The Port of London Society for Promoting Religion Among Seamen (1818)

The ‘Society for Promoting the Religious Instruction of British Seamen’, or the ‘Port of London Society for Promoting Religion Among Seamen’, better known as the Port of London Society, is the only one of the precursor organisations for the British and Foreign Sailor's Society for which a contemporary minute book has survived.Footnote ¹⁸ In support of its claim to be the longest-established Christian maritime charity in the world, the Sailor Society dates its foundation to a meeting called by ‘Boatswain’ Smith at the City of London Tavern, Bishopsgate.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Smith was successful in associating himself with a host of maritime charities and publications, in fact he had relatively little to do with the foundation of the Port of London Society, and even less with the successful campaign to purchase and outfit its signature achievement, the PLS floating chapel. Yet the claim that Smith was not only the founder of the PLS but also of the chapel (or ‘The Ark‘ as Smith preferred to call it) is strongly asserted by Kverndal in his monolithic history of the movement,Footnote ²⁰ and the same author's entry in the ODNB and in other works of reference.Footnote ²¹ On Smith's role, Kverndal is followed uncritically by Miller, the only other historian to attempt a survey history of the marine mission movement.Footnote ²² Neither assertion is correct, so who did initiate the PLS and the first floating chapel?

As reported in the Evangelical Magazine, ‘a very respectable number of gentlemen and ladies’ met at the City of London Tavern on Thursday 5 February 1818, ‘to consider the best means for affording religious instruction to British Seamen while in the port of London’.Footnote ²³ The chair was taken by Robert Humphrey Marten (1763–1839), an active Nonconformist businessman, friend of William Wilberforce, advocate for the repeal of the Test Acts, supporter of the Royal Humane Society and director of several marine enterprises including the Thames Tunnel and the East London Water Company. A provisional committee was established, made up of nine clergy, and seven laity – and Smith was not one of them, though, on his own account, he was in regular communication with Marten.Footnote ²⁴ It was Marten whose role was critical, and he is likely to have been responsible for the non-denominational approach which brought together Anglican Evangelicals and dissenters from the city, navy and merchant marine to support the venture.

The main purpose of the PLS was to acquire a ship, ‘fitted as a Place of Worship’, that might be moored ‘in the most eligible part of the Port of London, that this would be the best measure for conveying to the Seamen the Knowledge of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ’.Footnote ²⁵ The first public meeting was held on 18 March 1818, at the City of London Tavern, Bishopsgate Street, ‘when all persons desirous of promoting this important object, by providing for Seamen, while in the Port of London, a Floating Chapel, are respectfully invited to attend’. The chair was taken by Benjamin Shaw (c. 1770–1843), MP for Westbury from 1812 to 1818, and a leading merchant with interests in shipping, insurance and education. The firm of Jordaine and Shaw had premises near London Bridge at 323 Bridge-foot, Borough,Footnote ²⁶ not far from the Wapping Steps where the floating chapel was eventually moored. Shaw's interests are reflected in his voting in the House of Commons, where he pragmatically opposed reform to the child labour laws, or improvements to London prisons, although he supported missions to India and was on the organising committee for the new University College London.Footnote ²⁷ By September 1818 the floating chapel was a reality, moored near to the entrance of the London Docks and with space for seven hundred listeners.Footnote ²⁸ In September 1819 a colourful print was issued which displayed the new venture in flattering colours, with the Bethel flag flying at the mainmast, the red ensign (for a British merchant vessel) at the stern and the blue union flag at the stern (see Figure 1). One purpose of the print was to encourage attendance at services, which were carefully listed, along with instructions on how to recognise the Bethel flag as signal that services were about to begin. Another was publicity for the cause, and a reward for its leading donors. In November 1819 the PLS committee resolved to send an engraving of the Chapel for Seamen ‘to each Public Company from which a donation of 20 Guineas, or upwards, has been received’.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 1.

‘The PLS chapel for seamen, instituted 18 March 1818’: Print by John Gendall and Daniel Havell, 1 September 1819: Royal Museums Greenwich, ID PAH8470. © Copyright National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; photo: National Maritime Museum

Like the movement for sailors' homes, which advanced to some extent separately from that for missions to seamen afloat,Footnote ³⁰ wealthy marine businesses were key supporters of the PLS floating chapel, but not all were well to do, at least initially. Of trustees listed in 1819, assuming most can be identified from their names and addresses in the London Post Office directory, only Benjamin Shaw, Robert H. Marten and Benjamin Tanner, a merchant and ship agent, were men of any substance.

In terms of its overall religious ethos, the PLS was firmly non-denominational in orientation. This can reasonably be inferred from the clerical membership of the PLS committee,Footnote ³¹ as well as the names of those invited to deliver sermons at the opening of the floating chapel, and as movers and seconders at anniversary meetings. Their number included Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists and a small number of Evangelical Anglicans. Many were already mobilised through the dense network of dissenting missionary, publication and education societies for other non-denominational projects. Of those who delivered sermons on the opening of the floating chapel, Rowland Hill was chairman of the Religious Tract Society, and supported other ‘British and Foreign’ schemes such as the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804), and the London Missionary Society (founded in 1795). The Revd Thomas Roberts (1780–1841), pastor of the Baptist Church in King Street, Bristol, was active in the anti-slavery movement.Footnote ³² In line with its non-denominational committee and approach, the PLS was supported by cognate societies, including the British and Foreign School Society which provided free books, slates and material for Sunday Schools.Footnote ³³ There was also a close association with the Merchant Seaman's Bible Society, founded as an auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society just a few months before the PLS, in January 1818. Its agents boarded vessels, distributed Bibles and promoted the religious literacy of merchant seamen in the Port of London and beyond.Footnote ³⁴

While sailors were willing to attend services in some number, it was more challenging to secure competent preachers. A subcommittee set up to see to the issue of supply reported to the general committee on 9 February 1819 that there was concern at the ‘youth of many of the Preachers’, and that this was the result of application to the tutors of the academies, who had been requested to send ‘their ablest pupils’, but it might be expected that these would be in short supply given the lack of payment.Footnote ³⁵ It was also regretted that the clerical members of the general committee were not putting themselves forward for this duty, with the reasonable defence that they had other engagements on Sundays.Footnote ³⁶ From the beginning of 1819, the PLS began to advertise for visiting ministers who might be able to preach on the floating chapel.Footnote ³⁷

And what of Smith? Following the Kings Head Tavern meeting in February 1818, the PLS minute book notes that ‘the Revd G. C. Smith of Penzance was added to the provisional committee’. Throughout July, the committee continued to suggest suitable members for the committee, as well as raising funds through the sale of sermons. On 26 July, with funds being £1,600 short of the target, further invitations were issued, with tracts to distribute among sailors. On 14 August ‘Mr Smith of Penzance agreed to preach on behalf of the Society on board the Floating Chapel’. In September, it was resolved that the treasurer ‘be requested to address a Letter to Mr Smith to request his affectionate recommendation of the objects of this Society in his Travels thru’ the Country, wherever Providence may give him opportunity’.Footnote ³⁸ At this point it would seem that Smith was on good terms with the PLS committee and was busy claiming to be responsible for the floating chapel, which he grandly re-named ‘The Ark’. In August or September 1818 Smith published his own account of the floating chapel, highlighting his own role in its formation, for tuppence.Footnote ³⁹ A year later, it was all over. Following a dispute over payment for preaching, Smith refused to have anything more to do with the PLS or the floating chapel. In a letter sent to the committee on 22 August 1819, Smith announced that ‘until your funds enable you to act with common Christian justice towards me, I shall respectfully decline any further engagements on board the Floating Chapel’.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to the PLS, Smith's motivation was personal ambition, ‘that he hoped to form an institution which would invest him with importance, and place the means of remuneration within his own power’.Footnote ⁴¹ It was also sectarian.

Bethel Union (1819)

After falling out with the PLS, Smith created what was effectively a rival dissenting, as opposed to non-denominational, society, building on the good will created by the distribution of the Bethel flag and shipboard preaching. In contrast to the PLS, this would be firmly Protestant, or ‘independent’, with priority given to the dramatic preaching which was Smith's strongest point, and an energetic commitment to an expansion of the Bethel movement beyond London to other British and international ports. Smith published an account of a ‘preliminary meeting’ on 22 October 1819, with a ‘pious sailor’ leading the prayers and the first hymns, and Smith himself in the chair.Footnote ⁴² Speakers included men of modest rank and status, and Thomas Thompson (1785–1865), a secretary of the PLS who claimed to welcome ‘this fresh proof of religious zeal for our neglected Seamen’ while Smith allegedly declared himself ‘deeply impressed with this extraordinary unanimity’.Footnote ⁴³ Clearly this was rather less than the truth. Neither should particular confidence be felt in Smith's repeated assurance that, at sea, there were no sectarian divisions. Having again announced the importance of Sailor's Magazine, he confirmed that ‘[T]his Society had only in view the promotion of Loyalty, Morality, and Religion and SEAMEN. It had nothing whatever to do with religious denominations. Sailors were left fully at liberty to follow on shore the Church, or the Meeting, as seemed most agreeable to themselves.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The preliminary meeting was independently reported by the British Neptune,Footnote ⁴⁵ which gave due prominence to Smith as initiator and chairman. The meeting was held in the Lancasterian School Rooms, White Grounds, Horsely-down, which were adorned for the occasion with a spectacular display of flags. In central place was a white (or St George's) ensign from a three-decker, with two Bethel Union flags from another line of battle ships. Facing the entrance were three large flags from merchant ships on the Thames, with the word ‘Bethel’, in large letters together with a star rising in the East, and a dove bearing an olive branch. With rather less than perfect union, on 9 November 1819, the PLS Committee voted to publish a warning to the public that ‘the meeting called for next Thursday to form the Bethel Seamen's Union does not emanate from them’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The alarm call was only slightly modified by the reassurance that ‘every effort by other Friends to the welfare of seamen will afford them the highest satisfaction’.

The pious sailor and the Bethel Union

Smith's new society was different in character from that created by Marten and his non-denominational alliance, both Anglican and dissenting. Led by Smith's preaching, it depended much more on the common sailor for its justifying ethos and rhetoric, and while exuberantly patriotic it had fewer ties to the commercial and naval establishment. A fuller report of both the public meeting on 2 October 1819 at Horsely-down, and the general meeting on 12 November 1819 at the City of London, was included in the Baptist Magazine and the Evangelical Magazine.Footnote ⁴⁷ This provides an illuminating incident which reflects on Smith's capacity to inspire loyalty among his followers. At the close of the meeting Smith referred to the ‘humanity and heroism’ of the crew of the Robert and Margaret, calling on one of the crew present to stand up: ‘the cheerings of a most numerous and respectable meeting was astounding and protracted’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The fame of this crew derived from their heroic efforts to rescue the stranded crew of the Cato and another Prussian ship during a terrifying storm in the port of Memel in September 1817. The tract reporting on their heroism concluded: ‘The ships company were treated on shore with the highest respect, and the credit, humanity, and honour of Great Britain, and the glory of Christianity.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Smith's calling out to the crewmen of the Robert and Margaret alerts us that the pious penny literature celebrated at least some real people, who benefitted from the public display of their heroism and piety. The tract reporting their Christian heroism was printed by J. E. Evans, printer to the Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts, and sold for a penny.

Historians have been divided over the intent and impact of the Repository Tracts. While most were deeply conservative and have been interpreted as counter-revolutionary propaganda in defiance of the secular revolutionary allure of Thomas Paine, they met a huge popular demand.Footnote ⁵⁰ Anne Stott suggests that their popularity and impact on the poor reflected the mobilisation of middle-class women and clergy in the movement for the reformation of manners.Footnote ⁵¹ Tracts of this kind called on captains of the merchant marine to join the new moral class. It celebrated ‘Captain D’, who required all his crew to observe a set of regulations, ‘as a means for the promotion of piety, and the glory of God’. Before their rescue attempt, the pious crew knelt down and prayed before launching the life boat. This leads to the aside: ‘Too long has a general but mistaken notion prevailed, that the most profligate sailors are the fittest for any desperate enterprise … the simple story now present to the reader, effectually shows that the influence of divine grace does not weaken the natural courage of a British sailor.’Footnote ⁵² For Smith, the Bethel Union, along with his own cheaply printed pamphlets and sermons, was the means to demonstrate that piety and bravery were not incompatible virtues.

Like other missionary fundraisers, Smith was aware of the need to provide evidence of conversion though his preaching, and his pamphlets include quotations from sailors in attendance at ship-board prayer meetings. He was much impressed, he states, with these aspirations:

Such quotations may not have been intended to be taken as verbatim transcripts, but rather aspirational prayers of an ideal pious sailor, rewritten in language likely to appeal to dissenting readers and, possibly, other sailors who might be inspired to attend shipboard meetings. In this particular context, they established the credentials of the merchant seamen as the ‘deserving poor’, worthy of charitable support against those who were disinclined or unable to work. In this way, sailors might be differentiated from the cruelties inherent in the operations of the new Poor Law, introduced in 1834, and were spared the indignity of the parish workhouse.

With such distinctly different approaches, the struggle between Smith and the PLS for control of the floating chapel and the Bethel movement to seamen soon became bitter. Smith continued to preach to well-attended maritime congregations in London, while launching the first of many fund-raising publications aimed at publicising the cause of the sailor and celebrating his own role in their immediate salvation. Meanwhile, the PLS was becoming increasingly exasperated, though lacking Smith's flair for publicity, need for cash and immediate access to print. Smith made an attack on the numbers attending and funds raised in the floating chapel the main theme of a pamphlet released in 1827.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1827 and 1828 Smith published incendiary pamphlets addressed to all associated with the PLS.Footnote ⁵⁵ Finally, in 1829, the Committee published a 144-page riposte to Smith.Footnote ⁵⁶ This pointed out that Smith had not initiated the floating chapel, that his formal association with the PLS had ceased in August 1819Footnote ⁵⁷ and that there was no merit in his relentless attacks on the PLS through his magazine ventures.

In their turn, the Bethel Union was soon convinced of the need to distance itself from Smith and combine forces with the PLS. In 1826, the Bethel Union merged with the PLS following Smith's unilateral, and deeply unwise, decision to take over the mortgage of the Danish Church in Wellclose Square, which he renamed the Mariners’ Church. At the same time, Smith launched a rival New Sailor's Magazine (1827),Footnote ⁵⁸ which served as a vehicle for attacks on his various enemies. Besides R. H. Marten and the secretaries of the PLS and Bethel Union, these now included the Royal Navy, which had intervened to control the distribution of his tracts,Footnote ⁵⁹ and those who accused him of abuse in relation to the group of orphan children, dressed as sailors and soldiers, whom he used to sing hymns as part of his relentless collection campaigns, even taking them into prisons where their presence brought a reproval from the prison inspectors.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1831 questions were raised about his use of young women to collect subscriptions for his innumerable, short-lived charities.Footnote ⁶¹ As late as 1848, a correspondent to the Pilot decried collections for ‘counterfeit seamen's societies’, traced to the ‘benevolent (?) spasms of the notorious G. C. Smith’.Footnote ⁶²

It is reasonable to ask why Smith was able to continue his activities for so long. True, it was not until the Charitable Trusts Acts (1853–91) that parliament intervened in what had previously been an invitation to pious fraud on the public. Smith was simply more convincing and enterprising than most of those who preyed on the gullible with formulaic tales of shipwreck, marine virtue and briny misfortune. Mayhew listed fraudsters claiming to be navy and military men down on their luck, or shipwrecked sailors, in his catalogue of ‘disaster beggars’. Footnote ⁶³ Yet, even in the 1830s, Smith was regarded as beyond the pale. By 1832 he had faced a series of scandals, the earliest relating to the disappearance of funds supposedly raised in aid of famine victims in the Isles of Scilly.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1834 a Dublin paper referred to Smith as a ‘fanatic known in London as Boatswain Smith’,Footnote ⁶⁵ whose efforts at preaching inspired more laughter than attention to the sailor's cause. Charges of financial impropriety were published by whistleblowers who included former employees such as Joseph Mead, the secretary fired by Smith from the Bethel Union, who accused Smith of fraud and incompetence,Footnote ⁶⁶ or the secretary of Smith's orphan asylum who raised similar claims ten years later.Footnote ⁶⁷ Other accusations were raised by committee members, such as ‘Philo-Veritas’ who claimed Smith was appropriating funds raised on preaching tours, and similar issues leading up to the collapse of the Mariners’ Church.Footnote ⁶⁸ The regional press minced few words, calling him a crimp and a ‘canting imposter’ who had ‘converted his den in Wellclose Square into a receptacle for kidnapped children’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1845, while imprisoned for debt in the Queen's Bench Prison, his ‘noisy and fanatical singing’ was said to have hastened the death of a fellow prisoner, earning a reproof from the judge for his ‘unchristian and hypocritical conduct’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Two years later, having seen the Mariner's Church taken over by the resurgent BFSS, Smith returned to Cornwall where he engaged in a battle to eject the incumbent and return to his previous ministry in Penzance.

Despite these and other personal disasters, Smith's overwhelming personality and bombast have continued to inspire admiration and apologies by biographers and historians. Like other populists, he was able to escape scandals only to reappear, apparently undiminished, before embarking on some new project and acquiring new admirers willing to set aside his every foible. Among modern historians, Kverndal accepts Smith's self-serving and self-authored defence of his improprieties, calling the Philo-Veritas controversy a ‘poison-pen campaign’ and the ‘Voice’ controversy a ‘campaign of calumny’ and representing Smith alone as the friend of the sailor.Footnote ⁷¹ Richard Blake is willing to forgive Smith's appellation of himself as ‘Burning Bush Unconsumed’ as endearing rather than alarming.Footnote ⁷² In his review of Smith's scandals, Dray dismisses the evidence of serial impropriety as ‘unsavoury suspicions’, and all negative reckoning as the ‘effective dissemination of falsehoods relating to Smith, and their continuing impact nearly 100 years after his death’.Footnote ⁷³ Rather more balanced views of Smith were made by his contemporaries, including those who liked and admired him for his kindness, passion and commitment to the cause of the sailor. One of his most stalwart supporters was Thomas Thompson (1785–1865), founder and treasurer of the Congregationalist Home Missionary Society, who was also a major donor to the PLS floating chapel. Despite reservations, Thompson also supported the rival Bethel Seaman's Union, but even he could not agree with Smith's fratricidal conflict with all he encountered. Thompson's memoir, written by his daughter, muses: ‘Had George Charles Smith been the possessor of as much judgement, self-control, and humility, as of enterprise, zeal, and talent, he might have been to sailors as great a benefactor as Wesley and Whitfield were to the population inland.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Making every allowance, Smith's character flaws ensured that he was considerably less significant than his supporters wished for him to be.

So why did Smith attack the PLS and claim that the floating chapel was his alone – clearly the thought of many minds? A primary motive was religious commitment, and the unswerving belief in his own power to advance the cause of the poor sailor. Victorians were captivated by hero philanthropists among whose ranks Smith and his admirers aspired to shine. As one starry-eyed supporter suggested in 1833, when seeking to defend Smith, ‘the records of history which shall tell of a Howard for prisoners, a Wilberforce and Clarkson for slaves, Reynolds and Thornton for benevolence, Whitfield and Wesley as apostles of the eighteenth century, shall also tell of George Charles Smith as the unwearied, disinterested, faithful labourer for the seamen of the world’.Footnote ⁷⁵ While fame of this order was a powerful intoxicant, it is at least possible that Smith was also motivated to secure donations to his own preaching ministry, albeit for a worthy cause. He had identified a gap in the charitable landscape but needed to secure a continuous supply of new donations and projects to avoid being imprisoned for debt – which happened to him on four occasions when one or other of his ventures failed. In 1835 Smith published his own account of his arrest, ‘while in the act of public worship in the open air, near the Prince's Dock’, as a racy addition to the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Magazine.Footnote ⁷⁶ Secondly, Smith was a gifted preacher who was aware that his presence was sufficient to draw a substantial congregation and felt that he had little need to pander to the dissenting chapels and communities who were competing for the same newly enthusiastic Christian adherents. Thirdly, Smith was aware of the need and demand for similar work at other ports around the British Isles. He had the energy and the network to inspire similar floating chapel and marine mission ventures, united under the Bethel flag, in Hull, Bristol and other ports. He was convinced that the PLS needed him more than he needed them.

In this he was probably wrong. Throughout the Georgian and Victorian eras patronage, preferably at the very highest level, was essential to build successful national institutions. While Smith lurched from crisis to crisis, and his maritime ventures rose and fell, the PLS was solidifying its subscription base. It survived calamities including the accidental death, by drowning, of a youth who was attending a service at the floating chapel on 14 December 1820.Footnote ⁷⁷ At the second anniversary of the PLS, held on 8 May 1820 at the City of London Tavern,Footnote ⁷⁸ the chair was taken by Admiral of the Fleet Lord James Gambier (1756–1833), with Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg (1790–1865), later Leopold i of Belgium (r. 1831–65) in attendance. A year later, at the third anniversary meeting held on 7 May 1821, Gambier was again in the chair and Prince Leopold's name headed the impressive list of donors which ran to twenty tightly-printed pages.Footnote ⁷⁹ Among the donors were many of London's maritime mercantile elite including the Bank of England, partners in Lloyds and other shipping and insurance firms, the ‘worshipful companies’ of Cooks, Drapers and Ironmongers, the East India Company, West India Dock company and more than fifty other commercial firms. Besides chairing meetings, and being named on motions, the leading Evangelical Anglicans all donated, including William Wilberforce, Babbington and Zachary Macaulay, James Stephen and Hannah More. Five Royal Navy admirals contributed, as well as more than ten captains, both Royal Navy and merchant marine, with many providing contributions on behalf of their ship's company. Led again by Wilberforce, there were ten members of parliament on the list of donors, including J. C. Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, along with four aldermen. Among the clergy, Congregationalist ministers dominate but donations also came from established churchmen in port cities. Significant numbers of women also contributed, including a number who made small collections from their school or church. An anonymous woman ‘signs herself grateful for the invaluable privilege of being the daughter of a pious Seaman, and collected by her at sundry times for the Society’. Three ‘Misses Hill’ contributed almost eighteen pounds from the Penny a Week Society. For a new venture, this was a gratifying level of support.

Further evidence of the strength and depth of support for the Port of London Society and its non-denominational successors, leading to the formation of the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society in 1833, comes from the record of receipts (see Appendix 1). These were printed regularly in the Missionary Register, and while not perfect, they are the best means of comparing the overall financial health of religious charities and missions. These show that the non-denominational societies, led by the PLS, maintained consistent and viable levels of financial support (see Appendix, table 1), while the dissenting societies, particularly those most impacted by the Smith schism, floundered in debt (see Appendix, table 2). It is also salutary to note that the new missions to seamen were invariably outperformed in terms of donations by the two seamen's Bible societies, both the Naval and Military Bible Society (1780), and the Merchant Seamen's Bible Society (1818), as well as by the practical charities, such as the floating hospital at Greenwich (see Appendix, table 3).

In relation to Smith's personal drawing power, the evidence suggests that he was less effective than he imagined, at least in terms of receipts. The PLS published the amounts collected on board the floating chapel following all sermons. In its report for 1821, the highest sum was that following the sermon by the Revd Rowland Hill on the morning of the day of opening, namely £51. Smith preached very regularly on board the chapel throughout August, September and November. While his first collections on 16 and 23 August came to £41, subsequent sermons brought in diminishing returns and by 17 November amounted to £9, one of the smallest collections for any preacher. It is possible that Smith's association with the Bethel Union, and sales of the Sailor's Magazine diluted the flow of funds to the PLS. With the latter securing both actual royalty as patrons, along with the endorsement of the leading Anglican Evangelicals, including Wilberforce, it made little sense for a rival dissenting movement to detract from what needed to be a united effort.

British and Foreign Sailors’ Society (1833)

The need to create a new space for the marine mission movement in London, leaving behind Smith and the many disputes he had created, was generally recognised. However, it may have been the death of Gambier on 19 April 1833 that made it possible to create a new society, which excluded Smith. Within weeks of the death of Smith's most important patron, the Missionary Register reported on the formation of the ‘Sailors’ Society’ at a meeting held in London Tavern on 6 May, with the Lord Mayor, Charles Farebrother (1782–1858), in the chair. Leadership for the initiative was credited to the Revd Dr Francis Augustus Cox (1783–1853), a learned Baptist closely connected with the Clapham sect of reformers, co-founder of University College London and Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society.Footnote ⁸⁰ In 1833 The Missionary Register published a short report, possibly written by Cox, entitled, ‘Urgent Motives for Combined Efforts in behalf of the Spiritual Welfare of Sailors’.Footnote ⁸¹ This recommended the creation of two societies, one for dissenters and another for the established Church, which all existing societies should join. This was to prove prophetic, with the dissenters uniting behind the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society in 1833, and, some decades later, the Missions to Seafarers uniting efforts by the established Church in 1856.

For Smith, who is not mentioned in the report, this must have felt like a bitter, if not unexpected, blow. By demanding separation rather than cooperation, he was placing himself beyond the acceptable fringe of his own denomination. Unlike Smith, mainstream Baptists regarded their contribution to the non-denominational movement with pride and resented their undeserved reputation as ‘sectarian’ and unwilling to cooperate with other Protestants. In a letter to the Baptist Magazine dated 7 October 1822, Joseph Ivimey mounted a spirited defence of Baptists against their undeserved reputation as ‘the most sectarian of sects, the most intrenched, and fortified in the narrow circle of its communion’.Footnote ⁸² He lauded the importance of Baptists in the formation of the Sunday School Society, the Religious Tract Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society and the ‘Societies for the Conversion of Sailors’.Footnote ⁸³ All this was put in jeopardy by Smith's unilateralism and lack of financial probity. The Congregationalists, who now dominated the PLS and Bethel Union, were quick to embrace the new, national, society. Within six months, the PLSBU merged with the Sailors’ Society to form the British and Foreign Sailor Society, which has been active ever since.

The leaders of the new Society included the leading lights among dissenting ministers, business leaders and intellectuals. The motion to unite the Sailors' Society and PLSBU was moved by Cox, but the society was very much a continuation of the PLSBU. The seconder was R. H. Marten, the most diligent and persevering patron of religious missions to seamen, founder and benefactor of the PLS in 1818 and the floating chapel that had been its signature achievement. Subsequent motions were led by Revd John Clayton (1780–1865), pastor of the Poultry Chapel, and Revd John Styles (1782–1849), Smith's chief adversary and successor as editor of the Sailors’ Magazine. While all the above were Independents, the secretaries were both Baptist ministers: the Revd Francis Augustus Cox (1783–1853), and the Revd Thomas Timpson (1790–1860), while John Pirie (1781–1851), a shipbroker who went on to become Lord Mayor of London, was treasurer. The City was still closely involved, but only two MPs, G. R. Robinson and Alderman W. Thompson served on the Board of Directors, and the navy was considerably reduced, with just three Royal Navy officers: Allen, Dougall and Norris, and two merchant navy officers: Captains T. Brown and Prynn. It was soon able to advertise a remarkable range of activities using the usual rallying calls of the moral condition of the merchant seamen, their vulnerability to predation by crimps, pimps and alcohol and the obligation of a nation who relied on their service for Britain's commerce and international trade.Footnote ⁸⁴

Smith continued to make claims for precedence, but these were increasingly out of touch with reality. In January 1845 he wrote a public letter to Captain R. J. Elliott claiming for himself the role of ‘founder’ of the London Seamen's Home, relegating Elliott to ‘rearer and finisher’ of the grand buildings erected under Elliott's leadership.Footnote ⁸⁵ God was the ultimate cause, Smith suggested, but ‘under my sole and special direction on the ruins [of the Brunswick Theatre], I could not have gained that powerful and overwhelming and influence’ that enabled the erection of the Sailors' Home on the site. Smith based this claim on his own self-aggrandising account of his role in rescue operations at the time of the disastrous collapse of the theatre.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet Smith's role was so disruptive and Elliott's so critical to the success of the London Sailors' Home (founded 1828) that Mayhew noted in April 1850 that Elliott's bust was ‘now an ornament’ of the institution.Footnote ⁸⁷ As Kennerley demonstrates, it was also firmly episcopal rather than dissenting in outlook and personnel.Footnote ⁸⁸ As the funds and the fame went to others, Smith tenaciously recorded every fleeting visit, conversation and encounter to advance his claim to founding status for almost every charitable work in aid of the sailor's cause across the nation. On his release from prison in 1845, Smith filled his Mariners' Church and Sailors' Magazine with demands for recognition and diatribes against those he called ‘persecuting Dissenting Ministers’.Footnote ⁸⁹ He made plans for ever more societies, pleading ‘as a dying man, fast approaching eternity, and anxious to do what I can for posterity’, for support to found a ‘Navy and Army Missionary Society’, and a completely new ‘Sailors and Steamers’ Missionary Society’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It makes rather sad reading. In such dubious ways, Smith continued to inspire support, even while infuriating both detractors and supporters.

The extreme complexity of the origins of the BFSS, with its numerous competing organisations, acronyms and publications, traced by Kverndal and Miller, disguises the growing strength of the movement and its non-denominational foundations. Miller suggests that this was the result of religious conviction, ‘a style for the sea apostolate in which the Church went to the seafarer’.Footnote ⁹¹ Both Miller and Kverndal are also at pains to stress the original contribution of Smith who, according to Miller, ‘virtually alone, had woken the denominations, even the Church of England, from somnolence’.Footnote ⁹² This essentially repeats the myths created by Smith. A more convincing reason for the prominence of Smith in marine mission literature is the need of Victorian charities for founders and heroes for their fundraising publicity, without which they could not exist. While the foundation of the BFSS in 1833 was an attempt to repair the breach in reputation, the damage had been done. It is possible that the failure of religious humanitarian approaches to the welfare of the merchant marine accelerated the creation of secular alternatives, such as the Society for Improving the Condition of Merchant Seamen (1867).Footnote ⁹³

As suggested by close scrutiny of its founders, committee members and donors, the PLS and its successor the BFSS reflected the religious and commercial interests of marine capitalists in the moral direction of marine labour. From the 1820s, there was a huge growth in the scale of shipping entering and leaving British ports. This was accompanied by a turn to regulation, partly to improve the security of commercial ventures. Kelly suggests that between the 1780s and 1820s, there was a ‘safety revolution’, which saw the loss of life and shipping halved and a reduction in insurance claims.Footnote ⁹⁴ While improvements in technology and the practice of marine insurance were significant drivers of change, there was also concern to improve the training and moral quality of the merchant marine. These changes were essential if only to limit the alarming level of marine mortality, including commercial and human losses.

This article has attempted to frame the reputation of G. C. Smith in a more critical light and to question why he acquired such a strong reputation as the founder of the marine mission movement. Three major factors were involved. Initially, Smith had stalwart friends, especially among poor sailors and soldiers and those who had benefitted directly from his ministry. After the ignominious closure of the Mariner's Church, Smith's legacy was preserved by the re-birth of the Seamen's Christian Friend Society under the leadership of George Teil Hill (1818–67), who had been Smith's loyal deputy. The society managed to distance itself from Smith by dating its foundation to 1845, the year of Smith's departure from London, but remained closely connected to the work of Smith's Mariner's Church, British and Foreign Seamen's Friend Society and Bethel Union. Secondly, Smith was warmly remembered for his patronage of the many independent Bethel Unions that he had helped to establish in British, American and other international ports, visits which were effectively promoted by Smith in his own publications but also through local media. Many could trace their origins to personal visitation by Smith, and benefitted from his preaching at their early meetings. Thirdly, Smith's reputation was resuscitated in his old age, with numerous warm and appreciative accounts of his life, led in particular by Thomas Thompson, founder and treasurer of the Congregationalist Home Missionary Society. In 1858 Thompson contributed a letter of appreciation to an appeal for pecuniary assistance for Smith, who had fallen into poverty. The Christian World referred to Smith as ‘once the most popular preacher in the kingdom, and founder of the Sailors’ Home, Mariners’ Church, Home Missionary and Christian Instruction Society’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The obituaries, when they appeared following Smith's death, in his sleep, at the age of eighty-one, were equally generous and forgiving.Footnote ⁹⁶ They reflect the trend for mid-Victorian religious historiography and biography which praised piety and action, with particular appreciation for those whose actions had benefitted the global Christian community.Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1863, a call was made for funds to build a monument for Smith's remains. Reflecting similar ovations which sought to place Smith in the pantheon of religious humanitarians, Robert V. Orr declared, ‘As Clarkson and Wilberforce were for slavery, Howard for prisons, so will “Boatswain” Smith be remembered as the seamen's apostle.’ Footnote ⁹⁸ A supporter referred to him as ‘a great man, and the possessor of a great heart’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The sheer number of activities in which Smith was engaged also helped to enhance his legacy and allowed him to be named as founder by charities across the spectrum of his interests.

In contrast to this founding myth, it has been argued that missions to seamen, chaotic, sporadic and poorly funded as they were, were part of a commercially driven process, which sought to lift the quality of labour in an expanding, and increasingly dominant and profitable industry. The search for appropriate founder figures was necessary for the first effective national society because their financial model relied on the voluntary contributions of their denominational subscribers. The extreme fissiparity of the non-denominational and dissenting societies, with their constant changes of name, reflects the need to cater carefully to particular interest groups. Rather similar problems were to affect the episcopal societies, though most eventually allowed themselves to align with the Missions to Seamen. Smith's tragedy was that he was unable to accept leadership except under his command and lacked the financial probity needed to ensure the survival of a public-facing charity in the more exacting conditions of postwar Britain.

While Smith's reputation has to date proved impossible to puncture, there are reasons to question the enthusiastic endorsement of his personal qualities by historians of the marine mission movement. By seeking the context for the establishment of the British and Foreign Sailor Society in 1833 from the non-denominational Port of London Society (1818), and the dissenting Bethel Union (1819), this article had sought to link these charitable innovations to the explosive growth of marine commerce in the same period, and the rise of a new public class of highly motivated dissenting and Evangelical Anglican elites.

Rather than the triumph of a single individual, the contemporary minute books, newspaper reports and published accounts of meetings suggest that the success of the movement was driven by the same liberal, metropolitan class who embraced other ‘British and Foreign’ or ‘non-denominational’ causes. This included major shipping agents, bankers and city men such as Robert Humphrey Marten, Ben Shaw, John Pirie and George Fife Angas, along with many of the leading dissenting ministers. As the established Church subsequently moved to create its own, independent missions for seamen, the struggle for control of the marine mission movement in the 1820s and 1830s reflects the collapse of the non-denominational consensus that underpinned the Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society and, initially at least, the London Missionary Society. While it is convenient to honour Smith as the patron of the marine mission movement, his main contribution was to hasten its fragmentation into diverse denominational branches. For the established Church, the movement was strongly supported by a cadre of Evangelical naval officers, buttressed by the bishops, both at home and in the colonies. The huge growth of activity, much of it not aligned with the two largest national societies, can therefore be seen as a reflection of the wealth and diversity of British imperial power and industry.