Patrick Comerford
I was visiting a number of churches in the Hatton Garden and Holborn area in London recently, including Saint Alban’s Church, Holborn, Saint Etheldreda’s Church on Ely Place, the City Temple near Holborn Viaduct and Saint Peter’s Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road, facing the top end of Hatton Garden.
While I was walking back to Euston Station, I also found myself at the Theobald’s Road entrance to Conway Hall. I had written about Conway Hall in the past when I was visiting Red Lion Square, and about both the statue of Fenner Brockway by Ian Walters and the violent death of Kevin Gately, a young student, during a protest against fascism and racism in 1974.
Conway Hall describes itself as a home for humanism and is the base for the Conway Hall Ethical Society, whose aims includes the study of ethical principles based on humanism and free thought.
It was named after Moncure Daniel Conway, an anti-slavery campaigner, outspoken supporter of free thought and biographer of Thomas Paine. The hall and building were designed by F Herbert Mansford and were built in 1929. But they are the spiritual or social heirs of the former South Place Chapel, which was opened in Finsbury in 1824, and their origins can be traced back to radical Unitarian and Universalist chapels and pastors in that part of London in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Conway Hall Ethical Society is devoted to free religious thought and ethical inquiry. It trace its beginnings to a small chapel on the east rim of the City of London. After 30 years, the society moved to a building in Finsbury that was its home for a 105 years, and then, in 1929, it moved its present site in Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury.
The founder was the Revd Elhanan Winchester (1751-1797), who was born near Boston, Massachusetts. He taught himself Hebrew Greek, Latin and French, and grew up in the harsh Calvinism. By 19, he was preaching about election, reprobation, and everlasting torment. A personal awakening came brought about in a rebuke during a casual encounter and in time he was preaching universalism and the final restoration of all things. By 30, he was filling one of the largest churches in Philadelphia and in 1787 he moved to England.
English Nonconformity had never heard of Universalism, but many Baptist pulpits in London were open to him. At 42, he was a popular preacher and a prolific writer of sermons, hymns and tracts, and in 1793 his adherents found a building in Parliament Court, off Artillery Row, close to Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) and Liverpool Street station.
His congregation was made up of seceders from various Calvinist chapels. Winchester called his congregation Philadelphians and he stayed at Bishopsgate for 18 months, until he returned to America in 1794. He died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1797, at the age of 46.
The second minister of the Bishopsgate congregation, the Revd William Vidler (1758-1812), was born in Battle, near Hastings. The son of a mason and bricklayer. At 19 he joined a local Independent or Congregational chapel. He moved around the Sussex villages, preaching and baptising in the open air.
On a preaching journey to London and the Midlands, he came upon Winchester’s writings and was invited to preach at Parliament Court. Vidler was soon recognised in London as recognised as leader of the scattered Universalists but he moved steadily to the Unitarian position. Many members left the chapel in Parliament Court because of his Unitarian opinions, and his stipend fell by more than 60%, but he worked hard to rebuild his congregation. He died in 1812, and his funeral was held in the Gravel Pit chapel.
His successor, the Revd William Johnson Fox (1786-1864), was involved at an early age in unionising weavers in Norwich and at 20 he entered the Independent College in Homerton. His first chapel was in Fareham, Hampshire, but by the age of 24 he had moved to the general Unitarian position, and in 1812 he became the minister of a unitarian (Presbyterian) chapel in Chichester for five years.
Fox was called to the Parliament Court Chapel when William Vidler died and was installed in 1817 at the age of 31. He was radical in politics and in theology, and his chapel was always filled and was financially prosperous. He married Eliza Florance in Saint George’s in the East in 1820.
Fox laid the foundation-stone for a new chapel in South Place, Finsbury, in May 1823, and it opened on 1 February 1824. The former Parliament Court was later transformed into Sandy’s Row Synagogue.
The new South Place Chapel was a centre of liberal religion and intellectual activity, he spoke regularly on progressive causes, including education, the civil rights of Catholics and Jews, the repeal of the Test Acts, and women’s suffrage, and he was a founder of the Unitarian Association.
Fox’s influence in London expanded rapidly and his South Place congregation included families and people prominent in the City and in public life. His Sunday sermons became lectures and addresses. They were prepared in full shorthand notes, and for publication they were usually copied out by Eliza Flower, his devoted amanuensis.
In time, the ties that bound him to the Unitarian Association were wearing thin, as his religious ideas became far too radical for the general body of Unitarians whose theological beliefs still kept within the framework of biblical authority.
During the early 1830s, the important question was whether the minister’s independence, personal and intellectual, was becoming threat to the unity of the congregation. Eliza Flower became the central figure of a crisis in 1834. When Benjamin Flower died in 1829, he entrusted his daughters Eliza and Sarah to the care of Fox, his friend and neighbour. Eliza was a gifted musician while Sarah was known as poet and hymnwriter, and the author of ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’.
Fox’s friendship with Eliza Flower led to the breakup of his marriage and caused a crisis in South Place Chapel. He challenged the right of members of the congregation to interfere with his domestic affairs. Although there was no charge of impropriety, the complainants rejected Fox’s advocacy of divorce in cases of incompatibility. A large majority in the congregation exonerated Fox and asked him to withdraw his resignation, but 50 families withdrew, the chapel lost120 members of the congregation, Fox’s stipend was cut, and five other Unitarian ministers censured him.
The way the scandal unfolded and was handled led to a change in Fox’s ministerial character, and his addresses lost the tone of sermons. Eliza Flower took charge of his household and the care of his three children, and they moved into a cottage in Craven Hill, close to Bayswater, then a rural district and an inconvenient distance from South Place. There they stayed four years, until 1839, when they moved to Queen’s Square, Westminster. Sarah Flower Adams died in 1846 at 40; Eliza died in 1848 at 45. For about 10 years Fox then lived at Charlotte Street, Bedford Square, and then in Sussex Place, Regent’s Park.
Fox was the Liberal MP for Oldham from 1847 to 1862. He offered to resign from South Place when he was first elected an MP, but the society did not accept his resignation until 1852. Fox and his wife Eliza were reunited for a time before he died on 3 June 1864 at the age of 78. His memorial service was conducted by Dr Moncure D Conway who had become Fox’s successor at South Place.
There was an interval of 12 years between Fox’s resignation in 1852 and Conway’s arrival, and some of the ministers who filled the pulpit for short periods included the Revd Newenham Travers, who had resigned his Anglican orders and was there for two years; the Revd Henry Ierson, whose theology was out of key, but who continued for four years; and the Revd HH Barnett from Bristol, who resigned telling the South Place congregation: ‘You want a very different minister; I want a very different congregation.’
The society seriously considered dissolving itself in 1863, but the Revd Dr Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907) was in England that summer, and his arrival altered the outlook. He first entered the Methodist ministry, but left Methodism when he was at Harvard Divinity School, then the dominant Unitarian seminary.
He was still in his early 20s when he took charge of a Unitarian congregation in Washington. His outspoken advocacy of abolition brought a quick end that work and he moved to Cincinnati. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, he gave up his church to devote himself to the cause of Emancipation, and edited an abolitionist paper in Boston. A Sunday address at South Place introduced him to the remnant of Fox’s congregation, and the prelude to a ministry of 20 years from 1864, at the age of 32.
The South Place congregation had dwindled and the chapel was heavily in debt. His success was immediate, many families return, the financial basis was quickly restored, and by the close of the 1860s Conway had established himself and South Place had regained much of its former reputation as a centre advanced thought and progressive social activity.
Conway introduced an alternative to the Bible reading, and began to replace prayer with meditative reading. The interior of the chapel was remodelled in the early 1870s, the high pews were replaced by movable seats, a new organ was installed and a new hymnal was introduced. Conway’s religious philosophy had moved on, the Sunday services shed the remaining forms of liberal orthodoxy, and the chapel became the South Place Religious Society.
Conway first retired in 1885, with seven farewell discourses, and sailed for New York. The chapel faced great difficulties finding a new of minister or leader. Dr Stanton Coit changed the name from the South Place Religious Society to the South Place Ethical Society. He resigned in 1891, founded the West London Ethical Society, and later set up the Ethical Church in Bayswater, where he ministered until old age.
Meanwhile, Conway had kept in contact with South Place and was invited to return for a second term at the age of 60. The society celebrated its centenary in 1893 with a series of Sunday addresses, but Conway tended to withdraw from the general activities of the Chapel, confined himself to Sunday duty, and finally retired in 1897, a few weeks after Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
The committee cast the net widely for the Sunday meetings, and the names included Prince Kropotkin, George Bernard Shaw, GK Chesterton, JM Robertson, John A Hobson, Herbert Burrows and Joseph McCabe, and, from the early 1920s, Dr. Cecil Delisle Burns.
After World War I, the chapel and freehold were sold in 1920 to the School of Oriental Studies, and a new site was bought and Conway Hall was built on Red Lion Square, and F Herbert Mansford was the architect. The last Sunday meeting in the old chapel was held in March 1926, 102 years after it was opened by WJ Fox. For three years, the Sunday meetings were held in the lecture theatre of the School of Oriental Studies.
Conway Hall opened on Monday 23 September 1929. Sunday mornings were largely devoted to international and Labour problems, as well as philosophy, morals and religion, with a noticeable absence of topics related to the Bible.
Conway Hall opened half-way between the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II. Fox’s ministry spanned 35 years, and Conway’s two periods made 25. Later speakers and lecturers would include George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Jacob Bronowski, Fred Hoyle, Laurens van der Post, Alex Comfort, Fenner Brockway, Jonathan Miller, Bernard Crick, AC Grayling and Roger Penrose.
Meanwhile, in 1935, 20 members of the society signed a document stating that Conway Hall was their regular place of worship, and it was therefore certified for marriages by the Registrar-General until 1977 when the Deputy Registrar-General ruled that the hall could not be used for weddings under the terms of the Places of Worship Registration Act after Lord Denning, that marriages could only be solemnised in places whose principal use is for the ‘worship of God or [to do] reverence to a deity’.
Another name change took place in 2012 when it became the Conway Hall Ethical Society. Conway Hall today has a charming wood panelled hall and is a venue for concerts, plays, talks and functions, alongside regular events, such as the Sunday Assembly on the first and third Sunday of each month. The building also houses the Humanist Library and Archives. Access to the library is by appointment, Sunday to Thursday, 10 am to 5 pm.
