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Curates of St Mark Whitechapel

William Martin Mungeam (1839-42) - from an old Kent family of farmers and maltsters, he studied at Tonbridge School and St John's College Cambridge, and served his title at Marsh on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent in 1837 (where a new church, seating 1100, had been built the previous year). During his time here, in 1841 he was also appointed to the 'ministry of White's Row Episcopal Chapel' under the patronage of the Rector of Spitalfields; hence, no doubt, his becoming curate of Spitalfields the following year. He was also appointed as one of the five Readers of Christ Church Newgate Street, or Greyfriars (whose ruins, next to St Paul's Cathedral, remain), perhaps retaining this office when from 1844-48 he was chaplain of the Queen's Prison, Southwark and then Perpetual Curate (incumbent) of St Peter Summer Street, Bankside, in Southwark (then in Rochester diocese), where he published sermons on Our Citizenship of Heaven (1850), The Harvest (1851), The Death of Wellington (1852) and The Coming War (1854). He remained in office at St Peter's, living with his family at 11 Southwark Bridge Road, until his death in Clacton in 1886 (leaving an estate of £1127 8s. 1d.) in 1882 he had assisted at the funeral of a former neighbouring cleric, George Mansfield, in Wellingborough.
He was a keen committee man, active on various bodies formed around this time: local treasurer of the Scripture Readers' Association (formed in 1844 to provide support to clergy in poor areas - logo right - at which time he lived at 6 Anchor Terrace, Southwark), clerical secretary of the Church of England Education Society (established in 1853 to promote Education in Elementary and National Schools on sound Protestant Evangelical principles...), a committee member of the Metropolitan Sunday Rest Association (which in 1859 appealed to 'The Higher Classes of Society on the Duty of Discouraging Sunday Trading'), and attended meetings of the Protestant Reformation Society ('for promoting the religious principles of the Reformation, and for Special Missions to Roman Catholics in Great Britain'), the Church Association, the Church Missionary Society, the Church of England Sunday School Institute, The Prayer Book and Homily Society and the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.


A note on White's Row Episcopal Chapel: this was one of several dissenting chapels in the area which for various reasons were taken over by the Church of England - compare the three in our own parish: Trinity Episcopal Chapel, and a few years later St Matthew Pell Street and St Saviour & St Cross. It had a particularly colourful history. Built around 1755 for an Independent/Congregational congregation, many of them Huguenots, it flourished for some years but the much-reduced congregation left in 1836 for a new chapel in Bishopsgate when the lease was due to expire. In 1838 it was taken over by Robert Aitken, a Scots Calvinist ordained by the Bishop of Chester but removed from his post because of his 'flirtings' with Methodism, on the Isle of Man. He had become a flamboyant revivalist preacher with a chapel in Liverpool, and established a similar congregation here. When his wife died in 1839 he had something of a breakdown, and under the influence of a wealthy heiress Wilhelmina Macdowell Grant (whom he later married) he became an ardent Tractarian - while retaining his Methodist fervour - and made a public act of solemn penitence and reconciliation to the Church of England (at the 'advanced' church of St Jude Liverpool); after a spell at Dr Hook's church in Leeds Aitken became the incumbent of Pendeen, in Cornwall, but before he left London the Bishop of London licensed White's Row as a district chapel of the parish church, in 1841. It was then taken over by Robert Dillon, another popular preacher who attracted wealthy women, who in 1840 had been suspended from his cure of a proprietory chapel in Pimlico after an investigation into his private life triggered by corrupt dealing over a parochial appointment. He turned the chapel into the base of his 'Reformed Church of England' in which he dressed himself in episcopal robes and conducted an ordination. The black American evangelist Zilpha Elaw spoke here during her time in London. Dillon died (in the vestry) in 1847, and a few years later, until the mid-1870s (prior to its demolition), the chapel became a Catholic Apostolic Church.....

I Lewis (1840) - details needed

Charles Clark (1842) - possibly a Scot from Queen's College Cambridge, ordained in Bristol in 1831, who later became curate of Rotherhithe from 1851-55; after his wife Louisa's death in Pechkam in 1859, he became chaplain of the Kendal House of Correction, and in 1865 a naval chaplain, serving with HMS Resistance and from 1870 HMS Jumna - details need verifying

Benjamin Luke (or Lucas) Poyntz (1848-52) - a merchant's son, he entered Trinity College Dublin as a pensioner (ordinary student) in 1834 and graduated in 1839. He was ordained in Ripon diocese in 1842 and was curate of Christ Church Bradford before coming here. In 1850 he contributed half a guinea (less than most others recorded!) to the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics. From 1854-55 he was curate of [High] Wycombe in Oxford diocese; when his incumbent was absent for a prolonged period the bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, sent the following letters in response to Poyntz' apparent request to take charge of the parish:
22 August 1855
My dear Sir,
You were licensed under other circumstances as Senior Curate: for Mr. Paddon retains as Vicar his chief responsibility and refused in writing to me to entrust you with it.
By the sequestration of the living this oversight of the Vicar is for the time removed: and I am by the Act of Parliament chargeable with the duty of providing a Senior Curate. This I am about to do. Your income will still be as now £100 and I will make myself responsible for £10 a year more in lieu of Lodging if you if you wish to remain as I hope you may under the new Curate.
You ought to take into account in settling this the probability of Mr. Paddon's return next year and your continuance under him. I shall be glad at your early convenience to receive your decision as to remaining as I wish to fix the day for the new Curate's coming.
I am yours ever, S. Oxon
Poyntz appears to have linked this refusal to a criticism about his conduct of funerals, and tendered his resignation:
28 August 1855
My dear Mr Poyntz,
I by no means wish to expose your health to risk; when therefore the weather is wet or stormy I do not require you to go into the Church. But when the weather is favourable and no such danger to your health exists then I must require you to give the parishioners the full burial service going into the Church for it until the Cemetery Chapel is built. This I hope speedily to see effected. I must beg your immediate answer whether you will retain the Second Curacy of Wycombe with the stipend of £100 (to which I will secure the addition of £10 for lodging) under the first Curate whom I am about to license loco vicarii or whether you adhere to your resignation of the Curacy.
A few weeks later the bishop wrote again:
14 September 1855
My dear Sir,
I was about to write to you as I promised, to say that Mr. Rice has made arrangements for taking at once possession of the Curacy of Wycombe; and as you persevere in your resolution not to continue in your Curacy under him, and I cannot consistently with what I deem the interests of the Parish place you in loco vicarii, I have desired the Registrar to cancel your licence on resignation at the same date with the licensing of Mr. Rice. In this case therefore there is no 'notice' needful: and as the bringing of the Second Curate depends upon my at once establishing Mr. Rice in the Curacy I think it best that you should resign it to him whatever day next week he is able to take possession. Though I think that your decision about burials was [deficient] in judgement I have no fault to find with your conduct as Curate of Wycombe: nor does my feeling it necessary to put another into the very responsible post which the Vicars conduct leaves open imply on my part any blame of you. I should be very happy to find you if I can another post in my Diocese. There is one now vacant at Edgcott in your own County of £90 a year to which I shall be happy at once to license you.
I am ever most truly yours, S. Oxon.
(The Revd Richard John Howard Rice was a graduate of Exeter College Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture. If he did take up this post, he didn't stay long, for in 1856 he became Vicar of Sutton-Courtney, near Abingdon.) Poyntz never held an incumbent post; later we find him as a curate in Stone, Staffordshire; in Awre, Gloucestershire; and finally in Freethorpe, near Acle, in Norfolk, where he died in 1880.

John Jackson Manley (1853-4) - born in Barking in 1829, the son of a surgeon, after Eton he attended Exeter College Oxford and Wells Theological College; his brief ministry here was followed by further curacies in Dawlish (marrying Hester Martin in 1856) and Tiverton before becoming Vicar of Buckfastleigh (all in Devon) in 1858, then Rector of Cottered, in Hertfordshire in 1861, where he advertised
THE REV J.J. MANLEY M.A., Etonian, Graduate in Honours Oxford 1852, assisted by a resident Graduate in Honours of Cambridge, receives SIX GENTLEMEN to prepare them for the Universities or Bishops Examinations. VACANCIES after Christmas. Address: Cottered Rectory, Buntingford, Herts.
He left this post in 1870, and returned to London, latterly living at St Alban's Avenue, Bedford Park W4. His wife Hester was run over and killed by a bus in Hammersmith.  Manley published several books, of which the most popular was Notes on Fish and Fishing (1877) - brightly and pleasantly written, said the critics; he has a page for every day in the year, or nearly so, and there is not a dull one amongst them. In it he claimed we may take it as a fact, that the omnivorous pike refuses under all circumstances to take tench as food, which provoked some debate about why this should be. He also produced The Age of Tin (1872), Notes on Game and Game Shooting (1880), Literature of Sea and River Fishing (1883), and Salt and Other Condiments (1884); he died at Kennington in 1886. One of his six children, John Wills Manley, was a sergeant in the Border Scouts and Brabant's Horse in the Boer War, and died in Cape Town of syncope in 1902.

William James Richardson (1854-??) was ordained in 1850 after Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and served his title at Uggeshall with Sotherton, in Suffolk. After his curacy here he became Preacher, and in 1863 Minister (with Cosmo Reid Gordon - whose lack of university qualification had complicated his ordination - as Preacher), of Archbishop Tenison's Chapel, King Street, Westminster. This was a chapel of ease, with a charity school, founded by that archbishop, opened in 1702, with an endowment for two preachers, a 'reader' or chaplain to say prayers twice daily, and a schoolmaster; it was re-fronted when Regent Street was built, and from 1870 was also known as St Thomas, Regent Street when a district chapelry within St James Westminster was created. Its west front was turned into shops around 1860 when the endowments proved inadequate (blitzed in World War II apart from the tower, it closed in 1954 and now forms part of the parish of St Anne Soho). Beyond the shops were areas of great poverty; his predecessor was commended for ministry to poor and sick amid the difficult elements presented by the Regent Street shops and the scattered items of his flock. The plain chapel was turned into a centre of 'advanced' worship, noted with approval by the Church Union Gazette for its early (7am) celebration. Here is a description of events at this church during the 1874 London Diocesan Mission, by Charles Davies, an 'ex-ritualist' who was briefly Lecturer at St George-in-the-East. A description in the Farmer's Magazine that same year describes his Harvest Festival: The festival of St Luke was selected ... as the day of harvest thanksgiving; and very tastefully indeed, though not profusely, was the ugly old chapel decorated with fruits and flowers. The altar was crowded with candles - I will not commit myself even to a guess at their number - and bright with flowers....
While at St Thomas', he was a supporter of the Hospital for Women in Soho Square. His final post, from 1877 until 1902 (he died two years later) was as Vicar of Great Milton in Oxfordshire (with a stipend of £300), where he welcomed various groups of visiting church historians. Like other clergy mentioned in these pages, he was a naturalist: he presented a bonnet-monkey (macacus radiatus)  to the Zoological Society of London in 1866. He also bred cats (see this 1896 catalogue) and dogs: Rawdon Briggs Lee's 1897 History & Description of the Modern Dogs of Great Britain & Ireland says that he and his neighbour, the Rev. J. Pooley, ought ... to be mentioned as owners of pointers of undoubted excellence. Details of his liver and white bitches Regent of Milton, Romp of Milton, Milton Ringlet, and dog Rex of Milton, are here for those who want details. In 1886 Punch, under the title 'To Bee or Not To Bee', reported that he had announced to a friend that some of his bees had recently been attempting to extract honey from his study carpet (presumably from the flowers figuring in its pattern), and the magazine offered some similar anecdotes for consideration. Finally, he was a keen archer: Horace Ford's Theory & Practice of Archery (1887) lists his scores at the Grand National Archery Meetings in Exeter in 1859 and Bath in 1860, and The Archer's Register of 1889 says that in a variety of ways he contributed much to the prosperity of the Society and the interests of archery in general. His daughter Amy married a colonel in India in 1908.


Bradley Abbott (1854-55) - from Trinity College Dublin (despite Bishop Blomfield's reluctance to ordain TCD men - see here), after a year's curacy at Holy Trinity Brompton (an unlikely breeding-ground for ritualists today!) and a year here (the registers show he was energetic in getting parents to bring their children for baptism), he spent the rest of his ministry building up Christ Church, Clapham (then in the diocese of Winchester) notorious as a centre of 'advanced' worship. The Church and State Review of 1864 describes with horror an elaborate funeral service for a child in the church, with plainsong psalms and the censing of the coffin (surrounded by a profusion of white flowers). He worked hard at adult education, with classes several evenings a week. A large silk and velvet processional banner of the five wounds of Christ was made in his honour in 1873. Right is his memorial tablet at Christ Church.
There is grudging restrospective approval of his ministry there in this anonymous critic's commentary on The Roman Mass in the English Church: Illegal Services described by Eye-witnesses (Charles J. Thynne 1899):
The name of the Rev. Bradley Abbott has been a well-known one in the annals of Church life in South London. For forty years he laboured in one sphere, and when.....he died, while on his holiday abroad, it was recognised by all parties in the locality that a good, if not a great, man had passed away. 'Father' Abbott, as he was almost universally called, was Vicar of Christ Church, Clapham, a district lying between Larkhall Lane and Wandsworth Road. He built the church, and even to-day it is more often associated with his name than called by its legal designation. 'Father' Abbott was one of the pioneers of advanced ritualism in South London. I remember attending the church nearly a quarter of a century ago, and being impressed by the ornateness of the service. 'Fancy ritual' it was called then, even by some who were in sympathy with it..... [click the link above to read the full account]

He enjoyed foreign holidays. In 1883 he went with his daughter and three friends to Saratoga, staying at the United States Hotel. He died on holiday in Switzerland in 1896.

Robert Hebert Quick [right], a lifelong friend of the Vicar J.L.Davies, served as an unpaid curate from 1854-58, preaching, baptizing occasionally and conducting a number of weddings. He later became a leading educationalist - see his biography The Life and Remains of the Rev. R.H. Quick (Macmillan 1899). More details about his life and work here.

Charles Anderson (1858-66?) - from Caius College Cambridge, friend of Brooke Lambert (incumbent at the time) and other Broad Churchmen: see here on the Curates Clerical Club of which they all were to be members. Described as 'unconventional' and 'heterodox', after a curacy in Brighton in 1871 he became senior curate of St Anne Soho, and in 1874 Vicar of St John Limehouse [Halley Street, Limehouse Fields, built in 1853, blitzed in 1940], when Matthew Arnold (whom he knew as a schools inspector) wrote to him No words can be too strong to describe the gratitude which society owes to men, who, renouncing the old taste of employing with the multitude a false but powerful fairy-tale in the way of religion, do yet not renounce the taste of conveying religion to the multitude. They are the true civilisers, the true workers for the future; & they will have their reward. For further correspondence with Arnold and others, see the chapter by Anderson's friend Edward Clodd in Memories (Putnam 1916), which includes a good story of how specially-conveyed Jordan water for a baptism went down the plughole! The previous section is on Charles Voysey [see above]. Clodd was also a friend of the novelist, fellow-sceptic and rationalist, Samuel Butler.
He published Words and Works in a London Parish (1873), of which The Spectator said It has an interest of its own for not a few minds, to whom the question 'Is the National Church worth preserving as such, and if so, how best increase its vital power?' is of deep and grave importance; Church Thought and Church Work (1874), a collection of articles by Broad Church friends - healthy moral earnestness is evident throughout, said The Spectator; full of wise practical suggestions, evidently the result of earnest observation and long experience, and not the mere guesses of an a priori speculator, said Nonconformist; and a novel with the unlikely title The Curate of Shyre: A Record Of Parish Reform, With Its Attendant Religious And Social Problems (1875), described as a story of a country-town clergyman's endeavours to shake his people out of their semi-barbarous ways, of which The Spectator said wrote a novel with the unlikely title The Curate of Shyre: A Record of Parish Reform, with Its Attendant Religious and Social Problems (Henry S. King 1875), of which The Spectator said:
His curate is one of the men, a class, one would believe, from which something is to be expected, who would combine a decent order of worship and a zealous discharge of functions, priestly, if not sacerdotal, with liberal doctrine. In Shyre he finds an appropriate field for his labours.- There is no order or beauty of ritual, no life in the parochial ministrations. How he strives for better things, what hindrances and what help he finds from those about him, all this is described in a vigorous, life-like fashion, personal experience manifestly helping the writer throughout. Pareochial politics are discussed with the disaffected or indifferent townsfolk; sanitary reform with the selfish and pig-headed proprietors of cottage property; great intellectual questions, such as the bearing of science on religious belief, with the men of cultivation whom our curate, happier so far than many whom fate drops down in the average country town, finds among his parishioners. It is inevitable that the talk on these subjects should be, sometimes at least, more ponderous than befits the style of dialogue. That few men, in our judgment, have written as Sir Arthur Helps could write it. Yet, on the whole, it is vigorous and interesting. Perhaps the least satisfactory part of the book is the episode of the young lady who falls under the sacer dotal influences of a Romanising priest. We always expect to find some congruity between the life and the fate of the personage of a story; here we cannot see it. Why does she marry without affection, and separate from her husband, unless indeed the 'curate' himself, for whom she evidently has a preference, is to be blamed for it? Mr. Anderson is to be praised for his fortitude in resisting the temptation of marrying his hero, but poor Agnes Haswall has to suffer for it.
He died in 1893, aged 67.

John Cox Edg(e)hill (1858-60) was a Theological Associate of King's College London (made a Fellow in 1885) who began his ministry at St Mark's; but, as one commentator put it, his health ... was not then equal to the strain, and the offer of work with the troops ... with the probability of spells abroad, was accepted as a timely blessing. In the Army Mr Edghill may be said to have found his heart's desire scope for plenty of work in healthy open surroundings, constant opportunities for intercourse with fellow-men discharging responsible duties in life, and a crying need for the reforming spirit which he perhaps unconsciously possessed. So he went as a military chaplain to Aldershot (where, among other things, he sought to infuse heartiness into the singing at the camp services) and then to a more senior post in Chatham; and then to Halifax, Nova Scotia - where he was highly-regarded, and given a seat in the diocesan synod. He returned to Dover, then back to Aldershot, where he put his career on the line by proposing various reforms. After a period in Gibraltar which again tested his health and strength, he returned to a more junior post in Aldershot, butmoved on to the garrison church at Portsmouth, where he was highly-regarded both by the Army and the diocese of Winchester. Four years later, he was appointed Chaplain General to the Forces, succeeding Bishop Claughton and despite the fact that there were sixteen other more senior chaplains. He served in this role from 1885-1901, having meanwhile declined the invitation in 1887 to become the Bishop of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury not to leave a post for which he had been so prepared, and for which he had been selected after long deliberation - despite the difference in stipend (£1200 a year a bishop, as against £500 as Chaplain-General); Frederick Courtney was chosen in his place.
He became a Royal Chaplain in 1888, and Chaplain of the Tower in 1891. He was variously described as a definite Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic and as a High-Churchman with Broad sympathies. His preaching, in his various posts, was clearly attractive: one of his admirers was Juliana Horatia Ewing, a Major’s wife (who died in 1885 aged 44) - she told her sister He preaches the gospel of Hope, and gave her an outline of one of his sermons on the texts What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God. Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light, preached at the iron church in the South Camp at Aldershot. Here is a report of the dedication of new colours, which he conducted, for the Duke of York's Royal Military School, from The Times of 14 June 1897, and here is a full review of his army career.

Charles Voysey (1861-3), a graduate of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, was ordained by the Archbishop of York in 1852 and was a curate in Hessle and had two brief stints in Jamaica and Great Yarmouth before coming here. He was sacked for denying the doctrine of eternal punishment, but after a time at Victoria Docks went back to the diocese of York as Perpetual Curate of Healaugh, where in 1869 he was prosecuted by William Thomson, Archbishop of York, for heresy (for denying the divinity of Christ). The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council gave their judgement in 1871:
The Appellant is charged with having offended against the Laws Ecclesiastical by writing and publishing within the diocese of London certain sermons or essays, collected together in parts and volumes, the whole being designated by the title of The Sling and the Stone, in which he is alleged to have maintained and promulgated doctrines contrary and repugnant to or inconsistent with the Articles of Religion and Formularies of the Church of England.

His appeal was dismissed and Voysey lost his post. He returned to London and founded the Theistic Church in 1871, which welcomed former Jews alongside former Christians. He also became an advocate of cremation. He befriended Guy Aldred, the ‘Boy Preacher’ of Holloway in 1903. A Corner in the Kingdom of God: an account of some persons and things in St Mark's, Whitechapel, 1861-63 was included in his book (a collection of six sermons) Do We Believe? (Upfield, Green & Co., 1903): see here for a list of many of his other pamphlets. He died in 1912. His father had been an architect, and his son Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was a leading Arts and Crafts designer. See the chapter on Voysey in banker and man of letters Edward Clodd's Memories (Putnam 1916), which also has a chapter on Charles Anderson (above). Left is a cartoon from Vanity Fair 1871 – "I have much to be thankful for"; right an image from later life.


William Eustace Daniel (1866-67) was born in 1841 in Frome in Somerset, where his father Albert was the first vicar of Holy Trinity Frome-Selwood, a church built to serve the poor. (A neighbouring incumbent was W.J.E. Bennett who had founded the ritualistic church of St Barnabas Pimlico, from which he resigned in 1851, remaining in Frome until his death in 1886.) At the vicarage the brothers, led by Henry, operated a small hand press - the origin of the Daniel Press. William and Henry were both scholars of Worcester College Oxford, where Henry remained all his life, eventually becoming Provost. William, after his brief ministry at St Mark's returned there as chaplain, divinity lecturer and tutor from 1867-75, and honorary curate of All Saints (where W.W. Merry, later Rector of Lincoln College, was the Vicar). He returned to Frome as Vicar on his father's death, and two other Somerset incumbencies followed: East Pennard - where he was also rural dean; and from 1897 the well-endowed parish of Horsington - also holding the prebendal stalls of Timberscombe and Buckland Dinham. He was the Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint in Oxford from 1889-98, and his academic publications included a translation of the Greek Orthodox Holy Catechism of Nicholas Bulgaris (1634-84), edited by the Rev R. Raikes Bromage (1893). He made notes on the two parchment sheets known as the Sherbourne Lectionary, which were found when this Greek manuscript was re-discovered in the school library, and  wwas also a keen local historian - see, for example, The Street Names of Frome (1897) and Catash (an ancient Hundred near North Cadbury). He died in 1924.

William Raymond Scott (1866-68) - although only here for two years, his story is intriguing, and recorded more fully here, including his attempt to establish a mission chapel, St Clement's, on Backchurch Lane.

James Edward Butler (1868-70) - also of Trinity College Dublin; ordained in Ireland in 1861, served at Boyle and then Warrington; from 1864-66 he was curate in sole charge of Locks Fields Mission in Walworth (which later became the base for the St John's College Cambridge's London mission). In 1868 he gave evidence in a Queen's Bench case, Johnstone v. Cotham, before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury (Johnstone, a former curate of Etton in Northamptonshire, was lodging in Walworth and declared insane; among other things, he believed he was being hunted by Fenians). James Butler does not appear to have held any further appointment after his short time at St Mark's.

Hermann Hirsch (1865-66 or 1868-70?) - more detail of the life and ministry of this Jewish convert  here.

 William Robert Percival (1869-71) - described as a man of large heart, wide sympathies, loving enthusiasm and religious earnestness: a decade earlier, he had led a successful mission to working men in Carlisle, publishing a pamphlet on the 'dignity of labour' question Letters to Working Men (George Coward 1860) and a booklet Thinkings (1862), described by a reviewer in The British Controversialist as a collection of aphorisms of considerable pith and power, always eloquent, sometimes profound, unvaryingly religious. They are the utterances of great, but as yet not sufficiently practised, power. Percival had hoped that the Dean of Carlisle would support his call to ordination (he was termed the 'Dean's curate'), but he did not; rather, he led local clergy in opposing his preaching at the Mechanics' Institute and YMCA. Percival's supporters therefore set up a Congregational church and called Percival as their minister; he was ordained by the Rev David Thomas of Stockwell Green Chapel. In 1860 the congregation presented him with a calf-bound imperial quarto bible as a token of their affection. As the above reviewer wrote, he was far more largely read in Carlyle, Emerson, Kingsley, Maurice, Robertson (of Brighton), Arnold, &c., than beseemed an attaché to that Closeborough - in 1863 he also lectured on Caryle at the Carlisle Athenæum, and on Tennyson's In Memoriam to the South End Temperance Society at the Mechanics' Institute - so it is not surprising that, having trained for Anglican ministry at Queen's College Birmingham, after a curacy in St Helen's from 1867-69 (see this homily 'The Spiritual Endowment of the Church', which Thomas published in his journal The Homilist in 1869) he should serve here for a time among those who shared his views. In 1870 he lectured on Shakespeare at Wycliffe Chapel. In 1871 he became the perpetual curate of St James' Mission, Rosemary Branch, Islington (the parish of St James Prebend Street was established in 1875). Mary Smith, a feisty 'schoolmistress and nonconformist' (and correspondent of the Carlyles) dedicated her 1892 authobigraphy to him, as a thoughtful and catholic-minded man; a man of much wisdom.

Robert Dick Duncan (1869-77) was born in 1822, the youngest of a Scottish professor's six sons, all of whom were ministers in the United Secession, which split from the Church of Scotland in 1732 and became part of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1847 (see here for more details). Before ordination he wrote nature notes for various periodicals, some of which can be seen HERE. After studying at Edinburgh University, he was ordained to serve as the minister of Wishart Church in Dundee in 1845, having turned down posts in Girvan (to succeed his eldest brother) and Montrose, despite the fact that the callers were only 106 in number; they paid off a property debt of £850 with a grant of £250 from the Board, and gained more members when a neighbouring minister, at Bell Street, retired. He moved to Bread Street Church, Edinburgh in 1848, where his six children by his wife Margaret Elder were baptized. He published a pamphlet Popery: its crimes, and our duty in reference to it (Oliphant, 1861), a set of six services and sermons under the title of Sanctuary at Home, or Lord's day services and sermons for Christian invalids, mothers, emigrants, soldiers, sailors, or others detained from the House of God (1862), and some years previously a pamphlet on The Eldership (Veitch 1853), which enjoins strict compliance with the Letter of James on their visiting the sick but dismisses anointing as but beautifully poetic allusions. He had a high view of elders' authority: By the appointment of the Redeemer the session is the head of the congregation, and it is a suicidal act in any of the members of the body to injure the head, and treasonable to the authority of the king of the church.
This was to redound on him, for in 1865 disturbing influences brought his labours in Edinburgh to a close. He was declared bankrupt [London Gazette 20 January, p313], with debts of £4,000, to the great scandal of religion and disgrace of his sacred profession, as his elders put it, who declared that his usefulness among them was gone. Suspended for three months, he was restored after satisfactory professions of penitence, but soon moved to Barrow-in-Furness, where there were similar problems and his resignation (a letter of declinature) from the ministry was accepted by the Lancashire Presbytery in 1867. The Edinburgh Gazette of 27 November 1868 lists his bankruptcy, describing him as a deacon in holy orders, of Lance Lane, Wavertree near Liverpool: after further study at Edinburgh University, he had been ordained into the Church of England (today's rules about bankrupts did not apply then!) and became curate at St Mark's for eight years from 1869, and served at St George-in-the-East until his death in 1883. He took the lion's share of baptisms and weddings, alongside his Vicar and fellow-curates - see here for statistics.

Clement Frank Walker (1872-74) was born locally in 1843 (his father George was a schoolmaster, living at 78 Whitechapel Road) and studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; ordained in 1867 to St George Southwark, where he was junior then senior curate, after his time here was second master of Atherstone Grammar School 1872-76, assistant master of Eastbourne College for the next two years, and then headmaster of St Ninian's School Perth, and curate of the parish, from 1876-80. In 1882 he took over Heath Mount in Hampstead, which had been founded as a high-class 'commercial academy' with a classical curriculum - students wore Eton suits and silk hats on special occasions - which he turned into a traditional prep school. He was also curate of St Stephen Hampstead. He died there in 1895, aged 52.
Thomas Doughty (1871) - born in Halifax in 1826, he trained at St Bees, and served in Warrington, Walsoken (Norfolk) and St John Little Hulton (Bolton) before a brief spell here, after which he went to Peckham (then still part of Winchester diocese). His wife Grace was born in 1843, and they had daughters Grace, Beatrice and Irene. In the 1881 census he was curate of Walditch, in Bridport, and in 1891 of Wentworth, near Ely, lodging in the school house.

Daniel Reakes (1880-83) trained for ordination at Highbury College in Islington*, he had been Lay Preacher at St Stephen Walworth [then in Rochester diocese] and began his ordained ministry here, then becoming curate and afternoon lecturer of St Mary Whitechapel (where he was a local committee member of the Charity Organisation Society and supporter of the National Temperance League); from 1888-1900 he was Vicar of St Paul Sheerness and acting Chaplain to the Forces: this was an HM dockyard church built in the Bluetown district in 1873 [right], demolished in the 1960s and now part of the benefice of West Sheppey; here he supported local residents during the major 1897 floods. In 1900 he became Vicar of Wilsden, on the edge of Bradford [then in Ripon diocese], and later of Leake, near Thirsk, where he died, probably in 1913.
* Confusingly, there were several institutions officially or colloquially known as 'Highbury College', those of Anglican foundation having strong links with the parish churches of Islington, an evangelical powerhouse. The Independent/Congregational ministerial training college, formerly Hoxton / Homerton Academy, whose Mile End and other origins are told here, moved into a grand Ionic-style building [right] with two wings (reminiscent of the British Museum) in Highbury Park North / Vale (later renamed Aubert Park) in 1826, remaining there until 1850; this eventually became New College on the Finchley Road, part of the University of London since 1936. The premises then became the Church of England Metropolitan Training Institution (also known as Highbury College), instituted in 1849 to train pious persons as masters and mistresses of juvenile schools connected with the Established Church, upon principles Scriptural, Evangelical, and Protestant, under the superintendence of the National Society. This closed in 1864 (as did a sister institution in Chichester) because of the impact of new educational provision by the government, the revised code making schoolteaching less attractive (or so it was alleged), though in due course the NS was to found a number of new colleges. In 1866 it became Highbury College of Divinity (later St John's Hall), founded in 1863 in temporary accommodation in St John's Wood by the Revd Alfred Peache & his sister Kezia as a strictly evangelical theological college (against a background of suspicion of 'seminaries', for other foundations were anglo-catholic: see this note on ordination training). St John's Hall had 22 students in 1866, 44 in 1870, and by 1875 had produced 142 candidates for ordination. Few reached the degree-level standards they hoped to achieve; from 1909 St John's Hall (later College) in Durham sought to remedy this, but in 1934 the London College of Divinity, associated with London University, was founded. They left the site in 1939, eventually moving to Northwood, and thence to their present home in Bramcote, Nottingham (as St John's College). In 1913 six acres of the site had been leased to Arsenal Football Club (originally with a restriction on Sunday playing), who bought the freehold in 1925. The college building burnt down in 1946, and was replaced by a block of flats. The whole site was reveloped for housing when Arsenal moved in 2006, and is now a highly desirable location.

Teacher training provision was modelled on the Church Missionary Society training college (known as Highbury Missionary College), which was the first Anglican institution for missionary training, started in Barnsbury Park in 1820, moving two years later to a house (for 12 students) in Upper Street and in 1825 into grand purpose-built premises, with hall, library and lectures room for 50 students [left]; it provided some staff for the teacher training college. It remained there until 1917 (but with students transferred to St John's Hall, above, from 1912), actively involved in local parishes. In 1849 CMS also founded a home for the children of overseas missionaries in Milner Square, which moved four years later to purpose-built premises at the corner of Highbury New Park and Highbury Grove.

Philip Herbert Wentworth Peach (1882-83), a non-collegiate Cambridge graduate, served his title here (and was also a COS committee member), before becoming Vicar of Pawlett, Bridgewater, and then until his death in 1898 Rector of Elstree, in the recently-created diocese of St Alban's, where he unwittingly employed a bogus curate, who when suspicions were aroused was found to have a number of blank and partially-completed ordination forms, and false papers for his own purported marriage to a schoolteacher. Peach was a member of the Christian Socialist Society (not to be confused with Stewart Headlam's Church Socialist League), founded in 1886 on nondenominational lines to move beyond the 'sacerdotalism' of the past - its manifesto demanded the public control of land, capital and the means of production, distribution and exchange along with the abolition of interest. He gave lectures for the Society at the Industrial Hall, Bloomsbury, on topics such as 'Enforced Idleness' and 'Church Reform'. In their journalThe Christian Socialist (vol 5 Oct 1887 pp149f) he took issue with the attempt by the editor Charles L. Marson to establish common ground between Christian and other forms of socialism, deploring its apologetic tone towards those socialists who downplayed the movement's Christian roots. Christian Socialism is distinctive, he argued: it is not a cold economic theory and does not aim at the abolition of the family (unlike, he claimed, William Morris and the Socialist League Manifesto who dismiss it as 'a preconceived standard outside human responsibilities'). The editors' response was that previous editions of the journal had made clear that there were indeed distinctive moral differences; but in 1892 the Society disintegrated because of these tensions.

Robert Henry Charles (1883-85) was born at Cookstown, Co. Tyrone in 1855, he studied with great distinction at Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. He served his title at St Marks, officiating regularly on Sundays and at baptisms (some of them marked 'private') and weddings, and two further curacies at St Philip Kensington and St Mark Kennington (where he published Forgiveness and Other Sermons in 1887). But he left parochial ministry in 1889 and returned to academic life, becoming a professor in Dublin and Oxford and a leading Ethiopic scholar and expert on Jewish eschatology, the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Septuagint; many of his translations are still in use [reprint right, and CD with 1913 originals]. They include The Book of Enoch (Ethiopic text, 1903); Ethiopic Version of the Hebrew Book of Jubilees (1894), The Apocalypse of Baruch (Syriac text and translation, 1896); The Assumption of Moses (Latin text and translation; 1897); Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, in Christianity (the Jowett lectures for 1898-99); The Ascension of Isaiah (Ethiopic, Greek, and Latin teats and translation,1900); The Book of Jubilees: or, The Little Genesis (translation 1902); The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Epoch (1905); Greek Version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs with the Variants of the Armenian and Slavonic Versions and the Hebrew and Aramaic Fragments (1906); Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (1908); and, with W. R. Morfill, translation of the Slavonic text of The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (1898). He became a Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1913 and archdeacon in 1919, and died in 1931.

George William Meggy (1885-87) - born in Chelmsford in 1838, he studied at Wadham College, Oxford; the surname is Huguenot, and he was a member of the Huguenot Society of London. He was ordained in 1866, marrying Julia Freeland Brown, the daughter of a Chichester prebendary, in the same year at Saint Pancras Old Church, and served curacies in Exton (Winchester diocese); Forest Gate; Emmanuel, West Ham (staying seven years there - he was involved in the campaign to save Epping Forest for the people of London, and was presented with a testimonial on leaving; in 1869 William Johnson was imprisoned for 12 months for stealing his silk (? preaching) scarf from the vestry); Wortham (Suffolk); Aldershot (as 'senior curate'); Somerleyton; Lee Park; and Kensington. St Mark's was his final curacy before he finally obtained a parish in Bath & Wells diocese: Rimpton, with a population of 208. The village was in a state of excitement  when he returned in 1890 with his new bride Mary Watson (they had married at Great Amwell, Hertford), and erected a floral arch at the entrance to the Rectory. She was a singer - gaining an encore at a parish social in 1892 for her rendering of Love's Old Sweet Song - he recited The Bride of the Greek Isle by Felicia Hemans. He retired in 1910, with a pension of £55, and died in Wandsworth in 1919. He had two daughters, Violet and Emily, and two of his sons, Norman and Percy, emigrated to Australia.

Daniel Felix (1886-90), born Cilcennin, Cardiganshire c1855, trained at St Bees, and was ordained in his native Wales, serving his title at Ystradyfodwyg in Llandaff diocese before coming here, returning after a brief time at St Mark North Audley Street (where he lived at Old Quebec Street) to be curate of Abergavenny and from 1895 Rector of Llanhilleth (Llanhiddel) with Aberbeeg, in Monmouthshire - patron the Marquess of Abergavenny, with an annual stipend of £160 - for over 30 years (becoming rural dean of Blaenau Gwent in 1916). In 1911 a new church, Christ Church, was consecrated to replace the remote church of St Illtyd, whose site, Castell Taliorum (Tayl-y-rhun), less properly designated Italorum (of the Italians), was excavated by Trevor Lewis under the supervision of (Sir) Mortimer Wheeler, confirming a Norman site (with motte and bailey castle) but not, as some claimed, a Roman encampment with fortress and burial mound - still less the traditional house of a giant built with 'dropping stones' (Ithel)!  In 1923 Daniel and his wife Emily took a trip to Canada on the SS Ausonia 'to see the place' as they declared on the immigration form (which also asked are you or any of your family mentally defective?) He died in Cardiff in 1930 leaving an estate of £2848.

Henry Sidney Brown (1891-99) - born in London in 1852 (baptized at St Botolph Bishopsgate), of St John's College, Oxford; ordained in 1876 by the Bishop of Winchester (when south London still fell within that diocese), he served four brief curacies - Camberwell, St Silas South Lambeth (a mission church of St Barnabas Kennington), St Saviour Brixton, All Saints Hatcham - before crossing the river for three more - Holy Trinity Hoxton, St Peter Clerkenwell and St Thomas Stepney. During his time here, when he lodged at 4 Wellclose Square, he was assiduous, conducting large numbers of baptisms and weddings. Two further south London curacies followed, at Christ Church Croydon and St Crispin Bermondsey, with two years as curate of Culross, Fife, living at Burnside Cottage [right], before he returned in 1908 to a further curacy at St Matthew Fulham. In the 1911 census he was Vicar of Bledlow Ridge, near Wallingford, living with his sister Mary, where he died in 1916, leaving  an estate of  £2425.

Albert Elias Abrahamson (1896-1900) - more details here

John Edmeades Cox Colyer (1899-1903) - his father, John Edmeades Colyer, the Rector of Fenny Drayton, was a keen Tractarian, and sent his son (b.1859) to Cumbrae College, a monastic-style foundation in Scotland, built by the Earl of Glasgow to promote Tractarian ideals; after taking a non-collegiate Oxford degree he was ordained in 1884 in the diocese of Brechin as curate of Cove and Torry Mission in Kincardineshire. In 1886, his father having become the Rector of Astbury, in Chester diocese, newspapers reported this incident:
A SCENE IN A CHURCH
Recently Mr. John Wilson, a Cheshire gentleman, tore down certain inscriptions placed in Astbury Church appealing to the congregation to pray for the repose of the souls of the dead. Mr. Wilson has written to the Bishop of Chester, complaining that on the following Sunday while leaving church the Rev. John Colyer, the rector's son, exclaimed in a loud voice, "You are watched, you scoundrel!" Mr. Wilson replied, "Very likely, and I am come to see if any more Popish trash is put up in this porch. It it were I should take it down." Mr Colyer said, "You dare not, you scoundrel"; to which Mr Wilson answered, "And you dare not put it up again, you Popish idiot." Mr. William Colyer. another brother, then exclaimed, "If I had caught you at it, you scoundrel, I would have half-murdered you." Mr. Wilson made an angry retort, and some members of the congregation then interfered.
(When his father died, his will, leaving everything to his wife except a legacy of £300, was challenged in court; it was handwritten in the form of a deed, and the two witnesses - one of them his curate - could not specifically recall attesting it, but said they regularly signed documents for him. The signatures were not in doubt, and probate was granted: In the goods of Colyer (1889) 14 P.D. 48).
Further curacies followed from 1886, at Chalfont St Peter, St Mary Magdalen Oxford, Heage in Derbyshire and St James Bethnal Green before he came to St Mark's. He married soon after his time here, and served two further brief curacies, at Christ Church Notting Hill from 1905-06 and St Margaret Hollinwood (on the edge of Oldham in Manchester diocese) from 1906-07, returning to London where he live in Victoria Parade, Kew Gardens. He was a member of the Guild of All Souls, who remember him on 23 December, the anniversary of his death.

Frederick John Swanston (1899-1900) - of Worcester College, Oxford; his father George John Swanston CB (d.1895) was Junior Assistant Secretary at the Board of Trade. Ordained in Chichester diocese in 1885 to the curacy of Burgess Hill, three years later, while curate of Wimbourne Minister, he was present at a wedding which claimed Jack the Ripper connections. A series of further curacies followed, at St Clement Hastings, Old St Pancras and St Saviour Upper Chelsea before his brief time here, with further curacies at St Barnabas Bethnal Green, St George's Paris (1903-04) and Shoreditch, with no further appointments after 1906 until his death in 1938 at St Leonard's-on-Sea.
Sinclair Oates (1900-??), born in Sculcoates, Hull in 1855, whose younger brother Ernest's equally-diverse ministry overlapped at various points. Both trained at King's London; Sinclair served his title in Hull, and curacies in Alrewas (followed 11 years later by Ernest), Whittington and Fradley in Staffordshire, St Barnabas Bethnal Green (followed immediately by Ernest, in 1889 - during this time, Sinclair acted as Master of Ceremonies at meetings of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament) and South Shields (where he was a member of Hadrian masonic lodge), before five years as priest-in-charge of Tain, near Thurso (where Ernest had preceded him); then, after a short time as assistant chaplain at Wiesbaden and a further curacy in Forest Gate he came to St Mark's, and Ernest two years later to St Paul's. The 1911 census lists him as curate of Shadwell but living in Ilford with his widowed mother and younger sister Kate, a music teacher (in 1891 he is shown as 'single', and as  'married' in 1901 and 1911, but no wife is shown); he died the following year, though the 1913 electoral register still shows him as renting a furnished back bedroom in Shadwell High Street.

Henry Heaton (1903-04) was born in Gloucester in 1849, but his family moved to London. He went to Canada and trained at Bishop's College, Lennoxville in Quebec (established in 1843 to train clergy and others, but supplanted, perhaps for encouraging 'extreme' views, in the 1870s by the new Montreal Diocesan Theological College; it is now Bishop's University, a small, primarily undergraduate institution teaching mainly in English rather than French). Ordained in 1872, he served two curacies in Salisbury diocese and further posts in Northamptonshire, Leicester, Coventry and Camden Town. After five years as a missionary in Ontario, he returned to England in 1894 as curate of the Isle of Grain, and after a brief chaplaincy at the Eastern Hospital, Homerton and a spell at St John Curtain Road, Shoreditch came here for what was perhaps his last post. For some time he apparently commuted from Walthamstow, but the 1911 census shows him, as a married man of 62 (but no wife shown) at the City Lodging House for Working Men, 50 Princes Square (where G.E. Butler, a Church Army captain, was in charge).

Thomas George (Hamilton)-Baillie (1905-??), of Scottish gentry (his Lincolnshire clergyman father was the brother of the 10th Earl of Haddington; his mother was American), had held various posts in Ripon diocese before becoming Rector of Kingsland in Herefordshire in 1884, where he quickly came into serious financial trouble because of his extravagent lifestyle. Various brief curacies in London followed. He had 11 children by his first wife, and one by his second, and died in 1917 aged 75. [The family also included 'Baillie-Hamilton' clergy.]

[in 1911-12, though not a curate of the parish, James Hector de Courcelles (b.1838, son of organ builder John Courcelle) officiated at baptisms on several occasions, including one of an adult whose father was a Jew. Maybe he was a friend of L.S. Lewis the then-Vicar? Formerly a music teacher, he was a mature student of Worcester College Oxford and was ordained to a title in Exeter diocese, in 1874 he was Rector of Ardrossan for three years, and then curate of two London parishes until 1891, after which he held no further appointments, but lived at 24 Arundel Gate, Notting Hill on 'independent means' until his death in 1930; he gave 'Seven Theatrical Portraits' to the British Museum. G.W.E. Russell records this skit [scroll to pages 248-9) in the Morning Post of 1883 on the announcement of widower de Courcelles' society wedding to Matilda Chrysogoria St. Aubyn at St Marylebone parish church: Collections and Recollections, by One who has kept a diary (Harper & Bros 1903)].

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