Patrick Comerford
In recent weeks, I have been visiting a number of churches in Bedford, including Saint Paul’s Church, the main church in the town centre, Saint Peter’s Church on Saint Peter’s Street in the De Parys area, Saint Cuthbert’s Church in the middle of a traffic island between Castle Road and Mill Street, the former Church of the Holy Trinity, now part of Bedford Sixth Form College; and the site of a long-disappeared mediaeval church, All Hallows’ Church.
But Bedford also has a strong nonconformist or dissenting tradition, and on Mill Street I visited two chapels that are integral parts of that tradition: Bunyan Meeting Church, associated with John Bunyan, and the former Howard Congregational Church, associated with the campaigner for penal reform, John Howard.
Howard Congregational Church, was built in 1774 under the patronage of John Howard and was rebuilt in 1849 and was last used for worship in 1971. The philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790) was a leading figure in 18th century life in Bedford, and his statue stands in a prominent place in Saint Paul’s Square, in front of Saint Paul’s Church.
John Howard was born in London in 1726, the son of a nonconformist City merchant. His mother died shortly after his birth and he was sent as a sickly child to the family home in Cardington, Bedfordshire, to be nursed by the wife of a tenant.
Howard’s father died when he was still a young man, leaving him with the Cardington estate and independent means. When he was 24, he suffered a dangerous illness and was nursed back to health by a woman 30 years older than him. He married her but she died three years later.
On a visit to Portugal, Howard was captured and imprisoned by a French privateer. He was treated with such cruelty that he made up his mind to ease the sufferings of prisoners once he was freed.
Back in England, John Howard married again in 1758, when he married Henrietta Leeds from Croxton in Cambridgeshire. But Henrietta died in 1765 soon after giving birth to their child. Later, their son spent his last 13 years in an asylum in Leicester, and died in 1799.
John Howard worshipped regularly at the Independent Chapel in Bedford where John Bunyan had preached in the previous century. The Bunyan Meeting Church is between the house where Howard lived from 1765 to 1789 and the chapel he later founded. Howard gave a gift of part of his garden to the church as a graveyard, which is now a garden of remembrance, and he presented a new pulpit to the Bedford Meeting in 1770.
Two years later, however, the debate about infant baptism split the congregation. Howard, who favoured infant baptism, withdrew from the Bunyan Meeting Church in 1772. He gave £200 towards building what became known as the New Meeting or the Howard Meeting a few metres west along Mill Street, Bedford, in 1774.
Meanwhile, Howard became High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Immediately, he began to inspect the conditions in Bedford Gaol, then at the junction of Silver Street and the High Street and once the place where John Bunyan was imprisoned. One biographer said Howard ‘was as eager to get into prisons as Bunyan was to get out’.
The prison had two dungeons, each 11 ft below ground, and both male and female prisoners shared a small exercise yard. Even a prisoner who was found not guilty had to pay 15s 4d to the gaoler and 2s to the turnkey to be released.
Howard spent his last 16 years campaigning to improve the conditions of prisoners. He continued to live in Cardington but spent much of his wealth and time travelling over 50,000 miles investigating the conditions of prisons across Britain and Europe.
The House of Commons heard his evidence on several occasions, and he published his State of the Prisons in England and Wales in 1777, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons.
He travelled to Russia in 1789 and was inspecting prisons in the Tsarist empire when he contracted typhus and died in Kherson in Ukraine on 20 January 1790. He was 63, and he was buried at Stepanovka. Howard’s estates eventually passed to Samuel Charles Whitbread, a grandson of his friend and relative Samuel Whitbread I.
Meanwhile, three years after Howard’s death, another schism divided Bunyan’s chapel or the Old Meeting in Bedford. The Revd Samuel Hillyard (1770-1839) from Olney became the minister at the Old Meeting in Bedford in 1790, and was ordained in 1792. But, because he was an Independent or Congregationalist, a number of the Baptist members of the Bunyan chapel left to found the Third Church of Bedford in Mill Lane in 1793.
In time, the New Meeting founded by Howard on Mill Street in 1774 became known as the Howard Chapel. Daniel Millard was the architect of the new chapel, and it became a part of the Congregational Church.
The building was refronted and enlarged by John Usher (1822-1904) in 1849. It is a two-storey building with a stucco front, a recessed centre, a Doric portico, segmental headed windows on the ground floor, round arched windows on the first floor, and open pediments. A schoolroom and classrooms were added in 1862 to celebrate the 30 years of ministry of the Revd William Alliott. The chapel could seat 700 people.
The church had a youth club and a men’s forum in the 1950s. By the 1960s, however, the church had dwindling numbers, and the building was last used for worship in 1971. The majority of the remaining congregation joined Saint Luke’s Church in Saint Peter’s Street, an earlier amalgamation of older Presbyterian and Moravian churches.
The new body became Saint Luke’s United Church and a constituent member of the United Reformed Church in 1972. But Saint Luke’s closed for the last time as a church in 2008 and since 2015 it has been the Quarry Theatre.
There was a small burial ground around the former Howard Chapel on Mill Street. But the remaining headstones were moved from their original places and they placed up against the side walls.
The Howard Chapel stood as a derelict building throughout much of the 1980s and into the 1990s. It was later bought and became a nightclub. Its conversion to a nightclub was criticised in the local newspapers, not least because the gravestones around it were cleared away to the sides of the building.
It reopened as Cubana last December and claims to be the ‘biggest nightclub in Bedford’, although during the day it appears vacant. The name ‘Howard Chapel’ remains visible on the façade.
John Howard’s statue in Saint Paul’s Square, Bedford, by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934) was erected in 1890 to mark the centenary of Howard’s death. The monument is about 20 ft (6.1 metres) high and is Grade I listed. It stands on the site of a fountain presented to the town by Thomas Wesley Turnley (1809-1875) in 1870 and demolished in 1880.
Howard’s statue was unveiled on 28 March 1894 by Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford. Gilbert was a student of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, whose statue of John Bunyan is nearby. But Gilbert refused to attend, as he had done with the unveiling of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain (‘Eros’) in Piccadilly Circus, London, in 1893.
The Howard League for Penal Reform is named after John Howard, and he is also commemorated by a statue in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London.
The Howard Memorial Church in Cardington, 4 miles south-east of Bedford, remains open and is affiliated to both the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church.
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