Transcription of obituary published in the Minutes of Conference
SHADRACH EDWARD WILLIAMS : born at Tunstall, Staffs, in 1889. He entered the Ministry of the Primitive Methodist Church in 1915 after training at Hartley College. He travelled in the Edinburgh, Mexborough, and Sheffield circuits and also served during the last year of the first World War as an army chaplain in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
In 1926 he was appointed to the home staff of the British and Foreign Bible Society. His work as District Secretary for Yorkshire was of a very high standard indeed and wherever he went he made friends. In 1935 he took charge of their South Midland District, with headquarters in Birmingham, and here again he proved to be highly popular and effective. In 1943 the Bible Society made him a Regional Secretary with responsibility for a wider area in the Midlands. In all he gave twenty-seven valuable years of service to the Bible Society—a work for which his love of the Bible and his love for people particularly fitted him. He gave himself without stint and must have hastened, by his sacrificial labours, the ill health which caused his premature retirement in 1952.
He made his home in Bournemouth, where he continued to serve his Lord in every way he could. He was particularly acceptable in the pulpits of local churches, and no cause was too small for him; freely he had received and freely he gave of his time and energies. When he was not engaged in preaching, Sundays always found him present at worship, and for many years he greatly enriched the Bournemouth Ministers’ Fraternal of which he was a much-loved member. In the last year of his life he bore severe illness with great fortitude, and the end came suddenly on 14 October 1958 in the seventieth year of his life and the forty-third of his ministry.
Family
Edward was born on 5 March 1889 at Tunstall, Staffordshire, to parents Edward, an ironstone miner (1891), and Sarah.
The 1911 census return records Edward as a hired local preacher at Clapton, London.
He married Agnes Annie Sivil (1893-1950) in the spring of 1919 at Sheffield, Yorkshire. Birth records identify three children.
- Marjorie (b1920) – a student teacher (1939); married Joseph Sidney Jewitt in 1950
- Ronald Sivil (1923-2014) – a production engineer (1958)
- Keith E (b1928)
He married Elizabeth Mary Burrows in the summer of 1951 in the Solihull Registration District, Warwickshire.
Edward died on 14 October 1958 at Barton on Sea, Hampshire.
Circuits
- Hartley
- 1915 Edinburgh
- 1918 Chaplain H.M. Forces, Aldershot
- 1919 Mexborough
- 1922 Sheffield, John St
- 1926 York, BFBS
- 1936 Birmingham, BFBS
- 1953 Birmingham (S)
References
Methodist Minutes 1959/181
W Leary, Directory of Primitive Methodist Ministers and their Circuits, 1990
Census Returns and Births, Marriages & Deaths Registers
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