The Rev. Lewis Newcomen Prance

Journal 78 for December 2020 contained a photograph of Stapleford Tawney rectory, with the rector and his family by an open French window. The rector’s unusual surname was familiar, as I had found his signature on the title page of a copy of Winstone’s Minutes of the Epping & Ongar Highway Trust 1769-1870, with his carefully inked typographical corrections running throughout the volume.

Born in Hampstead in 1839, he was the son of a barrister. Graduating from Trinity College Cambridge, in 1863, he immediately joined newly established Haileybury College in Hertfordshire as an assistant master and the first housemaster of one of the boarding houses there. Similar contemporary private schools were largely staffed by ordained bachelors, but it is not clear of this was Haileybury’s policy at that time. While at the school he was ordained deacon in 1864, and priest the following year. By 1869 he had left the school for a living in Ayott St Peter, before moving to the rectory of Stapleford Tawney (combined with Theydon Mount) in 1872 where he remained for the rest of his life.

As Winstone’s book showed, he had an interest in archaeology and local history. He served on the Council of the Essex Archaeological Society for many years, and ‘rarely missed an archaeological excursion’. Though he never published anything in the Society’s Transactions, he did transcribe and edit the Stapleford Tawney parish registers, and also provided material for a family history of Lt. Col. T H Lewin (1839-1916), a pioneering administrator in India who worked with the rebellious tribes of the Chittagong Hills who were resisting British rule. In due course they came to revere him. Presumably the relationship between Prance and Lewin was established after the latter’s return to Britain. Prance was elected FSA in 1892, but it is not known for what work this honour came to be conferred.
He was said to have been a man ‘of great physical activity’. He must have been a pioneering cyclist, perhaps a little unusual for clergy man during that period, and was able to cycle long distances ‘without apparent fatigue’. He died in harness in April 1913.