Oldcroft Bethesda Primitive Methodist chapel

Averil Kear, Vice-President of the Forest of Dean Local History Society tells us about Oldcroft Primitive Methodist chapel:

“Bethesda at Oldcroft, where the Primitives revived their cause in 1873, opened in 1876  and closed, following storm damage, in 1929. Members of the congregation later reopened it as an independent church, which closed in the early 1960s, and from 1975 until 1991 the building was an electrical engineer’s workshop.  In 2021  it is used as a workshop and store.

Bethesda was a chapel built by my husband’s  (Alec Kear) Great Grandfather.

Richard Kear and his friends had held meetings for some time in temporary accommodation at Oldcroft and in 1875 a piece of ‘open waste land’ was purchased to build a chapel for the ‘Prims’ at Oldcroft.

Richard Kear would have been very proud of the report in the Dean Forest Guardian in March 1914 concerning the Yorkley chapel anniversary, at which his son ‘Mr. Richard Kear of Oldcroft was the preacher’.

‘Mr. Kear is known in the Forest as a clear, earnest and intelligent local preacher in the Primitive Methodist denomination to which, however, he does not limit his services as a preacher. On the contrary he is appreciated as such in other denominations as well as his own and his work on Sunday was no exception both as regards its own merits and the appreciation it won’.