▶Date of birth:   15 April 1835       Place of birth: Portsmouth, Hampshire

▶Father:  William Lang     Mother: Eliza

▶Spouse(s):  (1) (uncertain); (2) Sarah Ann Cooper   Date(s) of marriage:  (1) (uncertain); (2) 24 November 1883     Place(s) of marriage: (1) (uncertain); (2) St John’s Church, Clapham Rise, Surrey

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican, then Baptist minister); Journalist

▶Lifestory: William Lang revoked his Anglicanism to become a Baptist minister, though generally without official duties; in his later years he devoted himself to the temperance movement, which was a strong part of the Church. Lang was born in Portsmouth in 1835, the son of William Lang and his wife Eliza. He was “a native of the southern counties, where they grow trees, but with a training in the busy North, where they grow men”.

Lang was trained for the Anglican ministry but seceded, as a result of a controversy on Baptismal Regeneration which took place in the village where he lived. He “never entered upon a settled pastorate among the Nonconformists”, but preferred to work as an evangelist, supporting himself at first as a journalist. In 1873 he married in Wandsworth, and by 1880 Lang was installed as the Baptist minister of the Ebenezer Chapel in Southsea (he lived at 9 Church Street, Portsmouth at the time), where he preached and lectured (on one occasion on John Milton and on another on “A Vacation Journey from London to Rome”). Southsea was apparently his last official ministry, and he left this to become involved in other Baptist ventures and communities without official pastoral duties.

In 1881 he moved to Balham in south London, where in March 1881 he was appointed Travelling Secretary to the Baptist Total Abstinence Association, which saw him travel widely about the country in support of the aims of temperance, in July 1881, for instance, visiting Newport, Mertyr Tydfyl, Dowlais, and Ebbw Vale. He started with the Association on a six-month contract, and worked for it eventually for two and a half years.

In 1882 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was also an Associate of the Société de Topographie of France; “through his instrumentality, the journals of the two French Jesuit travellers who were butchered in the centre of Africa were recovered, and from which he translated much valuable geographical information”. During this time, in 1883 and by now a widower, he married Sarah Ann, daughter of John Cooper and widow of Mr. William Midwinter, of 2 Pittville Lawn, Cheltenham, where she continued to live after her first husband’s death. When he resigned his post in the Total Abstinence Association, he was nevertheless retained as a committee member. As his time as Travelling Secretary came to an end, in 1884, he was presented in his Wandsworth region of London with a beautifully bound version of the New Testament in the Breton language, which was one of his particular interests.

Early in 1885 he did travel to France, mainly in relation to temperance and the missions of Brittany; once back he found himself moving towards Cheltenham, and in 1886 joined the Gloucestershire and Herefordshire Baptist Association. While in Cheltenham Lang assisted, again with no official role, in the Cambray Chapel and other Baptist places of worship, and between 1887 and 1912 he lived at 2 Pittville Lawn (now 31 Pittville Lawn); during this time he was a personal friend of the Baptist champion, Charles Spurgeon.

His religious interests centred largely around mission meetings at Cambray Chapel, the promotion of Sunday Schools (which he linked to abolishing drunkenness), and representing Roman Catholicism as a political and not a religious force, in the light of experience he claimed from staying on the Continent. He donated a run of twenty volumes of the Geographical Journal to Cheltenham Public Library in 1900.

In 1908 he retired from Baptist duties, remaining in Pittville with his wife, some twenty years his senior. Still active, nevertheless, in support of the Baptist church, he died after a brief illness at his home, 2 Pittville Lawn, Cheltenham, in 1912, at the age of seventy-nine; after a service at Cambray Church in Cheltenham he was buried in Southport. His estate at death was sworn at just above £11,690 for probate, of which almost £2,000 was left to Baptist and other organisations. (He should not be confused with the Revd. W. L. Lang, Free Methodist minister, who died in 1908.)

▶Moved to Pittville from:  Balham, Surrey      Moved from Pittville to: (deceased)

▶Date of death:  30 September 1912      Place of death:  2 Pittville Lawn, Cheltenham

▶Date of burial: 4 October 1912        Place of burial:  Southport

▶Notes:  Blue Ribbon Gazette and Gospel Temperance Herald 4 July 1883      ID: 1609

Contributor(s):  John Simpson