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THE COLLEGE,

MARLBOROUGH,

5th Dec., 1884.

MY LORD, I write to acknowledge the receipt of your letter about the Marlborough Mission, and to thank you most heartily in the name of Marlburians, past and present, for the kindly interest you have always taken in our undertaking. It is in very

great measure to your untiring exertions that the success, of which you speak, is due, and thereby you

have conferred a favour, which can never be fully repaid, on all who take an interest in the Mission.

This is a critical moment in the history of the undertaking, so it gives us the greatest pleasure to be able to insert a letter like yours in our columns. I remain,

My Lord,

Your obedient servant,

A. F. B. WILLIAMS.

The Right Rev. the Bishop of Bedford."

THE MARLBOROUGH MISSION. BY THE O.M. CURATE-IN-CHARGE. WHAT I am about to write is intended not so much for the present Marlburians, who year by year have given me so friendly a hearing and so warm a greeting in the Bradleian when I have described the Mission; to them most of what I now write is a twice or thrice told tale. I write rather to Old Marlburians, to whom I look for assistance in getting my tools for the work of the Mission, as I do to the School for my daily bread. There is, however, an addition which I would like to make to the holiday task of the School this Christmas, and that is that they would send this appeal to some O.M. whose address I do not possess, or better still, would place it beneath the parental eye on their return home for the Christmas holidays.

When I last described the Mission in these pages two years ago, I dwelt on the great importance of a second Clergyman taking part in the Mission. A month after, during a serious illness, I received a generous offer from my friend, the Rev. P. Watson, then at S. Peter's, Eaton Square, to help me for a year without salary. A few weeks later the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, moved by the kindly recommendation of the Bishop of Bedford, and the Vicar of Tottenham, granted £120 per annum for an

Assistant Curate in the Mission district. Thus, when Mr. Watson's year, to the general regret, was at an end, I was able to get an O.M. to join me in the work-the Rev. E. S Marshall, formerly head of Mr. Gilmore's house, and Scholar of B.N.C., Oxford. His aid and help have been greatly valued by me, and I hope that the Marlborough Mission Curate will always be able to enlist an Old Marlburian for his assistant. Had I remained single-handed, I should not have been able to retain so heavy a work. Our present plant is as follows:

(1) We hire the Hall of the Local Board Schools, This for Sundays only, at a rent of £60 a year. can be used only for Sunday Services. (2) We hire the adjoining Board Schools as Sunday Schools at £20 a year.

(3) We hire for every-day use a Mission Room at Reform Row (near Bruce Grove Station), at £40 a year (of which the owners, who are the only large employers of labour in the district, very kindly abate half). This room is our only workshop for week-day use, and we use it also for additional Sunday Schools and Services.

(4) A small house is now being taken for a Club for Factory Girls. (Thus we have to provide nearly £150 a year for rent).

(5) At length, after long legal delays, about title, &c., we have secured a site for the Church and Vicarage in a convenient locality. It may be possible perhaps to find space for a Mission house upon the spot, but while we can continue to hire our present buildings, the Church is by far the most needful object.

PAST AND PRESENT WORK OF THE MISSION.-The congregations are remarkably good considering the neighbourhood, and are very reverent and hearty. On a Sunday morning I should calculate that there were 200 adults and 350 children (including those at the children's services); on Sunday afternoons over 400 children; in the evening the Hall is fairly filled with adults. There have been 350 baptisms, including 25 adults; and in two years 108 have been confirmed, including 24 men and 17 married women. The following table will show the growth of the number of communicants:

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Week-day services are naturally ill-attended in a place like this; yet special services, such as those held in Lent, or those for Factory-people during their dinner-hour, or for Board School children on week-day evenings, have gathered a very fair attendance.

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Our Provident Work is growing, although the Mothers' Meeting is not very large. Over 70 tons of coal were bought through our Coal Club, by small weekly deposits and an added bonus this year. A Blanket Club has also been greatly used. excellent Mission woman, whose stipend is paid for us by the East London Church Fund, collects at the houses for these Clubs and for the Clothing Club about £3 weekly, most of which would otherwise be wasted. Our two Penny Banks have nearly 400 depositors. These aids to thrift form part of our Temperance Society's Work. Our branch of the C.E.T.S. has 200 abstaining members and a Band of Hope, and provides a special service, lecture or concert once a fortnight, when the Mission room is crowded. We have over 80 Church Workers and try to find work for everybody, from our valued Lay reader down to working men who keep quiet and order outside the Mission hall, and it is to these faithful and zealous lay-helpers that I consider the progress of the Mission is due, under God.

Our people give very liberally in offertories and subscriptions and collecting cards, both for the Church and the current expenses of the Mission. This last, of course, they have to do, for Marlborough merely undertakes to provide £150 per annum towards the Mission Curate's stipend (the East London Church. Fund adding £50). I have therefore to raise over £350 annually for rent, gas, coal, cleaning and other bills, and to keep from bankruptcy our charities and treats.

The local contributions to the Church building fund now exceed £340 paid and £180 more promised. One working man-a hatter-subscribes 5s. monthly, and 15 working-men and their wives do the same once a quarter, and a penny-a-week Association starts with the New Year. What the College is doing for us, then, is so far from pauperising us that it draws both from others and from ourselves a much larger outlay for the Mission and charitable work.

Old Marlburians and others, desiring fuller information as to our ways and means and methods and

expedients, can have from me on application our annual report and other papers.

PERSONAL HELP FROM OLD MARLBURIANS.-The distance of the district assigned to Marlborough from the heart and West end of London-to say nothing of Marlborough-makes it difficult for us to receive much personal help from the Masters, School, or Old Marlburians, such as the Clifton and Winchester Missions receive week by week, nor has any O.M. as yet taken a house or lodgings here to devote his spare time to the poor, as is the case in the Harrow Mission at Notting Hill: yet there are enterprising O.M.'s who have survived the 25 minutes' journey from Liverpool-Street to Bruce Grove Station, and have earned our gratitude by their assistance. And we are specially grateful for the help and services which the only O.M. resident in the neighbourhood, the Rev. W. Almack, Head Master of Bruce Castle School, has so heartily rendered as the zealous Treasurer of the Building Fund, and formerly its Secretary, and as a preacher and adviser from time to time. Besides him and my valued O.M. colleague, the Rev. E. S. Marshall, let me thank in the name of the Mission:

The Master, for his visits to preach and mix with our people, and his invariable sympathy and interest.

The Bursar, for contriving a delightful excursion of our workers to the College and the Forest in July, 1883.

S. T. Fisher, for his generous and skilful management of our legal difficulties in acquiring a site. Rev. E. C. Coney, for often supplying my place when laid aside from work.

Canon Duckworth, Prebendary Wace, and the Revs. W. D. Fenning, J. L. L. Dove, B. C. Stephenson, C. Grant-Dalton, T. N. Hart-Smith, F. D. How, &c., for their sermons.

The Rev. W. E. Emmett and R. Leach, for Temperance addresses.

My brother, R. Bosworth-Smith, for lecturing, and J. W. Cripps for teaching history to a few working

men.

H. B. Lawford, W. H. Lipscomb, W. F. Blandford, &c., for songs and entertainments.

Rev. W. M. Furneaux, for his great services as Secretary at Marlborough. The gain of Repton was indeed a loss not only to Marlborough College, but

to the Mission.

M. H. Gould for similar services as Secretary at the College, Rev. W. H. Payne-Smith for work at Oxford, and G. H. Westcott for services at Cambridge. Rev. C. E. Thorpe, E. Charley, and many others for parcels of clothes and books.

Lord C. Bruce, M.P., for presiding at our temperance anniversary, and for a donation to the Sunday Schools.

The Old Marlburians, now nearly 400 in number, who have contributed to the Site and Building Fund. I conclude by stating what we ask O.M's to help us do. Our past progress makes it important to begin without further delay a Church to hold 700 people at least. This could hardly cost less than £6000, towards which £1100 only is in hand and promised as yet. Next, but not before, we ought to have a Mission Hall, with recreation rooms for Workmen's Clubs, partly in order to relieve ourselves of our present rent for Sunday Schools, &c., and partly that we may have "Fixity of Tenure" assured to us. Will Marlburians and other friends of the College then make up £2000 towards the Church, the patronage of which it is proposed to vest in the Bishop? The other two-thirds of the cost of the church would be raised by the congregation, by gifts from Societies and from our neighbours, and by other appeals to those who have at heart the extension of Christ's Church. I feel quite sure from my experiences hitherto that our district, containing as it does 6000 poor of-for London-average means and poverty, of average intelligence and ignorance, of average goodness and want of principle, but of unusual spiritual moral and intellectual destitution even for London, will help to build the Church, that they will fill it and value it, and that it will be the centre of many a humanising and civilizing effort.

EDWARD F. NOEL SMITH. P.S.-The Building Committee consists of the Bishop of Bedford, the Master of the College, the Curate in charge, two Old Marlburians (the Rev. E. C. Coney and S. T. Fisher, Esq.) and the two Churchwardens, as representing the congregation (Mr. A. Short and Mr. W. H. Cook).

The Treasurers are the Rev. W. Almack, and G. Gripper, Esq., Chairman of the Tottenham SchoolBoard.

All cheques and other gifts to the Building Fund should be sent to the Rev. W. Almack, Bruce Castle,

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