CITY URC’s humble little magazine has made it onto the hallowed pages of history in the current Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society. The Society’s Journal is edited by Rev Dr Robert Pope, who lived and ministered in Wales for many years before he took the post of teaching church history at the URC’s Westminster College in Cambridge.
It was Robert, too, who wrote the article quoting City URC Link, in his fascinating account of the first 50 years of the United Reformed Church in Wales. He recalls that at the time of the Union between the Congregational Church of England and Wales and the Presbyterian Church of England that established the United Reformed Church in 1972, practically all the churches in the new URC in Wales were Congregational. Only three were English Presbyterian.
In fact, it was so much of the same for most of the new URC churches in Wales that, he reports, for long, the new church was thought of as ‘the same people wearing different hats’. But not in Cardiff, where our own City URC started life as Windsor Place Presbyterian Church of England, becoming City URC after its formal union with Charles Street Congregational Church a few years after the main Union.
And that’s where our magazine enters the annals of history journals. The Presbyterians were very different people wearing very different hats. Founded by Scottish Presbyterian exiles working in Wales, all three – like similar churches in England – were known locally as ‘the Scottish church’ and operated as centres of Scottish culture with Scottish dancing, bagpipe bands and Scouts entitled to wear the kilt.
Some two years ago at the time our member Grace Mordecai died, I wrote an article for City URC Link, recalling that her grandfather was one of the expatriate Scottish Presbyterians, lured from Scotland by the Marquis of Bute, who had helped to establish the church. I talked then to some other members whose forefathers had also been part of the Scottish period, recalling the old Scottish ways and traditions.
This is the article from which Robert quotes, ending this section of his article with a quote from our long-time member Sadie Isaksson, who talked animatedly of the Scottish dancing and Scouts in swirling kilts marching to the bagpipes that she remembers so well, adding she was always ‘Puzzled over a Presbyterian Church of England, founded by Scotsmen, in a city in Wales.’
Jean Silvan-Evans at City URC, Cardiff
Photo credit: Taken from City URC’s own website