In 1862 Mary O’Bryan Thorne wrote in her diary: ‘At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.’¹

She regarded this as a routine engagement, something she had been doing for more than forty years and that her daughter had every right to continue. Thorne was the daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher. Women preached regularly in the Bible Christian (1815–1907) and the Primitive Methodist Connexions (1807–1934), both offshoots of Wesleyan Methodism, for the entire...

On her forty-second birthday Catherine Cowlin O’Bryan sat down to reflect on her Methodist conversion experience nearly a quarter-century before. She had lived in the Devon village of Stoke Damerel for about a year. It was probably in one of the new small villas that were filling in the area between Stoke Damerel and the rapidly growing town of Dock (soon to be renamed Devonport), where she often preached in the newly opened Bible Christian chapel on Prince’s Street. She probably did not feel settled; the family had moved five times in the eight years since her husband William O’Bryan...

George Eliot modelled her portrait of Dinah Morris inAdam Bedeon her aunt Elizabeth (Betsey) Tomlinson Evans, a Methodist preacher, wife of her father’s youngest brother Samuel. Her aunt’s experience was the inspiration for Eliot’s description of Dinah’s befriending of the desperate Hetty Sorrel, who killed her newborn child, and for their journey together to Hetty’s execution, although the novelist explained that ‘Dinah is not at all like my aunt, who was a very small, black-eyed woman, and (as I was told, for I never heard her preach) very vehement in her style of preaching.’² Elizabeth Ann Tomlinson was...

Mary O’Bryan Thorne’s tombstone is next to her husband Samuel’s, flush with the wall of what was once the Bible Christian chapel at Lake Farm, Shebbear, Devon, her home for twenty years of her life. It memorializes her as ‘wife of Samuel Thorne, printer, daughter of William O’Bryan, founder of the Bible Christians, among whom she was a minister sixty years.’ Mary O’Bryan was born on Gunwen Farm, Cornwall, in 1807, eldest daughter of Catherine and William O’Bryan. Catherine, herself an educated and independent woman, was determined that her daughters also receive a good education. As her grandson put it...

In 1889 Sarah Mary Babbage Terrett, Bible Christian founder of the English White Ribbon temperance organization, suddenly collapsed and died while attending a meeting at which she was a featured speaker. The shock and sense of loss must have been considerable because she was well known for her stirring addresses – on the third anniversary of the White Ribbon campaign she quoted Nelson and Tennyson’sCharge of the Light Brigadeto call on ‘all engaged in this glorious work, in the name and presence of our God tonight, at all times, and under every circumstance’ to do their duty as both...

Serena Thorne was born in 1842, the ninth of Mary O’Bryan and Samuel Thorne’s thirteen children. She grew up in a tense household; her parents were often at odds, Samuel’s business ventures, including the Bible Christian Connexional printing company, did not go well, and he alienated his elder sons. Perilous family finances probably meant her education was largely at home. The surviving portions of her mother’s diary do not record her conversion, but at age eleven Mary thought her ‘very pious.’ Her sister remembered her as ‘lively and vivacious … full of fun and frolic – she was ready for any...

Lois Anna Malpas (1858–1904) grew up in a family of Wesleyan Methodist preachers. Her father, a market gardener, and three of her brothers were local preachers in a village near Chepstow, just inside the Welsh border. We know little about her religious conversion; she herself only said that, ‘The good seed which was sown in my heart was a long time before it began to grow.’¹

When she was nineteen her mother died, and as the only surviving daughter she kept house for her father until he remarried two years later. She then went to live with her unmarried...

Emma Davis, the woman who became widely known in the central London district of Blackfriars as ‘Sister Annie,’ was born in Aldersgate in 1859, the eldest child of a poor family. Her mother died when she was eight, and the family moved to the dock area of Rotherhithe, where she attended a Primitive Methodist Sunday school. At age thirteen she abandoned formal schooling to work as a domestic servant, but left when her employer would not let her go to Sunday school. She took a job as a book folder in a City workshop where her grandmother was the forewoman....

In 1989 I stood in Gunwen farmyard, where once William, Catherine, and Mary O’Bryan stood. But, despite the plaque establishing William’s presence, this was not just their space, it was also mine. Like them, I knew where to find the violets, the strawberries, the hazelnuts, the sloes. Perhaps Mary too read in the oak tree’s branches and spent hours on her own in the small woodland area in the far corner of the farm. William claimed he was ‘born in the shadow of Helman Tor,’ and he must have crossed the moor, as we did, to climb to the top...