Beginnings of Charfield Chapel – condensed from original writings of 1848 by Edwin Gill
About the year 1814, Samuel Povey, a workman at Mappin Long’s Mill, established a prayer meeting at the Mill on weekday evenings. The prayer meeting led to preaching the Gospel and neighbouring ministers came to preach occasionally at these services. This continued for many years.
About 10 years later, a friend living in the neighbouring village of Charfield Green (then quite an open common but now the area near Railway Tavern) opened his house for prayer on Sundays. Again, the times of prayer grew into regular preaching and although the place of meeting was a lowly cottage, people flocked to it. This went on for about 30 years. Friends at Wotton-under-Edge Tabernacle also preached regularly in a cottage lent for that purpose by Samuel Long, a local mill owner. The population of the village increased with many attending the preaching and soon the place was found to be too small. The friends had talked for many years of erecting a Chapel, until a new arrival in the village urged the Christian friends on, to take immediate steps.
Rev Richard Knell (then pastor at Wotton Tabernacle) assisted in pushing it forward with all his influence and soon it was decided to ask the Earl of Ducie for some assistance. His Lordship very willingly gave as much land as was required and liberty to quarry as much stone as was needed.
The foundation stone was laid by Paul Long (son of the late Samuel Long) on July 28th 1846 and appropriate speeches were delivered. On December 25th of the same year, the Rev Richard Knell opened the chapel. The Lord’s supper was administered for the first time by the much esteemed and sincerely loved Rev Richard Knell on October 24th 1847 when 26 communicants sat down to commemorate our Saviour’s dying love. These people were members of the two neighbouring churches, viz Wotton and Kingswood which formed the nucleus of the present church.
The entire cost of the chapel, vestry and furnishings was about £290 defrayed wholly by voluntary contributions without even a public collection at the opening. It was universally felt that the growing needs of the village and neighbourhood required a House of God, and this has been borne out by experience. The chapel is now so crowded that various thoughts are entertained of enlarging it.
The preachers are mostly itinerant preachers. A good Sunday School has been established which contains 70 children at the present time with 12 devoted teachers.
Weekday evening services are held Tuesdays and Thursdays and monthly prayer meetings on the first Monday of the month. Writing School is on Monday evenings from 7 to 8 o’clock and a Bible class from 8 to 9 o’clock. A very nice library was established by a kind friend and the books are read avidly.
More history from the early days of Charfield Chapel, taken from an original history
Stephen Walter, who was one of the founders of the church, served as its gratuitous pastor for 22 years. He died in 1870 and is buried in the Chapel graveyard.
At the annual church meeting in January 1887, it was decided to restore the interior of the chapel and a committee was formed to plan this and raise the £130 needed for the builder’s contract which included heating apparatus and roof. Work began in July 1887 and the congregation met in the schoolroom while the work was going on. The opening service was two months later on Thursday 29th September 1887. The total costs including lamps and other things not included in the estimate was £153,15 shillings and 2 pence – the whole of which was raised before the opening service. By the following September, a small organ costing 37 guineas was installed, again fully paid for in advance.
A day school run by a mistress as an infant school had been going on for several years in the schoolroom which had been built as an extension of the chapel in 1854. In 1892, the Education Department demanded certain requirements and it now became necessary to either close the school and send our children to the National School, which we did not want to do, or meet government requirements requiring more building alterations amounting to £200. The Education Department refused to sanction our existing building at all. Eventually friends came to our help. Mark Whitwell, for many years chairman of the Bristol School Board, and D.B Jones, the Liberal Member for this division, went to London to the Department and laid our case before them. Eventually, the Department gave way and sanctioned the building if we would add another class-room and a cloakroom. The committee set to work to do this and Mr. A.W. King kindly gave £100 towards the cost of £180. It was opened free of debt on September 30th 1893. Various teachers were appointed after that, with Mr. W.J. Wilks proving most satisfactory. He was assisted by Miss F. Foxwell as the Infant Mistress and the school flourished both in terms of numbers and the first-class instruction given.
Mr. Augustus William King of Melrose House, Charfield, left several legacies to the chapel and schools when he died on 14th August 1900 after an unsuccessful operation in Birmingham. He left £200 for a pipe organ for the Chapel but there was no suitable place to put it. So, alterations had to be made once again to build an organ chamber. This was done as well as many repairs being made to the chapel and the inside redecorated. This came to £170 and the chapel was reopened on September 18th, 1901 with the opening of the new organ being on Wednesday March 19th 1902. He also gave £600 to build a Temperance Hall which became known as King’s Hall. This was used for many years by the people of Charfield for weddings and all kinds of events.
More recent history of the Chapel
The chapel continued for the next 160 years with a large congregation, lots of baptisms, weddings, funerals and burials in the graveyard.
After the second world war, William Baker moved from being pastor of Cromhall Chapel for over 30 years and became pastor of Charfield Chapel. He is also buried in the Chapel graveyard. There was a lot of interaction between the village Chapels in Charfield, Cromhall and Kingswood and the Tabernacle in Wotton-under-Edge and many preachers from one preached at the others.
By 2011, King’s Hall, which was over 100 years old, was dilapidated and had stood empty for over eight years and would have taken a great deal of money to bring up to modern, legal requirements. Due to its condition the Valuation Office had removed the building from its schedule for the payment of Council Tax and this has been backdated showing that the building was unfit for habitation. The Sanctuary of the Church itself was in such a poor state of repair that the congregation had been meeting in a back room for the last 5 years. New Trustees of the Chapel had been appointed in March 2007 and considered their priority was to get the main Sanctuary of the Church watertight and to prevent further damage and secondly to preserve the Church for future generations. (The Charity Commission has stated that this must now be regarded as the priority of the Trustees.) Unless severe action was taken both the Church and King’s Hall would become ruins.
Apart from the Church itself, the main assets were a one-acre field to the rear of the church and King’s Hall. All of this land was firstly gifted and then leased by the then Earl of Ducie and later purchased and gifted to the church by Augustus King, of Melrose House, Charfield. It was an outright gift directly to the Church. Augustus King had also provided for the funding for the “erection and furnishing of a hall for a reading room and temperance and other meetings at the Trustees’ discretion”. However, this hall, known as King’s Hall, was in a sorry state by 2011 and the possible space for meetings was less than that available in the Church. If it was sold it would not have raised enough funds to repair the Church.
Many people in the village were not happy to lose King’s Hall but it was the only way to save the Church, which is the older of the two buildings and had so much more potential.
It was decided by the Trustees to try to find a developer to build on the field. This would mean demolishing King’s Hall to allow an entrance onto Wotton Road. A developer was found to build 16 homes on the field belonging to the Chapel. Woodstock Homes made £150,000 of repairs to the chapel in return for the field, including central heating, a state-of-the-art kitchen, office and storage space, disabled access and new chairs among other improvements. This was the answer to the congregation’s prayers! It was hoped that this remodelling would help turn the church into a social as well as a religious hub for the village. They also provided the Chapel with 2 three-bedroom houses which the Chapel can rent out to bring in an income.
The Rededication of Charfield Congregational Church took place on Saturday 12th October, 2013 and almost 100 people attended the service which was followed by a finger buffet. Since that time, the building has been well used for lunches for the elderly, a weekly Sunshine Club for children, a youth club, the packing of hundreds of shoe boxes for children in poorer countries each Christmas and lots more as well as regular Church services.
Eventually some people moved away and the congregation dwindled and when churches were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Charfield Chapel stayed closed.
However, the Chapel has now been re-opened, with new Trustees, re-named as Charfield Christian Centre and has held regular, informal, interactive Sunday services since 10th September 2023. We hold coffee mornings (presently on the second Monday of the month) and Sunshine Tots, a Mums and Toddlers group each Tuesday in school term time. This has proved to be very popular with the young families in the village. We will be having free movie nights over the winter, starting Friday 8th November and Friday 13th December at 7.00pm. There will be a children’s movie on Friday 6th December at 4.00pm.
The wall around the graveyard has been beautifully re-built after it fell down and much needed repairs done to the roof and other parts of the building as well as tidying up in the graveyard. It is now a bright and welcoming space. If you haven’t been inside for some time, do come to one of our coffee mornings or a movie night or join us on a Sunday morning and see for yourself.
The history of Charfield Christian Centre is not finished, it will go on as long as people in the area want it! We would love to do more for the community, but this depends on having more people to help. Eventually we hope to be able to have a full-time pastor.
