Chapter 1: Parentage
A scan of the original unannotated document can be accessed from the HathiTrust Digital Library collection at
The Life-Story of Sir Robert W. Perks, Baronet, by Denis Crane.
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Chapter I: Parentage
Whatever may be the inevitable defects of a biography written during the lifetime of its subject —and of the reality of those defects the author of this volume is fully conscious — such a work may possess certain intrinsic merits, which excuse, if they do not justify, its existence.
Only two of these need here be mentioned. One is that, by indicating the good qualities and achievements of its hero, it may encourage their emulation; all the more so because—as against the old sneer that the good men all lived in the past —these qualities and achievements are daily verifiable.
The other is that, if the story be written with discrimination, it may win for its subject
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a measure of that honour which is only too frequently withheld until a man is dead and cannot enjoy it. This may be so even where one dissents from the hero’s religious or political views, if it be admitted that what gives real distinction to a career is the moral courage it exhibits and the loftiness of its controlling purposes, rather than its approximation to any one particular interpretation of life.
In writing the present monograph, the author has endeavoured to invest his work with these two merits. Anything like a critical account of Sir Robert Perks’s career, even if it were called for, would at present be impossible. This, however, may be claimed; from the first he has shone as a conspicuous example of a courageous Christian layman fighting side by side with the ministers of his day in many honourable causes; he has carried the fight, with singular determination and consistency, into the legislative councils of his country; he has been closely associated with industrial and commercial enterprises so gigantic and generally so successful that his experience must afford invaluable lessons to those who are as yet but on the threshold of
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life; and, what is more rare, amid all the cares arising out of these great enterprises, and throughout his steady rise in the social scale, he has retained his loyalty not only to the Church of his youth, but also to those of her doctrines and those more democratic features of her constitution which in the prosperous are so often a cause of stumbling or offence. It is natural, therefore, that his friends should wish to acquaint themselves more fully with the details of his career.
It was on April 24, 1849, in a Wesleyan minister’s house at Hammersmith, that Robert William Perks was born; but we must go a good deal farther back than that rightly to understand him. Indeed, the inclusion in our retrospect of a hundred additional years will hardly suffice; for he is more closely and honourably bound to his antecedents than are most men. For this reason the somewhat threadbare phrase, ‘A son of the manse,’ is in his case quite inadequate. The personal forces of his ancestry, rather than the incidental atmosphere of a Methodist preacher’s home, were the dominant influences in the formation of his character.
His father, George Thomas Perks, came
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from Madeley, in Shropshire, where the family had been resident for several generations. Madeley, as every student of the religious life of this country knows, was the parish of John Fletcher, whose name is inseparably associated with the town. The population in Fletcher’s time was under five thousand, and can hardly have been much more in 1819, when George was born.[1] Mrs. Fletcher, whose ‘saintliness’ equalled that of her husband, had died only four years before, and among those who visited her on her deathbed was George’s mother. It is recorded, indeed, that the dying woman prayed that upon her ‘the choicest blessings might descend.’[2]
The Perks’s house stood opposite the parish church. It was a substantial, double-fronted edifice, with high dormer windows, and, on account of its early associations with the Fletchers, could perhaps lay claim to a certain degree of sanctity.[3] Under its hospitable roof the godly vicar must often have tarried to discuss parish affairs, for George’s grandfather (by whom he was brought up, his father having died in early middle life)[4] was one of the church-wardens. Moreover, for some considerable time one of the rooms was utilized for the
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Methodist society class, of which, after Fletcher’s death, George’s grandfather, who lived to a patriarchal age,[5] assumed the leadership. He was a friend of John Wesley, whom he met at the Madeley vicarage.
The connexion between the house and the vicarage seems to have been a friendly one even in later days, for through the persuasions of Mr. Eyton, a subsequent vicar,[6] George was in his youth destined for the ministry of the Established Church. God willed otherwise, however, and soon after the lad’s conversion he experienced a call to exercise his undoubted gifts among the Methodists. From that day until his death his career was honourable and distinguished. He attained to the highest positions his Church had to bestow. In 1872 he filled the office of Secretary of the Conference, and in the following year was elected President. His competitors on the latter occasion were all men greatly beloved, and their names still rank high in Methodist annals — Alexander M’Aulay, Morley Punshon, Gervase Smith — yet so popular was his candidature, that of the three hundred and sixty-six votes cast, no less than three hundred and twenty were in his favour.[7] He had already,
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as far back as 1867, been appointed Secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and to the onerous duties of that position he devoted the best years of his life. His work involved a visit to Africa, during which, it is alleged, he seriously overtaxed his strength by long journeys and arduous labours.[8] A year or two later he passed away while advocating the cause in which he had already shown such self-effacement.[9]
The more intimate friends of Sir Robert assert that, though there are certain points of difference between the two men, he has inherited in an unusual degree some of the best qualities of his father. Certainly anyone comparing the portraits of father and son would observe a striking outward likeness; there is the same steadfast gaze, the same broad, clear-cut, resolute mouth, and the same ample brow; and the resemblance extends also to the compact frame, firm step, and powerful voice. But the intellectual and moral likeness is not less complete. What Dr. Punshon, in Wesley and His Successors,[10] claims for the father may, with few reservations, be claimed for the son. ‘He had superior natural endowments, which were developed and ma
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tured by conscientious study;’ in early life ‘his character had a singular ripeness which forbade men to despise his youth,’ while in later years it proved to be unusually ‘well-balanced,’ and ‘displayed in harmonious combination qualities not often found together.’ And the same may be said in respect to the ‘weight, promptitude, power and independence’ attributed to the father, ‘in no common measure,’ at the time of his election to the Presidency.
In one notable point, however, the likeness breaks down. At a congratulatory dinner in the precincts of the House of Commons a short time ago. Sir Robert, in alluding to his father, described him as ‘a confirmed but reticent politician.’ Equally ‘confirmed,’ but necessarily far less ‘reticent,’ the son has pursued a militant path; whereas, in politics, at least, the father’s course was one of tranquillity and peace. In his first address from the President’s chair the latter said: ‘As Methodist preachers we cannot afford to be politicians. Our people are divided, and we cannot please one party without offending the other. Besides, three years is much too contracted a period to allow of any abstraction
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of time or energy from our great and glorious spiritual work, which is to save souls.’ Heartily in accord with these sentiments, with reference to the ministry, as Sir Robert is, it is his own exemption from such restraints, as a layman and a professional politician, which accounts for the major differences between his father and himself. Beneath the somewhat brusque and lawyer-like exterior, and behind the strong and often mordant speech, there is, as it is hoped this story will show, more of the delicate sensibility and tenderness of heart which characterized his father than careless observers would suppose.
For some twenty years or more Sir Robert’s father was one of a little group of Wesleyan ministers who became famous, as much for their advanced sympathies in matters classical and political, as for their scholarship and evangelical fervour. Among other enterprises, they founded the Methodist Recorder (then a Liberal journal), which has since become the semi-official organ of their Church. The names of these distinguished men were Dr. Punshon, Dr. Gervase Smith, Dr. Ebenezer Jenkins, Luke Wiseman, Charles Garrett, and William Arthur. They have since passed away, but
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in the son of at least one member of the group the old Liberal spirit still survives.[11]
Mr. George Perks commenced his ministry at Leeds,[12] acting for the time being as President’s Assistant. When he left Leeds in 1843 he was presented with a magnificent folio polyglot Bible (now in Sir Robert’s library) in eight languages,[13] and signed, ‘John Bowers, William Kelk, Francis A, West, Ministers; and William Smith and Thomas Bell, Circuit Stewards.’ His first circuit was Dalkeith,[14] where there was a small Wesleyan colony. While stationed here he attended Edinburgh University and was a student under Sir William Hamilton.[15] He also attended the lectures of Hugh Miller, the famous geologist. The love of systematic theology, which subsequently won him honour among his ministerial brethren, was manifest even in these early days. His lodgings in Dalkeith chanced to be close to the palace of the Duke of Buccleuch. The duke had a steward, connected with the Methodist society, with whom he not infrequently got into dispute upon the subject of predestination and other abstruse theological problems, and the young circuit minister was more than once sent for
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by the duke to settle, as a sort of theological arbitrator, the controversy upon these thorny themes. It is related that the duke’s admiration of the young divine led him more than once to attend the Methodist chapel.
It was while preaching in Edinburgh, during his residence at Dalkeith, that George Perks made the acquaintance, at the house of Miss Drummond (afterwards Lady Falshaw)[16], of the lady whom he subsequently married. Her father, Alexander Dodds,[17] was a rising architect, who, having lost his wife, left his native town of Haddington and came with his two daughters to the Scottish capital. Here he laid the foundations of a modest fortune; for at the conclusion of the French wars Edinburgh, like many other cities, entered upon a period of marvellous prosperity, during which the stately squares and streets of the western portion of the city were laid out.
Unfortunately, the promising career of Alexander Dodds was early cut short, and his death was followed by that of one of his daughters.[18] Consequently Miss Dodds, when George Perks met her, was an orphan, but she was happily the owner of several large houses
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in Moray Place, then, as now, one of the fashionable quarters of Edinburgh. These furnished her with a fair competency at that time and during the lean years of her husband’s ministry.
‘My mother,’ says Sir Robert, ‘was a woman of very extensive information and a diligent reader, but she had very little humour. She was a Scotchwoman and a Presbyterian to her finger-tips, and dated everything from the Disruption. ‘Like many more of her countrywomen, she was a strange combination of strong common-sense and superstition, and was to the end of her days a firm believer in second-sight. Among her accomplishments were music and painting, at both of which she was decidedly clever. She was a loyal Methodist minister’s wife, devoting most of her time to her home and her family. When her husband visited Africa she accompanied him. After his death she settled at Beckenham, where, many years later, she herself entered into rest.[19]
Their first circuit after their marriage was Perth, the stipend being the almost incredibly small sum of thirty pounds a year. And the manse, which adjoined the back of the chapel,
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was as poor as the salary. To add to its scanty accommodation, the chapel gallery — never needed by the meagre congregations that then assembled — had been partitioned off and added to it. It was approached by what one who heard the story of her home-coming from the bride’s own lips, called ‘an old outside staircase’; and the same person expatiated with natural feeling upon the extraordinary conditions which enabled the Perth church to secure the incalculable influence of George Perks’s character and service, in exchange for this humble abode and thirty pounds a year.[20]
Under their new leader, however, the congregations grew; for his sermons, closely reasoned, full of sound practical teaching, and untrammelled by notes, suited the people. But they were not to retain him long. In 1846 came the inevitable call to London, where, three years later, as already stated, the subject of this book was born.[21]
It is not, however, to this first London home that Sir Robert’s earliest recollections go back, but to Manchester, where his father travelled six years. Writing in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine some time ago, he said: ‘My earliest recollection of a Methodist
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chapel was being carried by my father up to the gallery windows of the Oldham Street Chapel, Manchester, to see Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington go past. John Wesley did not attach much importance to the consecration of churches and graveyards. Indeed, he called it a Pagan ceremony. My father, I fancy, had no high classical notions of the sanctity of religious buildings for I well remember him frequently playing hide-and-seek with my sisters and me in Higher Broughton Chapel, which was then a very wealthy suburban church standing in fields.’[22] The circuit steward was a rough old contractor, named Garstang, who was fond of the preacher’s lad and often asked him to the Hall. One day the boy was lost. At last he was discovered inside the kennel of a huge mastiff, where he had spent the whole afternoon.
Even in these early days it was the father’s custom to take his son with him to his evening appointments, a practice which he maintained all through his ministry. Riding on Sunday was not permitted, and on the long walks it was a strict rule never to talk on their way to chapel; but they made up for their silence on the way home.
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‘I remember staying one night to the love-feast at Irwell Street Chapel,’ said Sir Robert, speaking some years ago at Manchester. ‘Among the men who spoke that night was an old coal-heaver on the Bridgewater Canal. I can still see him as he rose in the front of the gallery. Walking home I noticed a falling star shoot across the sky, and turning to my father I asked him if it was true that, as folk said, some one had that moment died.
‘ “No, my boy,” he said, “but if old Wilham, the coal-heaver, were to die to-night there would be another star in heaven.”[23] ’ Another incident which stamped itself upon the boy’s memory was connected with one of the less pleasant experiences that fall to the Methodist preacher’s lot. This was a tedious journey during a change of circuits from Manchester to Bath, whither the family removed in 1856. The long trek was broken at Wolverhampton, where the father’s relatives lived.[24] The arrival at Bath was far from cheerful. No one expected them, and the minister’s house, then a forbidding building standing in the chapel yard, was shut up.
Three happy years, however, were spent in the fine old city, and Sir Robert cherishes some
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pleasant reminiscences of his home-life there. An incident occurred during this period which throws an interesting light on George Perks’s tolerance and catholicity. He was a somewhat enthusiastic student of Irish ecclesiastical history, and especially of the life of St. Patrick. He had a strong opinion that modern Romanism was totally at variance with the teaching and practice of St. Patrick, and in a lecture at the Guildhall[25] he had so vigorously asserted these opinions as to call forth in the local paper the severe condemnation of the chief Catholic priest. Walking with Robert one day in Prior’s Park, Mr. Perks came suddenly vis-à-vis with his Catholic critic, stopped, shook hands with him, and entered into cordial conversation. When the priest had gone, the following dialogue took place between father and son:
‘Father, was not that man a Catholic priest?’
‘Yes, my lad.’
‘But is not that the man who attacks you in the paper?’
‘Yes, my boy.’
‘Then I should think you will never want to meet him again.’
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‘I dare say we shall never meet again till we meet in heaven.’
The idea of a Roman Catholic priest getting to heaven, confesses Sir Robert, was quite new to him; but this was his father’s way of training his children. He declares he never knew him to sit down and talk deliberately to them about their religious life. Instead, they were taught to think and act for themselves. This did not mean that his parents gave little direct guidance to their children’s convictions; on the contrary. Sir Robert says: ‘I think I owe my love of freedom in Church and State to my father; my strong aversion to sacerdotalism to my mother.’ And their influence in other phases of thought and feeling will be not less marked in the course of this sketch.
A notable result of this method of parental training was the way in which the high traditions of Methodism became inextricably entwined with the boy’s whole life. It would be as hard for Sir Robert to-day to cut himself adrift from his shadow as from the Church of his youth. Speaking thirty years ago of the problem of attaching children to the Church of their fathers, he said that, though
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not himself an undiscriminating believer in the revival of ancient traditions to achieve that purpose, his own experience would tell a tale. Fourteen or fifteen years before, he declared, his father had led him into Wesley’s Chapel, taken him round to the Communion table at the back, and pointed out to him the tablet to the memory of John Wesley, and then to the monument of John Fletcher; and afterwards told him how his own grandfather had taken the latter’s place at the class-room at Madeley, and looked after the early Methodists. The influence of such episodes as that, he concluded, added to the faithful life and triumphant death of his father, had so impressed him that for his own part he could never forsake the Methodist Church.
More recently, at the Bristol Conference, he related how when he first came to that city, forty years before, his father took him for a tour of its streets and, between his observations on the sights they saw, told him of the illustrious men who fought in bygone days the glorious battles of Nonconformity — of Penn and Fox, of Wesley and Whitefield, of Robert Hall and John Foster, and of that
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giant of power and resolution who towered above them all, Oliver Cromwell. The little poetry, romance, and imagination he possessed, he said, were to be attributed to that and to similar talks with his father in Bristol[26] and other cities.
But his strongest Methodist associations seem to have been formed at City Road, whither his father removed in 1864. ‘In those days,’ he says, in the magazine already quoted, ‘the preachers at Wesley’s Chapel lived on either side of the chapel. This was one of the secrets of their power. Wesley House, now a small museum, was my father’s house. My little bedroom was John Wesley’s old “praying-room.” My mother and I used to read Wesley’s Life, and in fancy we peopled the house once again with the friends of the great evangelist. Across the way was the sacred burial-place of the Puritans, where rest the bones of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe.
‘It was from the windows of Wesley’s House that we saw Garibaldi enter London in triumph after the Liberation of Italy. My father and I made a huge Italian flag, which we hung at the gate, with Wesley’s name below, and we were abundantly rewarded
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when the Italian patriot rose in his carriage and took off his grey slouched hat, and saluted Wesley’s name and the flag of his enfranchised country. A few years later it fell to my father’s lot, aided by two generous Lancashire laymen, to start the Wesleyan Mission in the Eternal City.’[27]
These were some of the formative influences of the boy’s home-life on its distinctively religious side. For the rest, the discipline was somewhat Spartan-like, as befitted the household of a Methodist preacher. Yet was it tempered by a serene happiness, which, notwithstanding the daily discussion of matters of public interest, neither controversy nor the faintest approach to a difference ever interrupted or disturbed.
End Notes to Chapter One
[1] George Thomas Perks was baptised in Madeley on 26 September 1819. He was the second child of William Perks and Elizabeth neé Pearce, who had married on 26 June 1817. The marriage record gives William’s age as 33 and Elizabeth’s as 22.
[2] I have not been able to discover any record of Mary Fletcher making reference to Elizabeth Pearce (as George’s mother then was). It is possible that Crane is confusing her, in this reference, with George’s aunt (Marianne Perks) who is recorded as one of the beneficiaries in Mary Fletcher’s Will.
[3] The Perks’s house is still standing. Photographs of it can be seen at thefletcherpage.org/perksfamily.html.
[4] William Perks died 31 March 1831, aged 50. His wife had died on 28 May 1828. From March 1831 therefore George Thomas Perks, his older sister and his two younger brothers were orphans.
[5] George Thomas Perks’s grandfather died 26 October 1833, aged 81. After his death his four grandchildren (as well as his widow) went to live in the household of his daughter Marianne in Wolverhampton. Marianne had married her first cousin, Robert Perks, and thus continued to have the surname Perks.
[6] This reference to “Mr. Eyton” is difficult to interpret. The Rev. John Eyton M.A. was vicar of Wellington in Shropshire from 1802 to 1823. George Thomas Perks’s mother was from Wellington, and Eyton had been the celebrant at her marriage to George’s father in 1817. Eyton was a friend of Mary Fletcher and her companion Mary Tooth, and was probably a frequent visitor to Madeley. But he died in January 1823 and was never vicar of Madeley.
[7] There were a total of 381 votes cast in the election of the President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of 1873, of which 320 were in favour of George Thomas Perks (The Methodist Recorder, 1 August 1873, p.415). Crane’s figure of 366 is the number of votes cast for G.T. Perks plus the three closest “competitors” named by Crane here. That figure omits the votes cast for the other four “competitors” (J.H. Rigg; W.B. Pope; C. Haydon; and M.C. Osborn). At the 1872 Conference, Perks had been elected Secretary with 238 votes out of a total of 382 votes cast. In the election for President that year, there had been 64 votes in favour of Perks. L.H. Wiseman received 356 votes and was elected President.
[8] G.T. Perks and his wife Mary departed from London for South Africa on 23 September 1875, aboard the “Edinburgh Castle”. They arrived back in England on the “Zulu” on 3 May 1876.
[9] G.T. Perks died 29 May 1877 in Rotherham. He had travelled from London to Rotherham on Saturday 26 May to attend an anniversary meeting of the Wesleyan Missionary Society.
[10] Published in 1891. The section on G.T. Perks is at pages 219-221.
[11] It is interesting to compare this paragraph with the following passage from “Mr R.W. Perks, M.P.”, published in The British Monthly, January 1903.“Between 1850 and 1870 Mr Perks’s father was one of a little group of Liberal Wesleyan ministers who fought a gallant battle to deliver Methodism from the domination of reactionary Toryism in Church and State. His colleagues were Dr. Punshon, Dr. Gervase Smith, Rev. Luke Wiseman, Charles Garrett, Dr. Ebenezer Jenkins and William Arthur, all of whom have passed from the conflict with the exception of Dr. Jenkins.” (op. cit., p. 77) Ebenezer Evans Jenkins, President of the W.M. Conference in 1880, and one of the Secretaries of the W.M. Missionary Society from 1877 to 1888, died in July 1905.
[12] At the W.M. Conference of 1839 G.T. Perks was accepted as a “Minister on Trial”. He immediately commenced studies at the Wesleyan Theological College, Abney Park, Stoke Newington. After three years of study, Perks was appointed by the 1842 W.M. Conference to the Brunswick circuit in Leeds. His three years of theological studies were deemed to satisfy two of the four probationary years required for a “Minister on Trial”. In some of the records, this is stated as “[He] started to travel” in 1840.
[13] This copy of Bagster’s Biblia Sacra Polyglotta is now held in the collection of Manchester University’s Library. See catalogue references R209327; R209328.1; and R209328.2.
[14] At the W.M. Conference of 1843, G.T. Perks was appointed to the Dalkeith circuit, where he remained for two years. See Alan J. Hayes, “The Extinct Methodist Societies of South-East Scotland: 4. Dalkeith”, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, Vol. 41, No. 4, February 1978, pp. 104-116.
[15] G.T. Perks wrote an article on Sir William Hamilton’s life and work, which was published in The London Quarterly Review, Vol. 33, No. 628, October 1869, pp. 1-32. In this article he refers to having attended Hamilton’s lectures during the 1843-44 academic year (p. 22).
[16] Crane appears to have made some sort of mistake here. Sir James Falshaw (1810-1889), who was a good friend of G.T. Perks and a prominent Wesleyan layman, was married twice. His first wife (whose maiden name was Morkill) was already married to him when George Perks arrived in Edinburgh in 1843. His second wife’s maiden name was Gibbs. They married in 1871.
[17] The Dictionary of National Biography entry for R.W. Perks gives the name of his maternal grandfather as “James Alexander Dodds”. Neither the DNB nor Crane are correct. On 2 August 1845 George Thomas Perks married Mary Dodds, the daughter of Robert Dodds. The record of this marriage is available on the Scotland’s People website.
[18] Robert Dodds died on 13 June 1833. His Will, dated 26 July 1824 (with a codicil dated 23 May 1833) is available on the Scotland’s People website. It is not clear how old he was when he died. Robert Dodds’s Will specified a series of bequests and then left the remainder of his estate in trust for the benefit of his two daughters Isabella and Mary. Isabella died on 27 June 1842 at 1 Manor Place, Edinburgh, aged 23. The birth records of Isabella and Mary indicate that their mother’s name was “Lillias Middleton”. Robert Dodds’s Will suggests that he and Lillias Middleton had not married one another: it describes Isabella and Mary as his “natural daughters”. Moreover, the 1833 codicil instructs the guardians/trustees of the two girls (appointed under the Will) not to allow any contact between those two girls and their mother. Mary Dodds’s mother was still alive at the time Mary married Geroge Perks, although she may not have been aware of that. Lillias died in April 1865 in Edinburgh, having been known in her latter years by the surname Watson. She was buried in Carlton cemetery. The inscription on the gravestone reads: “Isabella daughter of late Mr Robert Dodds of Edinburgh 27 June 1842 [aged] 23; Mary Ann daughter of Rev. George T. Perks 19 Feb 1847, infant; Lilias (sic) Watson 22 April 1865 [aged] 78”. (See the “Scotland Monumental Inscriptions” segment of the FindmyPast website.)
[19] R.W. Perks’s mother Mary died at “Ormonde”, Elm Road, Beckenham, on 4 March 1894.
[20] G.T. Perks was appointed to the Perth circuit by the W.M. Conference of 1845. According to R.W. Perks’s Notes for an Autobiography (p. 14), the stipend was sixty pounds a year.
[21] Crane is mistaken about the year of the move to London. It was the 1847 W.M. Conference which appointed G.T. Perks to the Hammersmith circuit. He preached his farewell sermon in Perth in early August 1847. See Perthshire Advertiser, 12 August 1847, p. 2.
[22] This quote is taken from page 95 of R.W. Perks, “My Methodist Life”, Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, Vol. CXXIX (1906), pp. 94-98. There are two changes from the original. The phrase “classical notions” was “ecclesiastical notions” in the original; and the final word “fields” was preceded by “country” in the original.
[23] This incident had been recounted in Perks’s 1906 “My Methodist Life” article, but with the difference that Wilham had there been described as a “boatman”. The relevant passage reads: “I was in the habit, when quite a small boy, of accompanying my father to his Sunday evening appointments. My father never rode on Sunday, and on our long walks we made it a rule never to talk on our way to the chapel; but we made up for our silence on our way home. One night, after a glorious lovefeast in Irwell Street Chapel, I said to my father, ‘is it true that when a star shoots across the sky and falls some one dies and goes to heaven?’ ‘I know not my lad’, he replied, ‘but I am certain that if old William (a boatman on the Bridgwater Canal, who had spoken at the lovefeast) died tonight, there would be another soul in heaven and another star up there.’” (op. cit., p. 95).
[24] The Wolverhampton relatives referred to here were probably G.T. Perks’s sister Rebecca, her husband Samuel Griffiths (whom she had married in 1840) and their children.
[25] This lecture was titled “St. Patrick and his successors”. It was delivered on Tuesday 23 February 1858. (See The Bath Chronicle, 25 February 1858, p. 8.)
[26] G.T. Perks was stationed in Bristol from the autumn of 1859 to the autumn of 1862. The W.M. Conference of 1862 appointed him to the London City Road circuit.
[27] The passage quoted here is taken from p. 96 of Perks’s 1906 “My Methodist Life” article. But, curiously, Crane has added some words into the final sentence. The original reads “A few years later it fell to my father’s lot to start the Wesleyan Mission in the Eternal City”. The date of Garibaldi’s procession along City Road was Wednesday 20 April 1864 (see The Times, 21 April 1864, page 14).