5: The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin

James Griffin, 1847

Rusholme Road has now disappeared; it connected Oxford Road and Ardwick Green, and lay just south of Grosvenor Street.  Moving there was to prove a major turning point for Alice Hopkinson and her children – it brought them to the Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel, which was to have an enormous influence on their lives.  

The chapel had only recently been built.  It stood on the corner of Rusholme Road and Upper Brook Street and had opened for worship in 1825 with an overspill congregation from two of the older Independent chapels.  

It was a plain, respectable, spacious building, not at all ornate, with a row of Ionic pillars behind the pulpit and no organ.  The Sunday School was held in a low cellar room underneath the building.  When it opened, there were nearly 80 children attending, 39 boys and 38 girls.

The Rev James Griffin may already have been minister at the Rusholme Road Chapel when Alice and the children moved into their new home.  He was to be an important family friend and advisor and he became, in Mary Hopkinson's words, "like a father to John".  So I think I should give a fairly full account here of James Griffin and the faith in which the Hopkinson children were raised and which was to have such an impact on their lives.

Young Mr James Griffin, aged nearly 23 and in training as a Nonconformist minister at Highbury College, visited Manchester for the first time in July 1828 as a supply preacher

• he had been told that he wasn't to be considered as a candidate for the pulpit – which had yet to be filled on a permanent basis – because he was still in training.  But he made such an impression that the post was offered to him and he was ordained minister on 16 September 1829

• the chapel was packed for his ordination.  The service lasted nearly five hours, and it was said that nobody left before the end.  That wasn't the end of the day – there was a second service in the evening

• John Hopkinson was then 5½ years old and the ordination was one of his earliest memories.  It must have been a long day for a child of that age.

Writing Memories of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life in 1883, James Griffin remembered finding in Manchester a "remarkable degree of really intellectual and practical energy stirring":

To live in Manchester was to live in almost constant excitement in connection with public affairs.  I should have said it was a glorious city to live in but for the smoke, and damp, and dirt of the place.  But smoke, and damp, and dirt, notwithstanding, it is now a noble city indeed

He was born in Portsea (Portsmouth) in 1806, one of seven children

• his father John was a highly esteemed Congregational minister at the King Street Chapel, a splendid new building which held 3,000 people when crowded

• his mother Hannah had died when James was nine.  The last words she was heard to say, he remembered nearly 60 years later, were "Underneath are the everlasting arms"

• James' eldest brother John had only just been appointed minister of the Congregational Chapel at Exeter when he fell ill, dying in early 1822 at the family home.  In his last days, he loved to hear his brothers sing to him the Isaac Watts' hymn

Not all the blood of beasts 

On Jewish altars slain 

 

Another brother, Samuel, became a bookseller in Portsmouth

Major influences on James Griffin as he grew up:

• his father the Rev John Griffin, who wrote missionary and devotional hymns, played an active part in encouraging vaccination against smallpox and, wrote James,

felt strongly united [to the poor] by birth, education, and conscientious principle.  He took every suitable opportunity to remind us of this fact, and to counsel us by every sacred motive to steadily and prudently 'consider the poor'

So from childhood James Griffin too felt a particular sympathy for the poor.  His tender regard for their troubles, their dignity and their wellbeing fill his memoirs

• a well-known book by the Anglican clergyman Legh Richmond called The Annals of the Poor.  The story called The Dairyman's Daughter was particularly popular and was published as a tract.  It tells the story of Elizabeth Wallbridge.  The dairyman explains to the narrator that his daughter 

was all for the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company.  Indeed, we were all very ignorant, and thought if we took care for this life, and wronged nobody, we should be sure to go to heaven at last.  My daughters were both wilful, and, like ourselves, strangers to the ways of God and the Word of his grace 

But her life was transformed by a sermon and she began to talk only 

of the goodness and love of God, and all his gracious dealings.  What a comfortable reflection, to think of spending a whole eternity in that delightful employment 

• Village Dialogues written by Rowland Hill, who had been ordained in the Church of England but left to found an independent chapel.  Hill was a friend of James' father for 40 years.  

One interesting theme deals with the adulterous Mrs Chipman, who has left her husband and child for an evil rake and comes to realise the full extent of her sin when she hears the Rev Lovegood preach on Hebrews 13:4 (Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge).  Overcome by learning of her husband's death and now fully convinced of her sin, she is so full of self-blame and self-loathing that she becomes perfectly deranged for six weeks. 

 

Mr Lovegood and Mr Worthy work steadily to bring her to believe that, whatever her sins, she can be saved by Christ.  She overcomes her feelings of worthlessness and the dread of facing people, and goes back to run her dead husband's business and raise her child.  Later writers would, one feels, sooner have brought Mrs Chipman to a penitent deathbed herself than have her re-integrate into society 

 

James Griffin explains in his memoirs that he was trained as a preacher to "aim at the conscience".  The preacher's task was of the utmost seriousness – it was to awaken in his hearers a conviction of sin and spiritual danger.  They needed to have a consciousness of sinfulness, a knowledge of their own helplessness, and a desire to cast themselves on Christ as their hope and salvation.

This makes him sound a stern and uncongenial man.  But his memoirs – which were available free online, but now seem to be available only as a reprint – reveal a delightful character, modest, with an intense interest in people, an acute social conscience and a lively desire to help.

Next:  6: James Griffin on the working classes & the poor