At last! (28.5.17) I have a map showing where the Walton Street Methodist chapel was (until it closed in 1946). This is a 1956/7 map of Oxford but still shows it as “Meth Ch” at top left of the map, opposite St Sepulchre’s Cemetary (where several Archers are buried) and more or less on the corner of Adelaide Street (where Ann Archer and her brother Thomas lived for many years in the 19th century).
So, what happened at Walton Street chapel then? Well, at a minimum my paternal grandpa William Archer was married there in 1902 to a local girl, one Elizabeth Gilder whose mother died at her (the child)’s age of about 7, in about 1882 and Elizabeth, who was to become my grandmother, was brought up (in the 1880s and 1890s) by her Aunt Sarah Blake (her mother’s sister) in the Blake household in (inter alia) Little Clarendon street.(continued 10.11.22): …while her father, Walter Gilder (who had remarried) and family started a new life in Hinckley using the tailoring skills which he possessed from his Oxford days, and far away from those who knew of his 1884 Oxford court case as reported in Jackson's Oxford Journal (the predecessor of The Oxford Mail).
(Continued 12.1.18): What else? Well, I believe the Walton Street chapel was the ‘centre of gravity’ of the spiritual and ethical life of the family of Alfred George Archer and his wife Olive Emma Archer (born Reed), and their eleven (was it eleven? I need to check) children, including the sixth child, William George Reed Archer (WGRA), my paternal grandfather, the only child given the Reed surname as a christian name. And likewise, I believe that the chapel figured just as importantly for quite some years in the life of WGRA and his wife Elizabeth Emma Archer (neé Gilder), not least because all their children were, I believe, baptised there, including my father, Frederick George Blake Archer (FGBA). And it gives me some pleasure to record here how much I now (at the age of 76) admire those qualities of FGBA that he perhaps inherited or derived from the traditions of Methodism that his father WGRA and his grandfather AGA had given him as role models. Difficult to summarise in a few words without long forethought, but steadfastness and cheerfulness and straightforwardness come to mind. Likewise reliability and integrity. Quietly going about life’s business with faithfulness seems to be the hallmark of Dad’s image when I look back. So good to record that. Dear Dad. Life did not treat him kindly in his latter days. How I wish I had made an opportunity to say these things to him when I could in 1990/1991. Well, well. So easy to regret things left undone. Perhaps he knew that I thought a lot of him. I hope so.