Posted on by David Steers

Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society April 2025

The latest issue – Volume 28 Number 4 – is on its way to members of the Society, new members are always welcome and details of how to join can be found below.

As ever there is a great wealth of material in the journal, including:

Essex Street Chapel in the later eighteenth century: members, adherents and sympathisers

G. M. Ditchfield

Centenary Service at Essex Church 1874

In this article Professor Grayson Ditchfield provides an analysis of the ‘associates, friends, visitors and even some critics of a congregation which has been, and remains, widely and deservedly regarded as a foundational pillar of the Unitarian movement in this country’.  In his paper Professor Ditchfield goes a long way to uncover the stories of the people who sat in the pews at Essex Street Chapel and looks especially at the role of women there. The Chapel was situated in a very impoverished area and Hannah Lindsey, the wife of the minister, organised poor relief for the local inhabitants. The congregation could not have survived without its female supporters in the early years in particular, and one member, Elizabeth Rayner, made an annual donation of £2,000. Essex Street Chapel included a number of MPs, including one described as `my fidgeting pew neighbour’ by another member. Some of the MPs made the free franking of letters in the House of Commons available to members! Was it a Dissenting Chapel or a reformed Church of England? Was it a congregation or an audience? All this and much more is examined in this fascinating article which breaks so much new ground.

After 1825 – celebrating the foundation of organised Unitarianism in Britain and America

Alan Ruston

AUA 75th anniversary brochure cover

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the foundation of both the British and Foreign Unitarian Association (B&FUA) and the American Unitarian Association (AUA), both founded within a day of each other in May 1825. Alan Ruston investigates the way each anniversary has been celebrated in Britain and the USA. Both the B&FUA and the AUA have evolved over this time, the B&FUA really being superseded by the General Assembly in 1928 and the AUA being absorbed into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961 but the development of both bodies over two centuries tells us a lot about the development of Unitarianism in both countries and the interaction between British and American Unitarianism.

Notes

Alexander Gordon on James Martineau: An Evaluation

Alan Ruston

Very Rev William McMillan Library

David Steers

Very Rev William McMillan Library, Dunmurry

Dr Williams’s Trust.Announcing a New Partnership 

The University of Manchester Library and The Dr Williams’s Library 

REVIEWS

Daisy Hay,Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, (Chatto & Windus, London, 2023) ISBN 9781784740184. 528 pages. Price £20.

Reviewed by Derek McAuley

Ben Stables, From Pigeon Flying to Intellectual Liberty. The History of Pepper Hill Unitarian Chapel in Shelf, West Yorkshire. With an Introduction by Rev John Midgley. Published by Pepper Hill Unitarian Chapel, 2024. 100 pages. Price £6. Copies are available directly from the author (benstables@hotmail.co.uk).

Reviewed by David Steers

Kazimierz Bem and Bruce Gordon (eds), Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism in the Early Modern World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 397 pages. ISBN 9783031696572, price £119.99; eBook ISBN 9783031696589, price £99.99.

Reviewed by Alan Ruston

Back to Life, The People on the Plaques in Brighton Unitarian Church, 2023, 95 pages. Price £8 including postage; copies can be obtained from Christine Clark-Lowes (cjclarklowes@yahoo.co.uk).

Reviewed by Alan Ruston

OBITUARY

John Jeremy Goring, MA, PhD (1930-2023)

by David L. Wykes

An individual annual subscription costs just £10.

Visit the Unitarian Historical Society website to join: https://unitarianhistory.org.uk/

Posted on by David Steers

Remembrance

On Sunday, 10th November we held a well-attended Remembrance Service at Dunmurry and the video can be seen below. Special thanks go to John Neill for delivering Binyon’s Lines, to Jack Steers for playing the Last Post and Reveille, and to Allen Yarr for playing the organ.

Click above to see the Remembrance Service from First Dunmurry 10 November 2024

In the service I make full use of the booklet For Remembrance mentioned in the previous post. Indeed this little book, particularly the contribution by the Rev R. Nicol Cross, as it is mentioned in the previous video, has already sparked a lot of responses. Along with some of the other pieces it is a poignant and very honest reflection on the situation in 1919 for those returning from the front after the Armistice.

At the time he wrote his contribution Nicol Cross was minister of Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, later he was minister of First Church, Belfast and later still Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. But from 1915 to 1919 he served as a private with the Royal Army Medical Corps. His perspective on the war was quite different from what you might otherwise have guessed.

Title page of the booklet

It is a very rare book, very few copies have survived. In the 2019 issue of the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society Alan Ruston contributed an article entitled ‘1919 – a re-evaluation of the part played by Unitarians in the First World War’. In his article he reveals that he had not previously come across the book, the copy he was sent while writing the article was the only one known to him. It certainly has not made its way into library collections. So this copy, in the Very Rev William McMIllan Library, is one of only two known copies.

One feature of For Remembrance that I didn’t mention in the first video or in the service above is that there is also a short note from the American Unitarian Association (AUA) included in the booklet. It seems to have come from a message sent out by the AUA to reurning troops and reads:

OUR GREETING AND PLEDGE

You have successfully met the challenge of the most powerful armies the world ever saw. You have shared in the most significant victory in all history. By a devotion that has won the affectionate admiration of the civilized world, you have helped to make possible a new and nobler life for humanity, and a truer brotherhood of man.

We welcome you again to our homes and our homeland. We pledge ourselves anew to the ideals for which you went forth to suffer; and because of your example we will rise to meet the duties of the new day with unwavering faith. Through our church we will unite our powers with yours in defence of the principles for which so great a price has been paid.

Your courage, cheerfulness, and fortitude will strengthen the church of your fathers.

From the Message of the American Unitarian Association

It would be interesting to know if this was the whole message of the AUA or whether they produced a book similar to For Remembrance.