Thomas Wilson and the chapel at Stanford Rivers

The non-conformist Thomas Wilson of Stanford Rivers noted, in a letter of 17 March 1819, that he ‘paid £190 a year in tithe to a clergyman who only reads a sermon on a Sabbath morning.’ He added that there was no Sunday school and that ‘the labouring people are very ignorant, and have very little means of instruction’. He had been keen for some time to send students to the village from the non-conformist college in Hoxton, but had been unable to get any parishioner to agree to provide the necessary accommodation. To solve this problem, he had acquired a cottage ‘on the turnpike road’ which would be suitable for a Sunday school in the afternoon, and for preaching in the evening. This began operating every Sunday from 20 October 1819.

Attendance was such that the cottage was soon found to be too small, and plans were being discussed to enlarge it. However a local gentleman offered £100 (provided that this was matched by a similar sum) to build a chapel, and this was opened on 27 June 1820. The building was enlarged and improved in 1832, and survived until its destruction by fire in 1927. The first pastor was the Rev. William Temple but finding a successor proved to be difficult. By 1846 a new minister, the Rev H. Cock, had re-established the Sunday school. However, Wilson’s son (and biographer) noted, using a rather convoluted agricultural metaphor, that ‘the soil is unpromising, but by diligent cultivation, under the hand of a faithful labourer, it will, I trust, not prove ultimately unproductive’.

Unlike the relationship between non-conformists and the established church in other parishes, the rector of Stanford Rivers, the Rev Dr Dowdeswell, remained on good terms with Thomas Wilson and ‘manifested a disposition rather to vindicate and to defend, than to oppose, the attempt to promote education, morality and Christian instruction in the parish’. Their better than expected relationship was perhaps assisted by Wilson’s purchase of a pew in the parish church for the use of his tenants and their families!