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History
The Library first
occupied premises in
Blomfield Street, near Finsbury Circus in central London, which were
opened after adaptation on 9th May 1831. A Librarian was not
appointed until December 1833, however, and the premises were at
first mainly used as meeting rooms for various Congregational bodies.
It was here that proposals to form the Congregational Union of
England and Wales were first discussed and in due course the Union
offices came to share the premises with the Library. The
Congregational Lectures were started in 1833 and were delivered in
the Library.
The idea of a Library
for the
denomination was first proposed by Joshua Wilson (1795-1874), the son
and biographer of Thomas Wilson, chapel builder and major benefactor
of Congregationalism. Joshua Wilson made a foundation donation of
4000 volumes and a further thousand came from other donors. By
1866, when the Blomfield Street premises had to be vacated for the
extension of the Metropolitan Railway, the Library had grown to 8000
volumes. These were put into store until the Congregational
Memorial Hall and Library proposed by Wilson to the Union as a
fitting celebration of the second centenary of the Great Ejection of
1662 – was opened in 1875 in Farringdon Street. At last the
Congregational Library had an imposing building on a central
metropolitan site as Joshua Wilson had originally proposed. He had
died the year before but his widow now gave the Library his own
valuable collection of books and manuscripts, built up since the
1820s and hardly diminished by his earlier donation.
The Library was
fortunate subsequently
to fall under the care of three distinguished men at critical times
in its history. Dr Samuel Newth received and arranged the Wilson
collection and on his retirement as principal of New College, London,
worked on the rest of the collection and prepared the first printed
(though incomplete) catalogue. He also established a reading room. His
successor, who served from 1896 to 1925, was the Rev. Thomas
George Crippen. He continued work on the catalogue, built up the
music collection and through his editorship of the Transactions
of the Congregational Historical Society attracted scholars and
readers to the Library. But finance was short after the 1914-18 War
and the continuance of the Library was threatened. It was saved by
the offer of Dr Albert Peel, editor of the Congregational
Quarterly, and of the Transactions, to
act as Librarian
from 1926. He oversaw the preparation of a card catalogue (which
was the basis of the present larger catalogue), and had the noted
music collection catalogued. He was again beginning to attract
research students to the Library when the 1939-45 War broke out.
From 1940 until 1950, Memorial Hall was
requisitioned by the government for war purposes and
the
Library was moved to Manchester for safety. The Library was
returned, the books cleaned and eventually reopened in Memorial Hall
in 1957. The Congregational Lectures were revived the following
year. Ten years later the Library again went into store so that
Memorial Hall could be redeveloped. The Library returned to a
separate wing at the rear of the new office block, Caroone House, in
1972, but the discontinuities of recent years had caused the Library
to be forgotten. For the third time, and this time successfully,
consideration was given to moving the Library, now owned by the newly
formed Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, to 14 Gordon Square to be
housed with and administered by Dr Williams’s Library. Terms
were
agreed and now, well settled in new premises, and sitting alongside a
complementary dissenting Library, the Congregational Library is again
in use by readers and scholars. It is especially apposite that the
Congregational Library is now only floors from that other great
collection of Congregational books and manuscripts, built up from Dr
Doddridge’s library and those of the dissenting academies of
earlier centuries, the New College Library. This came to Dr
Williams’s Library when New College closed.
With acknowledgements to The Congregational Library,
the Congregational
Lecture for
1992, by John Creasey, copies of which are available from the
Library, price £2.
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