WILLIAM AUGUSTUS SALTER (1812-1879) AND THE USUAL QUESTIONS

I am indebted to a fellow researcher of Baptist history for not only finding but allowing me to see a publication which had become something of a Holy Grail for me. I have been digging into the life of my great great grandfather, the Baptist minister William Augustus Salter, for around five years now. He served the congregations of a number of churches in the course of his life, from his first appointment at the Henrietta Street chapel in London’s Covent Garden to his last, the church in Clarendon Street, Leamington Spa, which he not only led but founded and built.

Rev William Augustus Salter (1812-1879) c1870 as pastor of Clarendon Street chapel, Leamington Spa

I have known for some time that the speeches and sermons made on 5^th October 1836, the day of his ordination at Henrietta Street, had been published. I learned of a copy held by the Angus Library at Regent’s Park College, Oxford; but could not afford the time or train fare to make a speculative trip.

The Angus Library is Britain’s best collection of Baptist publications, founded on the personal collection of Joseph Angus (1816-1902), William Augustus’ brother-in-law. William Augustus and Joseph trained for the ministry together at Stepney Baptist College, and it was when Angus was in 1849 appointed as Principal of that institution that it thrived. Outgrowing its Stepney premises the college moved in 1855 to larger ones overlooking Regent’s Park. Then in 1927, twenty five years after Angus’ death Regent’s moved lock, stock and library to the more studious environment of Oxford.

Regent's Park College quadrangle today (photograph by Tomsett, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia)

A few weeks ago, my colleague mentioned that he was going to be doing some research in the Angus Library and kindly offered to look for the Henrietta Street sermons, which included the Charge to the Minister delivered by Angus’ and Salter’s old teacher Rev W.H. Murch, then Principal of Stepney College. Surely Joseph was in the congregation that day witnessing his friend’s entry into the ministry?

What I hadn’t anticipated was that the Henrietta Street speeches would include one from Salter himself. My great great grandfather’s words! His voice on the page! William Augustus spoke in response to the previous speaker, Rev J.J. Davies, who (according to the Order of Service) “delivered the Introductory Address and asked the usual questions.”

Unfortunately the published speeches do not include the questions themselves! But we are told of their nature. Before asking the “usual questions” of William Augustus, Rev Davies “put the usual question to the church, respecting the circumstances which had led to the present service [of ordination].” A church elder Mr Dawson responded with a history of Henrietta Street chapel, founded in 1817 and suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of its sitting pastor Rev T. Thomas in May 1836. Thomas (with that initial, could he have been Thomas Thomas?!) had effectively been headhunted by Abergavenny Baptist College. My great great grandfather had been filling Thomas’s shoes as a supply-preacher at Henrietta Street for the past three months.

Henrietta Street in 1837 – note the early layout of Covent Garden market (from Cary’s New Plan of London and its Vicinity)

Salter’s own “usual questions” were on the matters of his personal journey to God, his decision to enter the ministry, and his views on Christian doctrine. He replied with admirable piety and brevity on all three counts (occupying four pages of the published version compared to seventeen from Rev Davies). In the first matter, he was drawn to God, and eventually baptised at Camberwell Baptist Church, after starting as a volunteer teacher at the church Sunday school. In the second, he knew from the moment of his baptism that he wanted to be more than merely a member of a congregation: that he wanted to be of public service to God.

In the third, his Confession of Faith shows that he believed in the Holy Trinity, and in the fundamental wickedness of mankind from Adam and Eve onwards. Sin, at the core of our being, was however more to be pitied and repented of than cursed with fire and brimstone. Salvation was possible for all sinners thanks to the sacrifice of the Son of God. It’s a speech full of love for all sinners and for the glory of God.

We can be fairly sure of the names of two others present at William Augustus' ordination: William Brodie Gurney and his daughter Emma. Emma and William Augustus were married less than a fortnight after this service. Joseph Angus married Emma's sister Amelia a little under four years later. And the flyleaf signature of the original owner of the Angus Library copy of the Henrietta Street speeches is none other than Salter's and Angus's father-in-law, W.B. Gurney.

Signature in the flyleaf of the Angus LIbrary copy of his son-in-law's ordination speeches: W.B. Gurney, Denmark Hill

It’s fascinating to read the clear and convinced statements of William Augustus' understanding of doctrine at the age of twenty-five, because they are entirely consistent with the sermons which he preached more than forty years later in Clarendon Street, and which were published posthumously. That loving belief in the possibility of salvation for his fellow men and women made William Augustus Salter a gentle shepherd to all the flocks he tended.

JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY (1846-1903) AND THE STEAM WINCH

I realise that I have unwittingly been following a family tradition in not ever writing here about the Norfolk branch of my Gurney antecedents. My father, who in matters of ancestry spoke with pride only of Gurneys, never spoke of the Norfolk Gurneys, only of “our” Bedfordshire ones.

The Norfolk Gurneys (with whom the Bedfordshire ones fell out around my 7x great grandfather’s generation in the early seventeenth century) were the senior branch of the tree. They produced all sorts of interesting people, including some of the most powerful Quaker banking families of England (the Barclays for example). Others reflected the Quakers’ more spiritual side, and those include the social reformer Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney) (1780-1845) and her brother who lent his name to Gurneyite Quakerism in the US, Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847).

In keeping with tradition I am writing today not about the latter but about his namesake, who was born a year before the Gurneyite’s death. “My” Joseph John was a mechanical engineer, the nephew of my 2x great grandmother Emma Gurney (1815-1893) and son of Joseph Gurney (1804-1879) who headed the family firm of parliamentary shorthand writers in London.

 Joseph Gurney (1804-1879)

Father of Joseph John Gurney (1846-1903)

Shorthand Joseph and his sister’s husband my great great grandfather Rev William Augustus Salter(1812-1879) were lifelong friends and died within weeks of each other. It’s interesting that they both had sons, Joseph John Gurney and Frank Salter, who followed not their fathers’ callings but instead the very modern world of mechanical engineering. Both sons, moreover, worked on steam engine design.

Frank and Joseph must have known each other quite well through their fathers’ friendship and it’s tempting to imagine them in boyhood comparing notes on mutually understood mechanical problems. In the 1860s Frank trained in the locomotive workshops of the London & North Eastern Railway at Crewe, while Joseph moved to Gateshead on the ship-building Tyne to learn his trade. In 1870 Joseph and a friend, Joseph Watson (another Joseph!) went into partnership with William Clarke, a manufacturer of steam winches. When in 1872 Frank was looking for a new apprenticeship after serving his time with LNWR, it was the firm of Clarke, Watson & Gurney that took him on.

William Clarke (c1832-1890)

with whom Joseph John Gurney formed a partnership and Frank Salter served an apprenticeship

Frank moved on in 1874 – I’ve written about his career elsewhere in this blog – but Joseph John remained on Tyneside for the rest of his life. It wasn’t just the work that held him there. In 1870, the year he and Watson went into partnership with William Clarke, Joseph John also formed (in Rye Hill Baptist Chapel) a lasting partnership with Watson’s sister Helen.

That union produced a daughter, Helen Mary Gurney. Joseph John’s business partnership saw the firm expand from winches into boiler-making, and from steam power to oil-fired and electric motors. The innovation by which I am most impressed was the company’s 1882 decision to employ women as draughtsmen. I don’t know the scale of this “experiment” (the company’s word), but it was long enough and large enough for Clarke, Watson & Gurney to build a separate building to house the draughtswomen in.

Clarke, Chapman & Gurney steam winch, 1882

Joseph John Gurney resigned from the firm in 1882 at the age of 36. Watson had by then also departed, and the firm continued to grow with William Clarke’s remaining partner as Clarke, Chapman & Co. It survives today as the Clarke Chapman Group with operations throughout the world in virtually every area of civil engineering, and still has its headquarters in Gateshead. Why either Joseph left I don’t know; but Joseph John’s father had recently died, and perhaps the provision of his will meant that JJ no longer had to work.

He seems genuinely to have retired from the field, and to have lived out his days in comfort: first at Rodsley House on Alexandra Road in Gateshead (demolished in 1931) and then in the White House, north of the River Tyne, on Grainger Park Road in Newcastle. Frank died too young, only 40, from pneumonia caught in the line of his work on water pumps in 1888. The White House with its 32 rooms was only demolished in 2011, and the site developed as the stunning new Newcastle Central Mosque.

The White House, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 2009, and an artist's impression of the Newcastle Central Mosque which replaces it

JOSEPH GURNEY (1744-1815) AND THE GORDON RIOTS

My Gurney ancestors had their finest hours in the century or so in which they were official shorthand writers to the Houses of Parliament. But the reputation of the Gurney system of shorthand was built in London’s law courts, especially the Old Bailey, by Joseph Gurney ( my 4x great grandfather, whose father Thomas had invented the system).

Joseph Gurney (1744-1815)

The newspapers did not report court cases in those days, and the public appetite for sensational evidence was catered for by private shorthand writers who printed their verbatim reports of proceedings. The cases recorded by the Gurneys were acknowledged to be more accurate transcriptions than their competitors’. 

One of the scandalous hearings on which Gurney shorthand made its name concerned the Gordon Riots of 1780. It was a case of particular personal interest to the Gurney family and others of their nonconformist persuasion. If you were not Church of England, your freedom to participate in public life was significantly restricted under English law, and in 1780 this applied to Roman Catholics even more than to nonconformists.

Two years before the riots, in 1778, Catholics had been advanced some limited concessions, notably the right to serve in Britain’s armed forces without swearing a religious (in other words, Protestant) oath of allegiance. This was an act of expedience as much as tolerance – Britain was at war with France, Spain and the United States, and needed all the troops it could muster. Nevertheless it was a liberal act which drew opposition from the Protestant majority, particularly in the form of an organisation called the Protestant Association led by Lord George Gordon.

Lord George Gordon (1751-1793)

Gordon was a maverick politician. A London-born, Eton-educated member of the Scottish nobility, he was unpopular with the establishment for his improvement of working conditions for sailors and his support for American independence. His opposition to Catholic emancipation could be seen in the same anti-establishment light; and popular support for his position was swelled by a general dissatisfaction among the public. Conducting war on so many fronts had damaged Britain’s overseas balance of trade, driving wages down and prices and unemployment up.

Whatever the source of his support, a crowd of around 50,000 marched on 2^nd June 1780 under the Protestant Association’s banner and wore its symbol, a blue-ribbon rosette or cockade. With their entrance to the House of Commons blocked, they attacked the carriages of members arriving at the House of Lords. Although the crowd was eventually dispersed, violence flared up again later in the day elsewhere in the city. Riots rumbled on for the next five days, with attacks on houses and embassies with Catholic connections. 

The Burning and Plundering of Newgate, and Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob

Catholicism wasn’t the only target. The Bank of England was besieged, and several prisons including Newgate attacked and destroyed, releasing large numbers of escaping prisoners into the chaotic streets. On 7^th June the army was finally called in, and ordered to open fire on the rioters. 285 were killed, 200 more injured and a further 30 later sentenced to death. 

Gordon himself was tried for high treason as the leader of the organisation in whose name the riots had begun. The trial naturally attracted a great deal of attention in the wake of the long and violent events which triggered it. He was acquitted on something of a technicality surrounding the definition of treason. His acquittal was popular with the public; and so too, presumably, were the transcriptions of the hearing published immediately afterwards by Joseph Gurney, and by his competitors.

The cover of the transcription of the trial of George Gordon, “the third edition, taken in shorthand by Joseph Gurney, London, sold by G. Kearsly, 46 Fleet-street, and M. Gurney, 34 Bell-yard, Temple-bar”

The establishment had its revenge on Gordon. In 1788, having been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was imprisoned on the unlikely charge of defaming Marie Antoinette, consort of Louis XVI of France with whom Britain had lately been at war. In 1793 he died of typhoid in Newgate, the very prison which his supporters had destroyed thirteen years earlier.

JOSEPH GURNEY (1744-1815) AND THE BASHAW OF MERRYLAND

The reputation for accuracy of the Gurney shorthand system invented by my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney was won in the law courts of the eighteenth century. I wonder sometimes what Thomas would have made of the fact that the system which he developed in order to record Baptist sermons proved itself in the reporting of sensational court hearings, which Thomas’s children Joseph and Martha then published to pander to the public’s lust for lurid detail.

Joseph Gurney (1744-1815)

Between 1772 and 1786 they published over twenty accounts of the more scandalous trials of the day. The fullness and accuracy of their transcriptions won them a good name for difficult work, and the family firm began to be engaged either by interested private organisations or by the government to record proceedings in parliamentary enquiries and committees. In time this led to the family firm’s appointment as official shorthand writers to the Houses of Parliament.

One of the first such trials to be recorded by Joseph Gurney was that of Frederick Calvert, 6^th Baron Baltimore (1731-1771). His formal title was “The Right Honourable The Lord Baltimore,” but there was absolutely nothing to honour in this despicable man.

Frederick Calvert, 6^th Baron Baltimore (1731-1771)

Educated at Eton, Calvert inherited the proprietorship and governorship of the colony of Maryland at the age of twenty, on the death of his father. The Barons Baltimore had owned Maryland since the time of Frederick’s great great grandfather Caecillius Calvert. He, the 2^nd Baron, named the settlement of Baltimore in the colony after the family’s manor in Ireland. Frederick County in the state is named after the 6^th Baron, who took no other interest in the colony at all. To him it was just a source of income to fund his extravagant, rakish lifestyle in Europe.

He had as little regard for women as he did for his responsibilities in America. His marriage was a failure, and his wife of five years died in 1758 from injuries sustained when she “fell” from an open carriage in which her husband was also travelling. Foul play was suspected but not proved.

In Constantinople, James Boswell recorded, Calvert “lived luxuriously and inflamed his blood … and was constantly taking medicines …he is living a strange, wild, life, useless to his country, except when raised to a delirium, and must soon destroy his constitution.” He was thrown out of Constantinople on suspicion of keeping a private harem, and on his return he built one in part of his London home. He kept a string of mistresses, one of whom later wrote Memoirs of the Seraglio of the Bashaw of Merryland, by a Discarded Sultana. In it she claimed that he was as ineffective in bed as he was in Maryland. But he left a trail of illegitimate children, none of whom he supported.

Sarah Woodcock Forcibly Introduced to Lord Baltimore –

a contemporary engraving of Frederick Calvert’s crime

The event that brought him to court in 1768, and to the shorthand skills of Joseph Gurney, was the alleged abduction and rape of a London milliner called Sarah Woodcock. Like many rapists, his defence was that she had consented; and the jury agreed that she had not tried hard enough to escape. Calvert was acquitted; but his reputation in England was destroyed and he left for Europe, never to return.

His arrival in Vienna is recorded: “In 1769 my Lord was travelling with eight women, a physician, and two negroes, which he called his corregidores, who were entrusted with the discipline of his little seraglio. When the chief of police requested him to declare which of the eight ladies was his wife, he replied that he was an Englishman, and that when he was called upon to give an account of his sexual arrangements, if he could not settle the matter with his fists, it was his practice to set out instantly on his travels again.” He died of a fever in Naples two years after that, aged 39, mourned by few. The Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine reported:

His Lordship had injured his character in his life by seduction, so that the populace paid no regard to his memory when dead, but plundered the room where his body lay the moment it was removed.

The TRIAL of FREDERICK CALVERT, Esq., Baron of Baltimore, in the Kingdom of Ireland FOR a Rape on the Body of Sarah Woodcock, AND OF Eliz. Griffinburg, & Ann Harvey, Otherwise Darby, as ACCESSARIES Before the Fact, for Procuring, Aiding and Abetting Him in Committing the Said Rape

(an Edinburgh publication of a transcription of the trial)