Changes & Chances
Chapter 12 Thirty Year Slumber
British communities dotted around the world must have shared the dismay of the Batavia community at the Foreign Office Circular Dispatch of July 31 1873 which informed the Consul:
that only half the usual Government subsidy could be looked for under the Accounts for 1874; that in 1875 all support from the Government would cease; that the management of the Church affairs would therefore devolve upon the residents who were at liberty to make what arrangements they deemed expedient, if any such were practical, for the continuation of public worship, without reference to the Foreign Office, as the Church came no longer under Consular jurisdiction.
This meant that in 1874 the funds of the Community for church purposes would be reduced by 25%, and the next year by 50 %. The Trustees of the church drafted a response and hastily convened a General Meeting of the British residents which unanimously resolved:
that this meeting, as representing the British Community in Batavia, thoroughly endorse the sentiments expressed in the Trustees’ letter and view with alarm the action of Her Majesty's Government in striking at the branches of the Established Church; that they do not consider the amount so saved to the country - some £9 000 per annum - of sufficient importance to warrant the withdrawal of Government aid, resulting, as it doubtless will in Batavia, and probably elsewhere, from the inability of the residents unaided to maintain a clergyman, in the downfall of public worship, and the loss of those oases in the desert which have hitherto served as a rallying place to sojourners in. foreign lands, and have helped not a little to maintain the prestige of the name of Great Britain, and that holding these views, an earnest appeal be made to Her Majesty's Government in the hope that this act may not be carried into effect.
The appeal failed, with the effect that from 1875 to 1905 the contribution from the Foreign Office ceased. When Kingsmill departed he was not replaced, and the next quarter of a century represents the lowest point in the church's history, marked only by the brief, spasmodic ministrations of visiting clergy. This was not helped by the high expectations of the status-conscious businessmen who constituted the BPC, as this correspondence of 1882 illustrates. J F Tidman, acting on behalf of BPC, visited J E Shelford, Bishop Hose's commissary in England, and was introduced to Shelford's candidate for chaplain at Batavia. Tidman reported disapprovingly of the man, who had been Shelford's curate and was now a missionary in East London:
He may be a first-rate man but he did not strike me as just the fellow you want, who according to my idea ought to be a gentleman and one likely to be socially attractive. Shelford says the pay is too low for all that, but my fear is, that if an inferior man is sent, he will have no influence and will soon find the support to him dwindle away.
In June of that year Rev. W Aitken from Singapore visited Java and held services at the church. In November 1882 Rev. W Hayton, travelling from Roebourne, Western Australia, passed through Batavia and ministered to the members of the community. On Trinity Sunday 1883, Rev. Codrington conducted services. In September 1883 Rev. McNeale passed through and held services, subsequently accepting the Committee's invitation to stay on until January 1884.
An incident in 1885 showed how prickly some of the community could be. In July Rev. E C Spicer passed through Batavia on his way from Australia to England. When he saw the situation, he promised to stay one month. His services were apparently so much appreciated that the Committee invited him to stay till the end of the year. In August H M S Espoir on her way to the Cocos Islands picked up Spicer, who wanted to minister to employees of Eastern Extension Telegraph Company stationed there. He had obtained the permission of four members of the Committee but had overlooked consulting the fifth member who wrote a very unpleasant letter to the Secretary. Things deteriorated after that, with a Batavia firm and another member of the community demanding to have their names taken off the list of subscribers. The particular firm went even a step further and asked for their July subscription to be returned to them. The four members of the much harassed Committee circularised a letter explaining Spicer’s fortnight’s absence and did their best to persuade the gentlemen and the firm in question to change their opinions, without success. Spicer seems to have weathered the storm because he stayed at Batavia until the middle of March 1886.
Some time in 1887 Bishop Hose sent Rev. E Bryant Wonnacott of Singapore to Batavia for six weeks of ministry, after which services became even more infrequent. It was not that the Bishop did not care as this letter shows:
25 October 1889
Bishopsgate,
Singapore
The British Protestant Community,
Batavia
My Dear Mr Fraser,
Thank you for the letter of the 2nd. We are terribly short handed just now. The three Colonial Chaplains [to] Singapore, Penang and Malacca are all absent, the latter two from broken health and the former after eight years service on well earned leave, and there are other vacancies. It is a great regret to me to be unable to do more in the way of providing for occasional ministrations to the British community in Java, but it becomes more and more difficult to do so as population grows in the Straits and the calls on the labour of the small band of clergy there become heavier year by year.
It was no understatement that the bishop found staffing his expanding diocese extremely difficult. His sponsor, the SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel), could not provide either the quality or quantity of men needed. He had just inherited North Borneo, and the Malay States were growing rapidly necessitating chaplaincy work among the British and mission work among the Chinese and Indian immigrants. Singapore was less of a problem because it was so compact, but Rajah Charles Brooke’s private fiefdom of Sarawak was a maze of isolated rivers and remote mission stations. In Sarawak alone some of Hose’s priests and schoolmasters had failed in the loneliness and isolation: Shepherd had drunk himself to death, Bywater had taken a native woman as a mistress and there was the usual retirement of promising chaps like Perham from ill health. This in turn made it hard to encourage Brooke’s forty or so officials, all Public School boys and supposedly gentlemen, to set an example to the native Christians by remaining chaste and sober.
By the same token, the Batavia gentlemen were less than reasonable. They wanted it both ways: a full-time chaplain who would be underutilised looking after the handful of compatriots in that comfortable city but not available to help around the growing diocese. Shelford, Hose's Commissary in England, caused alarm among members of BPC by implying that any chaplain he helped recruit for Batavia would be under the jurisdiction of the Bishop not the BPC. One indignant member of the BPC summed up their feeling: “Shelford talks of this parson taking 'oaths to Bishop Hose before me Shelford.' Now is that what you want? Why not let your man be your chaplain and not the servant of the Bishop of Singapore?”
After that, only non-Anglican clergy and laymen took the occasional service. In August 1889 W F Oldham of the American Methodist Mission Singapore conducted a service, which was duly advertised. On Good Friday 1892, Dr J Montague of the Medical Missionary Society conducted a service. The next service of which there is evidence was J C Robinson holding 'Lay Services' commencing in May 1892 at 6.30 pm. There is no information about how long these services, which were the last recorded until 1905, continued.
British communities dotted around the world must have shared the dismay of the Batavia community at the Foreign Office Circular Dispatch of July 31 1873 which informed the Consul:
that only half the usual Government subsidy could be looked for under the Accounts for 1874; that in 1875 all support from the Government would cease; that the management of the Church affairs would therefore devolve upon the residents who were at liberty to make what arrangements they deemed expedient, if any such were practical, for the continuation of public worship, without reference to the Foreign Office, as the Church came no longer under Consular jurisdiction.
This meant that in 1874 the funds of the Community for church purposes would be reduced by 25%, and the next year by 50 %. The Trustees of the church drafted a response and hastily convened a General Meeting of the British residents which unanimously resolved:
that this meeting, as representing the British Community in Batavia, thoroughly endorse the sentiments expressed in the Trustees’ letter and view with alarm the action of Her Majesty's Government in striking at the branches of the Established Church; that they do not consider the amount so saved to the country - some £9 000 per annum - of sufficient importance to warrant the withdrawal of Government aid, resulting, as it doubtless will in Batavia, and probably elsewhere, from the inability of the residents unaided to maintain a clergyman, in the downfall of public worship, and the loss of those oases in the desert which have hitherto served as a rallying place to sojourners in. foreign lands, and have helped not a little to maintain the prestige of the name of Great Britain, and that holding these views, an earnest appeal be made to Her Majesty's Government in the hope that this act may not be carried into effect.
The appeal failed, with the effect that from 1875 to 1905 the contribution from the Foreign Office ceased. When Kingsmill departed he was not replaced, and the next quarter of a century represents the lowest point in the church's history, marked only by the brief, spasmodic ministrations of visiting clergy. This was not helped by the high expectations of the status-conscious businessmen who constituted the BPC, as this correspondence of 1882 illustrates. J F Tidman, acting on behalf of BPC, visited J E Shelford, Bishop Hose's commissary in England, and was introduced to Shelford's candidate for chaplain at Batavia. Tidman reported disapprovingly of the man, who had been Shelford's curate and was now a missionary in East London:
He may be a first-rate man but he did not strike me as just the fellow you want, who according to my idea ought to be a gentleman and one likely to be socially attractive. Shelford says the pay is too low for all that, but my fear is, that if an inferior man is sent, he will have no influence and will soon find the support to him dwindle away.
In June of that year Rev. W Aitken from Singapore visited Java and held services at the church. In November 1882 Rev. W Hayton, travelling from Roebourne, Western Australia, passed through Batavia and ministered to the members of the community. On Trinity Sunday 1883, Rev. Codrington conducted services. In September 1883 Rev. McNeale passed through and held services, subsequently accepting the Committee's invitation to stay on until January 1884.
An incident in 1885 showed how prickly some of the community could be. In July Rev. E C Spicer passed through Batavia on his way from Australia to England. When he saw the situation, he promised to stay one month. His services were apparently so much appreciated that the Committee invited him to stay till the end of the year. In August H M S Espoir on her way to the Cocos Islands picked up Spicer, who wanted to minister to employees of Eastern Extension Telegraph Company stationed there. He had obtained the permission of four members of the Committee but had overlooked consulting the fifth member who wrote a very unpleasant letter to the Secretary. Things deteriorated after that, with a Batavia firm and another member of the community demanding to have their names taken off the list of subscribers. The particular firm went even a step further and asked for their July subscription to be returned to them. The four members of the much harassed Committee circularised a letter explaining Spicer’s fortnight’s absence and did their best to persuade the gentlemen and the firm in question to change their opinions, without success. Spicer seems to have weathered the storm because he stayed at Batavia until the middle of March 1886.
Some time in 1887 Bishop Hose sent Rev. E Bryant Wonnacott of Singapore to Batavia for six weeks of ministry, after which services became even more infrequent. It was not that the Bishop did not care as this letter shows:
25 October 1889
Bishopsgate,
Singapore
The British Protestant Community,
Batavia
My Dear Mr Fraser,
Thank you for the letter of the 2nd. We are terribly short handed just now. The three Colonial Chaplains [to] Singapore, Penang and Malacca are all absent, the latter two from broken health and the former after eight years service on well earned leave, and there are other vacancies. It is a great regret to me to be unable to do more in the way of providing for occasional ministrations to the British community in Java, but it becomes more and more difficult to do so as population grows in the Straits and the calls on the labour of the small band of clergy there become heavier year by year.
It was no understatement that the bishop found staffing his expanding diocese extremely difficult. His sponsor, the SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel), could not provide either the quality or quantity of men needed. He had just inherited North Borneo, and the Malay States were growing rapidly necessitating chaplaincy work among the British and mission work among the Chinese and Indian immigrants. Singapore was less of a problem because it was so compact, but Rajah Charles Brooke’s private fiefdom of Sarawak was a maze of isolated rivers and remote mission stations. In Sarawak alone some of Hose’s priests and schoolmasters had failed in the loneliness and isolation: Shepherd had drunk himself to death, Bywater had taken a native woman as a mistress and there was the usual retirement of promising chaps like Perham from ill health. This in turn made it hard to encourage Brooke’s forty or so officials, all Public School boys and supposedly gentlemen, to set an example to the native Christians by remaining chaste and sober.
By the same token, the Batavia gentlemen were less than reasonable. They wanted it both ways: a full-time chaplain who would be underutilised looking after the handful of compatriots in that comfortable city but not available to help around the growing diocese. Shelford, Hose's Commissary in England, caused alarm among members of BPC by implying that any chaplain he helped recruit for Batavia would be under the jurisdiction of the Bishop not the BPC. One indignant member of the BPC summed up their feeling: “Shelford talks of this parson taking 'oaths to Bishop Hose before me Shelford.' Now is that what you want? Why not let your man be your chaplain and not the servant of the Bishop of Singapore?”
After that, only non-Anglican clergy and laymen took the occasional service. In August 1889 W F Oldham of the American Methodist Mission Singapore conducted a service, which was duly advertised. On Good Friday 1892, Dr J Montague of the Medical Missionary Society conducted a service. The next service of which there is evidence was J C Robinson holding 'Lay Services' commencing in May 1892 at 6.30 pm. There is no information about how long these services, which were the last recorded until 1905, continued.