Chapel Sunday School
A newspaper report in 1892 describes how the Methodists started a Methodist Sunday School at the Wreningham chapel. Funds were subscribed and, in April of that year, a Sunday School was opened ‘under promising circumstances’ and ’35 children’ took part.
The chapel had been in operation since the early 1800s. Initially, it was ‘Independent’ or ‘Congregationalist’ according to a Methodist newspaper from 1908. The Methodists formerly took charge of the chapel in the early 1900s although the transition to Methodist control may have been more gradual.
The original chapel was demolished with a replacement being constructed relatively quickly – detailed here. It describes the construction of both a new ‘chapel and a school’.
We have kindly been given access to the above pair of roll books which provide pupil attendance details at the Sunday School they established. The first book is from January 1895 until March 1902. The second book ran between April 1933 and September 1947. Both roll books were used until their last pages had been filled.
We presume there would have been further roll books over the time of the chapel Sunday School but we have no other information about this.
Both books originally had all their roll pages interleaved with pink blotting pages bound into the spines.
This is from the era when most formal writing was carried out by ink pen (from a bottle by way of an ink well). Blotting paper was regularly used to prevent smudging from the inevitably wet ink.
A few of the attendance pages were written in pencil.
Many of the blotter pages have since been cut from the books. Presumably, once each registry page had been completed, the facing blotter page had served its purpose and the Sunday School teachers (or others) must have extracted the blotting paper to be employed elsewhere.
Sunday School class numbers were variable. Attendance is recorded for each pupil as a diagonal stroke in the box. The entry of an ‘s’ probably relates to a pupil known to be unwell whilst an ‘a’ may represent the absence of a pupil for unknown reasons.
At the end of each row, the teachers have totalled the number of Sundays each pupil appeared over the three-month period. Were these totals part of a reporting process to the church elders about the pupil numbers they were attracting?
In the earlier of the two books, teachers’ names are not given. However, in the later book, teachers’ names are sometimes listed together with the Sundays each teacher was attending. This includes a confirmation of the teacher’s actual attendance, too!
The adjacent example lists the teachers between April 1934 and the end of March 1935.
At this time, the chapel’s Sunday School teachers comprised:
Mr James Howlett
Mrs B Rushmore
Miss G Goodrum
Miss M Ford
Presumably, any occasional teacher ‘a’ for absence would have been agreed in advance with colleagues!
In the first roll book, it is possible to estimate the approximate ages of many pupils by comparing their names against the 1891 / 1901 census records. As an example: in the adjacent list extracted from the roll page in the last quarter of 1897, we have identified ten Wreningham children out of the thirteen names in the list.
(The chapel is within walking distance of the nearest parts of Ashwellthorpe, Florden, Bracon Ash etc, so the ‘missing’ three pupils might be listed under their own village census records.)
Of the ten identified from Wreningham, the youngest three are approximately: 3, 4, and 5 years old. The approximate ages of the others give the eldest at 12, two at 7, two at 9 and two at 10.
Scarlet Fever was primarily an illness in children and could even prove fatal; there was a large national outbreak in 1901. In the absence of antibiotics – not arriving until the late 1940s – victims could only hope for the best.
We might imagine Wreningham School would have been closed, for the same reason. At this time, an isolation hospital in Norwich was quarantining two dozen Norfolk children although we are not aware of actual cases occurring in Wreningham.
Attendance Numbers
Whilst the 1892 newspaper story tells us the first Sunday School attracted 35 pupils, the first (1895) book shows the roll had risen to 42. Roll numbers continued at about that level before rising to 49 in mid-1899.
By the commencement of the second book, in January 1933, pupil roll numbers were down to sixteen and stayed at this level for the whole year. With the inevitable absences, on two Sundays during the April to June quarter of 1933, the actual attendance was only eight and nine. Examining pupil surnames suggests four of those appear to have been related to the teachers – implying only half the remainder might have been attending of their own volition! The roll book shows four teachers were attending each week, on those two Sundays, there were four teachers available for the eight and nine pupils present!
During the remainder of the 1930s, the pupil roll initially climbed to 23 but then fell back to the high teens. It got up to about two dozen during the war years and then, post-war, quickly climbed – reaching four dozen in 1947.
The four teachers (named in the above 1934/5 extract) reduced to three when Miss Goodrum left the teaching staff in 1936. In 1939/40, teacher numbers were increased to five, with the addition of Mr Hill and Mrs Aldridge. After 1941, teachers’ names were no longer listed in the book.
Sunday School Pupils 1895 – 1902
The first book’s roll lists have been broken down into years. Each year’s listing is linked below.
Pupil listings from the 1933 to 1947 book have not been published here due to those details being in living memory and the related privacy / data protection considerations.
Both roll books have been deposited at the Norfolk Record Office at the wish of their owner.