▶Date of birth:  1822  (baptised 25 September 1825)      Place of birth: St Margaret’s, Leicester

▶Father: Benjamin Lewitt      Mother: Hannah

▶Spouse(s):  (1) Elizabeth Stevens; (2) Mrs Seymour    Date(s) of marriage: (1)  2 September 1845; (2) 16 October 1890     Place(s) of marriage: (1) White Friars Lane Chapel, Leicester; (2) Church of the Redeemer, Edgbaston, Birmingham

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Baptist minister)

▶Lifestory: Baptist minister James Lewitt had a tendency to follow his religious and political ideals rather than the civil law, and was an uncompromising Baptist minister in Chelttenham and elsewhere for over fifty years. He was born in Leicester in 1822, the fourth and youngest son of clockmaker Benjamin Lewitt, of Leicester, and his wife Hannah, both Wesleyan Methodists. Lewitt grew up attending the Methodist chapel, and saw his parents’ liberal values challenged by the local Tory corporation; his “uncle had to defend himself with a chair from the swords of the yeomanry, who burst in upon a political banquet held in a hay-loft of an inn”. A schoolfellow recalled that “as a boy Mr. Lewitt remembered a post-chaise rushing through Leicester announcing the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill, and for refusing to sign a petition against it he was expelled from school”; he “was also expelled for carrying a flag in a procession in celebration of the passing of the same Bill”.

Lewitt entered the Baptist Church in 1837, at Friar Lane in Leicester, at the age of fifteen, and went to training college in 1841. He had only four pastorates during his ministry, and the first was in Coventry, where he served from 1844 until 1855. In 1845 he married Elizabeth, daughter of John Stevens, a grazier; no children are recorded. With no respect for the Established Church, while at Coventry he was summoned before Magistrates for non-payment of the Ecclesiastical Rate and his goods were only saved from public auction by the intervention of the parish vicar, who accepted that Lewitt was a “pious dissenter” and not a “political” one.

From a very small and poor chapel in Coventry Lewitt moved to become co-Pastor at Stoney Street Baptist Chapel in Nottingham 1855-65, then the largest Baptist Church in the world in an area which suffered badly at the time of the Chartist insurrections; while there a conversation with the Mayor led ultimately to the provision of University Extension classes in the city.

He next took charge of the Albemarle Crescent Chapel in Scarborough, which met in the Mechanics’ Hall when he first arrived but soon moved into a “handsome” church with associated schools built at a cost of £7,000; he condemned the loose morals of the “gay watering place”, but ministered particularly to the fishing population so often in danger in their work at sea.

In 1876 he answered a call from Worcester to transfer as Pastor to the Sansome Walk Baptist Chapel, where he succeeded two seceders to the Anglican Church and was feared likely to follow them, but saw out his ministry there, resigning from active duty in the Church in 1890. While at Worcester he was particularly associated with the development of the Sunday Schools at Rainbow Hill and Red Hill; he stated proudly that during his career he had given 5,000 sermons and had officiated at 1,600 baptisms. After he left Worcester he resided in Kempsey in Worcestershire, on an estate owned by Mary, widow of Henry Seymour, of The Sycamores, Kempsey, whom he married in 1890 (his first wife had died in Worcester in 1889).

Subsequently the couple moved to Cheltenham, by at least 1895, where he became a member of the Salem Chapel, helping out with Chapel duties, leading prayer, and presenting talks; between 1896 and 1897 his household lived at 14 (now 65) Pittville Lawn, Cheltenham. At one talk in 1896 he looked at Sunday Schools fifty years earlier and in contemporaneous society, and claimed that the movement had helped to ensure that there was no revolution in Britain after the Anti-Corn Law unrest, and that it had nurtured many of the country’s scientists; by 1901 he lived at Yorkleigh, in St George’s Road in the town.

He maintained his old principles into retirement (“a Radical of unswerving democratic opinion”), and in 1903 was summoned before the magistrates at Cheltenham Police Court for “passive resistance” to paying the Church rates (he objected amongst other things to the Education Act which placed the cost of maintenance of Church-controlled schools on the rates); his wife spoke for him (and was applauded), but the order was still confirmed. The Revd. Lewitt died at his home, Yorkleigh, in Cheltenham in 1909, at the age of eighty-six. His estate at death was valued at just under £600.

▶Moved to Pittville from:  Kempsey, Worcestershire      Moved from Pittville to: (deceased)

▶Date of death:    4 August 1909     Place of death: Yorkleigh, St George’s Road, Cheltenham

▶Date of burial:  9 August 1909       Place of burial: Astwood cemetery, Worcester

▶Notes:  Worcestershire Chronicle 19 April and 26 April 1890; Nottingham Journal 4 July 1890; Gloucestershire Echo 4 August 1909; Gloucestershire Echo 7 August 1909      ID: 3816

Contributor(s):  John Simpson