Matt Davis pieces together some hidden history on the south coast…
Thomas Elworthy (1826–1899) is little known outside his adopted home town of Hastings, East Sussex, but he was a key part of civic life throughout the Victorian era. He was involved in local politics, property development schemes, and the creation of a magnificent waterworks in the nearby countryside which still supplies the town’s drinking water; but his most visible legacy is a set of high-quality Nonconformist chapels in and around Hastings. Some survive only in photographic form, having been lost to urban redevelopment, but enough of his output survives to prove he could work comfortably with various architectural styles and meet the requirements of different groups: Baptists, Methodists and Congregationalists (his own denomination). His first ecclesiastical work after going into practice in 1857 was the 350-capacity Memorial Baptist Chapel (1864–65) at Bank Buildings in Hastings town centre. This is early compared to his other chapels; and it had such a strange, troubled history that it was already disused long before Elworthy’s career ended! During the Chapels Society’s visit to Hastings in May 2025 which I led (reviewed in Newsletter 93; also see the visit notes here), I told members the story of the chapel which, as modern-day researchers looking at old newspapers will discover, very quickly had the word ‘Scandal’ suffixed to its name.
Rather than commemorating an eminent Baptist, the Memorial Chapel was almost certainly named after the adjacent Albert Memorial Clock Tower, newly completed in 1864. It was founded for General Baptist secessionists, led by Rev. J. C. Fishbourne, from the (then) Particular Baptist chapel which had stood 400 feet away in Wellington Square since 1838 (the Illustrated Christian Times in fact described the new chapel’s members as consisting of ‘Baptists and Independents’). Work on the Memorial Chapel started in late 1864 and it opened on 30 August 1865 at a cost of £3,000. It was surrounded by buildings and so was top-lit: the roof was in fact almost entirely of glass, with a series of clear domes underneath and gas burners in between to supplement the natural light. The gallery was of iron and mahogany. The dimensions were 55 x 40 feet and there were two schoolrooms at the rear. John Howell and Son – the leading firm of builders locally at the time, responsible for many of the town’s most important churches and chapels – built the chapel.
Suggestions of the problems to come were perhaps hinted at during the foundation stone-laying ceremony on 3 November 1864, when Rev. Fishbourne referred to the ‘struggle of 18 months’ experienced in getting to this stage and remarked that ‘those who supposed [he] had had motives in erecting the chapel were quite mistaken’. Nevertheless, things progressed normally at first; but in November 1872 Rev. Fishbourne was removed from his position as pastor and the chapel was locked up to prevent his having access. Two months later came the ‘Memorial Chapel Scandal’, as local journalists called it, when on 26 January 1873 the chapel reopened with a new pastor. Directly before the service Rev. Fishbourne marched in with some associates, ‘coolly mounted the platform’, argued with the new minister (who promptly retired to the vestry), and took the service. This consisted mainly of a speech stating that legal action was forthcoming and that he would stay in Hastings until suitable apologies were made for what had happened to him. Further remarks suggested he had been treated unfairly with regard to money, and indeed the subsequent arbitration found that the root of the scandal was Rev. Fishbourne’s remuneration, the payment of his rent, the debt remaining on the chapel, and who owed whom money. There were unhappy parallels with earlier events at Wellington Square, where a row in 1862 had culminated in all the deacons resigning and paved the way for the secession.
Information about what happened next is sketchy, but evidently the church was fatally wounded. The chapel passed to the Primitive Methodists, who established a Sunday school in 1874 and licensed the chapel for marriages two years later. Perhaps it proved too expensive to run, though, because it was put up for auction in February 1882, eventually being sold privately beforehand instead. Reports at the time claimed it was to become a museum and public library, but nothing came of this. In 1889 the ground floor became a newspaper publisher’s office; the upper floor was an auction hall by 1896; public meetings were later held there; and between 1910 and 1925 part of the building was used as a cinema. (Rev. Fishbourne, meanwhile, had died in January 1875 at the age of 46.)
The building returned in part to religious use in the 20th century. The Open Brethren, always strong locally, registered ‘one large room on the first floor’ (presumably the old auction hall) as a place of worship in February 1903, calling it ‘Central Hall’. Although the registration was not cancelled until August 1921, they actually left in 1911: after a short stay in the Public Hall in nearby Robertson Street, they moved to Stonefield Road, to a building originally erected as a school and later used as an art gallery, and remained there until 1991. The Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance subsequently occupied parts of the Memorial Chapel on and off for about 60 years, again using the name ‘Central Hall’. They first registered the upper hall in 1929, then added the lower hall (the old cinema) in 1931, but stopped using the building in 1938 – only to re-register the upper hall in 1957, remaining there until 1981 when they moved to a purpose-built church in the suburbs (a remarkable building, incidentally, like a stretched pyramid in form). The Memorial Chapel passed into secular use again as numbers 6a and 6b Bank Buildings, being subdivided into offices and ground-floor shops, but its chapel origins remain legible. And what a show the upper part makes: stuccoed, severely symmetrical, featuring an odd mix of Doric and Corinthian pilasters, segmental and triangular pediments above the windows, and owing something to the Regency-style terraces of Nash and Burton. In the light of his later works, it seems amazing that Elworthy really designed it. Wellington Square, meanwhile, remains in use as the main Baptist church serving central Hastings.