Local Preacher Research Articles

Deconstructing Methodist Mythology: The Search for a Usable Postcolonial Ethic

ABSTRACT This article offers a postcolonial and liberationist hermeneutic for reinterpreting and reassessing Wesleyan and Methodist history. It argues that much of Methodist and Wesleyan history has been shrouded in ‘Whiteness’; this term is concerned less with the epidermis of those racialized as ‘White’, and is more focused on systems, structures, policies, and procedures, all of which incorporate the totality of this phenomenon. As a cradle Methodist and a local preacher, I argue that for contemporary British Methodism to be a truly more radical, inclusive, and diverse ecclesial body, it will need to decolonize its history, rethinking how we see traditional, visible figures and consider the lack of agency of those condemned to the shadows. This work is not a revisionist ‘take down’ of John Wesley; rather, it is a postcolonial-inspired, Black theology hermeneutical reappraisal of our common history, seeking to give agency to often invisible Black voices.

The Strategic Role of the Da'i Nagari in Driving Rural Development in Pasaman, West Sumatra

<p>This paper analyzes the strategic role of <em>Da'i Nagari</em> (local preacher) as <em>Da'i</em> assisting the <em>nagari</em> (village) government in driving rural development in Pasaman Regency, West Sumatra. <em>Da'i Nagari</em> is a local government-created program that rewards preachers in West Sumatra. This study aims to describe the significant role of <em>Da'i Nagari</em> in the development process. This research is critical since <em>Da'i Nagari</em> is a specific regional government initiative that only exists in West Sumatra. By providing an overview of the presence of <em>Da'i Nagari</em> in Pasaman Barat, this qualitative descriptive study elucidates the role of <em>Da'i Nagari</em> in the development process. Additionally, this study addresses academic concerns regarding the potential positive effects of the <em>Da'i Nagari</em> program on rural development. The results of this study are revealed by describing <em>Da'i Nagari</em> as an extension of the regional government in developing rural communities. The presence of <em>Da'i Nagari</em> assists the community in resolving various religious problems, including character building, religious information development, and social issues.</p>

Introduction and Response to Special Issue

Introduction and Response to Special Issue

Невыносимость подполья. Коллективное самоубийство староверов-странников в межвоенной Вятке

Abstract In the first half of the 1930s in the Vyatka region about 60 Old Believers-Wanderers, mostly women, committed suicide, no longer wanting to live in a world overrun by the Antichrist. The initiator of the wave of voluntary deaths was the local preacher, Khristofor Ivanovich. It is easy to write off these episodes as an actualization of traditional Old Believers’ religiously-motivated suicides or as a reaction to the excesses of Stalinist religious policies. However, as will be shown in the article, the Vyatka Wanderers were neither persistent escapist radicals nor uncompromising dissidents in their dealings with the Soviet authorities. My hypothesis is that this grim practice became possible not because the Wanderers were consistent underground millenarians, but because, squeezed into the catacombs by Stalin’s social and religious policies, they found themselves unable to maintain this unprecedented (for them) regime of existence.

William Booth: The Man and His Mission, The Life and Legacy of William Booth, Part I: 1829–1878 and William Booth: The General and His Army, The Life and Legacy of William Booth, Part II: 1878–2015

William Booth (1829–1912), founder and first General of the Salvation Army, left an indelible mark on the religious and social life of the late nineteenth century. Born in 1829 in Sneinton, near Nottingham, Booth became a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher in his teens, an evangelist with the Wesleyan Reformers in his early twenties, and then a minister of the Methodist New Connexion for eight years before resigning in 1862 to pursue the calling of a freelance revivalist with his wife and fellow preacher Catherine, née Mumford (1829–90). From 1865 the Booths were based in the East End of London, seeking to reach the unchurched urban masses with a forceful gospel message. Their East London Revival Society evolved by stages into the Salvation Army, launched in 1878, with its flags, its uniforms, its brass bands, and its military terminology—and its deliberate eschewing of ecclesiastical language, structures, and sacraments. Over the next three decades Booth saw the Army become an international movement, with a strong presence in North America and Australasia, as well as Continental Europe. After years of strenuous opposition from local authorities and from the ‘Skeleton Army’ of urban ne'er-do-wells, Booth attained the status of a celebrity, visiting Buckingham Palace, conversing with the Emperor of Japan, leading prayers in the United States Senate, and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. His methods were discussed in the Contemporary Review in 1882 by Randall Davidson and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and his proposals for social reform, set out in his In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), were debated by public intellectuals like H. M. Hyndman and T. H. Huxley. When he died, Booth lay in state for four days before a funeral service at Olympia attended by an estimated 35,000 people and a procession to Abney Park cemetery headed by thirty-six bands. The General's absolute control over the Salvation Army was demonstrated by his bequest of leadership to his eldest son Bramwell; seventeen years later the Army's High Council removed the ailing Bramwell from office, although members of the Booth family remained in senior leadership for many decades thereafter.Gordon Taylor served for twenty-three years with the Salvation Army's International Heritage Centre, and was senior researcher, archivist, and associate director there. His unrivalled knowledge of the Salvation Army's archives and his indefatigable trawling through nineteenth-century newspapers have produced a monumental study of William Booth's long life, falling only just short of 1,000 pages. As a narrative, the biography is hugely informative, highly readable, and enhanced by well-produced photographs of the Booth family and significant places in the story. As indicated by the title of the second volume, Taylor continues the narrative into the twenty-first century, describing anniversary commemorations and biographies by Harold Begbie, St John Ervine, Roy Hattersley, and David Bennett. Taylor even notes the naming of a peak near Alberta, Canada, Mount William Booth in 1966.In terms of descriptive detail and thoroughness, this biography offers all that the reader might desire and more. This reviewer was intrigued to find the Booths' work endorsed by such Wesleyan luminaries as George Osborn, J. H. Rigg, and T. P. Bunting, as well as Hugh Price Hughes and Henry Lunn. Financial support came from Henry Reed, a lay Wesleyan who made a fortune in Tasmania, and from William Shepherd Allen, member of Parliament and scourge of theological liberalism. There are questions still to be explored: for example, why revivalism polarized opinion in most of the Methodist denominations in the mid- nineteenth century, so that the Wesleyans, the New Connexion, and the Primitive Methodists closed their pulpits to freelance revivalists; why the Salvation Army provoked such ferocious opposition, not only in the East End of London, but also in provincial towns like Basingstoke and Northampton; and to what extent the Army succeeded in its aim of reaching the ‘submerged tenth’ of the urban population. Likewise, the Booths' debt to Methodism, whether to John Wesley or to later iterations of Wesleyan theology and practice, both British and North American, continues to invite investigation. These issues are not discussed in any detail here, but Gordon Taylor has provided a rich and comprehensively annotated biographical resource that will place scholars of Victorian religion in his debt for many years to come.

Workshop Report: Social Media and Islamic Practice in Southeast Asia, 14-15 April 2016, Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Above the rooftops of Vienna's old city center and on the top floor of the building of one of the world's leading technology companies, a selected number of international scholars working on new media and religion in gathered early this year to discuss their current research.1 They were invited by the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Forderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, or FWF) project (lnter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia led by Martin Slama, a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The workshop, which was comprised of 12 presentations in the span of two days, focused on social media and digital technologies uses and Islamic practices of Muslims in different parts of Southeast Asia. The central question that informed this workshop was how the rising use of new communication technologies affects Islamic practices and forms of piety in the Muslim majority countries of Southeast Asia. The presentations touched upon a number of related issues including Islamic finances, fashion, music, and youth culture. They discussed changes in the perception and representation of religious authority or the revival of lslamic concepts in the light of social media uses. Apart from popular Islamic expressions of piety, some presenters addressed issues of religious sectarianism and sentiments of hate spread through the online presence of particular religious groups.What remained uncontested throughout those two days was the fact that social media have become an indispensable part of the daily practices and socialities of Muslims throughout Southeast Asia (Barendregt, 2012; Slama, 2016). For example, followers connect to their lslamic leader, be it the local preacher or the country's most influential Sufi scholar, by simply opening Facebook. Islamic leaders, on their part, use social media as means of self-representation in yet unprecedented ways. These online presences trigger new perceptions and articulations of authority and preacher-followers relationships which do not remain uncontested. This is the case when, for example, self-representations on the Internet intersect with the Islamic concept of riya, roughly translated as showing off. Yet, social media and other online platforms, such as forums or blogs, offer ample space for users to discuss and eventually find agreement upon such activities. This is only one example of how 'new' media prompt the renegotiation of traditional practices, forms of communication, and self-representation (Gershon, 2010).The infusion of digital media in everyday expressions of Islamic piety affect not only the construction of Islamic authority but also popular understandings of Islamic gender roles. Selfies, popular among social media users across Southeast Asia, expose those behind the camera to exhibitionist narratives and other forms of criticism framed in the discourse of Muslim femininity and virtue. Notably, both the authors of contested visual expressions and their most vigorous critics are predominantly young social media users. As a number of presenters argued, social media use affects the ways in which Southeast Asian Muslims understand their religion and conversely, Muslims' understandings of their religion affect the ways they use social media to spread their message, as in the case of online da'wa, or Islamic proselytization.Another aspect of social and digital media, which is rarely touched upon, is the effect of sound or music both upon consumers and music production industries. For example, nasyid - a popular music genre among Southeast Asian Muslims today - reconciles piety with modern consumerist lifestyles by offering new avenues for the expression and experience of Islam. Islamic sounds, constitutive of short videos posted on social media and other online platforms, trigger affective registers among users and generate sentiments and dispositions which further inform online and offline socialities. …

A Hundred Years of Theological Training in the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa

The AFM started as an interracial mission with a strong emphasis on the “anointing of the Holy Spirit” and the ministry of each member of the assembly. Leadership was developed through the local church as the body of Christ and there were no distinctions between clergy and laity. All who were saved were expected (and trained) to witness; no theological training was required for the different levels of ministry, not even for preachers. There was a hierarchy starting with church members being witnesses, but with the opportunity to develop into a deacon, elder, local preacher, and finally an overseer. In this article the development of training for the ministry along separate lines for different racial groups in accordance with the ruling Apartheid policy of the Nationalist government is discussed. After a hundred years the AFM has one training structure with a new centralized seminary and one curriculum for all.

Constant Inconstancy

Page 30 American Book Review Constant Inconstancy Michael Axelrod It Might Do Well With Strawberries David Matlin Marick Press http://www.marickpress.com 236 pages; paper, $14.95 As I flipped through the pages of David Matlin’s It Might Do Well With Strawberries before reading, I was immediately reminded of two things: 1) David Markson’s brilliant novel This Is Not a Novel (2001) and 2) René Magritte’s brilliant painting This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). If one knows anything about Markson’s work, then one knows This Is Not a Novel is definitely a novel; and if one knows even a bit of French slang, then one knows This Is Not a Pipe is definitely not a pipe. That said, one immediately wonders at the title of David Matlin’s book, It Might Do Well With Strawberries, what might do well with strawberries? What might it be that does well with strawberries? Perhaps, cream. If one knows the source of the quote (or not since Matlin tells the reader in the preface which is not a preface), then one remembers, recalls, recollects Herman Melville’s lines from Moby-Dick (1851): The Sperm Whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum. It might do well with strawberries. What is telling about this quote and its relation to Matlin’s work is that there is kind of poetic affinity in that quote and much of what Matlin writes. One might, in fact, read Melville’s lines as poetic discourse fraught with the munificence of whales, a kind of nonfiction treatise that absorbs one’s sense of purpose while simultaneously laying bare the art. “Making strange,” as one Russian literary critic once wrote. And “making strange” is what Matlin does in the text and does rather brilliantly primarily because the text goes against the grain of categorization. As readers, we are wont to open a text and know from the blurb or some such accoutrement that what we are soon to be in the process of reading is a novel or a collection of short stories or a collection of poems or a book of nonfiction. But one is given no help in that regard. Even the cover of the book offers no assistance. In that sense, reviewing such a book is difficult. Something akin to “skydiving.” If one hasn’t done it, then how does one explain the experience? Clearly, one’s initial attempt at categorizing Matlin’s text would be that it is poetry; after all, the text does begin that way: Trapezoid’s weight of facial planes pulls the cheeks flattens muscles around lips. Eye sockets stretched by storms of miraculous hands carry the permanent sneer of the butterfly’s complex age in this woman of ancient Uaxactun engaged…. But then, as a reader, one would be incorrect in assuming it is “merely poetry” since the poetry stops and another discourse begins, a kind of prose, albeit poetic prose, that engages one politically, that begins discussing things like the California Correctional Peace Officers Union or a day in the life of San Quentin or the fractured fallout of Abu Ghraib. We read of “deuterium in his piss,” of plutonium infested semen, of “[u]ranium so far up his asshole even the local preacher threw the church plunger away.” Perhaps , all of these things might do well with strawberries. Certainly, one would need strawberries to get...

Women Preachers in the Bible Christian Connexion

In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: “At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.” She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers’ experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry.

Louise Crummy McKinney (1868-1931): A Window into Western Canadian Christianity

Louise Crummy McKinney was a prominent social activist and popular preacher in Alberta during the first three decades of the twentieth century. McKinney was president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Alberta and Saskatchewan for over twenty-two years, and vice-president of the Dominion WCTU for twenty-one years. Shortly before her death in 1931 she was elected as first vice-president of the World WCTU. In 1917 McKinney also made history by becoming the first female elected to the Alberta Provincial Legislature and the first female MLA in the British Empire. In addition, she was a Methodist local preacher, Sunday School superintendent, church organizer, Bible class leader, a champion of women’s ordination, a teacher, writer and an international speaker. Further, she was a delegate to the final Methodist General Conference in 1925, and in that same year was one of only four woman chosen to sign the Basis of Union for the United Church of Canada alongside 327 male counterparts. Louise C. McKinney was also one of the Famous Five women in the Persons Case, who successfully petitioned the British Privy Council in 1929 for full legal definition and recognition of women as persons under Canadian law.

David Chilton Phillips, Lord Phillips of Ellesmere, K.B.E. 7 March 1924 — 23 February 1999

David Phillips was born on 7 March 1924 in Ellesmere, Shropshire, a small country town with a population then of 2000, on the border between England and Wales. His father, Charles Harry Phillips, was a Master Tailor and a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher. His mother, Edith Harriet Phillips (née Finney), was a London-trained midwife, the organist at Ellesmere Methodist Church and a member of the Ellesmere Urban District Council. She was the daughter of Samuel Finney, who was one-time secretary of the Midland Miners' Federation, a Member of Parliament 1916-22, and also a Primitive Methodist local preacher. David's unusual middle name is the maiden surname of his mother's great-grandmother and it was a reminder that the family was supposed to be related to the Pilgrim Father James Chilton, who sailed on the Mayflower. David was known as Chilton Phillips in Ellesmere. There was one sister who was four years older than David. She left home at fourteen to train as a child nurse, later became a telephonist and married. Tragically, she died in 1942 from diabetes.

Physical puritanism and religious dissent: the case of John Young (1820-1904), Sunderland chemist and druggist and Methodist lay preacher.

"Physical puritanism", the name given to the popular medical reform movements of early Victorian Britain by the Edinburgh academic Samuel Brown, nicely evokes their links with religious dissent. While historians have examined the formal organization, leadership, and membership of several of these movements, we know very little about the ways of thinking of their ordinary adherents. The diary of John Young (1820-1904), a Sunderland chemist and druggist and local preacher of the Wesleyan Methodist Association, affords unrivalled insights into the mind of one "physical puritan". In particular, Young's reading of the Edinburgh physician and phrenologist Andrew Combe's influential work Principles of Physiology (1834) can be examined in detail. Virginia Smith has argued that such advice books are valuable in providing access to lay ideas about health. Their readership, however, has not been studied. This article offers a case study which calls into question Smith's assertion that the new utilitarian popular physiology of the 1830s and 1840s was valued principally for the physical benefits offered by its therapies, so distinguishing it from its more spiritually-oriented eighteenth-century antecedents. I argue that the natural theology which marks Combe's work was important in helping dissenters like Young to appropriate new ideas (in particular ideas derived from the popular science of phrenology) not only to promote physical health, but also to assist in attaining spiritual goals. For some of their readers, Combe and Wesley were not so far apart.

Got to tell it: Mahalia Jackson, queen of gospel

Mahalia Jackson was one of the greatest gospel singers America has ever known, the woman who almost singlehandedly brought black gospel from the churches of Chicago into the public eye. In her pink, floor-length organza gown, her black beehive piled high atop her head, and her foot-stomping, hip-swaying style, Mahalia was gospel personified. And whether she was singing in a local church, performing at Harlem's Golden Gate, or appearing on The Dinah Shore Show, her spiritual bewitchery and monumental voice were sure to lift the souls of those listening into an astonishing state of grace. Now, Jules Schwerin, the producer of Mahalia Jackson's Grammy award-winning record for best gospel and soul in 1976 and the creator of a highly acclaimed film documentary on Mahalia, brings us a firsthand account of the Queen of Gospel, based on his interviews with Mahalia. We hear Mahalia as she remembers the local preacher who influenced her style: There was a way that he would preach, would have a singing tone in his voice, that was sad. And it done something to me....It is the basic way that sing. We follow Mahalia to Chicago, where her partnership with Thomas A. Dorsey (the Father of Gospel) brought her local fame, and where a young disc jockey named Studs Terkel invited her to appear on his radio program, successfully introducing her and gospel music to the airwaves. (As he recalls, Watching her in a church...her relationship to the congregation was something to experience. You didn't forget the call-and-response, the give-and-take; she didn't sing with her voice alone, it's the body, the hands, the feet.) We hear her sing at the Montgomery, Alabama, boycott for Rosa Parks (the woman who had refused to move from the white section of a bus). We feel her performance of I Been 'Buked and Been Scorned unite and uplift the thousands gathered at the Second March on Washington (I reached out and touched a chord...lifted the rhythm to a gospel beat...and joy overflowed). And we also encounter the other Mahalia, who became possessive and paranoid about her earnings and who fired her longtime companion and accompanist Mildred Falls when she asked for a much-deserved raise. Got To Tell It is the result of Schwerin's personal odyssey to reveal the Mahalia that he and those close to her came to know--a woman who could be at once warm and giving, and also cruel and unmerciful, but whose music would always bring joy and inspiration. Complete with a discography of Mahalia's recordings, here is an unforgettable portrait of the woman who brought gospel to the world.

William Valentine Mayneord, 14 February 1902 - 10 August 1988

William Valentine Mayneord was born 14 February 1902, the last child of Walter and Elizabeth Mayneord, in Redditch, Worcestershire. Walter Mayneord, who worked first in a fishing-tackle factory in Redditch and later as agent for the Pearl Assurance Company, was clearly a man of many parts. As a youth he was an enthusiastic amateur runner, a very able chess player, playing for Worcestershire, and a well-known figure riding his bicycle aged over 80 and singing in the choir at 90, the year of his death. He was a devoted Gladstonian Liberal and a founder of the Liberal Club in Redditch. Walter and Elizabeth had two older children, Ewart and Gilbert. Ewart the eldest, though largely self-educated, had a great facility for languages and served as an interpreter on the Western Front in World War I. After the war he taught himself Russian and became foreign correspondent for a firm trading with Russia, which he visited on business. Unfortunately Ewart died from a brain tumour at about the age of 34. The other brother, Gilbert, was to some degree mentally deficient and worked as a labourer. But clearly, despite the meagre educational opportunities of the time, the Mayneord family had talent and ability: still earlier, grandfather William Mayneord had been a well-known local preacher. The family books also showed that they were surprisingly well read.

The Ritual of Happy Dying among Early American Methodists

Jane M'Neil died a “glorious death” in 1814 when she was just twelve years old. Perfectly composed during her last illness, she spoke warmly of her attachment to her Methodist class leader and calmly informed visiting neighbors that soon she would be laid in the graveyard. Her biographer recalled that when the local preacher came to pray with her, “the joys of the upper world [seemed] to have been manifested… She was thrown into ecstasies of joy; she shouted the praises of the Redeemer aloud.” Her mother's unregenerate prejudices against religious shouting were removed. Her physician, a non-Christian, “was melted into tears, and gave vent to the loudest exclamations of grief” when Jane exhorted him to flee to “the good physician of souls.” Squire M'Neil, her proud and haughty father, struggled with deep conviction of sin after her death and became converted, influencing many in the neighborhood to seek religion.1

TEXTUAL UNION AND THESONG OF SONGS

For nearly fifty years my father has been what the Methodist Church in England calls a 'local preacher', a layperson who preaches and presides over the liturgy. When I told him that I was working on . the Song of Songs, and asked him what his views on the text were, he was evidently somewhat taken aback, and had to confess that it had never occurred to him that it would be possible to preach on the Song of Songs, or to make use of it in public worship. He was, in fact, under the impression that the Song was one of the books of the Old Testament Apocrypha, and not a properly canonical text. It is, of course, one of the Ketuvim, the Writings, which together with the Torah and the Prophets make up the Hebrew biblical canon. Nevertheless, the Song of Songs is typically absent from that inner canon which the various Christian churches select from within the Christian biblical canon as a whole; absent, that is, from the inner canon of texts perceived as being most necessary for salvation and most fitting for liturgical use. Even in the Roman Rite, where one might expect to find the Song most richly represented, it is completely absent from the lectionary for Sundays and feast days: the only place where it for a moment assumes the status of a privileged text is in the rite for the consecration of Virgins.I The whole people of God are not encouraged to appropriate the Song for themselves. But it wasn't always so: Augustine characteristically cites the Song in the context of discussion of the liturgy of baptism, the liturgy in which he says the Church celebrates its union with Christ.2 And in Jewish worship the Song still has a central place: in the Sephardic rite it is chanted every Friday at the beginning of the Sabbath liturgy. The Hebrew scholar Andre Chouraqui recalls that from infancy he heard the Song of Solomon intoned to the

Joshua Harold Burn: 6 March 1892-13 July 1981.

Joshua Harold Burn was born on 6 March 1892 in Barnard Castle, County Durham . He was fond of his birth place and was greatly interested in the history of the ancient town which had grown up around the castle, built by Bernard de Baliol (or Balliol) in the 12th century . Burn lived there until he went to Cambridge in 1909. He was the only child of John George Burn (1857-1932) and Mary Josephine Howson (1859-1937), who came fro m the Wycliffe family. Burn knew little about his father’s ancestry. However, he remembered his grandfather, Joshua Burn, vividly: ‘He must have been about 5 feet 10 or 11 inches. He was always upright in carriage and wore a black frock coat and trousers with a tall hat. He was an active member of the Wesleyan Church and for many years was a local preacher. At that time the villages surrounding Barnard Castle constituted a circuit and every chapel was visited every Sunday either by the Superintendent or the Second Minister or by a local preacher.’

Norman Percy Allen, 1903-1972

Norman Percy Allen was born on 5 June 1903, at Wrexham, North Wales, and was the fifth of ten children, seven girls and three boys. His father, Sidney Edward Allen, was an accountant who was employed in the Borough Treasurer’s Department at Wrexham at the time of Norman’s birth. He was one of the large family of a sculptor whose work was mainly on churches and other public buildings. In 1908, he became accountant to the Local Authority at Sheffield and in 1912 was appointed Borough Treasurer of Burton-on-Trent where he lived for the rest of his life. A deeply religious man, he was a very keen, active member of the Congregational Church and a local preacher. His children were all expected to take their part in Church activities and family life was much influenced by his insistence on its principles. This undoubtedly had a strong effect in shaping the characters of all his children. His mother, born Emily Davis, was a kind, intelligent, essentially practical person—very skilled in the domestic arts and an expert dressmaker. Care for her large family, who were very close together in age, left very little time for outside interests other than the Church. Little is known of her family, the remaining members of which are now in Canada. In a large and rather boisterous family, Norman is remembered as the quiet brother who was often absorbed in a book (he was a prolific reader) or in one of his succession of hobbies. He had, however, a keen sense of fun, one expression of which was in the nonsense verse he used to write and illustrate.

THE WARWICKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL AND GENERAL WORKERS' UNION, 1893–97

When the first real upsurge of agricultural trade unionism occurred in England during the years 1871–2, the farm labourers of Warwickshire were among the most enthusiastic for the cause. Indeed, largely as the result of agitation in that county, the first national organisation for farm workers was established at the end of May 1872. This new body - the National Agricultural Labourers' Union (N.A.L.U.) - had its headquarters at Leamington; all its early leading officials were either Warwickshire-born or had lived in the county for a number of years. Pre-eminent among them was the Union's President, Joseph Arch, a former prize-winning hedgecutter from the South Warwickshire village of Barford and a Primitive Methodist local preacher.

Gordon Roy Cameron, 1899-1966

Gordon Roy Cameron was born in Australia on 30 June 1899 at Echuca, a small town on the Victoria side of one of the bends on the Murray River. His father, George Cameron, was then a Methodist minister at a small village called Wamboota. George Cameron’s parents (Grandfather Cameron and his wife, earlier a Miss Miller) who came of hard-working farming stock in Dyce, Aberdeenshire, with forbears in Inverness and Fort Augustus, had left Aberdeen for Australia the day after their marriage early in the 1870’s and taken up land in Minlaton in St Vincent’s peninsula, South Australia. They had eleven children, of whom George Cameron was the eldest; he seems to have had a hard life on the farm. When he was twelve years old the Government of Victoria began opening up the Mallee area in northern Victoria, and he and his father each drove a wagon containing members of the family and their few goods over the 500 miles trek—much of it over uncleared scrub, desert and hill country—from Minlaton to the Mallee area, where they took up about a hundred acres of scrub to make a farm, later extended to some two thousand acres. There they and their neighbours built the mud house that still survived in 1920. Some fourteen years later the farm was going well, the younger children were growing up, and George Cameron, who had recently taken part in Bible Christian services and had developed a reputation as a local preacher, decided to join the Bible Christians as a candidate for the Ministry. In due course he was appointed to a circuit as a probationer in Horsham, North Victoria, where he met Emily Pascoe, whom he later married.