Baptism in the sea

Several denominations within Christianity follow the practice of baptism by immersion as a means of professing faith and for becoming a full member of a congregation [1]. Even branches of the Church that usually practise infant baptism, retain immersion of believers as an option, and services are conducted by the Church of England in some coastal parishes [2].

I was brought up as a Baptist and attended Winner Street Baptist Church in Paignton until I was eleven years old. Although I only attended two services of baptism, they left a strong impression and this in my description in Walking with Gosse [3]

Services of baptism at Winner Street were unsettling, although I only attended two. One was for my elder brother and I’ve no idea who was being baptised in the second, but it was likely to be a relative, or close friend. After some preliminaries, the minister conducting the ceremony walked down the steps into the pool followed, one at a time, by each candidate. Then came the solemn “I baptise you (or was it thee?) in the name of … (I can’t remember the rest)”, followed by a backwards dip to be completely immersed. Each successful candidate was then lifted up and made a soggy walk to the back vestry, accompanied by a supporter and the sound of joyous hymn singing. With my fear of water, I hated the thought of immersion, so didn’t think that I would ever be baptised. I was too young to be a candidate anyway, but if the idea of sending me to the services was to encourage me to think about a future baptism, it had the opposite effect. It wasn’t just the immersion; the whole church seemed to be filled with an unpleasant emotion. Or perhaps the emotion was fine, but there was too much of it? I still feel uncomfortable with the emotionality associated with evangelical Christian movements, yet a heightened state that borders on mild hysteria seems to be important to many believers.

This was in the confines of the church building in the 1950s, but in the Nineteenth Century at least one local group of Brethren held services of baptism in the sea, as their small chapel did not have a pool [3]. These Brethren were led by Philip Henry Gosse, the famous natural historian, and the party would gather on the shore at Oddicombe (see below in a more recent view) for the service, a practice that was stopped after onlookers started jeering and mocking the spectacle.

Henry Gosse’s son, Edmund, was baptised in 1859 when twelve years old, but not in the sea. It was unusual for one so young to be baptised in the Brethren and large numbers turned up at the main Brethren chapel in Torquay to witness the event (the room in St Marychurch probably did not have a pool, even though it had been newly constructed in 1859). In his famous book Father and Son, Edmund describes the baptism as being “the central event of my whole childhood,” and one would imagine it to have had an even greater impact if it was conducted at Oddicombe. As Ann Thwaite has remarked [4], Edmund relished being the centre of attention and I read his account with special interest, as the ceremony he described was almost identical to that which I had observed at the service of baptism in Winner Street. It is an event that invites an emotional response from the audience and I can imagine the comments from the jeering crowd of onlookers at Oddicombe in earlier times.

 

[1] https://christianindex.org/baptism-around-the-world/

[2] https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2015/4-september/news/uk/cornish-beach-baptism-for-model-who-found-peace-and-greater-love

[3] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse, e-book, available widely.

[4] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 

Henry Gosse finds Sandhurst in Torquay, his home for the next thirty years

As a boy growing up in Paignton, I knew that the railway from Newton Abbot to Kingswear had been built a hundred years before, but not that it had been completed in sections. The line ran to a terminus in Torquay (now called Torre) until it continued to Paignton in 1859 and on to Kingswear in 1864 [1].

It was to the old Torquay station that Philip Henry Gosse, the famous Natural Historian, came in 1857 and he then set off for St Marychurch, an area that he knew from an earlier visit to the town. He had decided to move away from London after the death of his wife, to continue his researches on marine life; his young son, Edmund, being his constant companion. In his first biography of his father [2], Edmund writes:

[St Marychurch] had just been seized with a building craze, and new villas, each in its separate garden, were rising on all hands. [Henry] Gosse hired a horse, and rode round the neighbourhood to see what he could find to suit him, and at last he discovered, near the top of the Torquay Road, what he thought was the exact place.

It was not an attractive object to the romantic eye. It is impossible to conceive anything much more dispiriting that this brand-new little house, unpapered, undried, standing in ghastly whiteness in the middle of a square enclosure of raw “garden,” that is to say of ploughed field, laid out with gravel walks, beds without a flower or leaf, and a “lawn” of fat red loam guiltless of one blade of grass. Two great rough pollard elms, originally part of a hedge which had run across the site of the lawn, were the only objects that relieved the monotony of the inchoate place, which spread out, vague and uncomely, “like the red outline of beginning Adam.” By taking the house in this condition, however, it was a cheap purchase, and my father felt that it would be a pleasure to discipline all this formlessness into beauty and fertility. He never repented of his choice, nor ever expressed, through more than thirty years, the wish that he had gone elsewhere. The Devonshire red loam is wonderfully stubborn, and for many seasons the place retained the obloquy of its newness. But at length the grass became velvety on the lawn, trees grew up and hid the unmossed limestone walls in which no vegetation can force a footing, and the little place grew bowery and secluded. It was on September 23, 1857, that the family settled in this house – named Sandhurst, by the builder, in mere wantonness of nomenclature – and this became their home.

Sandhurst is still there, although modified by extensions, and we held a Blue Plaque ceremony for Henry in the garden (see below). It was Henry Gosse’s home for the rest of his life and he died there in 1888. He had re-married in 1860 and his widow, Eliza, continued to live at Sandhurst, but Edmund had moved to London to work at the British Museum in 1867. Edmund’s views on life, and on religion, were different to those of Henry and this caused many difficulties for them both, although Nellie Gosse, Edmund’s wife, acted as a go-between during visits to Sandhurst, and she and her children were loved by Henry and Eliza.

Edmund writes of a final carriage ride that he took with Henry to Cockington and the scene described must have been very close to the spot shown in the photograph above, with the road (then a small lane) passing under the railway line to Paignton that had been completed nearly thirty years before [2]:

My father, with the pathetic look in his eyes, the mortal pallor on his cheeks, scarcely spoke, and seemed to observe nothing. But, as we turned to drive back down a steep lane of overhanging branches, the pale vista of the sea burst upon us, silvery blue in the yellow light of afternoon. Something in the beauty of the scene raised the sunken brain, and with a little of the old declamatory animation in head and hand, he began to recite the well-known passage in the fourth book of Paradise Lost

Now came still evening on, and twilight grey

Had in her sober livery all things clad.

He pursued the quotation through three or four lines, and then, in the middle of a sentence, the music broke, his head fell once more upon his breast, and for him the splendid memory, the self-sustaining intellect which had guided the body so long, were to be its companions on earth no more.

As an admirer of Philip Henry Gosse, I find Edmund’s account very moving and it is sad that they were never fully reconciled, although they were able to enjoy each other's company rather more in Henry's last years. The trip to Cockington was in July 1888 and it was the last drive out that Henry took, as his final illness had immobilised him. At the end there was little pain and he died on 23 August 1888, being buried on 27 August in unconsecrated ground in Torquay Cemetery. Eliza, who lived to be 87, was buried in the same grave on 18 October 1900 and I have visited it to pay my respects.

[1] C.R.Potts (1991) The Newton Abbot to Kingswear Railway (1844-1988). Wallingford, The Oakwood Press.

[2] Edmund Gosse (1890) The Naturalist of the Sea-Shore: The Life of Philip Henry

Gosse. London, William Heinemann.