▶Date of birth:  17 November 1863       Place of birth:  Bradford

▶Father: Revd. Dr. Frederic Greeves      Mother:  Martha Bentley

▶Spouse(s):  Kate Lilian Forster       Date(s) of marriage:   1 November 1890        Place(s) of marriage:  Wesleyan Chapel, Redcar, Yorkshire

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Methodist minister)

▶Lifestory: The Revd. John Henry Greeves was born in Bradford in 1863, the second son of the Revd. Dr. Frederic Greeves DD, Principal of Southlands College, a Wesleyan training college in Battersea, London, and in 1884 President of the Wesleyan Conference, and his wife Martha (née Bentley).

Greeves was trained for Methodist ministry at Headingley College in Leeds in 1884; he had spoken at the Wesleyan Conference in Leeds two years earlier. He started his probation as a Minister at Middlesborough 1886-7, processing to Fawcett Street district in Sunderland 1888-9. Both here and later elsewhere he lectured on Wesley’s Hymns, discussing their origin and intent, alongside choral performances. While at Sunderland he was sent twice on a “special” evangelical mission to Boston, Lincolnshire, where the Methodist leadership sought to play to his undoubted strengths in attracting new members to the Church. In 1890 he completed his four-year probation as a Junior Minister and was advanced to “full connexion” with the Methodist Conference at Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was ordained.

Once he was ordained, the Conference sent him south to minister, at first at Blackheath, Kent 1890-1. Later in 1890 he married, at the Wesleyan Chapel at Redcar, to Kate Lilian, daughter of William Forster Esq., of Middlesborough and Redcar; sadly the marriage was short, as his wife died a week after giving birth to their only daughter, also called Kate Lilian, at Blackheath in October 1891. He never remarried. But days after his loss he was again preaching, in Boston, where he was said as ever to be “argumentative, doctrinal, pictorial”, whilst his sermons were “studded with poetical quotations, mostly from hymns” (it was said that Greeves could “recite hymns by the hundred”.)

From 1892 until 1895 he was stationed at the London Westminster district. From the very first he was acknowledged as a powerful preacher, and took a general interest in Methodist missions at home and abroad. He remained in the London area for several further years, spending 1896-8 in Highbury, London, and passing the years 1899-1901 as second minister in the Kingston-upon-Thames district in Surrey, where he became Secretary of the Wesley Guild Foreign Missions Union in 1899, and Probationers’ Examination Secretary in 1901; his “fertile brain” advanced a scheme for a “Missionary Parliament” where members of different districts would congregate for discussion. Between 1902 and 1904 he ministered as one of the team at the Kilburn and Hampstead district of London, as ever preaching regularly around the district.

1905 saw a slight change of direction for Greeves, when he was stationed at Bishop Street in Leicester, remaining in the city at the King Richard’s Road district 1906-7, before returning to London (Stoke Newington) 1908-9.

Methodist ministers were expected to move on after three years, as they went between stations, and from 1910-12 Greeves was moved north again, to Rochdale, for his first duty as a District Supervising Minister. In 1913 it was down to the Midlands, and the Halifax Place district of Nottingham until 1915, where he was required once a month to preach elsewhere on the Nottingham circuit). After Nottingham he was posted to the Torquay Wesley district where, never in the best of health, he may have appreciated the more gentle climate (and he was required to preach twice a month on the Taunton circuit).

Greeves remained in Torquay until the end of the Great War in 1918, and the following year became the Methodist Superintendent in Cheltenham. He lived with his sister Martha Marian Greeves at 2 Clarence Square, Pittville 1920-2, after which he left Cheltenham to becoming Supervising Minister at Rotherham. He remained in Rotherham for two years, before he retired in May 1924 after thirty-eight years’ service within Wesleyan Methodism. He went to live with his son-in-law the Revd. Stanley Derham Robinson, at the Wesley Manse in Thorne, Yorkshire, where he died in October 1924. His estate at death was valued at just over £1,033.

▶Moved to Pittville from:   Torquay                       Moved from Pittville to: Rotherham

▶Date of death:  19 October 1924         Place of death:  Thorne, Yorkshire

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial: 

▶Notes:            ID:  16166

Contributor(s):  John Simpson