Patrick Comerford
During my visits to Cambridge last week, on my way to and from the High Leigh Conference Centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, one of the many churches I have went to see was Cambridge Memorial Church or Cambridge Unitarian Church on Emmanuel Road.
The church was built on the corner of Emmanuel Road and Victoria Street almost 100 years ago in 1928. It faces across the open green space of Christ’s Pieces, and is a short walk from Emmanuel College and Drummer Street Bus Station.
Cambridge Unitarians describe themselves as ‘a friendly, active and growing congregation based in the heart of Cambridge.’ They gather for Sunday Services and a range of other events and activities. They are especially focussed on social justice, LGBT+ equality and community work.
The poet John Milton (1608-1674), who studied at Christ’s College, is sometimes cites among influential people in Cambridge who held Unitarian views, although this is a simplification of Milton’s views. Similarly, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is often cited as an early Unitarian in Cambridge, although he kept private many of his theological opinions and remained a nominal Anglican.
The Revd William Whiston (1667-1752), who succeeded Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, was deprived of his university offices because of his Unitarian views, and became a Baptist
The Revd Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) was a Fellow of Saint John’s College and later Vicar of Catterick. He was strongly influenced by Whiston and resigned his parish in 1774 to become minister of the first openly Unitarian congregation in England at Essex Street in London.
The Revd William Frend (1757-1841), a mathematician and Fellow of Jesus College, resigned his living as Vicar of Madingley in 1787 and became a Unitarian. He was part of a circle of leading intellectual dissenters in Cambridge that included George Dyer, Benjamin Flower, Robert Hall and Robert Tyrwhitt and Robert Robinson.
It seems there was no organised, formal Unitarian presence in Cambridge before 1875-1876. However, FJM Stratton (1881-1960), the church’s first chair, claimed the congregation began to meet in the ‘smoky atmosphere’ of a billiard room in Green Street. He traced the Unitarian Church in Cambridge back to a congregation was formed in 1680 and that met in a chapel in Green Street until 1818, when the lease of the building came to an end.
Cambridge Nonconformists were the heirs of the mid-17th century Puritans. They included the Baptists at Saint Andrew’s Street and the Cambridge Great Meeting at Hog Hill or Hog Hill Independent Church, which began in 1687 and became Emmanuel Congregational Chapel in 1790 and later Emmanuel United Reformed Church on Trumpington Street, but closed in 2017.
The other nonconformist congregations in Cambridge included the congregation of the old meeting house on the north side of Green Street, which began meeting in 1669 in the home of Elizabeth Petit.
Green Street runs from Trinity College to Sidney Street, with the east end facing onto Sidney Sussex College. The returns of Nonconformist conventicles in Cambridge in 1680 record one that met at ‘Widow Elizabeth Petit’s house in Green Street.’ At the time, it was the only important nonconformist congregation in Cambridge then possessed, and had about 100 ‘hearers’.
The early ministers included the Revd Samuel Corbyn, a former chaplain of Trinity College who was ejected from Trinity and Clare in 1662 under the Act of Uniformity, Joseph Oddy and Francis Holcroft.
This congregation built a meeting house or chapel in 1688 on the site of Nos 3, 4 and 5 Green Street, on the north side of the street, immediately behind the present Sainsbury supermarket on Sidney Street.
After the Toleration Act, a Congregational Church was established in Green Street, with a settled meeting house. This chapel or meeting house was some distance back from the street, and was accessible only through a narrow passage between two houses. Such secluded situations were preferred by the early nonconformists, offering security against mob violence.
The early ministers also included Thomas Taylor, formerly of Gonville Caius College, who had led a small congregation in Bury St Edmund’s. He was ‘silenced’ after the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and was jailed for nonconformity. However, he held no endowed benefice, and so is not counted among the 2,000 ministers who were ‘ejected.’
After the Toleration Act, Taylor became the pastor of the Green Street congregation. He seems to have been a moderate Calvinist. He was described in 1692 as ‘a judicious and faithful minister who hath witnessed a good confession, and that in bonds, for the commandments of God.’
He described the Green Street congregation as ‘small’ in 1693. It was outnumbered by the Great Meeting in Hog Hill, where the minister was the Revd Joseph Hussey. That congregation was Presbyterian in origin, but in 1694 Hussey induced it to begin to follow Congregational usages, and in 1696 it drew up a ‘church covenant’ for its members.
With these innovations, some members left and joined the Green Street chapel. When these newcomers persuaded Taylor’s church to induce it to cease being Congregational, some of the older members seceded to Hussey’s church. But, in reality, both the Congregationalists and Presbyterians in Cambridge, were close to each other.
At the funeral of Francis Holcroft, an ejected Fellow of Clare known as ‘the Apostle of Cambridgeshire,’ the preface to his funeral sermon was signed jointly by Taylor as the minister of the Congregationalists and by Joseph Hussey as minister of the Presbyterians.
The Revd Thomas Leavesley was a minister in Cambridge in 1697, probably as a colleague to the aged Taylor. Taylor died in 1700, aged 75, and was buried in the meeting house. He was succeeded by James Peirce, who also became a trustee of the Hog-hill Chapel so he must have been already settled In Cambridge. He was a Congregationalist by origin, but was ordained by Presbyterian ministers.
Peirce became friendly with the mathematician Whiston and the two became the most prominent Arians of their generation. When Peirce came to Cambridge, he found the congregation in Green Street ‘a discontented people.’ By 1708, he had settle as minister at Newbury. Later, he was at the centre of the dispute at Salters' Hall that led to the beginnings of Unitarianism in England.
It seems it was difficult to find a successor to Peirce, and by 1715 Hussey bitterly claims that the Green Street Chapel had 20 ministers in the 15 years. In that year, the Green Street congregation had some 300 people associated with it, while. Hussey’s had 1,100.
The pastor in Green Street in 1715 was the Revd John Cumming, an Irish-born Presbyterian who was ordained in Scotland. He moved to London in 1716. George Wightwick then became the pastor, but he moved to Colchester in 1720.
Hussey had left Cambridge in 1720, and the Green Street congregation, still numbered 300 in 1721 when the Revd James Duchal (1697-1761), an Irish-born Presbyterian, was invited to the pulpit. Duchal left Cambridge in 1730 and became a minister in Antrim and Dublin, where he was a key figure in the development of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians or Unitarians in Ireland. In later life, he described his time in Cambridge as the ‘most delightful’ part of his career.
Duchal was succeeded by John Notcutt, who left soon after 1740. By then, the Green Street congregation was the most important dissenting presence in Cambridge. But it soon went into decline under Notcutt’s successors, a minister named Marshall in 1743, the Revd Richard Jones in 1750, and the Revd Samuel Henley in 1762.
Henley joined the Church of England in 1769. When he left, the Green Street chapel closed for about two years. The Revd John Robotham, who came in 1772, was ‘nearly, if not quite, a Socinian’ or Unitarian. His congregation dwindled rapidly, he left about 1778, the meeting house was closed once again, and the Presbyterian congregation disappeared. Some of the members joined the Independents at Hog Hill, while others joined the Baptists in St Andrew’s Street.
New life came with the ‘Evangelical Revival’ and the preaching of George Whitefield and John Wesley. During this revival, John Stittle (1727-1813) was converted under the preaching of the eccentric John Berridge of Everton, a friend of Wesley. Stittle became a preacher and the Green Street Meeting House reopened as a Congregational chapel in 1781 with Stittle as its pastor.
John Stittle is referred to as Stettle by Byron in 1811 in his ‘Hints from Horace.’ He was married four times, and survived his fourth wife. He said that if he had known that he should survive her so many years he would have married a fifth one.
Stittle could read but not write, and many stories are told of his eccentric ministry his running battles with undergraduates, who would come to ridicule him. On one occasion, he invited an undergraduate who had been insulting him to return home and share his supper, after which the student stayed on for family worship. This led the undergraduate to consider religion seriously and eventually to become a preacher himself.
Stittle was a high Calvinist and rejected all water baptism, either of infants or adults. and attracted some of Charles Simeon’s congregation from Holy Trinity Church in the Market Square. When Simeon later heard that Stittle was in financial difficulty, he sent him a regular allowance with a note thanking him ‘for shepherding my stray sheep’. When Stittle died at the age of 85 in 1813, he was buried in the Green Street Meeting House, by then known as ‘Stittle’s Chapel’.
Stittle’s successor in 1815 was a Mr Popplewell. When the lease of the old building expired in 1818, the owner refused to renew it. The congregation split, with some members moving to a building on the opposite, south side of Green Street and a group of Stittle’s followers renting the original meeting house in their place. Those divisions within Presbyterian, Independents or Congregationalists and Baptists are a constant feature in nonconformist history in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Stittle’s former meeting house was hired in 1819 by a small and newly formed group of Calvinistic Baptists. By 1820 they built a new chapel on Fitzroy Street, on land that was part of a piece called, ‘The Garden of Eden.’ The name ‘Eden’ was given to their new chapel. When Green Street was rebuilt in 1826 and the old chapel was pulled down, Stittle’s grave was opened, and he was reburied at Eden Chapel.
So two groups emerged eventually from the remaining congregation from Green Street Chapel: one group went on to become Eden Baptist Church; the other led to what in time became a Unitarian congregation in Cambridge. The irony is not lost on many that one of most conservative and closed evangelical churches in Cambridge and the most theologically liberal church in Cambridge both trace their origins to the same Green Street Meeting House.
The present Unitarian congregation in Cambridge traces its roots to a congregation that met from 1875 or 1876 onwards in the Green Street Billiard Room. But a formal, explicitly Unitarian, congregation was not formded in Cambridge until 1904 following a series of lectures on ‘The Historical Jesus and the Theological Christ’ by the Unitarian scholar and lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford, Revd Joseph Estlin Carpenter (1844-1927), principal of Manchester College (now Manchester Harris College), Oxford.
The congregation’s first chair was FJM Stratton (1881-1960), who was the Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1928 to 1947. The new congregation met in Stratton’s rooms on Downing Street. The present church hall was built in 1923 and it was used as the church until the present church on Emmanuel Road was built in 1927-1928.
Both the hall and the church were designed by Ronald Potter Jones (1876-1965). In his design of the church, Jones was inspired by Sir Christopher Wren’s chapel at Pembroke College. He also designed the Unitarian chapel in West Kirby (1928), and adapted the Westgate Chapel at Lewes in 1913.
Jones was a pupil in Liverpool of Thomas Worthington and his son Sir Percy Worthington, who designed many Unitarian chapels and Manchester Harris College in Oxford. Jones was no admirer of Victorian Gothic, and his work is an attractive example of the neoclassical style. His interiors in Cambridge and West Kirby are similar in their restrained yet rich design and woodwork.
The cost of building borne by MGW Brown, a local business figure in memory of his daughter Millicent. A Latin memorial in the chapel is based on 18th century memorial in Toxteth.
Gandhi (1869-1948) visited the church in 1931 to speak to the Indian Community Association in the hall.
An important figure in the church in the 1960s and 1970s was Arnold McNair (1885-1975), Lord McNair of Gleniffer, who was President of the congregation. He was Professor of Law at Cambridge, Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool University, President of the International Court of Justice and first president of the European Court of Human Rights.
Cambridge Unitarian Church describes itself as a ‘Non-Prophet Organisation.’ The church, and its hall, common room, kitchen and office are home to a modern, progressive and free-thinking community that says: ‘Here there is only one orthodoxy, namely, a love of truth that is a sincere desire to understand how the world is and our place in it.’
The Revd Andrew James Brown has been the minister since 2000. He was born in 1965 in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and originally trained as a musician at Colchester Institute where he studied double-bass. He later studied theology at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and Jewish-Christian Relations through the Woolf Institute, where he has been a tutor and researcher in the Centre for Public Education.
Sunday services are held between 10:30 and 11:40. Communion is celebrated three times a year, on Christmas Eve, Good Friday and Pentecost/Whitsunday.
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