Tea Meetings in Victorian Wiltshire

Every September cups and saucers, mugs and plates, are pressed into service for cancer charity Macmillan’s Coffee Morning. This nationwide event raises much-needed funds for the charity, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was tea, rather than coffee, that was the beverage of choice for fund-raising events.

 ‘Tea meetings’ were a popular way of raising money from the mid-19th century onwards for both secular and religious groups, but particularly by nonconformist congregations. These congregations were strongly influenced by the temperance movement, which campaigned against the evils of alcoholic drink, but not against tea-drinking, which was entirely acceptable. Fund-raising events involving tea were held up and down the country, usually to raise funds for their own church or chapel. It is not surprising that there are many references in chapel records and local newspaper reports to tea meetings in Wiltshire.

In 1867 Chippenham’s Causeway Methodist church were building a new house for their preacher; a tea meeting was held to raise funds for the construction. The tea meeting, and some donations, raised £48. 3s. 6d. towards the £200 cost. Over thirty years later, in 1900, a congregation of Wesleyan Methodists in Chippenham held a tea meeting to raise money for a chapel in the town, which eventually opened in 1909 as the Monkton Hill chapel, still in use today.

Tea meetings could be thanksgiving events as well as fund-raisers. Lowden Primitive Methodist chapel, on the outskirts of Chippenham, hosted a tea meeting in August 1855 to celebrate the opening of their new chapel, an event attended by 300 people. More sadly, a ‘Farewell Tea Meeting’ took place in January 1877 to mark the closure of the Bath Road church, an independent Christian congregation in Chippenham. Tickets cost 8d., with the tea served at 6 pm, followed by addresses from several local ministers.

 While tea meetings could be one-off events, chapels often held them as annual events to raise money. Lowden Primitive Methodists held such an event every Good Friday, generously supported for many years by one of their lay preachers, Jacob North (1824–1907). When the Methodist congregations at Stanley and Derry Hill near Chippenham held their annual tea meetings in 1870, they paid a shilling each to hire the tea urn from the Causeway Methodist church.

Such annual tea meetings were often held to celebrate the church’s anniversary. In July 1866, the anniversary tea of the Primitive Methodist church at Clack, near Lyneham, saw about 80 people sit down to plum cake, plain cake, seed cake and lard cake, with bread and butter and watercress. This spread was unusually sumptuous, but tea meetings would be expected to include cake, and sometimes bread and butter as well. In January 1881 another Primitive Methodist congregation, in the hamlet of Seend Cleeve near Melksham, enjoyed tea and cake at their annual tea meeting, while the Wesleyan Methodists of Aldbourne celebrated their Sunday School anniversary in May 1890 with tea, cake and bread and butter enjoyed by some 50 persons.

Tea meetings declined in popularity in the early years of the 20th century, and during the First World War all but ceased entirely. Nevertheless, in their mid-to late 19th century heyday, they were popular events not only for fundraising, but for community celebrations and chapel anniversaries. Today’s Macmillan Coffee Morning brings together people for coffee and cake in the same way as Wiltshire’s nonconformists brought together their congregations for tea and cake over a century ago.

~ Rosalind Johnson, September 2023