▶Date of birth: 22 June 1820         Place of birth:  Lansdown Crescent, Bath

▶Father:  Charles Lowder       Mother:   Susan Fuges

▶Spouse(s): -     Date(s) of marriage:       Place(s) of marriage:

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican)

▶Lifestory: Charles Fuge Lowder (erroneously Loader, Loder) was an Anglican clergyman who gradually came to advocate Anglo-Catholic Ritualistic practice; his forthright actions brought him into conflict with the authorities but he emerged as a leading Anglo-Catholic.

He was born in 1820 in Bath, the eldest son of Charles Lowder, banker, of Bath, and his wife Susan (née Fuge). Lowder was educated locally in Bath (1827-34) and at Bruton grammar school (1835) before attending King’s College School, London (1835-9); he matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1839, BA (second class in Classics) 1843, MA 45. After graduating he took holy orders, and was ordained Deacon in 1843 and Priest in 1844 (in both cases by the Bishop of Salisbury by letters dismissory from the Bishop of Bath and Wells, to officiate in the diocese of Oxford).

Lowder was licensed Curate of Walton, near Glastonbury, in 1843; in 1844 he stayed for a while at the Belle Vue Hotel in Cheltenham, and in 1845 was recorded living at 10 Pittville Parade (now 20 Evesham Road) (this perhaps refers to residency the previous year, apparently without cure of souls; his name was misspelt in the Annuaire, as it was often afterwards elsewhere). In early 1845 he was appointed by the Bishop of Bath and Wells Chaplain to the Axbridge Union Workhouse in Somerset. In 1846 he became Curate of Tetbury in Gloucestershire, where he lived with his mother and sister at the time of the 1851 census, and later that year he moved to become Assistant Curate at the Puseyite, Anglo-Catholic Church of St Barnabas, Pimlico in London.

By this time his somewhat uncompromising “Advanced High Church”, Ritualistic style was becoming apparent. In 1854 he appeared before the Westminster Police court for encouraging choristers to throw eggs at the candidate he did not support during a churchwarden election; he was not sentenced but was “warmly” admonished and briefly suspended by the Bishop of London. His work was to be with the poorest of the capital city, who would benefit from his spirited advocacy; the idea had come to him during his suspension, when he envisaged secular priests supporting the clergy’s spiritual life. With others he founded the Society of the Holy Cross in 1855, which came to be well supported by the leading Anglo-Catholic figures of the day, and initiated home missions in St George-in-the-East in London. In 1856 he was appointed the chief minister at his Mission Church in Calvert Street, Wapping, moving soon after to the Mission Chapel nearby Wellclose Square.

The management of the parish by the clergy was perceived as authoritarian, and anger spilt over during the St George’s-in-the-East riots of 1859 and 1860, during which Lowder and others were mobbed by rioters. He maintained his Ritualistic style when he moved as Perpetual Curate, and then Vicar, to a new church, for which he had raised funds, St Peter’s (Old Gravel Lane), London Docks in 1866 as “Father Superior”. His successful advocacy of Anglo-Catholic practice at St Peter’s “undoubtedly contributed to the eventual acceptance of high-church ritual within the Church of England” (ODNB). In order to encourage contributions, which had become harder to obtain, Lowder wrote Ten years in St George’s Mission (1867), later updated as Twenty-one years in St George’s Mission (1877).

Lowder was still Vicar of St Peter’s when he died in 1880, at the age of sixty, while on a holiday trip to Zell am See, Salzburg, Austria; his body was brought back, and he was buried at Chislehurst. He was commemorated by a new clergy house in Old Gravel Lane, for the use of the Mission clergy; his wealth at death was valued at £600. For a detailed account of his life see Maria Trench’s Charles Lowder: a biography (1882).

▶Moved to Pittville from:  (uncertain)      Moved from Pittville to: Axbridge, Somerset

▶Date of death:  9 September 1880      Place of death:  Zell am See, Salzburg, Austria

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial: St Nicholas’s Church, Chislehurst, Kent

▶Notes: ODNB        ID: 3968

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden