mi. CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE y Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029450107 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT GREGORY ROBERT GREGORY 1819-1911 BEING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT GREGORY, D.D. DEAN OF ST PAUL'S PREPARED FOR THE PRESS, WITH NOTES, BY W. H. HUTTON, B.D. ARCHDEACON OF NOKTHAMPTON, CANON OF PETEREOKOUGH AND FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1912 All rights reserved M h^ii-^^^ PREFATORY NOTE It was my privilege to read, with^ great zest, the autobiography of Dr. Gregory while he was still alive ; and he had often talked with me about many of the incidents in it. In preparing it for the press, I have been guided at every point and instructed in every difficulty^ by his daughters who were with him to the end of his Hfe. The book is not only his but theirs : it is in no way mine, but that I have had the happiness of helping to give notes and illustrative matter that seemed necessary, and to collect into a final chapter some memories of the Dean by his friends. To every one whose name is associated in it with reminis- cence I owe the most grateful thanks : the reader wiU know them to be due, page by page. I should like also especially to thank the Right Hon. Sir William R. Anson, Bart., M.P., for advice on a particular point, the Rev. R. S. Gregory for several notes, and the Very Rev. the Dean of Chichester for permission to quote freely from his paper^ on his uncle. W. H. H. Ascension Day 1912. CONTENTS CHAPTER I FASE Boyhood and Oxford, 1819-1843 1 CHAPTER II Parish Work in Country and Town, 1843-1873 . 32 CHAPTER III Wider Activities, 1867-1900 86 CHAPTER IV St. Paul's, 1868-1912 155 CHAPTER V Robert Gregory in the Memory of his Friends . 226 APPENDIX List op Publications by Dr. Gregory .... 270 Index 271 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Portrait as Canon of St. Paul's . Frontispiece St. Paul's Cathedral in 1840 . To face page 155 From an old Frird. St. Paul's Cathedral at the Present Time „ „ 225 From, a Photograph. Portrait on his Ninetieth Birthday . „ „ 266 From a Photograph ly Barratt, Salisbwy Court, London, E. C. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT GREGORY SOMETIME DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S CHAPTER I BOYHOOD AND OXFORD, 1819-1843 At the request of friends, I am about to note down a few particulars of my life. Probably no one will think it worth while to publish them, and with that opinion I should perfectly agree, as I do not feel that I have taken that leading part or occupied such a prominent position as to so place my name before the world ; nor do I expect that more than a few friends will miss me when my Heavenly Father calls me hence. But I have had a long life, and been conversant with some matters that have affected the life and well-being of the Church, and been mixed up with some events of importance, of which some few persons who have knovra me may like to be reminded. Robert Gregory, Dean of St. Paul's, was born at Nottingham, on February 9, 1819. His father. : 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT GREGORY also Robert, was born at Nottingham, November 27, 1793, and died before he had completed his thirty-first year. His mother, Anne Sophia Oldknow, also of Nottingham birth, was born on March 16, 1789, and died a few months before her husband. Her father was twice Mayor of the city, and her brother filled the same office just before her death. A memoir of both of them was written by Dr. Hannah, a Wesleyan minister, whose son married the elder Robert Gregory's daughter. The family was one of active successful traders, with a strong sense of duty. The strength of character, which seems to have been a family inheritance, is illustrated by the story which the Rev. R. S. Gregory remembers from the lips of his father. The Dean's grand- father, " who commenced the fortunes of the family, invented the application of bones, when ground in some particular way, as a manure : he was too poor to afford to pay for a seat in the coach, so he walked all the way from Nottingham to London, to see the Home Secretary and get a patent. The reason for doing this was because all his letters to the Patent Office had been ignored so he went to London, to see the Home Secretary, and knocked, and asked to see him. The footman said 'Not at home,' but he pushed his way in, and said he was not going to leave until he had seen him : ultimately he did see him, got the promise of a favourable reception for his patent, and then walked back—124 miles." With the money he got he bought some vacant land, and on that land were afterwards built some model cottages, of " — BOYHOOD AND OXFORD S which the Dean writes later. 1 may add another note, from the Dean of Chichester's paper on " The hghter side of a great Churchman's charac- ter," before I resume Dr. Gregory's own record : " His infancy and boyhood were spent at Not- tingham, where he lost both his parents at a very early age. Considering he himself survived till his ninety-third year, it is interesting to recall the fact that his father died before he was thirty-one, and his mother at about the same age, so that he was actually in unbroken possession of what landed property he had for a period only a decade short of a century. On the occasion of the death of his grandfather, which occurred just before that of his father, he was a little chap of two or three years old. According to the custom of those days, he was invested for the occasion in an ungainly cloak provided by the undertaker. With this he was vastly pleased, and went dancing about, shouting, 'I'm to be a mourner, I'm to be a mourner,' when some one amongst his elders, judging such conduct to be unseemly, caught him a sound box on the ear, which he has often told me ' made him a mourner indeed.' My father and mother died in 1825 when I was five years old. I and my three sisters were left under the charge of an unmarried sister of my mother, who was one of the most excellent of women, but had not the slightest idea of how to educate a boy. Afraid of the evil influences of 4. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT GREGORY public schools, of which she had heard some ex- aggerated accounts, she sent me to second-rate private schools, where I learned but little. When I was sixteen, in 1836, I was apprenticed for five years to Messrs. Sands, Turner & Co., American merchants at Liverpool. With my work there I was greatly interested, and before the completion of the term for which I was indentured, I had risen to a principal place in the office. My father had been a leading member of the Wesleyan Methodists at Nottingham, and until I went to Liverpool and for the portion of the time when I was there I attended the Methodist Chapel. But I never could accept what seemed to me the prominent doctrine of their teaching. That it should suffice to change one's position in God's sight, to believe that Jesus Christ had died for me, and that, upon the hearty acceptance of that belief, I should no longer be a child of wrath, but have become an accepted child of God, seemed altogether inconsistent with what Christ had wrought for the salvation of mankind. If a change of mind was all that was needed to make me a partaker of the salvation Christ had purchased for mankind, why should not a change of mind on God's part have sufficed to secure what was needed by man ? Analogy seemed to me to contradict what was BOYHOOD AND OXFORD 5 taught, and though 1 made efforts to become religious on the basis which was set before me, reason and conscience rejected it ; I felt there was no foundation on which to build. Happily for me the Oxford Tracts were then in course of being published,* and were arousing much public attention. In them 1 found what I wanted. From them I learned what the Son of God had done for man ; and how man was to be made partaker of the blessings He had purchased for him, and how man was to be enabled to die unto sin and to live unto God. With little or no external teaching but what was derived from the Oxford Tracts, I became a Churchman. I had been baptized at St. Mary's Church, Nottingham, when I was a few days old, and I now learned from the Oxford Tracts for the first time what my baptism was to me and what it had done for me. Before leaving this part of my life, there are two events which I should mention. When I was about nine or ten years old I fished frequently in the canal, in a boat belonging to my uncle.