▶Date of birth:  15 February 1852        Place of birth: Weston-super-Mare, Somerset

▶Father:  George Derrick     Mother: Harriet Edwards

▶Spouse(s):  Edith Rée    Date(s) of marriage: 28 March 1885      Place(s) of marriage: St Stephen’s Church, Cheltenham

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican); Tutor

▶Lifestory: John George Derrick served at a number of different churches in Cheltenham in the late 1870s and early 1880s, before heading east with his wife to India as a Chaplain to the Bengal Establishment; but the heat of India was too much for him, and they returned home to Cheltenham, where he retired and developed an interest in photography.

Derrick was born in Weston-super-Mare in 1852, the only son of George Derrick, master tailor, of Lympsham, Somerset, and his wife Harriet (née Edwards). The family lived at 1 Rozel Villas, Weston-super-Mare. Derrick attended the London College of Divinity in 1870, before matriculating at Trinity College, Dublin and studying part-time and “supplementing his modest income with lectures” (Downs), BA (Junior Moderator in Ethics and Logics) 1872. At the time of the 1871 census Derrick lived at home in Weston-super-Mare with his parents, as a “Wesleyan Local Preacher”.

Derrick was ordained Deacon in 1875, and Priest (both Ripon) in 1876. Once ordained, he was licensed Curate of St Mark, Dewsbury, Yorkshire in 1875, where he lived in Hope Street. After this he moved to Cheltenham as Curate of St John’s, where in 1878 he was appointed Acting Chaplain of the 1st Gloucestershire Engineer Volunteers and lived in 1880 at 2 Royal Crescent. In 1881 he transferred as Curate to Christ Church, Cheltenham;  in that year he lived with his widowed mother as lodgers at 6 Keynsham Terrace, before moving to 13 Selkirk Parade (now 47 Prestbury Road) in Pittville, and by 1883 to 10 Leamington Place (now 26 Prestbury Road) nearby (taking a summer holiday at the Italian Lakes). After his work at Christ Church he became Curate of St Stephen’s in Cheltenham 1884-5, having been present at the consecration of the new church in 1883. In 1885 he was licensed to St Luke’s in Cheltenham.

In April 1885 he married Edith, only daughter of Hermann Rée, of 11 Lansdown Crescent, Cheltenham and originally from Edinburgh; after the honeymoon in Italy the couple proceed to India, where John had been appointed a Junior Chaplain on the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment. The couple arrived in Calcutta in June, but “he found the heat on the sub-continent too much to bear” (Downs), and later in the year they were back home in Cheltenham (he may have officially retained the appointment until 1887, when he retired though ill-health); the couple had two daughters and a son.

Back in England he was elected Chaplain of the Cheltenham Union 1887-1907, and also worked as a tutor and lecturer, preparing young men for university; he was considered to be an able scholar. With the money he had obtained from his additional employment, he set up home at 2 Royal Crescent; the Borough Council minutes record permission given to him to make alterations there in 1888. At about this time he acquired his first camera, and he became a keen photographer, especially of his favoured countryside in Somerset where he had a second home in East Brent (very few of his surviving photographs are of Cheltenham).#

He remained living at the Royal Crescent until his death in 1907, at the age of fifty-five. ‘He never sought preferment in the church, and attached himself to no school or party’ (Cheltenham Examiner, 24 July 1907).

▶Moved to Pittville from: Dewsbury, Yorkshire       Moved from Pittville to: Keynsham Terrace, Cheltenham

▶Date of death:   16 July 1907      Place of death: East Brent, Somerset

▶Date of burial:  20 July 1907       Place of burial: East Brent, Somerset

▶Notes: See http://www.rooksbridge.org.uk/history/derrick.html; also “Ministers of ‘the Black Art’: the engagement of British clergy with photography, 1839-1914”, submitted by James Downs to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in March 2018       ID: 8159

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden