In retrospect, it is clear that he had a real evangelical zeal and a good connection with his congregation.
Luckily, in order to be able to give a fuller picture of my grandfather I have found some pages that he wrote about his life. He was born in 1880 in Leeds, the second child of five. His father was a fellmonger (a dealer in hides and skins) and he praises his parents for the fun that he remembered from his childhood. He says his parents made sure that they were kept tidy and fed and brought up to be respectable and honest.
My grandfather only attended one school and left school at the age of thirteen. He recalls how he used to recite at school concerts and states how this helped him later because he was used to facing an audience and also trained his memory. My father did exactly the same thing while he was at Shebbear (a Bible Christian Methodist boarding school.) My father took parts in school productions of Shakespeare. Although my grandfather had the chance of a scholarship to continue his education, he needed to get a job to contribute to the family income. He started his working life as an errand boy and he remembers bringing home with pride his first week’s wages—three shillings and four pence. Later he became an apprentice for a firm in York. It was at this time that he started going to James Street Methodist Free Church in York.3 Here my grandfather committed himself to a life of service to God. He started by helping run the Sunday School and joined a mission and Temperance Brass Band. He and a group of others also conducted open-air services in the poorest areas of York. This was invaluable experience for my grandfather. I find it amazing that this was a group of teenagers who were committed to these activities on a regular basis.
My grandfather’s next task was to become recognized as a preacher. He became, first of all, a fully accredited local preacher. He continued with his job, but I feel sure that what he really wanted to do was become a full-time evangelist. Through a meeting with the Rev Thomas Cook he became a full-time Gospel Car Evangelist (see the picture above). Despite the obvious cares and concerns of his family, because in his own words “he was leaving a certainty for an uncertainty,” he gave in his notice and took on a precarious lifestyle. This was a calling with no salary at all. He started at Cleethorpes but soon was sent to Lingdale with the Gospel Car Florence.4 He preached all over the Cleveland, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Saltburn, and Danby circuits. Later my father often preached at many of these small chapels where Grandpa had surprised his superiors by his ability to preach and to convert people to Christianity.5
After about eighteen months out on the road with Florence, my grandfather, while still doing a lot of mission work, found time to do the necessary studying to become a Methodist minister, and he started his ministry in the Walton and Felixstowe circuit in 1905. In 1907 Grandpa moved to Katherine Road, Forest Gate, in London. This was a huge church with seating for 1250 people. The church was usually full to capacity on a Sunday night, including extra chairs in the aisles. In 1947, he returned to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of his work in London. In his own words: “We had great crowds and I came away humble and yet exalted that, after 40 years, so many people kept a place in their hearts for this now elderly man who had gone to them as a young minister.”
In 1916, Grandpa married Clara Seed (she had been a deaconess at Katherine Road) and they moved to Salford to a large downtown church. He describes it as one of the dirtiest and dreariest districts he had ever known. This was where my father was born. However, after five years they were ready to move. They went back to London—this time Fentiman Road in the Brixton circuit.
Fentiman Road, by all accounts, was the jolliest of Grandpa’s churches. Grandpa found he had a group of young and inexperienced stewards who were taken aback by his ideas of how to develop the church’s life but they committed themselves fully to helping run the church. Grandpa issued a Monthly Messenger and for eight years they sent out two thousand copies. I still have some of these copies. They started Saturday Popular Concerts and the crowds came. Grandpa and my father must have sung duets at these concerts and I remember father singing them with me in my childhood. In short, Fentiman Road prospered, and Grandpa says, “It was a sheer joy to watch the joy of the people at the church.” While he was there, he was also released to conduct missions in Newcastle, Sheffield, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Leeds, Bideford, Exeter, Bury, and Norwich.
In 1930 Grandpa went back to Katherine Road. The church had fallen on hard times. The congregation was much depleted and there was a deficit on the church current account. He doesn’t say much about his second stay at Katherine Road, except to say that they cleared the deficit and that this is where my father was accepted as a local preacher.
Grandpa’s next church was in Wednesbury (1936–1944) where he became the superintendent of the Spring Head Mission. He enjoyed the fact that the mission stood for a great deal in the municipal life of the town. He must have relished all the extra commitments this brought as well as always producing new ideas to keep the church work appealing. His final appointment was to Bishop Street, Central Hall, Leicester.
I have great admiration for my grandfather. I find it impossible to imagine what my life would have been like if I had left full-time education at thirteen. It seems that he must always have been driven to seek his goals in circumstances that any teenager of the twenty-first century would find at the very least daunting.
He was undoubtedly a product of the times in which he lived. From the mission work that he started as a teenager, to becoming an itinerant evangelist preaching against the evils of the time, and then a Methodist minister, where he relished every aspect of church life and was never afraid of being innovative.
Ben has given a good comparison of the sermons of both men, but perhaps I may just add a few comments of my own. My grandfather exhorted his congregations to follow a better and Christian life. He was perhaps flamboyant in the pulpit, but also a very caring minister of his flock, and in this he was ably helped by his wife. She was by comparison quiet, but always a good listener and always concerned for others rather than herself. In Grandpa’s notes about his life he quotes the last words she said in their house. The ambulance had come to take her to hospital late at night and she said, “I am so sorry to have brought you out so late.” I guess these words sum up the sort of person she was.
Among all the paperwork I have inherited I found a cutting from the Methodist Recorder. Unfortunately, I do not know the date but I am guessing it is probably from the 1930s. I quote: “There is probably no man in the United Methodist ministry who has conducted so many evangelical missions as the Rev. Fred Barrett.” After a list of various places where he conducted missions, the article continues: “Combining culture with a keen sense of humor and extraordinary powers of mimicry, Mr. Barrett has the zeal and consuming passion for souls of an old-time hot gospeller.”
A further testament to his impact on the lives of those he met is in the letters my father received after Grandpa’s death. There are probably one hundred or so letters, which came from all parts of the country. Virtually all of them describe him in the most glowing way and how he affected their lives for the better. However, rather than choosing to quote from these letters I have chosen to include something that my grandfather wrote in his very last monthly bulletin (July/August 1951).
As I write my heart is full of gratitude to my many friends and of praise of God. I close my letter with a word of witness. When I was a lad of thirteen, God called me and saved me. It is of grace divine that I have been kept. To my amazement and my joy God counted me worthy and called me to preach the Gospel. For over fifty years, as local preacher and minister, it has been the joy of my life to proclaim salvation by grace through faith.
How deeply my father felt about his parents is best summed up in his own words. This is what he wrote in the copy of his first book:6
The first
