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Lancashire Times
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Kaye McGann
Features Writer
10:01 AM 16th April 2021
fiction

Grandad And The Baptist Minister

 
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Kaye McGann's mother, Vera Lord; Grandma, Betsy Greenwood Lord; Grandad, John Lord; Kaye's aunt, Hilda Irene Lord; Kaye's Great-Grandmother, Sarah Watson Greenwood
Kaye McGann's mother, Vera Lord; Grandma, Betsy Greenwood Lord; Grandad, John Lord; Kaye's aunt, Hilda Irene Lord; Kaye's Great-Grandmother, Sarah Watson Greenwood
‘For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.’
(The gospel according to Luke, chapter 16, verse 8)


Grandad married a Watson, and, like all the Watsons, Grandma was a Baptist, coming from a family of dyed-in-the-wool Baptists. In earlier days, family members had been baptised by full immersion in the fast-flowing river nearby (before it became polluted). This was ‘Believers’ Baptism’, performed when a person reached the ‘age of discretion’, and decided for him- or her-self to ‘take the plunge’. (Sorry about that!) To say the Watsons were staunch Baptists was an understatement.

Now, if you’ve already read any of my tales of Grandad, you’ll have some idea of the culture shock he experienced when he began to court Grandma. He had no religious affiliation. He was twenty-one, and she eighteen, only just of an age to ‘put up her hair’. This was a rite of passage for girls, who were expected to put their long hair into a chignon when their parents deemed them to be no longer girls, but young women – usually round about the age of seventeen. Grandad was comparatively worldly, and irreverent about most things.

He had only seen Betsy Watson Greenwood from a distance, but had decided she was the one for him. Once Grandad made up his mind about something, there was no stopping him.

He had grown up in abject poverty, but now all the Lord children were adult, and all working. Every Friday when they got their wage packets from the mill, they handed them straight over to their mother. She kept a strict tally of every penny, so, after she’d calculated what would be needed for the week, she’d dole out spending money. They were no longer poor, and all of them had developed a taste for good clothes, no doubt as a reaction to their childhood rag-bag of outfits. Grandad presented a fine figure in his smart Sunday best.

He didn’t work for the Watsons, who owned the mines and quarries up and down the valley, and lived in the big house on the hill. He was a cotton weaver – and an exceptional one. He and his sister Emma ran eight looms each. They were the only two weavers in all of the Whitworth valley who could do this, and they were known as ‘crack weavers’. Certainly to run eight looms simultaneously, all day and every day, required great skill: you could say a ‘cracking’ achievement; and they were much admired for this. Even so, there was a social gulf between Grandad and Grandma.

This did not bother Grandad in the slightest. It was just a problem to be overcome. So he did. A few enquiries revealed that Betsy was a baptised member of Millgate Baptist Chapel. He decided he would attend services there, so as to meet her.

The Watsons had their own family pew, and Betsy sat in it with her grandparents, Thomas Watson and Betty Howarth Watson, the sister of Sir Joshua Howarth. Betsy’s parents had to sit elsewhere. Her mother, Sarah Watson, had ‘married beneath her’, eloping with Elias Greenwood – but that’s a horror story for another day. Although Thomas Watson then built a house for his daughter Sarah, and supplied her with free coal, and welcomed her children, he would not receive her husband, and they could not sit in the family pew.

After service, the congregation would gather on the steps outside, exchanging greetings. There were hundreds of people, but Grandad somehow contrived to speak to Grandma, and also somehow persuaded her to meet him at some point to go a walk – alone and unchaperoned. I really and truly do not know how they ever managed this, given the social strictures of the time, plus the Non-Conformist attitudes of the community, but they did. And before too long, Grandad was accompanying Grandma back to her grandparents’ house after Chapel on Sunday evenings, where the family sat in the drawing room in silence, each reading his or her own Bible. This was the only ‘entertainment’ permitted on the Sabbath.

As I explained in ‘Grandad’s Mother’, Grandad was no reader. (The only book he’d ever managed to read was ‘Wuthering Heights’, which had so impressed him he never wanted to read anything else. At ninety-two, he told me, “I can still remember hearing the wind over the moors, and Cathy tapping at the window.”) As the Watsons sat there reading, Grandad fidgeted around until Betsy’s grandfather broke the silence. Putting down his Bible, he fixed her with his eye, and thundered, “CAN’T John Lord read?”

Despite all this, John and Betsy married soon after. It was a ‘shotgun’ wedding, which went down like lead with the Watsons. The wedding had to take place well away from the valley, so it was held at Ogden Baptist Chapel, an offshoot of the big and wealthy West Street Baptist Church, Rochdale, a church patronised by the local gentry in large numbers. Afterwards, Grandma and Grandad settled down in Rochdale, where their infant son was born. He lived just three days; and it was to be fifteen years before they had another child, and two years after that when my mother was born.

Grandma transferred her membership from Millgate to West Street, and remained a loyal Baptist for the rest of her long life. Grandad, however, ceased to attend chapel as soon as they were married. The only times he put in an appearance was for the Annual Chapel Anniversary.

These were very big occasions, usually lasting a whole weekend. Even when I was a girl, they were still going strong. On the Saturday, there’d be a big communal ‘tea’, a sit-down meal in the large hall adjoining the main church. A couple of hundred people sat at long trestle tables, with white table cloths, and plates of sandwiches and cakes, and ladies carried round giant brown teapots to fill everyone’s cup. In the evening, there’d be a concert, with songs, sketches, and jokes, all well-rehearsed.

The main event, though, was on Sunday. There’d be two services, both well-attended, despite the sermon being up to an hour each time. At each of them, a collection was taken, and at the end of the evening service, the Church treasurer announced the total collected. He’d been able to miss the sermon to count it….. Even in the fifties, it always amounted to a few hundred pounds. When the total exceeded last year’s amount, the congregation clapped.

When I was a girl, I’d go with Grandma to the Anniversary morning service. In the evening, we all went – Grandma and Grandad, my parents, and me. We walked the mile each way. We didn’t ride on the Sabbath. This was the only occasion of the year Grandad ever went to church – and what a performance he made of it!

Our family pew was near the front. It had a maroon Axminster carpet, and a matching long cushion on the seat. Underneath that seat was a drawer where we kept our own hymn books and Bible. There was a hearing aid, resembling an old–fashioned telephone from the 1940s, fixed to the front of the pew, for Grandma.

Dressed in his smart suit, his gold Albert chain across his waistcoat, Grandad would strut importantly down the aisle to our pew, and when he got there would sink down ostentatiously, with his elbow resting on the pew in front, and his hand supporting his bent head, a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’. Everyone behind had a good view. He sang all the hymns with great gusto and a powerful voice. He nodded sagely at the Minister’s words of wisdom. At some point he would pretend to nod off, so that I, sitting next to him, would anxiously prod him awake, and then he’d grin, and give me a humbug to suck. At the end he would circulate, and enjoy the various enquiries and comments – “How are you, Mr. Lord?” – “It’s good to see you, Mr. Lord” – and so on.

It was a few days after one such Anniversary that the Minister, Rev. George Dearden, called on him at a time when he’d be alone in the house. Grandma always went to the Ladies’ Bright Hour at Church on Tuesday afternoons, as Mr. Dearden well-knew.

“My wife’s out,” Grandad said.

“Yes, I know, but it’s you I’ve come to see,” the Minister said.”

“You’d better come in then,” Grandad said, not very graciously, wondering what on earth this was about.

“Now, Mr. Lord,” said the Minister, “I’ve come to ask you why we only see you in Church on Anniversary Sunday.”

Grandad thought quickly.

“It’s like this,” he improvised, “I find it hard to worship with other folk there. I’d rather be on my own for it.”

He then went on to elaborate at length (he had a good imagination), and ended , “Whenever I’m troubled by anything, I think of those wonderful words we sang in one of Sunday’s hymns :

‘Ask the Saviour to help you,
Comfort, strengthen, and keep you.
He is willing to aid you,
He will carry you through.’”

With that, Mr. Dearden went away, happy.

When Grandma got home, Grandad repeated the conversation. “I don’t wonder you eat humbugs!” she said.

Later, she told my mother about it. “Old hypocrite,” she said. “He’s incorrigible,” Mum laughed.

Worse was to come, however.

Next Sunday evening, when Grandma, my mother, and I were sitting in the family pew, Mr. Dearden began his sermon.

“I met a wonderful gentleman this week. He really made me think about how we worship, and how we apply what we learn in our daily lives, especially in our trust in the Lord. This gentleman doesn’t come to Church very often, but I have rarely met anyone so devout and sincere. This is what he told me has sustained him throughout his life.” He went on to quote Grandad’s tongue-in-cheek recitation.

“Oh, no,” my mother muttered.

“Silly idiot,” Grandma hissed.

When the service had ended, they just looked at one another. “I’ve never been so embarrassed,” Mum said.

“Don’t be daft. No-one else knows it’s him. Just wait till I get home, though. Just wait!”

Grandma was a big, powerful woman. One can only imagine the scene…….

It was not long after this that the Rev. George Dearden died, still very young. He went to his grave not knowing he’d had had the wool pulled over his eyes by my more worldly Grandad, thank goodness.

Grandma lived until she was eighty-five. She had a good Baptist funeral, arranged by Grandad, where we all sang her favourite hymn,

‘In heavenly love abiding,
No change my heart shall fear’.

She and Grandad had been married for sixty-six mostly happy years. Before her coffin was finally closed, Grandad looked at her for the last time, tears running down his face. In his mind’s eye he must have seen the eighteen-year old girl he’d set out to woo and win. He said, “Isn’t she a bonny lass;” and we all wept, too.
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