October 1901 Magazine - St Peter's Church, Nottingham, England on-line magazine

St Peter’s Magazine October 1901

Harvest Home!

‘Pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved’ (Song of Solomon, 7.13).

The motto for October aptly summed up the month which included the parochial harvest festival services (Anthem: ‘O clap your hands together’) on the 20th of the month and the major fund raising event of the year, the Bazaar and Sale of Work on the 10th, 11th and 12th of the month. The latter had been extensively trailed in the September 1901 edition of St Peter’s magazine, as well as in editions earlier in the year. Rector George Edgcome’s homily reflected a general thankfulness for the goodness of life, including the annual Nottingham Goose Fair, held at the beginning of October in the Market Place, which had:

bazaars and stalls… the customary array of shooting galleries, an innumerable variety of scientific machines at which you might test your height, weight and strength, with other attractive features too numerous to mention… and [was described in 1852] as “a mountainous region of toffee and gingerbread, nuts and brandy snaps…” which extended to the top of Chapel Bar.

He compared these earthly delights to those which ‘real members of Christ’s Church laid up… for the Lord Jesus Christ’ and urged his congregation to look at what fruits they had to offer in return for the new fruits that Jesus brought them. This exchanging of gifts took a literal form in the choir on 13th September when one of its choirmen, a Mr John Neale, ‘on the occasion of his marriage [received] a silver-plated dinner cruet as a token of esteem and regard from his fellow choristers’.

However the ‘falling of leaf and decaying flower’ that Geo. Edgcome also attributed to October had its human face, too. The Parish magazine for October 1901 carried one of the few obituaries published during the years 1901-02. It was for Susanah Stevenson, ‘on the 19th inst., after a long and painful illness,… the beloved wife of James Stevenson, of Sussex Street, aged 54 years’. The Rector suggested that spiritual life had its ups and downs too, and urged people to recognise the fruits with which they had been blessed and give thanks for them and offer them to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fund raising for Parish activities

There were various fund raising activities throughout the year 1901-1902 organised by members of the congregation. In addition the church organised one major fund raising event each year towards more general parish expenses. This seems to have been organised by a St Peter’s Working Party which ‘meets fortnightly at the Rectory’ and seems to have had a function of making up garments for sale at the annual Sale of Work for which it acquired a sewing machine in April. The Working Party stall raised £20-13s-1d at the Bazaar in October 1901 (SPM, 11/1901) when it was run by Mrs Gray, Miss Skerritt, Miss Brookfield and Miss Gowthorpe.

On 30 January 1901 ‘a very successful meeting [of the Working Party] was held… when it was decided to hold a three day’s Sale at the end of the present year instead of the usual Sale of Work in the [St Peter’s] Schools. The Sale will probably be held in one of the Halls of the City and the proceeds will be devoted towards freeing the Church of its present debt on the Restoration Fund and other expenses’. The debt was £200, and the ‘other expenses’ became ‘funds for a Curate… [as] it is also felt that in his declining years the Rector should have some assistance’.

Comparison of the scale of the fund raising intended for 1901 with other years shows just how ambitious it was. In December1900 there was an Annual Sale of Work which was opened by a Mrs Wilkinson Smith of Bunny Park, who ran a stall at the St Peter’s Bazaar in 1901. It included a refreshment stall (crockery loaned by Mrs. Darby.

The Bazaar and Sale of Work of 1901was held in the Circus Street Hall, opening each day on 10th, 11th and 12th October 1901 at 3pm. The stalls included a Working Party stall; a Parish Magazine stall on which was ‘obtainable household goods as well as a good selection of Fancy goods’, a refreshment stall, a Bluecoat stall, a flower and a Misses Evans stall, which raised more money than any other (£33-16s-5d). The Bazaar also gave concerts for which there was a charge, and the cost of hiring a piano.

The remaining two articles in this series of gleanings from the Parish Magazine of St Peter’s (1901-1902) will explore the social outreach work of the Parish, the coming of the curate and his impact on church life, and the work of the St Peter’s Day schools, not excluding the Blue Coat school.

Hugh Busher and Keith Charter

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