches, under the personal direction of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon until her death in 1791. She liked to move ‘her’ ministers around on a regular basis! They trained at Trevecca in Wales, and then, after her death when the decision was made to move to a convenient place near London, at Cheshunt [right]; the trust deed for the college makes interesting reading, and has some links with the family of Dr Herbert Mayo, Rector of St George-in-the-East. When the Connexion's training transferred to Cambridge, the site became an Anglican theological college, sponsored by the four local dioceses of London, St Albans, Southwark and Chelmsford, from 1909 until its closure in 1969.

From 1773, the Countess' ministers preached under the mulberry trees in Wapping,  and in that year she reported that I am treating about ground to build a large, very large chapel at Wapping; in 1776 Mulberry Gardens Chapel was opened. The reason for the delay relates to disagreement about the choice of minister; this, and the subsequent history of the building, are explained more fully in this biography of the Countess. It was fitted up in a tasteful manner and opened using Anglican rites. Allegedly the hymn-singing was so hearty that Dr Mayo, in his nearby meeting-house, could not be heard when preaching. 

One of her ministers, appointed in 1778, was a Cornishman John Eyre, an able and well-respected preacher, who was ordained into the Anglican church the following year (not all that strange, since the Connexion did not regard itself as formally separated from the established church, and used its liturgy). He went on to serve in Chelsea and Homerton. However, he kept contact with former friends, and was a keen supporter of the London Missionary Society. Two others whom she did not appoint - despite local pressure - were William Simpson, despite his significant financial contributions to the chapel, and William Aldrige, who left the Connexion and became a Calvinistic Methodist, though remained on good terms with the Countess - he also subscribed to Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative.

T. & R. Allen's Brewery declined to renew the lease on this chapel when it expired (instead it was offered to Pell Street Meeting), and the congregation dispersed - some to the Countess' original chapel at Spa Fields, some to Sion Chapel, but most to Charlotte Street. When this latter building in turn was demolished to make way for the Docks, she built 'New Mulberry Garden Chapel' in Pell Street, with its main entrance in Prince's Square, in 1802 (see opening notice right from the Evangelical Magazine vol.10). It was a simple building – a plain brick box, without even a bell-cote, and had high pews and a gallery. There was a vault below, and two further ones under the school and almshouses, which became very full and insanitary. (In his will John Luden, slopseller of 14 Upper East Smithfield, who died in 1845, had specified burial in this vault for his son Joseph, and for himself, but it is doubtful whether this was achieved given subsequent developments.)

As explained above, the Anglican liturgy was used in the chapel, whose minister from 1804-07 was the Rev Isaac Nicholson. He was born in Netherwasdale, Cumbria in 1761, was an ordained Anglican minister, and had been President of the college at Cheshunt following the death of Lady Huntingdon; he published a Collection of Hymns....for Mulberry Gardens Chapel in 1807. He was a noted preacher, and gave lectures every Tuesday evening. Among his published sermons, delivered at Pell Street, were The Office and Operations of the Spirit of God as a Witness, intended as an antidote against the virulent poison of the Sandemanian heresy, diffused in London by the Hibernian stranger (1806). He was also an opponent of promiscuous and unscriptural communion, and instigated a system of moral examination by church leaders for admission to the sacrament. After his death in 1807 (aged 47) this and other aspects of his church governance were subject to legal challenge in the High Court of Chancery. While this was being resolved, some of the congregation transferred for a time to the Pell Street Independent Meeting, which in 1805 had taken over a former mariner's chapel twelve yards away.

Nicholson's successor, whom he first met while convalescing from 'nervous debility' in Cumbria and brought back to London, was the Rev Robert Stodhart,  for more details of whom see here. He remained until 1842 (living in Islington), and died died in 1846, aged 67. They chapel continued to use the Anglican liturgy; by this time, however, church order was similar to that of the Congregationalists. In his time the chapel became an 'auxiliary society' of the London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 by evangelical Anglicans and nonconformists - and which became the main missionary agency of the Congregationalists.

When the Independent chapel in Pell Street closed around 1833, Stodhart bought the premises at auction to prevent it falling into inappropriate hands. The Connexion abandoned Mulberry Gardens Chapel in the 1840s (the last recorded baptisms were in 1837 - and see here for the visit of the black evangelist Zilpha Elaw in 1845), but there was one more minister: when Stodhart resigned in 1842, Joseph Cartwright took his place. He was an Independent who had been offered a Church of England title but declined; had served in Orpington and Devonport; and had supplied at New Mulberry Gardens Chapel for several weeks before receiving their call. The Monthly Repository's portrait gives a glimpse of which doctrines mattered, and the language in which they were expressed:

Mr C is one who boldly declares the whole of a free-grace Gospel, by exhibiting the glory of its doctrines, the necessity of its experience, and the certainty of its practical effects. The scope of his ministry may be condensed as follows:- The everlasting love of Jehovah the Father; the blessedness enjoyed by the church secured in the purposes of grace, founded in the decretive will of God alone. The love of Jehovah Jesus, as developed in the great work of redemption, undertaking our cause, assuming our nature, bringinh the church up to himself in an everlasting oneness, and sustaining all his covenant offices and characters, for her well-being in grace, and her exaltation from grovelling corruption, to songs of praise, crowns of salvation, and thrones of eternal glory. The love of Jehovah the Spirit in his covenant work of regeneration, quickening dead souls by his sanctifying influence, subduing the depravity of out first Adam's nature, carrying on the work of grace to consummation in glory, and finally making us meet for our Maker's kingdom.

Zion Chapel
In 1790 - the year before the death of the Countess - the Connexion took on a former theatre on Whitechapel Road, which was fitted out as Zion Chapel. The dressing rooms were turned into vestries, and a pulpit built on the front of the stage. It was fairly spacious: the pit was filled with seats, and the galleries were large and accommodating. When Pell Street failed, efforts were made to revive the Connexion's cause locally. went into decline on the death of the Countess, despite various attempts to revive the cause: i

Although the East End made a huge impression on William Booth, he did not return here for more than a decade. In 1857, he was appointed by the New Connexion to a ministry in Brighouse, in the Halifax circuit (having married Catherine in 1855), and following his ordination in 1858 was appointed to Gateshead. But he found this too restricting, and fell out with the church authorities, so resigned and became an independent evangelist, returning to London in 1865.

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