Churches have had to move with the times
TUCKED away in Old Baptist Chapel Court, off Tewkesbury’s Church Street, is one of the earliest Baptist chapels in the country.
The half timbered building was converted from three mediaeval cottages for use as a chapel in the early 17 century.
This was shortly after two Englishmen, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, introduced the denomination from Holland in 1609 and founded the country’s first Baptist church in Spitalfields, London.
There’s a long history of non-conformism, people who wanted to break away from the established church, in Gloucestershire. One of the first was a community of Lollards, who from about the 15th century baptised adults, the practice that gave the Baptist Church its name.
Evidence of the county’s former non conformism exists to this day in virtually every local village where one or more chapels, most of which have now been converted into homes or have fallen into disrepair, can be seen.
These places of worship once provided a focal point for Baptist, Congregational, Prestbyterian, Unitarian and other congregations.
One of the more unusual sects was the Rechabites who established a community in Churchdown that continued until about the time of the First World War. Rechabites modelled themselves on a strict Old Testament sect, were teetotal, didn’t shave and lived in tents.
But back to Tewkesbury.
At the time its chapel was established it took great courage to be a Baptist. Dissenters were liable to fines, imprisonment and even transportation. They had to be secretive about some aspects of their religious life and it’s said that baptisms were carried out at night in the Mill Avon.
Despite this, three quarters of Tewkesbury’s population declared themselves to be members of the Baptist congregation and by 1655 people regularly tramped from as far afield as Cheltenham to swell the congregation, as this was the only Baptist chapel in the district.
By the start of the nineteenth century the old chapel was too small and so a new one was built between Barton Street and Swilgate Road and opened in 1805.
This was used until the 1980s when the present Baptist church replaced it.
The Old Baptist Chapel is open to the public and retains many of its original features, including an 18th century, six sided pulpit and a pair of coffin stools.
In the burial ground at the end of the court are the tombs of many noteworthy Tewkesbury families, including descendants of William Shakespeare.
One last thing. The first minister of Tewkesbury’s Baptist church was the splendidly named Eleazer Herring.
Cheltenham’s Highbury Congregational church probably holds the record for having moved premises more often than any other place of worship in town. The movable feast began in 1827 when the congregation took over a building in Grosvenor Street (now Mallam’s the auctioneers) that was previously known as Snow’s chapel.
By 1852 a larger gathering place was needed, so a local architect named Samuel Onley was commissioned to design a new church in Winchcombe Street. His church was an architectural triumph in the gothic revival style and Congregationalism plainly enjoyed a fine following in the town, because by 1932 Sunday services were so packed there was barely enough room to turn a hymn sheet. So it was time to move again.
Controversy entered the saga, because an application was made by the Gaumont-british Picture Corporation to demolish Sam Onley’s efforts and replace the church with a cinema. This caused uproar. Replace a House of God with a palace of Mammon? Out with the rood screen and in with the silver screen? Hollywood in place of Holy Scriptures? Despite the fuss, at 2pm on March 6, 1933, the Mayor Councillor J H Tye CBE declared Cheltenham’s new Gaumont Palace open for business.
By then, over at the newly completed Highbury Congregational church in Priory Terrace, services were already taking place. The foundation stone was laid in May 1932 at a ceremony under umbrellas in the pouring rain and the church opened in October 1932. Norman Myers was the architect, W T Nicholls Ltd of Gloucester were the builders, the hand-made roof tiles were put in place by Webb Brothers and the internal fittings came from town iron masters R E and C Marshall. On March 25, 1950 an open air service was held to celebrate the opening of the new Elim Pentecostal Church in Gloucester’s Millbrook Street. Built by the congregation, this was located next door to the original premises, which had been destroyed nine years earlier in a wartime bombing raid.
The date was March 2, 1941, when shocked city centre shoppers stopped in their tracks at the sight of a Luftwaffe JU88 scorching low overhead at 4 o’clock in the afternoon with an RAF Hurricane in hot pursuit.
So unexpected and hypnotic was the spectacle that nobody took cover, not even when they saw four high-explosive bombs dropping from the twin engined Junkers. Six people were killed and a further 27 injured in the attack on the Barton Street end of the city, which resulted in 18 houses being flattened.
That afternoon in Millbrook Street’s Elim chapel a mothers’ meeting was in progress when the building was hit by a bomb and wrecked. Amazingly nobody was hurt, but such was the violence of the blast that a section of railway line was lifted from near Eastgate Street station and deposited in the garden of a house in Denmark Road.
Perhaps the city’s most unconventional looking church is St Aldate’s in Finlay Road, which was consecrated in 1964. Called “Gloucester’s church in the round” in The Citizen’s report of the time, the modern structure was one of the first in the region to have seats that spread around the three sides of its sanctuary, rather than the traditional plan of aisles either side of a nave.
Highbury Congregational Church was demolished to make way for the Odeon