Minister of Religion – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Nathaniel Dodson

Nathaniel Dodson, who was vicar of St Helen’s for over forty years, was born in 1787 into a clerical family based in Sussex. His father and grandfather had been clergymen, and so were two of his brothers while the third became a leading canon lawyer. He entered St John’s College, Oxford, in 1805, took his BA degree with second-class honours in 1810 and was ordained a year later. After taking his MA in 1814 he became domestic chaplain to the first Earl of Sheffield, a middle-ranking politician also based in Sussex, and tutor to his son. He accompanied the young man on a three-year continental tour.

It was possibly through the earl that he came to the notice of Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, who in 1824 made him vicar of St Helen’s and rector of St Nicolas’ in Abingdon, which were then under the patronage of the Crown. According to biographical notes made much later by his daughter Emma, he was to become Dean of Chichester at the next vacancy and accepted Abingdon only reluctantly as a stopgap; but by the time the Chichester vacancy arose Liverpool was dying and had resigned the premiership.

Dodson’s local responsibilities extended to the hamlets of Drayton, Shippon, Dry Sandford, Radley and Northcourt. He proved active and hard-working. He took great care of his parishioners and gained the special respect of the poor among them. He had had some medical training and saved them doctors’ bills by treating them himself and lawyer’s fees by helping them write their wills.

He was a great builder. In the late 1840s he started a public appeal for the building of new churches at Dry Sandford and Shippon. Another appeal in 1860 resulted in the church of St Michael’s being established in Park Road; Dodson himself contributed £100 towards the £2500 budget. St Mary Magdalene at Shippon and St Michael’s were designed by George Gilbert Scott, architect of, among much else, the Albert Memorial and the St Pancras Hotel. The Reading-based architect, J B Clacy, was responsible for St Helen’s at Dry Sandford. In addition to St Helen’s, Abingdon, D0dson held the rectory of Buttermere, a small parish near Hungerford where he had to employ a curate, and must have been involved in rebuilding the dilapidated church there in the 1850s to a design by the ecclesiastical architect, Robert Jewell Withers.

When under the Poor Law of 1834 Abingdon was made the centre of a union , Dodson became chairman of the Board of Guardians that managed the new workhouse. Before accepting the position, he insisted that some of the harsher provisions of the new law should not apply: paupers would continue to get free medical attention, and married couples over sixty years of age or when one of them was infirm would not be separated. The post was subject to annual re-election, but he continued to hold it almost until his death.

His activities as a magistrate were mostly routine, but occasionally controversial. In 1845 he was viciously attacked in the satirical magazine Punch for an allegedly vindictive sentence on a poacher. Punch had got its facts wrong, and had to apologise. In 1844, as a magistrate responsible for oversight at the Abingdon gaol, he investigated and ended serious fraud and malpractice going on there. It had been an impressive piece of detective work, using one of the prisoners as a spy. At the same time, he questioned the inhumane ‘separate system’ in use at the newly opened Reading gaol, where convicts were denied any human contact except with warders and the chaplain. He was fearful that the Abingdon prisoners would eventually be transferred there, as indeed happened after his death.

When Dodson came to Abingdon, there was no vicarage. The banker William Bowles was mayor at the time, and there may have been some agreement between them. Bowles built a large house on land he leased at Lacies Court on what is now Bath Street, and in 1832 sold it to Dodson at half its cost as an official residence

Much later, when Albert Park was laid out in the 1860s, an acre of freehold ground at the top of the crescent was granted for a vicarage. Dodson started building a large house, now No 17 Park Crescent and sub-divided, but unfortunately he died before it was ready. It was his successor, Alfred Pott, who was the first occupant.

Dodson married in 1829 Mary Ann Wapshare, daughter of the rector of East Hendred. She died in 1833, leaving him with three infant daughters. In his last years, Dodson became disabled and blind and had to employ curates to carry out his duties. Nonetheless, when he died in August 1867, the town went into formal mourning. Shops were shut and the bells of all the churches rang continuously. He was to be buried with his wife at East Hendred, and as the funeral procession left Abingdon the mayor and corporation stood bare-headed at the town boundary on Drayton Road.

Memorial Tablet to Dodson at St Augustine, East Hendred.
(Photo © Michael Harrison)

Of his daughters, the oldest, Frances, remained unmarried, keeping a large house in Spring Road until she died in 1919 at the age of eighty-nine. Mary and Emma both maintained the family tradition by marrying clergymen. In spite of the very moderate income from St Helen’s and heavy expenditures on his churches, on curates, and on charity, Dodson was able to leave his children well provided for.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2019, revised 2022

Henry Forty

Henry Forty, preacher and occasional religious writer, was the first professional minister to lead the Abingdon Baptist community after the death in 1656 of its founder, John Pendarves.

His origin and early career are obscure. Accounts differ on the year of his birth, and are silent as to the place. Most probably, he was a Londoner, since he seems in the 1640s to have had some role at the proto-Baptist church at Swan Alley, off Coleman Street. By 1651, Forty was prominent enough to sign on behalf of his congregation a Confession of Faith of the Particular or Calvinistic Baptist sect that had been set up some years earlier and which Pendarves represented in Abingdon.

Soon after this we find him in the West Country as minister of a Particular Baptist community in Totnes. Pendarves was himself a west-countryman and kept up his connections there; in 1656 both Pendarves and Forty were among the signatories to a controversial tract called Sighs for Sion which might be read as a call for armed resistance to the Cromwell government. In the same year, Forty was one of the many Baptists who gathered in Abingdon for Pendarves’ funeral and had to be ejected from the town by the militia after disturbances.

Several accounts say that at the Restoration in 1660 Forty was arrested and held in prison at Exeter for twelve years. He may well have been held there for some time, but was back in London, probably at Swan Alley, by May 1670 when there was a crackdown on illegal religious assemblies. He was imprisoned at Southwark, and released two years later. It has been suggested that Forty was now officiating at Swan Alley, but this is uncertain. He published at least one tract from there in the 1670s, but in 1675 moved to Abingdon as minister.

For almost twenty years after Pendarves’ death, the congregation he had founded was led by its lay preachers, notably the wealthy maltster John Tomkins (1621-1708). Forty now took it in hand. Probably his greatest achievement was the revival from 1678 of Pendarves’ Abingdon Association, a regional grouping which held regular conferences at which representatives – ‘messengers’ – of the member churches worked to maintain unity of practice and administration. This now covered a much greater area than it had in Pendarves’ day, extending from its Abingdon centre as far as Reading and Cirencester.

Persecution of religious Dissenters intensified in the 1680s. Forty was excommunicated by the Church of England in 1684, which will have been intended as a financial rather than an ecclesiastical penalty since excommunicated persons were effectively excluded from the civil courts. But he had his triumph in July 1686 when James II was granting Protestant Dissenters dispensations from the repressive laws in the hope of gaining toleration also for his Catholic coreligionists. Forty was at the head of a group of twenty-five Abingdon Baptists on trial at the Berkshire assizes when their defending counsel, Thomas Medlycott, came with a royal dispensation in due form and they had to be acquitted. The hearing was on a Saturday. The Baptist chapel had been closed and, it seems, vandalised, but was cleaned up overnight and triumphantly re-opened for services the next day.

In June 1689, after the accession of William and Mary, the repressive laws were relaxed. Forty led some fifty members of his flock in publicly taking the oaths of allegiance to the new regime.

Forty’s position in the doctrinal debates of his time seems to have varied during his career, following changes in intellectual fashion. He moved early from the principle of open communion to one where access to the Lord ’s Supper was limited to those baptised as believing adults – but may have moved back again later. In the 1680s, there was controversy among the Baptists on whether hymn singing should be part of divine service, and he accepted this. It seems that he never did accept the laying on of hands as a qualification for the Baptist ministry and never underwent this ritual.

Forty died on 25 January 1692/3, presumably at Southwark where his funeral took place. The minister officiating described him, in spite of his effective pastoral work at Totnes and Abingdon, as merely a lay preacher.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

Father John Paul O’Toole

At the intersection of the Oxford and Radley roads in Abingdon is a group of buildings – church, cloister, presbytery, school and former convent – that have developed over the years for the benefit of Abingdon’s Catholic community. They have their origin in an organisation or ‘mission’ which was created in the 1850s largely by the efforts of three men. Father John Paul O’Toole was one of them and was the first minister to the mission. The other two were Sir George Bowyer, the generous donor, and William Wilkinson Wardell, the initial architect.

Father John Paul O’Toole (1805-1883), the first rector of St Edmund’s, arrived in Abingdon early in 1856. Compared to many of his contemporaries he was well provided for. In addition to the handsome presbytery and the chancel and sacristy now nearing completion, he enjoyed a stipend provided by George Bowyer of £100 per annum.

O’Toole came from an impressive academic background. Irish-born, he spent much of his early life studying in France. Later he returned to his native Galway where he displayed his continuing interest in education by applying for the presidency of the projected Queen’s College, although he had to be content with the post of vice-president. However, this attempt to equip Ireland with a system of secondary level institutions was doomed to failure; the bishops meeting in synod deplored the secular nature of the colleges. O’Toole was undeterred by the episcopal ban, and travelled to Rome in an unsuccessful bid to secure a papal veto on the bishops’ action. The Vatican endorsed the action of the bishops, leaving O’Toole a disappointed man.

O’Toole’s encounters with the Irish bishops seem to have played a part in his decision not to return to his own country. Given the growth of Catholicism in England, there was a real need not just for clergy but for clerics with experience. O’Toole offered his services to Bishop Grant of Southwark. After being engaged in pastoral and chaplains’ work, O’Toole’s appointment to Abingdon seemed particularly apt. St Edmund’s was the most accessible Catholic church for Oxford, and O’Toole would be expected to have some influence on Oxford University men who might be interested in Catholicism.

The Presbytery, Our Lady and St Edmund.
(Photo: M. Brod 2014)

Education had always been one of his concerns and a day school was opened shortly after his arrival in 1857. The teacher was a Mrs Howard, while O’Toole himself, as rector, offered classes in Christian doctrine. In the absence of a suitable building, classes met in the church and later in a disused nonconformist chapel in the Vineyard. It was O’Toole who invited the Sisters of Mercy to Abingdon; they arrived in 1860 and members of the order directed the school for almost a century and a half. The Sisters of Mercy were dedicated to St Mary, and after their arrival the church and parish took on the name of ‘Our Lady and St Edmund’.

Not only did St Edmund’s make a significant contribution to the spiritual life of Abingdon, but its founders will have had the satisfaction of seeing their ‘handsome group of ecclesiastical buildings’ praised in Cassey’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Berkshire and Oxfordshire for 1868 as being ’justly regarded as a great ornament to the town’.

© AAAHS and contributors 2014

John Pendarves

John Pendarves, minister of religion, was a Cornishman, born in 1623. He took his BA degree in Oxford just as the Civil War was starting, and then served in both the Parliamentary army and in its navy as a chaplain. He arrived in Abingdon in 1644 with the parliamentary occupation forces, and, finding St Helen’s vicarage empty, simply moved in. He was later confirmed both as minister at St Helen’s and as chaplain to the garrison.

In the heated religious climate of the time, his position was as a Puritan who was more radical than the mainstream, but without being an extremist. St Helen’s already had a nucleus of such believers thanks to its last pre-war vicar, Edward Roode. Pendarves was soon in contact with a group in London who were setting up a new denomination, the Particular, or Calvinistic, Baptists. In 1650, he resigned from St Helen’s to lead his followers into this new religion. His new congregation included members from all over the Vale of White Horse, and even as far away as Wiltshire; and he set up a second local centre of the denomination in Wantage.

Pendarves was an able and charismatic man. He travelled throughout the region to preach his doctrines, often in competition with other religious leaders, and sometimes accompanied by a band of rowdy supporters. His great achievement was the Abingdon Association, a forum at which representatives of local Baptist churches over a wide area would meet three times a year for up to three days to discuss common problems and maintain uniformity of practice. At its peak, this united twelve individual churches.

By 1656, he was moving into a more central role among the Baptists, but died in London of dysentery. There was a new Baptist cemetery in Abingdon, and his body was sealed into a sugar chest and brought slowly up-river for burial. It was a time of particularly febrile politics, with Oliver Cromwell’s regime under fire especially from the religious radicals. The funeral turned into a great anti-Cromwell carnival attended by people from all over the country, with inflammatory preaching, malcontents gathering support and concerting plans for insurrection, and the security services noting identities and searching baggage. After three days, the town had to be cleared by a force of cavalry. It seems unlikely that Pendarves himself, always eminently respectable, would have approved of such goings-on.

The Baptist community he set up in Abingdon exists to this day.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Archdeacon Alfred Pott

Alfred Pott was vicar of St Helen’s, Abingdon, from 1867 to 1875. It was one of six parishes he served in during his fifty-two years as a parish priest. He was appointed Archdeacon of Berkshire in 1869 which made him the assistant to the bishop in the Berkshire parishes of the Oxford diocese, a position he held until he finally retired from active ministry in 1902 at the age of eighty. In his retirement, Alfred Pott wrote Memoirs of my life, 1822-1903 as a typescript intended solely for his children, but a surviving copy came to light a century after it was written and has provided much of the material for these articles.

Pott suffered from periodic bouts of ill health all his life and a constant theme in his Memoirs is his doubt about having the strength to undertake the new positions that were offered to him. Despite these problems he survived to his late eighties and his contemporaries much appreciated his wise counsel and his ability to get things done.

Alfred Pott’s parents were Charles Pott, a merchant, and later the treasurer of the Foundling Hospital in London, and Anna, née Cox, daughter of Samuel Compton Cox, a leading lawyer. Alfred was educated at Eton and Oxford, ordained as a priest in 1846, and, after a short period as a deacon at Swallowfield, served at Cuddesdon, near Oxford, from 1847 to 1857 as curate and then vicar. A protégé of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, he also served for many years as one of his examining chaplains, a post he continued to hold even after Wilberforce became bishop of Winchester.

In 1852 Wilberforce gave him the task of setting up a theological college on land opposite the bishop’s palace in Cuddesdon, and then appointed him as the first principal. The college aroused some initial opposition to what were described as its ‘Romanising practices’, but Pott and his immediate successor established its place in theological education.

In 1855, while at Cuddesdon, Pott married Emily Harriet (1835-1903), daughter of Joseph Gibbs, vicar of Clifton Hampden. During their long married life they had five daughters and five sons. Joseph was a younger brother of William Gibbs who managed the very profitable family guano business and was also a notable religious philanthropist. Gibbs family money was significant in Pott’s building projects, particularly in Abingdon.

After resigning from Cuddesdon due to one of his periodic bouts of ill health, Pott resumed his ministry after a break of a few months and, in 1858, moved to East Hendred, near Wantage, where the local squire was a Roman Catholic. He began by building church schools and then asked the well-known church architect Henry Woodyer to undertake the restoration of the parish church.

Pott succeeded the long-serving Nathaniel Dodson as vicar of Abingdon in 1867. He was hesitant – there was no vicarage and “the loss of income was not inconsiderable” – but was “strongly urged” by Bishop Wilberforce to accept, perhaps suggesting that Wilberforce, knowing that Pott had some private means, wanted him to serve in parishes which it would be difficult to get other good candidates to accept. He moved to Abingdon although the new vicarage had still to be built and immediately set about improving the facilities in the town. His priority was the construction of proper church schools, and boys’, girls’ and infants’ schools were built in 1868-9.

Pott then turned his attention to the restoration of St Helen’s Church. He was daunted by the prospect of “a work of great cost and difficulty” but Henry Woodyer was asked to draw up plans. Woodyer’s style of architecture with its emphasis on the chancel fitted Pott’s high church views, and their plans went far beyond the immediately necessary repairs and stabilisation of the structure.

St Helen’s has an unusual layout for a church. Its site constrained it to growing by adding aisles and, from the sixteenth century, the chancel and nave had been flanked by two aisles on each side, all the full length of the church and with only small differences in the heights of the five pitched roofs. Woodyer transformed the central chancel and nave aisle by raising its roof to be significantly higher than the roofs of the neighbouring four aisles, and inserting a new east window. Pott and his family, particularly his uncle William Gibbs, paid the entire cost of the new chancel aisle.

Pott also had a great influence on the life of the church and the grammar school. He reorganised church services, used the surplice for preaching, a high church practice, and replaced pew rents by voluntary weekly offerings. He served as chairman of the governors of Abingdon School from his appointment as vicar in 1869 until 1900, long after he had left Abingdon. The local historian James Townsend, writing some forty years later, comments that he won general respect through the changes he accomplished and “by the tact and vigour of his character”.

Pott resigned his Abingdon living in 1874 suffering again from one of his recurrent bouts of ill health. In 1875 he moved to Clifton Hampden as vicar and then, in 1882, accepted his last incumbency and moved to Sonning, near Reading, where he stayed for seventeen years. Both these parishes were already provided with a refurbished church, a vicarage, and a school, allowing Pott to concentrate on his pastoral work and his responsibilities as archdeacon.

Pott resigned as a parish priest in 1899 and as archdeacon in 1902, and retired to Windlesham in Surrey, where died in 1908. He was very highly regarded by his contemporaries who valued his “practical wisdom, great powers of organisation, judicious advice, and unobtrusive readiness to help”.

William Tiptaft

William Tiptaft, founder of the Abbey Baptist Church in Checker Walk, was born in 1803 near Oakham, Rutland, into a moderately wealthy family. He was educated at Cambridge and ordained into the Church of England in 1826. In 1829, he became vicar of Sutton Courtenay.

It was a time of great turmoil and questioning in the church. While there was a strong movement towards High Church principles and several well-publicised conversions to Catholicism, Tiptaft’s spiritual development led him in the opposite direction, towards an extreme Calvinism. After a period of uncertainty that had started in 1827, he arrived two years later at the belief that salvation could not be achieved by good works but depended entirely on divine grace. He was encouraged in this by certain local clergymen who held the same opinions, but it cost him his hopes of marriage when his fiancée rejected both them and him.

He now began to preach his new ideas with force and eloquence, and attracted large crowds to the church in Sutton Courtenay. Many went from Abingdon to hear him. At Christmas 1829, he was invited to preach in St Helen’s. His sermon was deliberately controversial and provocative. The headmaster of Abingdon School, Joseph Hewlett, tried to make the case for orthodoxy, but was scornfully dismissed as ‘a wine bibber, a great card-player, and a fox-hunter’.

In 1831, Tiptaft resigned his living and, like some of his clerical friends about the same time, ‘seceded’ from the Church of England. Moving to Abingdon, he built a new chapel with his own money. It was opened in 1832, and could hold up to about 500 people, though some of them would have to listen from the vestry and not all could be seated. A few months later he was re-baptised into the Strict Baptist denomination.

Tiptaft was primarily a preacher, often away from Abingdon, and he does not seem to have given much attention to his pastoral duties. He was criticised for this, and it pained him. Yet he gained a reputation for great generosity and personal kindness. He seems to have been respected and loved by his congregation. His ministry continued until his death.

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