The Diaries of Thomas Brem Wilson, 1865-1929: African Businessman and Pentecostal Pioneer in Britain
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Diaries of Thomas Brem Wilson, 1865-1929: African Businessman and Pentecostal Pioneer in Britain. The Diaries of Thomas Brem Wilson, 1865-1929: African Businessman and Pentecostal Pioneer in Britain. This disk contains transcripts of the diaries of Thomas Brem Wilson, an African businessman from the Gold Coast, who settled in Britain in 1901. I am grateful to members of the Brem Wilson family who gave me access to the diaries, provided photographs and other papers, and allowed me to transcribe the diaries and make them available to other scholars. As an introduction to the Diaries I have included an essay which is an extended version of a paper of mine earlier published as ‘TransAtlantic networks of early African Pentecostalism: the role of Thomas Brem Wilson, 1901-1929’, Studies in World Christianity, 23, 3, (2017), 218-36. Many of Brem Wilson’s entries in his dairies consist of single lines, often mentioning his friends and acquaintances. I have added footnotes to the transcripts to help readers know who some of these people were and the circumstances in which they contributed to Brem Wilson’s life and his varied activities. I would be grateful to receive comments on the diaries, corrections to the footnotes and the essay, and comments on the value of the diary, to [email protected] David Killingray, July 2019 Professor Emeritus of Modern History, Goldsmiths, and a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London 1 THOMAS BREM WILSON AND EARLY AFRICAN PENTECOSTAL ORIGINS IN BRITAIN, 1901-29’ ABSTRACT Thomas Brem Wilson, a west African businessman who settled in London in 1901, is a little-known figure in early British Pentecostalism. However, the discovery of his diaries provides an insight into his spiritual life as he moved from being a nominal Wesleyan to becoming a pastor of one of London’s first Pentecostal chapels. When Brem Wilson came to London he was baptised as a member of Alexander Dowie’s Zion chapel in the Euston Road. The diaries detail his contacts and financial dealings with Dowie when he visited Zion City in the Autumn of 1904. The visit appears to have given Brem Wilson new spiritual fervour; he took several of his African friends to the Euston Road chapel, and he also helped promote the Zion cause in the Gold Coast. As Dowie’s mantle fell, other Pentecostal influences touched Brem Wilson’s life; he practised speaking in tongues, and at a crucial time he provided financial support for Alexander Boddy’s journal Confidence. The diaries reveal Brem Wilson as a complex figure with a dysfunctional family life; he may have been a Pentecostal pioneer but his domestic life was not a model for others. Nevertheless, he continued to pastor a Pentecostal chapel and to preach in the London streets, and on occasions as far away as the Orkney Islands and south Wales until shortly before his death. Thomas Brem Wilson from West Africa is a relatively little-known figure in the early history of British Pentecostalism. The Revd Alexander Boddy mentioned him in his magazine Confidence in 1907 and 1908, and the veteran Pentecostalist T.B. Barratt referred to ‘a coloured gentleman from London’ in his autobiography published in the 1920s.1 More recently the late Desmond Cartwright in an article mentioned Brem Wilson as a founder of what was locally known as ‘the black man’s church’ in Walworth, South London. 2 In the last two years enquiries via the web led to contact with members of the Brem-Wilson family who generously made available photographs, correspondence, documents, and also Thomas Brem Wilson’s diaries which intermittently cover the years 1 T.B. Barratt, When the Spirit Fell: An outline of my life (Oslo, 1927), p. 156. 2 Desmond Cartwright, ‘Black Pentecostal churches in Britain’, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 27, 2 (2007), pp. 128-37, see pp. 128-29. See also Des Cartwright, ‘From the backstreets of Brixton to the Royal Albert Hall: British Pentecostalism 1907-1928’, paper given at European Pentecostal Theological Association, Leuven, Belgium, December 1981. London’s Oldest Pentecostal Assembly (nd. c.1948), p. 2. Brem-Wilson is reputed to have established the church ‘with another coloured brother J. Barnes who died in 1950 aged 82.’ 2 1899-1925.3 From these and other primary sources it has been possible to retrieve from obscurity the life of Brem Wilson, and to plot his journey from nominal Wesleyanism in West Africa, involvement in Dowie’s divine healing movement, to Pentecostal preacher and ‘missioner’ in south London. Thomas Brem Wilson was born at Dixcove in the British colony of the Gold Coast in 1865. He received his education in the Wesleyan School at Cape Coast, where he subsequently taught, before becoming headmaster of the Wesleyan school in his home town. He then turned to commerce.4 Many entries in his diaries are concerned with his various commercial interests in West Africa, and relations with the African lawyers J.E. Casely Hayford5 and Peter Renner.6 In a letter Brem Wilson stated that ‘I have a practical knowledge of working Palm oil, palm kernels, Mahogany, Gold mining and general cultivation of the soil’.7 He owned auriferous land concessions, for example at Tuasie near Acquidah, and elsewhere, which he hoped to mine and to exploit for timber or to develop with palm oil and rubber.8 Dixcove was a small port, although without a 3 Thomas Brem Wilson rarely used a hyphen in his name, and that is the convention that I have maintained; the family today use a hyphen. Papers have come from two branches of the Brem-Wilson family, the diaries indicated as TBW1, other papers as TBW2. I was also given photographs by another branch of the Brem-Wilson family. 4 Brem Wilson received a good education, and Mfantsipim, the newly opened Wesleyan Grammar School in Cape Coast seems the obvious place. See A. Adu Boahen, Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana: A centenary history 1876-1976 (Accra, 1996), ch. 2. 5 TBW2. J.E. Casely Hayford (1866-1930), became distinguished as a journalist, politician, and lawyer in the Gold Coast; his Gold Coast Native Institutions, the first of his several books, was published in London in 1903. In a letter, dd. Anona Chambers, Axim, Gold Coast, 9 June 1906, he curtly reminded Brem Wilson that his legal services required prompt payment: ‘Your letter of 6th November 1903 was urgent, and, pray, how was I to know the grantors of Pakiavilly [mine] owed you money. Did you expect me to do all the legal work and pay the fees and rents besides to enable you to keep the contract? As it is, you have to pay your share of the legal expenses.’ 6 Peter Awooner Renner, son of Dr. William James Awooner Renner of Freetown, Sierra Leone, educated in England and Germany, called to the bar (Lincoln’s Inn) 1883; began practice as a lawyer in Sekondi in 1884, claiming in 1888 to be making more than £1,000 p.a. (The National Archives, Kew - hereafter TNA. CO96/200/9638, 15 January 1889). Like many members of the West African educated elite, Renner was a freemason: ‘Visitors from Cape Coast … and Accra entertained by their brethren here [as is] Brother P.A. Renner, P.M. of the Gold Coast Lodge’; Letter from ‘A Mason’, Gold Coast Globe and Ashanti Argus (London), 18 February 1902, p. 205. Renner was active in Gold Coast politics and helped to establish the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society in 1897. 7 TBW2. Statement by Thomas Brem Wilson, most likely addressed to the Management Committee of Zion Church, London, dd. 28 April [probably 1905]. 8 For the background see Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa. The gold-mining frontier, African labor, and colonial capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875-1900 (Athens, OH., 1998), and articles cited in the bibliography on African mercantile entrepreneurship, although Wilson is not mentioned. 3 harbour for ocean-going steamers; since the 1850s steamer services had put the Gold Coast in faster and more reliable contact with Britain, and the postal service and the telegraph were well established in the coastal area by the late 1890s.9 Little is known of the earlier history of Brem Wilson’s family, part of the formally educated elite who bore European names. Modern family recollection asserts that Brem Wilson’s father, Thomas B. Wilson, who died in 1906 was related to the veteran black British missionary Thomas Birch Freeman.10 Thomas B. Wilson, and other members of the family, did not use the prefix ‘Brem’. The family were Wesleyan Methodists, members of the Dixcove church,11 although there is no evidence from Brem Wilson’s early diaries that he was particularly devout or active. Indeed, he drank alcohol, womanised, and dabbled in indigenous religious rituals. The latter should not occasion surprise; it was not uncommon for members of the West African educated elite to inhabit plural religious worlds. By 1899 he was married to Hagare, and had two children, relationships that would complicate his later life.12 It is not known if Brem Wilson travelled outside West Africa in the early 1890s. Members of the family state that he visited Britain in 1897, and indeed a ‘Mr T. Wilson’ did travel to Liverpool on board the ‘Cabenda’ from Axim in July that year and returned, in the company of a Mr Mensah, on the ‘Laguna’ to Chama in late September.13 Brem 9 Overseas mail to the Gold Coast was carried by steamer. An inland postal service was established in the Gold Coast in 1888, the volume of mail greatly increasing with the mining boom at the end of the century.