Reference
X715/41
Title
"Some recollections of Brook End Baptist Chapel Keysoe by one of its old Sunday School Scholars, Mr.Arthur Stapleton" including the following:
- notes celebration of bicentenary of erection of chapel (1941);
- remembers of previous pasters Edwards, Gates, Perkins, Head, Stembridge and Bishop;
- pulpit removed 1881 and new one installed to celebrate centenary of Robert Raikes, founder of Sunday Schools; new pulpit called an eyesore and "cow crib", later removed;
- remembers Sunday School Anniversaries, usuallu attended by preacher E.J.Farley of London;
- recalls three cottages opposite Chequers Inn and an old farm building divided into three believed to be the original Baptist meeting place;
- oldest gravestone that of John Crow of 1741 or 1742 in NW corner a few feet from W chapel entrance;
- speculation about meetings being held in Willow Spinney near the Riseley border and at Bury Fields by early baptists, the latter being where John Bunyan was arrested with his followers;
- recalls early Protestant martyrs including 19 year old William Hunter;
- recalls that John Donne of Pertenhall was ejected from his living for not sewaring the oath required by the Act of Uniformity and that he went to Keysoe;
- praise for the chapel as being better than any other he had seen in England for "so small a place";
- remembers when only light in the chapel was from a tallow candle, superceded in his youth (c.1880) by paraffin lamps;
- remembers the first musical instrument, a harmonium, introduced in the early 1880s and heating at the same time, though smoke and fumes were a major drawback;
- erection of the manse, caretaker's cottage and schoolroom in 1850s;
- 1850s pastor's salary of 40 per annum;
- remembers the Sunday School building and activities, used as a day school in its early years under Mrs.Gates and Ruth Dickens (who was "as deaf as a post"), the latter later opening a private school in the caretaker's cottage after the National School rendered the chapel day school obsolete; she also made lace as she taught
- remembers his parents, his father (b.1818) "lived the life of a puritan and would be designated derisively by modernists as a Victorian" and was a deacon for over fifty years;
- remembers Thomas Brown and William Hartop, successive Sunday School class teachers;
- remembers the plating of three yew trees in the graveyard in 1875 "with my youthful assistance"
Date free text
c.1941
Production date
From: 1650 To: 1941
Level of description
item