▶Date of birth:  2Q 1865         Place of birth: Camberwell, Surrey

▶Father:  William Fairbairn     Mother: Eliza Gordon

▶Spouse(s):  Emily Grange    Date(s) of marriage:  3 June 1891     Place(s) of marriage: New Mill Chapel, Tring, Hertfordshire

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Baptist minister)

▶Lifestory: Baptist minister Robert Gordon Fairbairn was a popular preacher who lived in Pittville in the 1890s, as Pastor of the Salem Chapel in Cheltenham. He was born in Camberwell, Surrey, in 1865, the second son of William Fairbairn, a commercial traveller in the publishing trade, from Camberwell in Surrey, and his wife Eliza (née Gordon). Fairbairn was brought up in a Nonconformist environment; his father was a Session Elder of the Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in Camberwell was inaugurated in his father’s drawing-room. He was educated at Peckham Rye College (where he later worked as an instructor for six years).

While at Peckham he took classes at University College, London; he then worked (by private study in London rather than at a local college) from 1884 for his BA degree from the Royal University of Ireland, which he obtained in 1888, and was accepted in 1887 to study for his ministry for two years at the Bristol Baptist College. As a young man he was an active sportsman, playing football and cricket, and also golf.

In 1890 he was appointed Pastor of the Salem Baptist Chapel in Cheltenham, arriving from Bristol College (though he had preached at the Salem Chapel the previous year). He recalled later “that the first baptism he performed at Salem was that of an infant whose mother wished her baby son to be named Robert Gordon Fairbairn”; he “besought her almost with tears in [his] eyes not to overload the boy with a name like that, and at last [he] managed to bring about that he was called plain Gilbert” (Gilbert later became an organist at the Salem Chapel). He was then and in later years much in demand as a popular preacher.

In 1891 Fairbairn lived at 18 Cambray Place in Cheltenham; he married in mid-year to Emily, youngest daughter of Mr William H. Grange, farmer, of Tring, and they had two children. Between 1892 and 1899 the family lived in Cheltenham at 22 Clarence Square, Pittville. In 1902 they left Cheltenham, but not until his congregation had presented him and his wife with a “handsome massive oval tray … as a mark of esteem, and in recognition of their loving and faithful ministrations during the past eleven and a half years”.

He left Cheltenham to become Minister of the King’s Road Baptist Church in Reading, and lived at 215 King’s Road, Reading, with his wife Emily and his two children. In 1912 he was one of a group of people fined in Reading for taking part of “Passive Resistance” protests against militarism, of which a common ploy was tax resistance or refusal to pay local rates.

He retired from his pastorate in Reading in 1930, and he and his wife lived latterly at 43 Hamilton Road, Reading. He was described as “a man of short physique, but as a preacher he is great”; he became completely deaf but continued to preach occasionally in Reading until the year before his death. The Revd. Fairbairn died in 1948 at the Dunedin Nursing Home in the town, at the age of eighty-three. His estate at death amounted to just under £3,500.    

▶Moved to Pittville from:  Bristol      Moved from Pittville to: Reading

▶Date of death:  17 May 1948      Place of death: Dunedin Nursing Home, Bath Road, Reading

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial:

▶Notes:  Cheltenham Chronicle 8 March 1902; Reading Standard 20 February 1909; Gloucestershire Echo 27 August 1940      ID: 5599

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden