IT was a considerable step up for Wesleyan Methodists in Blackburn when in 1879 they left the humble preaching room in Dukes Brow -- identified in this pre-war photograph (above, right) by the church-style windows of the Dukes Hall above Frank Pinder's grocer's shop -- for the splendid new gothic-style Trinity Chapel which opened that year down the hill on the corner of Preston New Road and Montague Street.
Pictured (bottom left) with the now-gone old High School for Girls to its right, the church, with its 155ft spire, was to be a Blackburn landmark for almost 100 years until it was demolished in 1965 to make way for the petrol filling station that now occupies the site.
But when the Wesleyans' eventual progress there from the preaching room that they had first occupied in 1874 was marked by the fixing of the very top stone on the Trinity's church's steeple in June, 1878 -- with its first minister, the Rev TD Anderson and trustee, solicitor John Robert Fletcher being hoisted up through the scaffolding to perform the ceremony before a crowd of spectators -- they had gone past a milestone unique in the Methodist Church's history in Blackburn.
And a major one it was, too -- marking the rare condonation of a practice that was normally frowned by its members... gambling.
But evidently it was considered a lesser evil leading to a greater good because the cost of the new church project was considerable -- the chapel, the Sunday School built with it and the site cost the then-immense sum of almost £16,000. And towards it went almost £2,100 -- a record at the time -- raised at a great five-day bazaar held at Blackburn Town Hall in May, 1877, a feature of which was a raffle with some splendid prizes. The top one -- which, arguably, gave the raffle the Victorian equivalent of a Win-A-Car lure -- was a "handsome, four-wheeled carriage" donated by bazaar committee secretary Thomas Lewis, the coachbuilder husband of Elizabeth Ann Lewis, who became famed in beery Blackburn as the "Drunkard's Friend" temperance campaigner whose rousing meetings enticed thousands into signing the pledge.
Nor did Mr Lewis's own anti-drink principles prevent him from inviting Blackburn brewer Daniel Thwaites, then one of the town's MPs, to be one of the event's patrons. Another paradox was that the beer magnate Thwaites was a trustee of the land purchased for Trinity Chapel, despite a clause being added to the deed of transfer stipulating that no public house should be erected on the site.
The other principal prizes in the raffle included a piano given by Mr Gillibrand, the organist of the Wesleyans' "parent" chapel in Clayton Street and a "handsome fire grate with a hearth of splendid tiles and surmounted with a marble cornice."
But this was the only temptation of its sort the town's Methodist community would ever permit.
For, said a history of the Trinity church on its 50th anniversary: "This was the first bazaar the Wesleyans in Blackburn had organised; raffling was allowed, but at no similar function of the Wesleyans in Blackburn has it been permitted since."
And even without the attraction of a big-prize raffle, they were able to raise even more in the future.
For the building of the Trinity chapel was part of an extension scheme the church had begun in Blackburn to not only build the new church in Preston New Road, but also rebuild the crumbling Clayton Street chapel in the town centre and free the other chapels in the town's Wesleyan circuit from debt. That aim was realised by the staging of another bazaar -- this time, at the Exchange Hall in King William Street which is today's Apollo cinema complex -- over four days in October, 1896, which raised more than £3,000 for the achievement of the goal.
With its closure in early 1964, the Trinity Chapel was merged with the Paradise United Methodist Church in town-centre Feilden Street (bottom right) which dated from 1836 and was rebuilt in 1871-72 and which, in turn, was pulled down to make way for the Wesley Hall new Blackburn Central Methodist Mission which opened two years later in 1972.
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