Archives Spotlight: Westminster College and the Australian Imperial Forces, 1914-18

On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The First World War raged for over 2,000 days before coming to a halt on 11 November 1918, and killed 880,000 members of the British forces, including 102 alumni of Westminster College. This amounted to 6% of the adult male population of Britain at the time, and it took much of the following decade for the College to recover.[1] Greatly reduced, Westminster was evacuated from London to Richmond College, the Wesleyan theological institution. In the second of our collection highlights, we explore what happened at the Westminster College site during the First World War, and its connections with the Australian armed forces.

Westminster College Archives. A/3/c/2, Principal’s log book, 1911-14.

In July 1914, H. B. Workman closed his Principal’s log for the year by recording that ‘College finally went down’, suggesting that he was pleased to have reached the end of a long term![2] What he did not realise, however, was that he would be summoning groups of College men back to Horseferry Road in a matter of weeks so that students would be together if they chose to enlist.[3] The College continued to operate from London for twelve months, albeit it with a reduced cohort. The following year saw the College re-open in September 1915, only to be relocated to Richmond at the start of term. Workman later recalled,

I had finished my inaugural address to the new students on the morning of Thursday, 23rd September, and was about to go on with the usual routine of the day — the signing of indentures and so forth — when there came an urgent call for me at the telephone. It was from H.M. Office of Works to state that the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia were anxious to take our College as their military headquarters, and that officials would be round within the hour to survey the premises. They came, and before lunch the matter was practically settled: all that was left being the discussion of certain terms and conditions. They asked me to summon at once our various Committees. These duly met on the 30th September and unanimously approved the proposal. The Executive Committee of the Richmond Branch of the Theological Institution also unanimously and, with great graciousness, approved a proposal to hand over Richmond College to us and to transfer their students to Didsbury, Manchester. Within a week of the proposal first being mooted, the Australian Government were already beginning to lay down telephone wires and in other ways to effect the great change.

The College would remain at Richmond, and the Australians at Horseferry Road, until 1919. In his wartime memoirs James Green recorded that ‘Horseferry Road has its special place in our records’, before listing its achievements in both peace and war.[4] As the administrative headquarters for the Australian Imperial Forces, the College buildings were always extremely busy, with thousands of servicemen visiting the College buildings each week. Outside of the main College buildings, a sign labelling them as the ‘Australian Military Offices’ was erected, opposite a YMCA hostel ran by Mrs Workman (also in College buildings).

Westminster College, Victory Bulletin, No. 49, Vol. V, No. 1 (December 1918), p. 10.

A Union Flag was placed in the middle of the Principal’s Quad, and a cannon added in its corner. Inside the buildings, Captain H. C. Smart organised offices which financed the Australian war effort, and also kept track of convalescents being returned from France. Smart ‘organised a records office, employing a few military supervisors with a large number of girls, whose labour was as effective as that of the soldiers, and much cheaper’.[5] They were surrounded by the trappings of College life – ‘working in libraries surrounded by memorial busts and bronzes of old Masters, Tutors, and Scholars. They see hundreds of clerks working in lecture-halls, class-rooms, or College Chapel’.

A parade presentation of Australian Comforts Fund Christmas gifts at the main building of Administrative Headquarters, AIF, Horseferry Road https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C364528

This flurry of activity did not go unnoticed: George V and Queen Mary visited in October 1917, inspecting a contingent of recovering Australian men.[6] Following the cessation of war in 1918, Westminster College memorialised its former students through a series of panels in its Chapel; the alumni society did the same for its members through the installation of an organ; and the Australians contributed a brass plaque to be set up in the buildings. Today, there is another plaque recording the College’s use by Australian forces, and it was believed that this plaque was long since lost – either during the Second World War, or left behind when Westminster moved to Oxford in the 1950s. But it has recently been rediscovered at the Harcourt Hill campus, hidden for the past twenty-five years.

These College Premises were used as

A.I.F. Administrative Head Quarters

during the Great War 1914-1918

by the

Australian Imperial Forces,

of 330,000 Men.

More poetically, James Green closed the Horseferry Road section of his memoir by noting that, ‘to Horseferry Road the Australian came gladly, leaving it regretfully for war again; and when the war is over it will be a kindly memory. In close proximity to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, where so many bonds of Empire are forged, the old Westminster Training College will continue to do its useful part in Empire building’.

ANZAC Day on 25 April is the national day of commemoration of Australia and New Zealand for victims of war and for recognition of the role of their armed forces. You can view more wartime records from the Centre’s collections, here.

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[1] https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/

[2] Westminster College Archives. A/3/c/2, Principal’s log book, 1911-14.

[3] Pritchard, The Story of Westminster College (1951), p. 110.

[4] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67351/pg67351-images.html

[5]https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C2130826#:~:text=The%20Horseferry%20Road%20offices%20(formerly,High%20Commissioner%20in%20October%201915.

[6]https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C364528?image%3D2&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1713886293620759&usg=AOvVaw0QxFkYnJSg98qIPYRWUPMj

Publication – Methodism and External Controversies in Britain, 1800-1900: A Provisional Bibliography

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Methodism and External Controversies in Britain, 1800-1900: A Provisional Biography by Clive D. Field.

Like most new religious movements, Methodism encountered opposition and found itself embroiled in literary controversies with its critics from the outset. The hundreds of anti-Methodist publications issued during the eighteenth century, and Methodist responses thereto, have already been extensively investigated by scholars. Less well-known, however, are the external controversies in which British and Irish Methodism was engaged during the nineteenth century, especially in its first half, and the publications to which they gave rise.

In this work, Clive D. Field offers the first modern (albeit still provisional) bibliography of that literature, comprising 862 books, book chapters, and pamphlets for 1800–1900 in which Methodists either responded to literary attacks from Anglicans, Catholics, Nonconformists, and Freethinkers or initiated attacks on them, for reasons of doctrine, polity, or on other grounds. Many of these disputes were local, rather than national, in nature. The bibliography, preceded by a substantial introduction, is fully annotated, including edition histories and brief biographies of authors and subjects, and fully indexed, by author, date, short title, and place of imprint. The volume will be essential reading for anyone researching Methodist relations with other Churches in this period.

Clive D. Field is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham and a former Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library. He has researched and published extensively in the social history of British religion from the eighteenth century to the present, with particular reference to statistical sources and the history of Methodism. His most recent book (2022), also from the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, is Methodism in Great Britain and Ireland: A Select Bibliography of Published Local Histories.

This book from OCMCH Publications is available in both paperback. Order your copy now by following this link.

Archives Spotlight: International Women’s Day profile – Sarah Smetham (1828-1912)

SME/1/13, James Smetham, ‘Sarah Smetham and Baby John’, 1855, oil on canvas

This blog post is the first instalment in a series of regular Archive Spotlights, exploring stories from the Centre’s rich historic collections of archives, artworks, and printed works – and we begin with a International Women’s Day feature.

Sarah Smetham (née Goble) was born in October 1828, and baptised at the Wesleyan chapel in Milton next Gravesend in Kent. Her mother was the first of the family to join the Methodist society in that town, and her earliest quarterly ticket – preserved by Sarah throughout her life – dated to June 1815, the same day as the Battle of Waterloo. The Methodists in Gravesend were much ‘despised’ at that time, and this caused a breach in the family. Sarah’s mother gave up the fancy clothing of her youth and adopted the ‘plain cottage bonnet’ of the class. It was through the society that she met her future husband (Sarah’s father), though her family did not immediately approve of the union.

In Sarah Smetham’s early childhood, the family relocated to the village of Green Street Green some five miles away, where her father established a Sunday School class in their kitchen. They were also friendly with the local Anglican minister, who allowed Sarah to teach a babies’ class from the tender age of eight; ‘so I began the work of my life at a very immature age’. The family returned to Gravesend on her father’s death in 1839, and there she took all opportunities to educate herself by reading philosophy and science. At eighteen, Sarah was considered a strong candidate for further teacher training, and so following preliminary examinations, and with the consent of her mother, she embarked on the long journey to Glasgow to attend the Free Church Training College in preparation for a teaching career. At that time, this was the only option available for Methodist educators.

SME/1/7/1, ‘Letters and Reminiscences’,
[c. 1840s]- [20th cent.]

Sarah soon came to the attention of the Rev. John Scott, who remarked that she gave ‘the best Bible lesson he had ever heard.’ With plans in motion to create a Methodist teaching training college in London, Sarah was appointed to the infants school in Westminster, which in 1851 was attached as a practising school to the newly-established Westminster Training College. She later reflected on her role in the early successes of the College, with Scott at the helm as it’s first principal,

London was crowded with visitors from all parts of the world and many of them found their way to the new College of Methodism … scarcely a day passed in which, without any warning, Mr. Scott would come in with a party, and desirous of showing off his pet schools to advantage would say in his suave way “Now Miss Goble will you kindly put the children in the Gallery and give them a lesson.”

The move to Westminster also quickly brought about the other most significant connection in her life. In that same year, the thirty-year-old artist James Smetham was appointed drawing master to the College. Almost fifty years’ after the event, Sarah recalled their first encounter in reminiscences for her children,

The first time I saw your father was on July 4th 1851. It was about half past four in the afternoon, the children had gone home and I was standing talking with Mr Langler by one of the windows which commanded the school entrance when he entered and crossed the playground to the College (then near its completion)… I little thought I should one day know him so well.

SME/1/7/1, ‘Letters and Reminiscences’,
[c. 1840s]- [20th cent.]

The couple married in 1854, and over the next decade the family grew to include six children. At this time, James Smetham was moving on the periphery of Pre-Raphaelite circles and could count Ford Madox Brown, Gabriel Dante Rossetti, and John Ruskin among his friends. But, James’s art was never consistently financially viable and he struggled with profound mental health issues that affected his ability to work. Sarah remained her husband’s constant supporter and solace during these periods, and it frequently fell to her to provide for the family with her teacher’s salary.

This pattern persisted until the late 1870s, when James Smetham’s mental health collapsed for the final time. He became unable to work, or create artworks, and barely spoke for the final decade of his life. For many years before his death in 1889, he resided away from the family in lodgings where he could receive round the clock care.

Following her husband’s death, Sarah Smetham became a champion for his artistic and creative legacy. She oversaw the publication of James’s letters and literary endeavours, and curated and embellished his partially-realised projects – including a series of Bible Studies that was greatly admired by Ruskin.

SME/1/5/1, ‘Bible Studies by James Smetham’, 1847-1900

This continued into the final years of her life, as a new generation became interested in James Smetham’s artworks. When a series of previously-unpublished letters by her late husband appeared in the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine in 1903, Sarah reached out to their editor directly,

I presume it is by some relationship to Mr Winders of Selby that the letters have come in to your possession… I am grateful to you for making them public. Had I had them when the volume was in preparation I should have included them

Sarah also permitted the loan of a treasured possession, her husband’s pocket New Testament which he had illustrated with his characteristic ‘squarings’, hoping it would meet with those ‘who have some memory of my dear husband.’ She also added,

I have always regretted that in the volume of the Letters more expression was not given to the Art side of his life. I wanted it at the time but the difficulties were great.

Sarah Smetham died in 1912. She belonged to a generation at the very forefront of Methodist teacher training expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, and – more particularly – was among the very first women to qualify under the new government examinations at that time. Her story is entwined with the first days, and earliest successes of, Westminster Traning College. It was there, of course, that Sarah also met her husband James. And we are indebted to her for the preservation and continued survival of many of his artworks and manuscripts that now form the Smetham Collection at the Centre.

To learn more about the Centre’s Smetham Bicentenary Project, click here

Publication – Heterodoxy & Antiquity: Joseph Bingham (1668-1723)

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Heterodoxy & Antiquity: joseph Bingham (1668-1723) by L. W. Barnard.

In the early eighteenth century Joseph Bingham (1668-1723) was a significant figure. Ejected from Oxford in 1695 for heterodox views on the Trinity, he was appointed to Church livings in Hampshire. With use of the Winchester Cathedral library, he wrote his Origines Ecclesiasticae which appeared from 1708. His son, Richard, went on to published his father’s collected works in ten volumes which were still in print in the nineteenth century. Bingham’s works engaged with numerous contemporary debates, including lay baptism, anti-Catholicism, the Union with Scotland, and European Protestantism. This is the first full-length study of Bingham and his works.

After service in the Second World War, Leslie William Barnard (1924-2016) graduated from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1948 with a degree in Theology. He was ordained in the 1950s and served a number of parishes. He undertook a PhD in Patristic studies at Southampton University, and in 1968 was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Leeds. In retirement, Leslie wrote a series of three biographies of eighteenth century bishops who were, like himself, Patristic scholars: John Potter (1989), Thomas Secker (1998), and Thomas Herring (2005).

With a new introduction by William Gibson.

This book from OCMCH Publications is available in paperback. Order your copy now by following this link.

Black History Month – Recovering Oxford Brookes University’s black heritage from the archives

For Black History Month, we’re delving into the Centre’s archives to learn more about Oxford Brookes University’s black heritage.

During a recent digitisation project, we made freely-accessible online a photograph album from the Westminster Training College archives dating from 1893 to 1912.¹ This belongs to a series that commences in the 1850s and mainly features formal group shots of students, staff, and sports teams arranged chronologically. It is the most important visual record of the college’s earliest history.

What’s remarkable about one Westminster College photograph for 1904-5 is that it is the first to include a black student. He stands prominently in the centre of the group, just behind the college staff and the chairman of the Union Society, and is proudly wearing a form of African dress over his suit. Notes alongside the photograph identify him as ‘Nichols’.²

Corroboration with the Wesleyan Education Committee’s teachers’ register reveals this was the Rev. William G. Nicol of Sierra Leone.³ From a Creole background, Nicol was a graduate of Fourah Bay College in Freetown affiliated with the University of Durham; he matriculated in 1887 and earned his B.A. in 1891.⁴ Fourah Bay opened in 1827, and was dubbed the ‘Athens of West Africa’. It was the first Sub-Saharan establishment of higher education founded after the collapse of the ancient university of Timbuktu.⁵

Having earned his degree, Nicol was a tutor at the High School in Freetown. Already prominent in Wesleyan circles in Sierra Leone, in 1892 he was a public speaker during centenary celebrations marking 100 years of Methodism in the country.⁶ Nicol’s name first appears in the proceedings of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in 1896, where he is described as a ‘native assistant minister’.⁷ The ‘assistant’ part was dropped in 1901 when he was ordained. ‘Native’ ministers were equipped for undertaking colonial duties, but were not permitted by the Conference to undertake positions in Britain.⁸

In 1903, Nicol was promoted to vice-principal of the High School, but he was destined for still greater things.⁹ £20 was raised by the Wesleyan circuit in Freetown to send Nicol to England to further his training at Westminster College and better qualify himself to succeed as principal.¹⁰ This step was supported by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and the Colonial Office.¹¹

It was not uncommon in this period for Westminster students to go onto careers in the wider Empire. The registers record that they served in Australia, Canada, India, South Africa (and beyond) as teachers, inspectors, ministers, and missionaries.¹² But Nicol was the first to come from Africa to England. His arrival was warmly acknowledged in The Westminsterian for May 1904, just as other students were concluding their classes for the year.¹³

The Westminsterian (May 1904)

Aged around 35-40, Nicol was senior to his Westminster classmates (and even some tutors) in age, academic, and ministerial terms – having been ordained and holding a Durham B.A. That said, it appears that he did engage with student life at the college. On 12 November 1904, Nicol addressed the Senior Debating Society on the subject of ‘Individuality’.¹⁴

SOAS. MMS Box 795. File 1905. Item 29, letter from William G. Nicol, 9 August 1905

Surviving letters from Nicol’s time at Westminster mainly concern his accommodation and financial support. He lodged in Medway Street, immediately adjacent to the college site, and was reliant on regular maintenance from his teaching salary and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. Nicol also requested funds to buy a new set of teeth, having suffered twenty-two extractions(!).¹⁵

Nicol also participated in wider Wesleyan life in England, making appearances at local meetings and events. He can be identified as one of several preachers from Sierra Leone to address English congregations in the first years of the twentieth century.¹⁶ This sometimes brought cultural attitudes into sharper focus. In May 1904, shortly after his arrival from Sierra Leone, Nicol attended a Missionary Meeting in Guildford where he was described as ‘the centre of interest’. Newspaper coverage seemed as much concerned with describing his appearance in racialised language as providing an account of the speech he gave. Appealing to sensibilities of the time, Nicol addressed the meeting about the progress of missionary work and said,

He stood there that night of living proof of Methodist evangelism and self-sacrifice, by which thousands of his brothers in West Africa had been emancipated from heathenism

In Methodist circles, as elsewhere, attitudes towards people from Africa were still openly caricatured and racially-stereotyped. The June 1904 issue of The Westminsterian referred glowingly to a performance at the college by a blackface minstrel troupe, then still a common form of popular entertainment.¹⁷

Yorkshire Evening Press (26 August 1905)

But other appearances by Nicol were reported in less contentious terms. In August 1905 he was a guest preacher at the opening of the new Lecture Hall and Social Rooms at Melbourne Terrace Wesleyan Chapel in York.¹⁸ This may have been on his way to or from Durham, where he received a Masters degree for the ‘excellence’ of a paper on Socialism.¹⁹

Nicol returned to Sierra Leone at the end of his year at Westminster College, and successfully took up the principalship of the High School and Training Institution in Freetown. He is recorded in that post in the Wesleyan Methodist Conference minutes until 1911 when he left the Connexion.²⁰

Subsequently, Nicol undertook ministerial and teaching work in the Niger Delta.²¹ By 1914, he was leader of a ‘foreigners church’ in Calabar, in modern-day Nigeria.²² When this interdenominational church became associated with the Niger Delta Pastorate, Nicol and the Wesleyans broke away – but he was soon replaced from Lagos.²³ He remained in the area for around a decade before returning to Sierra Leone to teach under the colonial government. Nicol was senior master at the Prince of Wales School in 1930.²⁴

By the turn of the twentieth century, Westminster College had trained almost 5000 teachers.²⁵ Its contribution to the history of education in Britain cannot be underestimated. The identification of William G. Nicol as the first person from Africa to attend the college – and so, the first black student to attend a predecessor institution of Oxford Brookes University – is an important step in recovering black heritage from the archives.

To find out more about Black History Month 2023 celebrations at Oxford Brookes University, click here.

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1. OCMCH. Westminster College Archives, Ph/a/3, college photograph album, 1893-1912. Accessible online, here. ↩︎
2. We’re grateful to members of the ‘Old Photos of Sierra Leone’ Facebook group for their enthusiasm and input into the research for this blog post. ↩︎
3. OCMCH. Westminster College Archives, B/1/a/5, register of teachers, 1894-1922. ↩︎
4. Fourah Bay’s association with Durham began in 1876, with over fifty students earning degrees in its first decade or so. See, Matthew Paul Andrews, ‘Durham University: Last of the Ancient Universities and First of the New (1831-1871)’, unpublished University of Durham PhD thesis (2016). With thanks to Jonathan Bush, University Archivist at Durham, for more information. ↩︎
5. ‘Old Fourah Bay College’, UNESCO World Heritage Convention [accessed at https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5744/ on 16 October 2023]. ↩︎
6. Charles Marke, Origin of Wesleyan Methodism in Sierra Leone and History of its Missions (1913), p. 130. ↩︎
7. Minutes of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference. ↩︎
8. Thanks to Dr John Lenton for advice on this subject. ↩︎
9. Marke, Origin of Wesleyan Methodism in Sierra Leone and History of its Missions, p. 165. ↩︎
10. Ibid., p. 168. ↩︎
11. The Methodist Recorder (29 May 1905). ↩︎
12. OCMCH. Westminster College Archives, B/1/a/5, register of teachers, 1894-1922. ↩︎
13. The Westminsterian, vol. XIII, no. 6 (May 1904), p. 2. ↩︎
14. The Westminsterian, vol. XIV, no. 3 (Christmas 1904), p. 16. ↩︎
15. SOAS. MMS Box 794. File 1904. Item 22, letter from W. G. Nicol, to, W. H. Findlay, 26 April 1904; MMS Box 795. File 1905. Item 24, letter from W. G. Nicol, 15 July 1905; MMS Box 795. File 1905. Item 29, letter from W. G. Nicol, 9 August 1905. With thanks to Ed Hood at SOAS. ↩︎
16. In 1901, the Rev. T. T. Campbell spoke in Burnley, and the Rev. C. W. L. Coker in Runcorn. See, Burnley Express (6 March 1901); Runcorn Examiner (3 May 1901). ↩︎
17. The Westminsterian, vol. XIII, no. 7 (June 1904), p. 4. ↩︎
18. Yorkshire Evening Press (26 August 1905). ↩︎
19. The Methodist Recorder (29 May 1905). ↩︎
20. Minutes of Wesleyan Methodist Conference (1911), p. 152. ↩︎
21. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, The Wesleyan Presence in Nigeria, 1842-1962, An Exploration of Power, Control and Partnership in Mission (1992), pp. 107-110. ↩︎
22. Rosalind I. J. Hacket, Religion in Calabar, The Religious Life of a Nigerian Town (1989), p. 79. ↩︎
23. G. O. M. Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta, 1864-1918 (1978), p. 220. ↩︎
24. Sierra Leone Blue Book (1930), p. 99. ↩︎
25. OCMCH. Westminster College Archives, B/1/a/3, register of teachers, 1861-1896. Note on students figures by J. R. Langler dated 23 March 1898. Accessible online, here. ↩︎

Publication – Our Justice Journeys: Three Centuries of Striving for a Better World

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Our Justice Journeys: Three Centuries of Striving for a Better World edited by Thomas Dobson.

Methodist commitment to social justice predates the Church itself, and is often what draws members to the Connexion. Our Justice Journeys brings together papers from the 2022 Methodist Heritage conference celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hugh Bourne, alongside other essays touching on Methodist collections, histories, and work in the present day. Between them, they explore many different aspects and narratives of Methodist engagement with social justice, encompassing nearly three centuries of striving for a better world.

Contributors: Jonathan Hustler, Rachel Lampard, David Leese, Tim Macquiban, Elizabeth Morris, Mike Norman, Kate Rogers, Ruth Slatter, Allison Waterhouse, and Hannah Worthen.

This book from OCMCH Publications is available in paperback. Order your copy now by following this link.

Centre – OCMCH Annual Report 2022/23

The Centre has published its Annual Report for 2022-23 – an acknowledgement and celebration of our achievements over the past twelve months. OCMCH Director, Professor William Gibson, had the following to say about the Centre’s work over the last year,

The academic year 2022/23 has been a highly productive one for the Centre. Staff have participated in over fifty events and the recovery from COVID has meant that we have recorded over a hundred in-person uses of our collections.

Three specific examples of our work deserve special mention as they have potential to really enhance our activities. First, our small publishing venture, OCMCH Publications, saw the production of two new books, Clive Field’s Methodism in Great Britain and Ireland: A Select Bibliography of Published Local Histories and Philip Tovey’s History of the Local Ministry Pathway in the Diocese of Oxford. Future plans include a second volume by Clive Field and collection of essays from the 2022 Methodist Heritage conference.

Secondly, engagement with the wider world on the internet is growing significantly. British Methodist Buildings has been visited by more than three quarters of a million people and our other Digital Collections page has had half a million visitors. Our Twitter page has had 111,750 views.

A really exciting venture is an expansion of our ArtUK partnership to include the new Bloomberg Connects programme. This means that the Centre’s art collections will be electronically accessible in the same way that other major art collections are. They will be on the same platform as pictures from the Tate, Guggenheim, the Uffizi, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre. Daniel Reed and Tom Dobson have worked extremely hard to organise this development and we are sure it will expose our collections to a worldwide audience.

Our events this year have been better attended that ever before. We had a major conference on Evelyn Dunbar, a Christian Scientist and the only salaried woman war artist in the Second World War, which attracted over eighty delegates including representatives from the Ashmolean and the Imperial War Museum. Our annual Colloquium, focusing on new research and publications in ecclesiastical history, was also well attended and attracted very positive feedback.

Looking forward to 2023-4, we have just received back from the Oxford Digitisation Centre 3,500 images from the Curnock glass slides. These are fragile photographic images from the early twentieth century and almost certainly contain some ‘lost’ manuscripts of early Methodism. It is a great relief to have these images secure for the future, and to begin the exciting process of identifying each item. We also have plans to work with the Old Rectory at Epworth and John Wesley’s New Room in Bristol in making their work more widely available, and we are supporting a new Westminster College Heritage project.

We are also organising a conference in November, entitled ‘Church for Change’, which will explore the history of the Methodist Church’s commitment to social justice in light of the ‘Justice Seeking Church’ report to the 2023 Methodist Conference.

You can download a digital version of the full Annual Report, here.

Events – Some Trends in Methodist Education – Transforming Lives: An International Methodist Education Conference, April 2023

On Thursday 27 April, Professor Bill Gibson (OCMCH Director) and Tom Dobson (Collections, Digitisation & Research Officer), joined delegates in Bristol at Transforming Lives, a conference jointly organised by Methodist Schools (UK) and the International Association of Methodist Schools, Colleges and Universities (IAMSCU).

The Centre, along with 1100 other organisations, is an institutional member of IAMSCU, and all six continents had representatives at the conference. In all, the event lasted over a week, visiting our sister College, Southlands, in London; before heading to Bristol and Bath; and then on to Wesley House in Cambridge. This conference explored Methodist engagement with education throughout history, and also Methodist education alongside key issues to the international sector in the present day.

Having explored a series of exhibition stands – making time to acquire the new 275th anniversary history of Kingswood School, and begin planning Christmas activities with other Methodist heritage sites – we joined other delegates from Europe in a regional meeting, discussing how we can work more closely together, and how our collections and work can support their teaching and research activities.

The conference then started in earnest, with welcome speeches from the President and Vice-President of IAMSCU; a representative of Methodist Schools; and the Principal of Kingswood School.

Dr Gary Best opened the first full session in Bristol with a paper focussing on the history of Kingswood School, which had been founded by John Wesley in Bristol in 1748. This was the first fee-paying, boarding school established by Methodists. Dr Best finished his paper by commenting that, for Wesley, education and teaching was as much a vocation as preaching, and that, through education, a child could be raised with good Christian values.

Papers followed that discussed issues surrounding Methodist engagement with education, with a presentation from the Rev. Jennifer Smith (Superintendent Minister of Wesley’s Chapel and Leysian Mission) bridging the gap between Britain and the world; before discussion pieces from Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan, Vinita Prakash, and Julio Andre Vilanculos.

What was most interesting, however, was not the discussion around the growth of Methodist education, but how many of the matters raised are cyclical, repeating themselves time and again. Although teacher training was not covered, Dr Best’s paper referenced the fact that Kingswood had purposefully been established in an impoverished area, as Westminster College was just over a century later. The difference here, though, was that Westminster College sought to engage with the local children whereas Kingswood actively discouraged any mingling. Both Kingswood and Westminster were established as co-educational institutions, but both became single sex institutions within the first half a century of their operation, although both latterly returned to operation as co-educational, with Kingswood accepting both male and female students today.

Title page of Westminster College souvenir booklet (1951), OCMCH Digital Collections

Of further interest was that Kingswood School moved to Bath in 1851, the same year Westminster College opened on Horseferry Road, and that both Kingswood and Westminster were designed by James Wilson, resulting in buildings which looked very similar. Aside from these two institutions, Dr Best also noted that in the nineteenth century the varying Methodist denominations in Britain had embraced education as a missional output, none more so than the Methodists who, perhaps, viewed education as the fastest route for social mobility, and also as a link between themselves and the established Church of England.

Following Balfour’s 1902 Education Act (and the greater responsibility this placed on the state for the provision of education), many of these schools closed or were transferred to state management. This also reduced the financial burden on local Methodist circuits, who were expected to provide a good portion of the funding for these schools. Today, however, there are seventy-six Methodist schools in Britain alone, governed by four bodies (Methodist Independent Schools Trust; Methodist Academies and Schools Trust; The Epworth Trust; and the Inspiring Lives Educational Trust’).

The ‘Inspiring Lives Educational Trust’ will begin operation in September 2023 demonstrating, along with a growth in the number of Methodist schools worldwide, that there is a return to the provision of education by Methodists – proving that the trends in Methodist education (as with many things) are cyclical – growing and declining to meet the needs of changing populations and times and (certainly in Britain) changes and trends in direct state funding of education. 

Tom Dobson is Collections, Digitisation, and Research Officer at the OCMCH. He is pursuing a doctoral study titled ‘Training to Teach: Westminster College and the development of Higher Education in the 20th century‘

Events – ‘Rediscovering Evelyn Dunbar: a Life in Art’

Evelyn Dunbar, Self Portrait (1958), private collection

On Saturday 22 April 2023, the Centre welcomed over 50 guests (both in person and virtually) to the Harcourt Hill Campus for Rediscovering Evelyn Dunbar: a Life in Art – a celebration of the life and work of Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960) – most famous as the only woman artist salaried by the War Artists Advisory Committee during the Second World War.

Professor Lucy Mazdon, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes, provided an introductory message:

During the course of the day we heard four excellent papers illuminating different aspects of Dunbar’s life and artistic practice; Peter Vass drew from the recently-discovered sketchbooks now in the Centre’s collections to provide insights into her juvenilia; Gill Clarke explored Dunbar’s illustrations informed by her deep knowledge of gardening and horticulture; Claire Brenard elaborated on Dunbar’s connection with the War Artists Advisory Committee, with specific reference to papers and artworks in the collections of the Imperial War Museum; Jan Cox highlighted the importance of Christian Science as the spiritual foundation of Dunbar’s life and art.

The day concluded with a round table discussion featuring all speakers, led by Ian Holgate, senior lecturer in the History of Art at Oxford Brookes.

This commenced with an address by Christopher Campbell-Howes, who gave an enthusiastic and generous recap of the day’s events, which included indications of future pathways of ‘Dunbar Studies’:

I leave you – you, Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History – that spark that Peter Vass mentioned, that holy fire, that sacred flame of her work and her memory. Everything that she stood for. And I know that that flame will be well-tended and kept burning brightly.

You can revisit these papers here:

The conference was accompanied by an exhibition of works by Dunbar from the Centre’s collection, supplemented with items loaned from a private collection especially for the occasion.

Selections from the Evelyn Dunbar Collection (OCMCH)

The Evelyn Dunbar Collection is available for consultation at the Centre. For more information click, here.

Publication – History of the Local Ministry Pathway in the Diocese of Oxford

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of History of the Local Ministry Pathway in the Diocese of Oxford by Phillip Tovey.

This book looks at the history of theological education for laity and ministry in the Diocese of Oxford. While there are a few histories of colleges, there is almost nothing on Reader training and on Local Ministry. This book tells the story from the inside and includes voices of the participants.

Phillip Tovey worked for twenty four years in theological and ministerial education for the Diocese of Oxford, eventually becoming the Principal of the Local Ministry Pathway and Warden of Licensed Lay Ministers. He has published many books and articles in the areas of history, theology and liturgy. He is now retired in the diocese.

This book from OCMCH Publications is available in paperback. Order your copy now by following this link.