Our Heritage

The Old Meeting House is the oldest Nonconformist building in Tenterden and is thought to date from about 1700. There was extensive rebuilding in 1746 when the property was conveyed to 17 trustees for five shillings by William Blackmore, a member of one of the leading cloth-making turned land-owning families of the previous century, himself a leading member of the church.

Like a lot of other Unitarian churches, the inspiration for its foundation came in 1662 with the Act of Uniformity.  After the Restoration of Charles II, George Hawe, the Puritan vicar of Tenterden, was ejected from his living, along with 80 other Kentish ministers who refused to assent to the Act. Hawe had many local sympathisers who were no longer content to worship at the Parish Church after the episcopacy had been restored. They probably began to meet clandestinely soon after the Restoration and included many leading and affluent citizens of the town.

The new church was called Presbyterian, because it was governed according to the Presbyterian model, that is, by Elders elected by the members. During the next century, under the influence of the minister, Laurence Holden, who served for over 70 years (1774-1844), the congregation, like many English Presbyterian churches at that time, responded vigorously to the intellectual stirrings of the Enlightenment, when the liberating possibilities of rational and scientific knowledge began to affect some religious thinking.

Sometime after the Unitarian Relief Act of 1813, when there were no longer legal penalties for denying the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the term “Unitarian” was added to the label “Presbyterian”. Later the term “Presbyterian” fell into disuse, but the church is still governed by trustees and a committee, and is now affiliated to the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, an association of congregations holding or tolerant of unorthodox religious views.

The Building

Although the building looks plain from the outside, the timber-framed interior is of considerable architectural interest. The painting on the wall by David Embry depicts the visit of Benjamin Franklin, one of the stalwarts of the American Declaration of Independence, who in 1774 is believed to have visited the Meeting House with his friend Joseph Priestley, the celebrated Unitarian minister and scientist who discovered the existence of oxygen as a constituent of the air. The famous visit is commemorated by a plaque on the front of the church donated by the Tenterden Trust.

The clock (possibly c. 1740) fixed to the gallery, was made by a Cranbrook Presbyterian. The rails surrounding the pulpit were erected in 1845 to provide “greater convenience in performing the marriage ceremony”! The present pews were installed in the latter half of the last century.

The congregation has provided eleven mayors of Tenterden: Robert Stace, Isaac Clokee, William Curteis, William Lott, John Johnson, Thomas Shoobridge, William Grisbrook, John Ellis Mace, Joseph Munn, Edgar Winser and Walter Walsh (minister 1930-48). The current Mayor even has his/her own pew assigned at the front of the church. You can see the Mayoral crest and the holder for the Mayor’s mace in the photo below.

The unusual organ (pictured above) was installed as a second-hand instrument in 1847, but has now been replaced.

Behind the Meeting House there is the burial ground, including vaults for the more “prestigious”, although interments no longer take place there.

In the mid 1850s the younger members formed the first cricket team in Tenterden, from which sprang the Tenterden Cricket Club.

The church has several links with Dame Ellen Terry, the famous actress. Harold Rylett (minister, 1904-1929), was a close friend and was appointed a pall bearer at her funeral and his successor, Walter Walsh, delivered the address. A member of the congregation and a talented artist, Miss Margaret Winser, made the death mask and the plaster bust of Ellen Terry which are at the Ellen Terry Museum, Smallhythe.