Title:
STOCKWELL CONGREGATIONAL CHAPEL, COLCHESTER
Level: Category
Congregational (later United Reformed) Church records
Level: Fonds
STOCKWELL CONGREGATIONAL CHAPEL, COLCHESTER
Admin History:
The origins of Stockwell Congregational Chapel in Colchester can be traced to two Church of England clergymen ejected in 1662, the Revd Owen Stockton of St James’s parish and town lecturer and the Revd Edmund Warren from St Peter’s. They initially formed a congregation which met in Colchester Castle. After Warren’s death, a meeting house for Independent Protestant Dissenters was built in c.1691 in St Helen’s Lane. The meeting house was mainly used by Independents and Presbyterians, but there appears to have been an element of ‘Socinianism’ or Unitarianism among the congregation and some of the ministers. In 1796 the Revd Isaac Taylor, father of the poets Ann and Jane Taylor, was appointed pastor and served for 14 years, before leaving for Ongar in 1810. He and his successor who served less than a year both found opposition form the Unitarain element in the congregation. In 1813 the Revd Joseph Herrick was appointed.

Joseph Herrick was to remain at the chapel until his death in 1865. His first year as minister was spent in what he described in his church history as ‘war and confusion’ with the remaining Socinians among the majority of the Trustees and some of the members. This came to a head when the Trustees pulled down the roof of the chapel, Herrick described ‘not a tile, or a bit of lath, or ceiling but what was dismantled and lay in the pews and Galleries of the place’. Herrick bought a site opposite, the foundation was laid in August 1816 and the new chapel opened on 13 November 1816. Subsequently the old site was known as the Old Meeting House.

The new chapel was enlarged in 1824 and again in 1836 with a new front on [East] Stockwell Street, the chapel being known as Stockwell Chapel after this date. Missions were opened in Lexden in 1821 and in Barrack Street in 1824. In 1840 there was dissent between the Revd Mr Herrick and some of his deacons and trustees. A mortgage had been raised on the chapel, without his consent, to pay for the cost of the 1836 enlargement, and was possibly being used by Herrick’s opponents among the trustees and deacons. Herrick believed that there was a plot ‘to drive him away’. This culminated with the sheriff’s officers seizing the chapel on 19 February 1843 for a debt of £714. The Baptists offered their chapel when not in use, and the chapel hired the Bible Room in Lion Walk. Herrick launched a fundraising campaign to pay off the debt and on 28 March 1844 services resumed in the chapel.

Joseph Herrick died in 1865 and was succeeded in 1866 by the Revd Thomas Batty. During Batty’s ministry, in 1868, new schoolrooms were built on part of the graveyard. In 1875 the front of the chapel was altered with new windows, and seating inside. Another mission was established at Mile End, where a chapel was built in 1880. In 1880 the old chapel in St Helen’s Lane came into the possession of the trustees and in 1882 a Charity Commissioners’ Scheme ordered the sale of the site; the money was put in trust with the annual income split between the minister, the Sunday School and the treasurer for the upkeep of the chapel. The Revd Mr Batty retired after 40 years as minister in 1906.

During the 1920s and 1930s the numbers in the congregation fell and it became difficult to find and retain ministers and to raise the necessary funds to pay them. After the Second World War it was decided by the Congregational Church that more churches were needed in some of the newer areas of the town and in 1946 the Revd David McLean was appointed as joint pastor with the church in Shrub End. The original proposal had envisaged a gradual diminishing of the Stockwell Chapel with a view to building a new Stockwell Memorial Chapel in Shrub End. This plan was not carried out, but after 1951 the chapel had no minister, and by 1960 its membership had fallen to 20. It finally closed in 1966. The chapel was sold in 1979 and converted to offices.