▶Date of birth:   4Q 1852       Place of birth: Hollingbourne, Kent

▶Father:  Thomas Bolton     Mother: Elizabeth (also Eliza) Ransom

▶Spouse(s):  Louisa Augusta Cockshott    Date(s) of marriage:  16 August 1882     Place(s) of marriage: Frizinghall Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Bradford

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Wesleyan Methodist minister)

▶Lifestory: Thomas Bolton’s residency in Cheltenham as Superintendent Wesleyan minister dated from 1901. He was born in Hollingbourne, Kent, in 1852, the son of Thomas Bolton, farmer, and his wife Elizabeth (née Ransom). His father died when he was young, and by the age of eighteen, in 1871,  he worked as a Warehouseman to a grocer in Maidstone, Kent.

It is possible that he trained for the Methodist ministry at Didsbury College in Manchester about 1877, when he entered the ministry. He was stationed widely throughout England, starting in Henley, Oxfordshire (1878-9). In 1880 he moved north, to Willhill, Bradford, where he was a Circuit Ministry and also President of the Windhill Wesleyan Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society. It was here that he met and married Louisa Augusta, youngest daughter of Edmund Cockshott, manufacturer, of Beamsley House, Shipley, at a Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Bradford; they had no children. After a honeymoon in North Wales, they moved to Kendal in 1882, and in the following year moved on to Grantham in Lincolnshire.

This was followed by a two-year posting to Malton in Yorkshire (1886-9), Hull (1889-91), and Harrogate (1892-4); by now he was taking a particular interest in education. In 1895 he was stationed in South Shields, where he remained until 1897, moving to Preston as Circuit Superintendent in 1899. 1901-4 saw him in the same capacity at Huddersfield before he took up a new station as Superintendent Minister in Cheltenham, where his preaching made a “favourable impression”; from September 1904 until 1907 he is recorded as the principal occupant of 27 Clarence Square in Pittville, Pittville’s Methodist manse. He suffered the local headline “Is a minister a civil servant” in 1905 when he claimed to be on the Parliamentary list for this address before he had moved in.

In 1907 he moved to Rugby as Superintendent Minister, where he stayed for a year, before moving again to Bristol (Portland) in 1909 and Bristol (Clifton) in 1910. From 1911 he lived at Hovedene, Harrogate and worked as a Supernumerary Minister, but died at Bournemouth in late October 1924, at the age of seventy-two and in the forty-seventh year of his ministry. His estate at death was sworn at just over £6,450.

▶Moved to Pittville from:   Huddersfield     Moved from Pittville to: Rugby

▶Date of death:   28 October 1924     Place of death: Bournemouth

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial:

▶Notes: Burnley Advertiser 30 June 1877       ID: 15204

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden