6: James Griffin on the working classes & the poor

James Griffin writes with great sympathy of the Christian poor

• they were "unconstrained by conventional forms and feelings" and, with "few things of an outward kind" except daily works, wants and domestic cares to distract them, the spiritually minded were deeply engaged in their religious concerns.  They joined together at chapel, at prayer meetings, church meetings, Sunday school, "and each one's home seems to belong to them all"

• they sat together by their firesides and walked together, and talked together of their personal experiences with a frequency and freedom not much to be found in other classes.  "Many of them are well acquainted with the Scriptures, and have very just and enlightened views of Christian truth"

• the Taylors, three sisters and a brother, were particular favourites of his

• they were "all of them very rough and uncouth in appearance and manners, but honest, upright, hard-working persons, and some of them in no common degree of shrewd and vigorous minds"

• the brother could only work at "easy jobbing things" because of his epilepsy and was at one point thought an idiot, but James Griffin gives an account of finding him by his fireside encouraging the master chimney-sweep William Davies.  Davies felt that "I am so bad, it seems as if it was hard to believe that such a sinner as I am can be saved" to which Taylor replied, "We are pardoned, justified, and saved, only through faith, without our own merits or good works, but that it is all by God's free grace, and that therefore all are invited to come, just as they are, without trying to make themselves better."

• the poor, James Griffin wrote, were often valuable fellow-helpers with their pastors "and a great comfort to them, for among no other class do they find more loving and faithful friends."

• he found on his arrival that there was no afternoon service at Rusholme Road and he thought he might get a few domestic servants to come to a Bible Class

• he asked some of his friends to mention it to their servants and on the first day 50 or 60 people turned up.  The next Sunday there were 100 to 120

• so he set up a regular service for the working people of the district and he asked the usual worshippers not to come because it was to have a special simplicity and freedom of manner

• it lasted an hour and, except for prayers, he sat in an armchair.  A Sunday School teacher came up to lead the singing.  The address was in a free and colloquial style

• after seven years, with his health failing under three services on Sunday and two in the week, lay helpers took it on until it was finally discontinued.  But by then the chapel's galleries were filled from end to end at morning and evening services with a large proportion of the working class

• and they knew that Mr Griffin was on their side – this became clear in times of industrial unrest, when it was plain that Manchester working men trusted Mr Griffin and other Nonconformist ministers, while the employers looked at them askance.

He also praised the rich of his congregation for their generosity to the chapel, their contributions never failing even when business was bad, and the donations they gave, sometimes anonymously, to be distributed to the poor.  He gives a couple of examples of sensitive assistance by the well-to-do:

• one of his poor, the widow Mrs Turner, had come to chapel without any breakfast because there was no food in the house – she depended on mangling and there had been no work that week – but she didn't like to trouble anyone with this.  She said later that she "committed my case to my Heavenly Father".  She was feeling faint and ill but it wasn't so bad, she said, as she became absorbed in the service.  Then, at the end, a man who had always sat in the next pew but had never spoken to her and whose face she had never seen, put something into her hand and left at once.  It was half-a-sovereign. The deacons made sure she was never in want of breakfast again

• one day he called at the cottage of a poor widowed old man and his daughter.  The old man told him that during the previous week they had both been so poorly that they couldn't work.  Nothing was coming in to the house and at the end of the week they had only three half-pence left.  They were sitting on the Saturday evening with the door open – it was a fine evening – when something was thrown in and fell under his chair.  He thought it was a stone thrown by the boys who were playing in the street but, when he looked under the chair, he found it was something wrapped up in paper.  He opened it and there was half-a-crown.  He went out to see if there was anyone in the street, but there were only the boys.  Mr Griffin told him it was undoubtedly some kind friend wanting to supply his wants without his knowing from whom it came

"The pious poor," he comments, "generally, so far from desiring to be pensioners on the Church, or on public or private charity in any form, are very reluctant to let their wants be known."

He tells a couple of stories of the active ministry of his congregation:

• two of the young men were going into the rough and impoverished area called Little Ireland – in 1845 Engels described it as "the most horrible spot" of the whole area –  later the population was scattered when a railway terminus was built over the slum

• then the young men went into Charter Street, which was known as the centre of a wretched neighbourhood inhabited by "the very scum of gaol deliveries".  They went among the people, found a cellar where they could hold a Sunday evening service, wrote out hymns on slips of paper for the people who could read, and carried on services in a dismal cellar by the light of a candle or two.  It was soon full to overflowing

• the minister and church tried to help the young men unobtrusively and without interference

• on the next New Year's Day, at the usual Chapel prayer-meeting at 7am, one of the young men appeared with seven men, well-dressed, "really very respectable and looking exceedingly happy".  They had come nearly two miles to be there from Charter Street.  They had been accounted some of the worst men of their neighbourhood and were now total abstainers, earning an honest living

• James Griffin notes that the two young men achieved this in the simplest and quietest manner possible, with no adverts, no processions, no music, just the Bible and tracts and kind words

• soon after he had come to Manchester, he had been invited to lead the Whitsuntide service at the Mosley Street Chapel and, just as he was about to begin, he saw three women standing hesitating on the threshold

• he stretched out his hand and beckoned to them, saying "Come in, my friends, come in; no doubt we can find room for you: come in".  They had been uncertain because they had just come from "the dram-shop" where they would go to buy "a little comfort" in the form of alcohol and the youngest of them had been leading "a vicious life" and was not long out of prison

• a few weeks later, she was brought by a woman member of the Rusholme Road Chapel to Mr Griffin.  She was quite broken and now "longing for Divine mercy".  He and some of the women spent a good deal of time with her and after some months she was proposed, at her own request, for membership.  Her health was failing and she died before it could happen, but she and her aunt – who came to chapel until her own death – and the third of the women, who returned to her Methodist upbringing, spoke until the end of their lives of the day when James Griffin had beckoned them in

Next: 7: Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel