THE FREE CHURCH ARMY CHAPLAIN 1830-1930 JOHN HANDBY THOMPSON CB MA PhD Thesis DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD Submitted October 1990 THE FREE CHURCH ARMY CHAPLAIN 1830-1930 J H THOMPSON CB MA The study traces the efforts of English Nonconformists to provide chaplains for their adherents in the British Army. Unrecognised by the War Office, and opposed by the Church of England, the Wesleyan Methodists persisted in providing an unpaid civilian ministry until, by stages, they secured partial recognition in 1862 and 1881. The respect earned by volunteer Wesleyan civilian chaplains, who accompanied the troops on most colonial and imperial expeditions in the last quarter of the century, culminating in the Boer War, prompted the War Office in 1903 to offer them a number of commissioned chaplaincies. The Wesleyans declined the offer. Although they had earlier, and after anguished debate, accepted State payment of chaplains, they were not prepared to accept military control of them. In the Great War, Wesleyan chaplains were nevertheless obliged to accept temporary commissions. Congregationalists, Baptists, Primitive and United Methodists, through a United Board, provided another stream of chaplains. With the political help of Lloyd George, both sets of Nonconformists secured equitable treatment at the hands of the Church of England and, through an Interdenominational Committee, gained positions of considerable influence over chaplaincy policy. In the field, remarkably for the age, they joined with Presbyterians and Roman Catholics in a single chain of command. By 1918, over 500 Wesleyan and United Board commissioned chaplains were engaged. After the war, as the price of retaining their newly won standing and influence, both the Wesleyans and the United Board denominations accepted permanent commissions for their chaplains and their absorption within a unified Chaplains Department. Acceptability was secured through willingness to compromise on voluntaryism and conformity to the State. THE FREE CHURCH ARMY CHAPLAINf 1830 - 1930 Contents Sources and Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 6 1. Beginnings 17 2. The early Wesleyan experience 43 3. Wesleyan recognition 113 4. Wesleyan acceptability 156 5. The English Presbyterian experience 200 6. Edwardian peace 225 7. The Great War to 1916: the United Board 280 8. The Great War to 1918: Interdenominationalism 333 9. Nonconformist chaplains in the Great War 391 10. Post-War Unification 436 Bibliography 471 1 SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My research began at the Royal Army Chaplains' Department Centre, Bagshot Park, and I acknowledge the help and encouragement of the then Departmental Secretary, Lt. Col. (Ret'd) Ralph Nye. He allowed me to see the old Precedent Books of the War Office Chaplaincy Branch and miscellaneous papers which were particularly useful for the period of the Great War. It was also Colonel Nye who introduced me to "the little doctor", W.H. Rule, whose work for soldiers from the 1830s creat d the Free Church army chaplain tradition. Rule's voluminous correspondence I found in the Methodist Archives at John Rylands University Library, Deansgate, Manchester, where I read it by permission of Miss Alison Peacock, the Methodist Church Archivist. Most Methodist Forces Board papers, however, are still in an attic room at Westminster Central Hall. A full record of Wesleyan chaplaincy work from -2- 1856, including the manuscript minutes of the Army and Navy Committee or Board from 1896, and of the Primitive Methodist Army Committee from 1914, are to be found there. Equally useful is a full set of the minutes of the Interdenominational Advisory Committee from its inception in 1916. There is also a good deal of important miscellaneous correspondence. I am especially indebted to the retiring Secretary of the Methodist Forces Board, Revd C.R. Wolsey Gilbert, for permission to use this material, and to him and his secretary, Miss Joan Garwood, for much other help and encouragement. The United Board minutes from its formation in 1914 are kept in very good order at Baptist Church House, now removed to Didcot from Southampton Way, London, and I acknowledge the ready permission of Mr David Lovegrove, the present Secretary of the United Board, to use them. Mr Fred Keay, Librarian of the United Reformed Church Library in Tavistock Place, gave me access to the records of the Soldiers and Sailors Committee of the Presbyterian Church of England and its predecessors from 1839. Mrs Judith Blacklawe, of the Ministry of Defence Library in Great Scotland Yard, very patiently responded to a great many requests for help and the Army Historical Branch provided a necessary key to the relevant papers in the Public Record Office at Kew. I am particularly indebted to Father Michael Clifton, Archivist of the Southwark Diocese, both for freely opening up his store of papers on Roman Catholic chaplaincy work in the nineteenth century and for gently -3 - instructing me in many aspects of mid-Victorian Roman Catholicism. He also allowed me to read the relevant chapters in his forthcoming book on Bishop Grant. Though not central to my work, this has enabled interesting parallels to be drawn and comparisons to be made with Wesleyan strivings of the period. What Free Church army chaplains actually did and thought, as opposed to their recognition, status and organisation, proved harder to reconstruct at this distance. The printed reports of individual chaplains are dutiful, sometimes instructive and occasionally revealing. There are fortunately several privately or generally published records of value - pre-eminently the books of Revd O.S. Watkins, the first Deputy Chaplain General to be drawn from the Free Churches. Private manuscript sources are rarer. There are very few at the Imperial War Museum, but I was fortunate to be given a personal reminiscence of the youthful Leslie Weatherhead as chaplain by an old soldier still alive; and I have been allowed by his daughter, Mrs Marian Robinson, to read the Revd A.C. Gray's record of his ministry, written for his family, which includes his Great War experiences as a United Board chaplain in France and Italy. My final acknowledgement is reserved for my supervisor, Dr Clyde Binfield, whose encouragement, guidance and friendship have been invaluable. It was no easy task to turn a retired civil servant, trained in pith and precision, into an expansive, questing amateur academic. I sense that he has succeeded but others must judge. ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations have been used in footnotes for the most frequently used sources BP War Office Precedent Books and miscellaneous papers at the Royal Army Chaplains' Department, Bagshot Park DNB Dictionary of National Biography Minutes of the Interdenominational Advisory Committee on Army Chaplaincy Services MAN Methodist Archives Manchester (in the John Rylands University Library) Presbyterian Church of England Soldiers and Sailors' Committee reports - 5 - R Reports of the Wesleyan Army and Navy Committee or Board UB United Navy and Army Board of the Four Denominations (Baptist, Congregational, Primitive Methodist, United Methodist) W Wesleyan Army and Navy Committee or Board minutes WO War Office Clergy General records at the Public Records Office Meetings are indicated by the month and year following the initial letter. e.g. UB 11/18 The reports indicated by R are contained within the annual reports of the Wesleyan Home Mission and Contingent Fund, or later in the annual Conference Agenda. INTRODUCTION The generic name for the religious bodies with which this study is concerned was for much of the period "Nonconformist". By the time of the Great War, however, when Nonconformist army chaplains were not merely accepted but welcomed in great numbers, the more modern term "Free Church" was becoming common, and it has been used for the sake of familiarity in the title. I hope it will not cause offence that I have taken "English" for granted. The denominational names of the period have been retained. The study embraces the Wesleyan Methodists, the Primitive Methodists, the United Methodists and their predecessors, the Presbyterian Church of England and its predecessors, the Baptists and the Congregationalists. These, with the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists were in due course the authorised providers of Free Church army chaplains. There is passing reference to bodies such as the Unitarians, Moravians and the Salvation Army which sought, but did not readily obtain, the right to supply army chaplains in the Great War. Although not the focus of the study, considerable reference is necessary to the chaplaincy arrangements of those earlier in the field: pre-eminently the Church of England, but also the Church of Scotland, 7 other Scottish and Irish Presbyterians, and the Ronan Catholics. These were by stages competitors and comparators. I have made brief reference in Chapter 1 to the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to provide a sense of development and a firm base for the study proper which begins around 1830 in Chapter 2. In a period of colonial, imperial and international wars, and of missionary endeavour, the study cannot be confined to England. But it is confined to the chaplains from churches whose denominational boundaries were drawn at home. It is also mainly confined to the army, though there is reference to the origins of chaplaincies in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. It was the army which first offered the challenge of service and was the main initial focus of resistance to what the churches sought to provide. What was won for the army was in time very largely translated. The study may be read in its own terns. It is the only detailed account of the development of the Free Church army chaplaincies which goes beyond 1903, or which looks wider than Wesleyan Methodism. It ends around 1930 because about then the arrangements for army chaplaincies assumed their present-day characteristics. The additional aim of the study is to illustrate a number of broad themes to do with Nonconformity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.