Buying bibles and books for the church
REGULAR Bugle contributor John Taylor from Kidderminster has recently loaned to the Bugle a couple of items from his collection of Black Country memorabilia – two documents from the Victorian era relating to the church in Stourbridge.
They are receipts, both for books supplied to the church but from different vendors.
The first is a receipt from the stationer and bookseller Robert Broomhall, of High Street, Stourbridge, to the St Thomas’s Sunday School, dated the Christmas quarter of 1878.
The fine letterhead to the receipt gives details of Broomhall’s wide services. Not only was he a printer and bookbinder but he also maintained the town’s library (this was long before the days of free public libraries), a music warehouse and a depot for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge – he was a Norwich Union insurance agent as well.
Doubtless, the books he supplied to the Sunday School were suitably edifying and moral; perhaps they were prizes for the Sunday School scholars.
The vicar of St Thomas’s Church, in Market Street, at that time was Rev Hugh Sherrard, the longest serving incumbent in the church’s history – 50 years between 1858 and 1908.
In 1863 Robert Broomhall had published a book of lectures given by Rev Sherrard entitled Defence of the Christian Faith. The four lectures were The Bible Account of the Creation and the Fall of Man; Noah’s Ark and the Flood; True Religion or the Teachings of Nature, Experience and the Bible, with regard to the Duty and Interest of Man; and The Bible and Itinerant Lecturers. Rev Sherrard had given these lectures to the Church of England Young Men’s Association, of which he was president.
Rev Sherrard is named on the second receipt, dated March 20, 1896, from William J. Levi. He was based in Union Buildings, Stourbridge, and had supplied the vicar with several hymn books, bibles, prayer books and story books.