As a child, I believed what I was told: that my grandfather had been a wonderful man loved by all. It seemed only right since everyone talked about him as Dear Belovèd.
According to my mother, he had been born a gentleman into the Smyth-Pigott clan of north Somerset landed gentry. He was also, she said, connected to some of the kingdom’s great aristocratic families. As a result, she was often gently insistent that her own daughters were ‘ladies’ and should always behave as such. She even relayed to us the injustices her father had suffered as a boy. How her father, John Hugh, the youngest of three boys, had had to attend Rossall School, then a brand-new boarding school in the unfashionable northern seaport of Fleetwood in Lancashire, rather than Eton, where male members of the family had traditionally been educated.
What she didn’t tell me was the reason for his apparent banishment, perhaps because she never knew. By the time my grandfather was old enough to be sent to boarding school, family charity was running out. The Smyth-Pigott family had taken in John Hugh, his mother and older brothers when the boys’ father, Henry, had first shown signs of madness, now thought to have been brought on by gonorrhoea. Soon Henry was declared insane and committed to a lunatic asylum, where he died. His youngest son, my grandfather, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, was just five. It was no wonder England’s premier private school was no longer an option.
My grandfather didn’t excel at school. He won no academic prizes, failed to represent the school or his ‘house’ at sport and left aged 18. Within weeks, he had signed on as a seaman aboard a sailing ship. In 1870, calling himself plain Johnny Pigott (he dropped the Smyth part of his hyphenated surname), he set off to see the world. Just as 100 years later legions of young men and women would ‘drop out’ in search of nirvana, so my grandfather shrugged off his upper-class background and immersed himself in the tough world of the ordinary sailor.
As I grew up and the community dwindled, my mother and I were thrown together and she began to tell me the tales her father had told her, of his seafaring adventures and attempts at gold prospecting. I wish now she had seen the articles he wrote for his divinity college magazine about his travels and read for herself his descriptions of his adventures. But my mother had been dead for years by the time I tracked these down, written in his recognisable handwriting and archived at the University of Nottingham. ‘Lost in the Bush’, my grandfather’s article about his gold prospecting days in Cawarral Goldfield in Central Queensland, Australia, was published in the St John’s Magazine in December 1880. The huge Cawarral Goldfield, discovered in 1860, stretched from the northern branch of the Fitzroy River to the sea as far north as Yaamba. My grandfather and a friend named Arthur had set off one morning on a twelve-mile hike to a shanty town then known as Cawarral Diggings to buy more rations. He wrote:
Our attire was selected rather with a view to coolness and ease than elegance. It consisted of soft white felt hats, flannel shirts, moleskins [trousers] and good large Blucher boots; and if I add to these two knives, two pipes, some tobacco and matches, and a one pound note, you have our whole equipment before you . . . Our surroundings continuing to raise our spirits: the deep blue Australia sky, bright sun, green grass, grand trees, cockatoos, white and black, screaming a grand operatic chorus, exquisitely coloured parroquets [sic] flying from tree to tree, iguanas lazily sunning their hideous bodies, any amount of flyers and wallabies springing about, and now and then an Oldman Kangaroo leisurely stopping to take a good look at us, then solemnly going about his way as if he had the cares of nations on his old head; whatever we were doing we seemed so friendly and happy together that Arthur and I felt like two Alexander Selkirks, ‘monarchs of all we surveyed’.
But the young men got lost:
. . . finding ourselves in a regular cul-de-sac of thick scrub. We now decided on retracing our steps to the plain in order to take a new departure from it to search for the much longed-for water hole. This plan, simple enough in theory, proved quite a failure in practice. Immediately we turned to go back, the cattle track, which had seemed so simple as we went, began to branch off in every direction.
Just as they began to despair, lost with night closing in and no water, it began to rain. They were saved and after another 36 hours stumbling about lost in the bush, they came across the camp belonging to a couple of men fencing in the area. They were escorted into Cawarral, where they picked up their supplies and returned to their camp.
In this, the second article of his to appear in St John’s Magazine, published in 1881, my grandfather told of sailing up the West Coast of America aboard the SS Oregon as it threaded its way through a maze of buoys. Just a few weeks earlier, the SS Great Republic, then the largest sailing ship in the world, had run aground in the same area.
Their ship eventually reached the town of Astoria and my grandfather and a shipmate disembarked. They found that renting a room was costly, at $10 a week.
. . . we must get work without delay, or we would soon get no dinner. This knotty point being settled we went downstairs and following the sound of a very noisy bell we found ourselves in a large room in which two tables were groaning with luxuries. The menu was something like this – clam soup, salmon, beef, mutton, veal, pork in many forms, plenty of vegetables and the inevitable apple pie. Everybody seemed in a terrible hurry, for we had scarcely finished our soup, when most of the men got up to leave, having, as we calculated, eaten in eight minutes, an enormous dinner of four courses, while we, although making all possible speed, couldn’t accomplish it under thirty minutes. However we took heart, as it was our first attempt and hoped that even in this most difficult case the old proverb ‘Practice makes perfect’ might hold good. We now sallied forth in search of employment and found as the results of our first enquiry that the general opinion was that there were many more men in Astoria than there was work for. We were not in the least disheartened by this as the same story meets you all over the world if you only go to the right quarter, i.e. somewhere contiguous to a liquor bar, – for when the drink curse has taken away a man’s self-respect, his energy soon follows and he loves nothing so well as to loaf about within the range of the poisonous odours, so that he may be within hail if some ‘good fellow’ half-seas-over, should come along and call him a drink.
Johnny Pigott and his friend soon tracked down the kind of area they were looking for: a fishing cannery by the docks. The manager of Booth’s Cannery told the two young Englishmen that, yes, there were plenty of men looking for work but that ‘the majority of them were most anxious that they should not find any’. The manager then suggested they travel further down the coast on a newly arrived steamer which was picking up returning boats filled with salmon on its way to a nearby seining station. There they met ‘Poker’ Smith.
‘His sobriquet of “Poker” came from his unfortunate predilection for that ruinous game of chance, which is another of the curses of America,’ commented my grandfather.
My grandfather was hired immediately on $45 a month and his friend was assured that work would also be found for him. ‘We went aboard the steamer and off [back] up to Astoria greatly pleased with the results of our expedition,’ he concluded. But by 1879, my grandfather had grown tired of his rough, knockabout life. He had also, he confessed to my mother, ‘got religion’ while staying in a Seamen’s Mission in New York.
Suddenly, this life of adventure seemed aimless for a man just turned 27. And he was losing friends. His fellow sailors couldn’t abide ‘God-bothered’ seamen in the forecastle. He decided to return to England, no doubt to the relief of his widowed mother.
* * *
My grandfather was 28 when he enrolled in the London College of Divinity in 1880. The Islington theological college had been founded fewer than 20 years previously as an evangelical establishment to train mature students for the Anglican priesthood, with the idea that many of them would perhaps become missionaries. That must have appealed to my restless grandfather and he threw himself into his studies, winning several academic prizes and finishing first in his year. His unusually quiet voice added power to his increasingly compelling sermons as well, while his dark, mesmerising eyes set in his long ascetic’s face added to his attraction. And as a bachelor with what surely would be a rosy future within the established Church, Seminarian Pigott must have appeared a catch to mothers of unmarried daughters in the locality – and no doubt also to the daughters.
After ordination as deacon in St Paul’s Cathedral in December 1882, my grandfather was given a prestigious position at St Jude’s in Hackney, a church he already knew well from its involvement with the college. A year later, Deacon Pigott was ordained a priest, again in St Paul’s, and appointed curate at St Jude’s.
At first, his vicar couldn’t speak highly enough of Reverend Pigott. ‘He had a pleasant personality and was a born leader,’ Reverend Daniel Bell Hankin recalled many years later. ‘His ministry was much blessing to many people, over whom he exercised an influence that was almost mesmeric.’ He was also enthusiastic and unconventional, even with his evangelical training. He began to lead nights of prayer.
He did not, however, take kindly to criticism. ‘He was a strongwilled man, determined to get his own way, and, I may add, generally got it,’ Reverend Hankin ruefully acknowledged. But less than two years into his curacy, Reverend Pigott walked away from the established Church. He wasn’t alone. Two other enthusiastic and unconventional young clergymen also swapped the pulpit for the street-corner soapbox. The three of them joined the Salvation Army.
In 1865, as regular churchgoers became appalled at the sudden influx of the shabby and unwashed into their place of worship, William Booth, an Anglican clergyman who had abandoned his living for the streets and its shifting population of destitute, hungry and homeless, founded The Christian Mission in east London, later to become the Salvation Army.
By the time Reverend Pigott joined ‘the Army’, it was becoming almost respectable, to the point that there had been some mention of its amalgamation with the Church. Once again, my grandfather must have seemed a great catch to this upstart organisation. By July 1884, he was leading Holiness meetings twice a week and had converts rolling on the floor in spiritual ecstasy. In September, by then a staff captain, Reverend Pigott took part in an evangelical expedition led by Booth’s son Bramwell to Cambridge University, where notice was taken of the young Pigott by one of the undergraduates, a devout young man called Douglas Hamilton. In the December, my grandfather was chosen to accompany ‘general’ William Booth himself and some of his close associates to a Holiness Convention in Brighton on the south coast. Then he was sent as special envoy to Norwich to raise money to rid the Army of its debts. He rode to the Houses of Parliament bearing a temperance petition signed by thousands of Salvation Army stalwarts. He even preached in Yeovil, Somerset – perhaps his mother, who lived not far away, turned out to hear her devout youngest son preach. He made many moneyed friends within the Salvation Army faithful, among them wealthy company director and stockbroker Charles Stokes Read and his wife, Sarah.
In June 1885, now ‘major’ Pigott, he was appointed vice-principal of the Salvation Army’s training homes in Clapton, north-east London, and was surely destined for even greater heights within the organisation. So why, by September of that year, had my grandfather resigned from his position and written the Army off as a ‘rope of sand’? And why did the Salvation Army commissioner complain years later that the young major had proved ‘careless, slovenly and unreliable’ and had failed to keep up with his correspondence? But, worst of all, the commissioner accused Pigott of causing a young man’s death by his insistence on constant prayer and fasting.
Did news of this reach Bramwell Booth, who meted out punishments severe enough to anger my grandfather into resigning? Was he becoming disillusioned with a once radical Army that appeared to be growing ever closer to the religious establishment? Claims that the Army and my grandfather fell out over his spiritualist leanings are surely without foundation. My mother remembered clearly how, as a child, she witnessed her father’s fury when he discovered some of his followers surreptitiously trying out an Ouija board. ‘I think it’s the only time I ever saw him angry,’ she told me.
My grandfather’s resignation was accompanied by those of several others, including the devout Mr and Mrs Read. What did they think, I wonder, of this young man of God’s next move, which was to rejoin the Anglican church?
The former ‘major’ John Pigott began to network among his former Anglican friends and acquaintances, among them Reverend Alfred Reynolds, who had charge of a living in Kingsley, Cheshire. My grandfather paid Reynolds a visit, one of several that autumn. Alfred invited his friend to preach the Sunday sermon, which was ‘much appreciated’ by the congregation. Another visit coincided with that of Reynolds’ spinster sister Catherine, the eldest girl of five siblings. Was it a set-up?
Catherine, now in her mid-30s, must have already reconciled herself to the life of a spinster. But the handsome young priest appeared attracted to the tall, plain young woman with a wonderful personality. A year older than him, she seemed so steady and empathetic to his beliefs and aspirations. Above all, she was such a good listener. Perhaps, as the weeks went by and he pursued her back to the family home in Woodford, Essex, my grandfather also decided that marriage to the sister of a clergyman might help his own reconciliation with the Church.
On 14 August 1886, Reverend Reynolds officiated at the couple’s marriage in the parish church of West Hackney, where my grandfather was living at the time, most likely courtesy of the Reads, who owned or leased extensive property in the area.
The marriage was obviously popular with the bride’s family: the handsome young priest was suitably devout and well-born. Catherine’s widowed father and her younger sister, Helen, were happy to be witnesses to the ceremony. Having one of three daughters married must have been a relief to the father.
Three months later, Reverend and Mrs Pigott left for his first appointment since his successful reconciliation with the Church of England. After a rough November crossing of the Irish Sea, they arrived in Dublin, where my grandfather was to take up a position as curate at the Anglican mission in Townsend Street, Dublin.
It was a tough job, even for someone so familiar with the vagaries and difficulties of missions. He had, after all, stayed in a number of them during his knockabout years. But my grandfather had moved on and later confessed to my mother how he hated the pitiful pay, endless hours and spartan accommodation. Perhaps he also felt bad for the deprivations to which his wife was being subjected and decided the appointment was a deliberate attempt by a vengeful Church to punish him for turning his back on the Anglican faith.
‘He was recommended to me by friends in whom I had the fullest confidence, who wished him to return to the Church of England or Ireland after his lapse to the Salvation Army,’ wrote mission priest Reverend Henry Fiske many years later. But Fiske and the charismatic young priest took an instant and palpable dislike to each other. Six weeks later, my grandfather left.
‘Mr Pigott left me at my own desire, as he held doctrines, as I found out, which were entirely contrary to my own and which I thought calculated to undermine the faith of my flock,’ said Fiske.
Now out of work, my grandfather had no option but to take his wife back to Cheshire and the hospitality of his clergyman brother-in-law. Alfred was delighted to see the couple and asked John Hugh if he would like to once again give the Sunday sermons. But news of Pigott’s hasty departure from Dublin had already reached the Bishop of Chester’s cloisters. The bishop quickly sent a letter warning Reverend Reynolds against the idea. Alfred had his own career to think of and my grandfather was barred from the Kingsley pulpit.
There was nothing for it. Reverend Pigott returned to Dublin, intending to poach members of his erstwhile superior’s flock. But not even that was a success, although, coincidentally, news of the goingson in the mission reached the ears of Douglas Hamilton, who three years earlier had been so impressed with the then Staff Captain Pigott’s performance at the Salvation Army’s evangelical expedition to Cambridge University.
Hamilton, now a devout Agapemonite, was visiting Ireland on holiday and came to hear of Pigott’s trials at the mission, perhaps from my grandfather himself. Whether Hamilton approached the unhappy clergyman about joining the Agapemonites isn’t known. Maybe the Reverend Pigott had picked up a copy of writer and editor Hepworth Dixon’s book, Spiritual Wives, published in 1868, or even seen a copy of his article, also entitled ‘Spiritual Wives’, published the same year in The Athenaeum, a weekly literary periodical.
Prince, now elderly and infirm, was no longer able to make the journey to London to preach to his followers there. The sect needed a London pastor. Perhaps Hamilton had found one.
John Hugh Smyth-Pigott as a young man in his seminarian uniform in the 1880s
The Agepemone
My grandfather John Hugh Smyth-Pigott (Dear Belovèd) in his later years
The ‘KP’, probably taken in the early 1900s: Margaret (Waa) Davis (seated, second from left), Ellen, my grandmother’s personal maid (seated, fifth from left), my paternal grandmather Elizabeth (May/Maisie) Link (standing, far right)
John Victor Read, community chauffeur and odd-job man, and my paternal grandfather
Phoebe (Toto) Ker, Nellie Bush and Emily Hine by the tennis net on the upper lawn in the early 1900s
My grandmother Ruth Annie Preece in her nurse’s uniform in the 1890s
The ‘Holy Family’: (from left) Belovèd with Power on his knee, Glory seated on the step, Lavita in Ruth’s lap, 1910
My uncles Pat (left) and David (right) with my mother Lavita circa 1919
A costume picnic at the Agapemone in June 1912: Charles Stokes Read (standing at rear, second from left), Waa (fourth from left), Eva Paterson (fifth from left), Katie Pigott holding Lavita (centre standing) and Toto (seated on far right). Glory (Uncle David) is astride the donkey and to his left is Power (Uncle Pat)
Children at the ‘A’, dated 1916: my father, Leopold (Polo) Read (far left), my mother, Lavita Smyth (third from left), Uncle Pat (fifth from left) and Uncle David (far right)
