1 - Introduction

Summary

The finances of the parish of Wrenbury, near Nantwich, were transformed in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, thanks principally to the efforts and investment wisdom of Thomas Bateman, a prosperous tenant farmer who had been baptised there on New Year's Day 1800. The vestry's gratitude was marked in 1864 by the presentation to Bateman of seventy-five guineas, about three years’ pay for one of his employees. It had mainly been raised from the local gentry and nobility, including his aristocratic landlord, the Marquis of Cholmondeley, and it was to be used to buy a tea service of his choice: perhaps the family associations of his friend of over forty years’ standing, John Wedgwood Esq., influenced his decision.

Yet Bateman had become a Wesleyan in his teens and then – thanks to the emotion-charged preaching of Wedgwood – affiliated with the Primitive Methodists (henceforward PMC to denote the connexion, PM the movement more generally, and PMs to denote groups of its members). Although he refused formal office until 1837, the leadership valued his counsel, and since the early 1820s few major decisions had been taken without his being consulted. He was connected by marriage and friendship to other early key figures: his wife hailed from Englesea Brook, site of an early PM chapel on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border, and her farmer brother married one of the three nieces of the man now seen as its chief founder, Hugh Bourne. The remaining two nieces were also married to farmers there: all were influential in the congregation, and one would in due course become Bourne's literary executor and first posthumous biographer. Bateman shared the honour of conducting the inaugural services at Englesea Brook after its extension with William Clowes, the second-most illustrious PM name; and his friend Wedgwood is reported to have been first married to Clowes’ sister. He was the anonymous author of Wedgwood's posthumous biography, published under the soubriquet ‘a Layman’; a local preacher for nearly three-quarters of a century; a permanent member of Conference for most of that time; one of its auditors for over a quarter of a century; and uniquely for a non-itinerant after 1843, twice its President.