20. St. John’s Church – 200 Years of History

By the time St. John’s was 70 years old, efforts were already being made to recall and write down its history.  Local historian and churchwarden Ernest Whitfeld [link] gave a talk on origins of the Mission House in 1896, and we owe the preservation of many years of Parish Messenger [link] to his personal collection. A beautifully presented publication from 1914, Souvenir of Old and New Churches [link], contains the first published history of the church, likely researched by Whitfeld.
From the 1930s, church brochures were produced which included a short history of St. John’s. These tended to be revisions of earlier versions, and updates have continued into the present era.
From the 1890s, Harold Blake Brownrigg [link] , an avid photographer, took many photos which are our main visual record of the church until the 1950s. He presented “magic lantern” (slide) shows on its history.
In 1969, local historian, P.G. Webb, who presented many papers at Launceston Historical Society,  wrote a well-researched history of the building, with wider context – The Building of St. John’s Church [link]. Webb also discovered and listed the remnants of Archdeacon Browne’s lending library, the subject of another of his articles – St. John’s Library – 19th Century Adult Education [link]
By the 1980s, the late Jenny Gill [link] was very concerned about the poor state of the archives at St. John’s, and began a decades-long project to properly store and catalogue them. She was a local historian of some renown, who also regularly presented papers at Launceston Historical Society. She was a founding member of the present All Saints Heritage and History Group, and those who continue the work of archiving and cataloguing the history of the church at our fine and well-equipped archive centre, are honoured to build on her immensely significant work on which Julian Burgess drew heavily for the first full-scale published history of St. John’s published earlier this year.
Thank you for following our Bicentenary History Snippets. All 20 are now published online. [link]