Walpole, Samuel (1882-1955)

Transcription of obituary published in the Minutes of Conference

SAMUEL WALPOLE: born 1882. Brought up in Rugby, he attended the Railway Terrace Primitive Methodist Chapel, where at the age of sixteen he was accepted as an accredited local preacher. He was led to offer for the Ministry, entering Hartley College in 1905. His service as a probationer was spent in the Beccles and Bungay circuit and at Bath. In 1912 he was ordained, and there followed periods of service at Chorley, Hurstbourne, Blackburn, Fakenham, High Wycombe, Newark, Pocklington, Bingley, and Lye. 

Failing health brought about his retirement in 1948, when he came to Tilehurst, Reading. There, in spite of limitations imposed by increasing weakness, he exercised a pastoral ministry which endeared him to the hearts of many. He in his life and work was a shining indication of the value to the Church of the devoted circuit minister. A consistent student, a capable preacher, a popular and faithful pastor, possessed of a large fund of common sense and the saving grace of humour—a most kindly and lovable man. Added to these natural qualities his faith, simple, strong, contagious, sustained him throughout his life, enriched the Church and was surely used of God to advance His Kingdom.

He died on 21st October 1955, in the seventy-fourth year of his age and the forty-eighth of his ministry.

Family

Samuel was born on 3 March 1882 at Rugby, Warwickshire, to parents Joshua Walpole, a locomotive engine driver with L.N.W.R. (1891), and Mary Holland Johnson.

Before entering the ministry Samuel worked as a railway clerk (1901).

He married Mary Hannah Buglass (1877-1947) in the summer of 1912 in the Rochdale Registration District, Lancashire. Mary was a daughter of Rev. J.B. Buglass. Birth records identify one child.

• Dorothy Mary (1913-1984) – married Neville B Dakin, a mechanical engineering draughtsman (1939), in 1939

Samuel died on 21 October 1955 at Reading, Berkshire.

Circuits

• Hartley
• 1908 Lowestoft
• 1910 Bath II
• 1912 Chorley
• 1916 Hurstbourne
• 1919 Blackburn III
• 1922 Chorley
• 1925 Fakenham
• 1928 High Wycombe
• 1933 Newark
• 1935 Pocklington
• 1938 Bingley
• 1942 Stourbridge W
• 1946 Chorley
• 1948 Reading

References

Methodist Minutes 1956/182

W Leary, Directory of Primitive Methodist Ministers and their Circuits, 1990

Census Returns and Births, Marriages & Deaths Registers