Wycliffe Chapel facts for kids
The Wycliffe Chapel was a Congregational Chapel at 44 Philpot Street, London. It came there from Cannon Street Road and traced its roots to one of the early Independent congregations which met from 1642 at Haydon's Yard, Minories, and then in Smithfield.
History
The chapel in New Road (the original name of part of Cannon Street Road) was built in 1780, with a schoolroom added in 1785 and a Sunday School in 1790. It was long and narrow, seating up to 800 people, and lit by brass chandeliers holding candles (which had to be trimmed mid-service). It had a large burial ground, whose story is recounted here and here. Its minister from 1811 was the noted philanthropist Rev Dr Andrew Reed (1787-1862). In 1831 it moved to larger premises in a new building named Wycliffe Chapel, in Philpot Street; here the congregation grew from 100 to 2,000.
Reed had been a watchmaker's apprentice and worked at his parents' china shop in Butcher Row - Beaumont House, dating from 1581 and named for the French ambassador who lived there in the time of King James I; ornamented with roses, crowns, fleurs-le-lys and dragons, it was demolished in 1813. He became a member of the congregation when Thomas Bryson was the minister.
Bryson's successor was Samuel Lyndall, trained at Rotherham Academy, and formerly a minister in Bridlington; in 1805 he published a sermon on Popery.
In 1813, from his home in St George's Place, the East London Orphan Asylum was established, initially based at a house in Clark[e]'s Terrace, Cannon Street Road. (A couple of years earlier, he had rescued three orphan apprentices, whose master, a shoemaker in Rosemary Lane [now Royal Mint Street] had become bankrupt - no doubt this was part of his inspiration). Reed was adept at obtaining patrons (the Duke of Kent attended the inaugural dinner), and larger sites followed, first in Hackney Road for boys and Bethnal Green for girls, then at Clapton, then (following the cholera epidemic) at Watford, and now Reed's School in Cobham. He also founded an Infant Orphan Asylum, later called the Royal Wanstead School in 1827; the Asylum for Fatherless Children, later established in Purley and called Reedham School in 1844; the Asylum for Idiots, later the Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill in 1847; and the Royal Hospital for Incurables, now in Putney, in 1854. Although he was aware that providing Anglican instruction (particularly the Catechism) would attract greater patronage, he fought - not always successfully - for his institutions to be non-denominational. He and his wife Elizabeth were hymn-writers; his hymn Spirit divine, attend our prayers still features in some hymnals. In 1834 he visited the United States, and Yale University made him a Doctor of Divinity.
