The Vestry Library of the Hanover Square Unitarian Chapel, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Abstract

On the 26th August 1782 Willian1 Turner, a young man not quite twenty-one years of age, arrived in Newcastle at the invitation of the dissenting congregation of the Hanover Square Chapel, to become their minister, and thus began a connection which was to last till Turner retired in 1841. Turner, whose father was a Unitarian minister at Wakefield, Yorkshire, had been educated at the Warrington Academyl,2. He was soon active in local affairs. In 1783, inspired by the example of Robert Raikes, he set up the first Sunday Schools in the North East at Hanover Square, subsequently recommending their establishment in a sermon preached to an assemblage of the dissenting ministers of the Northern counties at Morpeth. He played a leading part in the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and in the Newcastle Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was secretary for a time. He initiated the Newcastle ;Bible Society, of which he was joint secretary for twenty years, and also the Newcastle Unitarian Tract Society. The intellectual life of Newcastle owed a great deal to Turner. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society originated in his suggestion that 'if a society could be formed for the reading of papers and conversations on scientific subjects it would be a useful way of spending an evening', as a result of which he was invited to read a paper setting out his ideas, and the society was founded in 17933• l'urner was its secretary, and also lectured on Natural Philosophy to the Society, delivering no fewer than 600 lectures in the next forty years. He also lectured on science to the Mechanics' Institute, of which he was a vice-president from its foundation in 1824. In this year he was one of the founders of the Newcastle Natural History Society.