Fordington

The Rev Henry Moule (pronounced Mole) became Vicar of Fordington when he took over from the Rev John Palmer who had held the position for 30 years and died there aged 80 on the 11th May 1829. Henry was himself to remain Vicar for fifty one years until his death in 1880.

The early years (1801-1828)

Henry was born in Melksham Wiltshire on 27th January 1801 the sixth son of twelve children of George Moule and his wife Sarah Hayward. His immediate forefathers were in law or business in London but French in origin. His father, a solicitor and banker, had him educated at Marlborough grammar school, and in 1817 he went onto St John’s College at Cambridge; obtaining a BA degree in 1821. The next few years were spent travelling in France and Switzerland as a tutor with the family of Admiral Sir W Hotham. From University he set out to make a career in the church, was ordained deacon at Salisbury in 1824, and then placed in the curacy of his home town of Melksham.

Marriage

It was in Melksham that he married on 1st July 1824 to Mary Mullett Evans, the second daughter of Joseph Jefferies Evans, a citizen and merchant of London, and his wife Mary Ann Mullett. Henry’s wife had been born on 17th September 1801 into a large pleasant house over her fathers offices in Staining Lane, close to St Paul’s. The Evan’s family were of old Baptist stock from Brecon in Wales and Mary’s eldest brother a highly gifted individual, was articled to a London Solicitor along with one Benjamin D’Israeli. The young Disraeli travelled on the continent that year and carried to Heidelberg a letter announcing their marriage to some of Mary’s relatives.

On 15th June 1825 as a stipendiary Curate Henry was placed in sole charge of the church of St Mary the Virgin in the village of Gillingham in Dorset, and on 9th September that year advertised in the Times for four scholars that he could tutor in preparation for University. Sixteen days later their first child, Henry Joseph Moule was born, and Henry duly baptised him in the church on the 14th of October. 1826 was marked by a Masters degree from Cambridge and on 29th March 1828 Henry returned to Melksham as Officiating Minister to marry his sister Elizabeth Jane Moule to Colonel CS Fagan of the Bengal Army. Their tenancy in Gillingham however was completed by the baptism of their second child, George Evans Moule, on 14th April 1828.

Fordington

In 1829 Henry was still a young man of 28 when he arrived in Fordington with his wife and two children to become the vicar of St Georges Church. He tackled the job with enthusiasm, making himself unpopular with the parishioners by introducing a second fiery sermon in the Sunday service, and reforming the music until he drove the choir away. At his first baptism, (the son of a Cordwainer called Job Allen and his wife Mary), he complained there was no water in the font; the Parish Clerk said of the previous parson, 'He never used no water; he did spit in his hand.'  Many of his parishoners also disliked him being an enthusiastic evangelist and for a long time no one called at the Vicarage and worshipers were reviled at the churchyard gates as they passed through. We can gain an insight into his life at that time from the reminiscences of his youngest son, Handley who published them in 1914 in his book entitled. Memories of a Vicarage. He explained about his fathers arrival in the Parish:-

“Fordington had lately grown, all too hastily, through changes in ground tenure, from a mere village into a suburb of Dorchester. Its crowded lower levels harboured much vice and misery and a great deal of political disaffection too; for those were dark days in England with rick burnings, and still more formidable kinds of violence. --- Great contempt of religion was commom in Fordington”.

The events referred to here are the Swing Riots of 1830/31.  Discontent at wages which had been reduced to below subsistence level by greedy landowners, finally boiled over in 1830. Riots  which started in Kent, Surrey and Sussex  spread rapidly into Hampshire and Dorset where field labourers expressed their anger by burning hayricks and smashing new steam driven machines. In December 1830 at Dorchester 55 men appeared before a special court & six were initially sentenced to death. Letters written by Mary in 1831, from the Vicarage to her relatives, and passed to Handley after her death, give further insight; talking of rick burning she refers to:-

“the almost nightly alarms, the constant tidings of violence and disorder, and the energy and courage of Henry, who organised patrols and served on them, and meanwhile retained the good will of the poor”

In 1833 his protests to Lady Dorchester, a relative of William Pitts, put an end to the evils of the race meetings at Dorchester. The spectacle attracted large numbers of people to the area, many of a dubious moral character, and those left destitute often ended up in Fordington.

Handly however also says about that time:-
“But a group of  devoted Christians, resident in Dorchester, were already at work among the poor, and these admirable friends soon gathered round the new pastor and his wife and held up their hands. So work began. In a short time two school houses, the first ever built, were provided, and a large Sunday School organised” 

Barracks

Henry was also appointed by the War Office as Chaplin to the troops in Dorchester Barracks, which is where the current Dorset History Centre is now situated. In later years his son recalled:-

Every Sunday, with unfailing energy, he walked up to the town to the military service in the Riding School, read the prayers standing on the sanded floor, preached a short pointed sermon at the drum-head, took up the guinea which lay ready thereon, and then hastened back to his own morning service at St George’s. Many of these soldiers were to marry locally and raise families in Fordington.

Undeterred by disaffection, Henry ran the vicarage like a self-supporting commune, growing vegetables, running a hothouse and keeping cows. There was a personal tradegdy for him and his wife when in 1839 his 7th son Christopher Cooper Moule died of atrophy when he was still only 15 months old. Throughout he continued earning extra money by teaching, and in 1841 he was not only tutoring his own six surviving children, but also eight paying boarders in the vicarage and adjoining house, something which he continued to do until 1859.

Christchurch Church of West Fordington

Throughout he continued with his duties as Chaplin to the Soldiers and in 1845 he wrote a book called “Barrack Sermons”.  This sold so well he was able to use the royalties to build a church for the troops in West Fordington, which he named Christchurch.

Cholera Outbreaks

In 1849 and 1854 Fordington was badly affected by outbreaks of Cholera. Although at first he was heartily disliked for his puritanical zeal, when the deadly cholera came Moule worked tirelessly with the sick and the dying, boiling or burning contaminated clothes and bedclothes, spreading help and sympathy. Handly later recalled:-

 “ Far more vividly I remember the autumn of 1854, when the cholera was upon us, and in tremendous force. A number of convicts had been drafted from London to the then vacant cavalry barracks and laundresses in Fordington took in the washing. The clothes had the disease lurking in them, and the awful mischief burst forth in the densely peopled and undrained lanes of the town end of our village. My dear Father, with great courage and resource, “stood between the dead and the living”, and with the zealous help of the doctors (trained nurses hardly existed then) so dealt with the position that no case of infection occurred in the closely adjoining town.  But our churchyard was peopled with deadful rapidity; I remember six funerals in one day”. 

At this time he even gave up some of his church services and called people out into the fields for prayers, hymns, and preachings under the trees.  As a consequence of his endeavours Henry gradually won the respect of the whole community. He was convinced that the Cholera deaths were caused by appalling sanitation. Once, as he knelt by the bed of a dying man, the overflow from the one privy shared by 13 families trickled between him and the bed, and he saw the sewage bubbling up from the earth beneath the fireplace. What was needed was sanitary reform.

The long, hot summer of 1858 highlighted the problem with the existing system of cesspools. Cholera, which was now known to be spread by contaminated water, was a constant problem and London became completely overwhelmed by its sewage when the streams through the city and feeding the Thames could no loger cope with the volume of effluent being produced. Coupled with an unusually warm summer that year the problem produced such a foul smell throughout the city that chemical soaked sacks had to be hung at the windows of the House of Commons and that year is now known as “The Great Stink of London”.

In the summer of 1859 Henry decided his cess-pool was intolerable and a nuisance to his neighbour; so he filled it in and instructed his family to use buckets. At first he buried the sewage in trenches in the yard but discovered by accident that in 3 or 4 weeks no trace of the matter could be detected. So he erected a shed, sifted the dry earth beneath it, and mixed the contents of the bucket with dry earth every morning. “ the whole operation does not take a boy more than a quarter of an hour and within ten minutes after its completion neither the eye nor the nose can detect anything offensive”.

Then he discovered that he could recycle the earth and use the same batch several times and use the contents to beneficial effect in the garden. He persuaded a farmer to fertilise one half of a field with earth used five times in his closet and another with equal weight of superphosphate. Swedes were planted in both halves and those nurtured in earth manure grew one third bigger.

Dry Earth System Patent

Far more important Moule believed that if this system could be adopted widely it would go a long way towards preventing the spread of disease, thereby leading to a general improvement of everybody’s health. He produced a sort of commode with a bucket below the seat and a hopper behind it containing dry earth or ashes. When you had finished you pulled a lever to release a measured amount of earth into the bucket and cover its contents. On 28th May 1860 he took out a patent for the dry earth system and further patents in 1869 and 1873. He set up the Moule Patent Earth Closet Co. Ltd which manufactured and sold earth closets.

Moule spent the rest of his life advocating its adoption and he managed to convince a lot of people. In 1865 the Dorset County School in Dorchester with  83 boys adopted the system cutting the annual maintenance costs and eliminating smells and diarrhoea. The Indian Government in particular established the system in its hospitals, lunatic asylums and gaols and commissioned a report following trials in Bengal; the Punjab and North Western Provinces. They were so satisfied with the results that they awarded him a payment of £500, a considerable sum in those days. He took the step of publishing extracts from the report and letters to him from the Indian Government in the Times on 14th November 1867.

In 1868 the Lancet reported that 148 of his dry earth closets were used at the Army volunteer encampment at Wimbledon – forty or fifty of them used daily by not less than 2000 men, “without the slightest annoyance to sight or smell”.

Mary Moule

For many years Mary’s main role had been the rearing of her children, and overseeing of domestic arrangements for a household often exceeding 16, but by 1859 when they gave up paying pupils and Henry started filling in his cess pool, she was free to devote herself more to the service of the Parish. She had already been the devoted superintendent of the girls Sunday School and a friend of every teacher and pupil. Now she embarked upon an incessant domestic visitation programme during the course of which she came to know not only every house but well-nigh every room in the Parish. No weather, however wet , windy, or cold ever interfered with the literally daily round. One woman said to Handley of her “ Her feet brought light into the room”.

Publications

Throughout his life Henry wrote many books and pamphlets on religious and educational topics plus volumes of poetry which included:-  Two Conversations between a Clergyman and one of his Parishioners on the Public Baptism of Infants (1843) Scraps of Sacred Verse (1846); Barrack Sermons; Scriptural Church Teaching(1848); Christian Oratory during the first Five Centuries (1859); My Kitchen Garden by a Country Parson (1860) Manure for the Million; A Letter to the Cottage Gardeners of England (1861); Self Rules for Reading Scripture; Sixty Original Hymns; Narrative of the conversion of a Chinese Physician (1868); Our Home Heathen; A Letter on the Dry Earth System; The science of Manure as the Food of Plants; The Advantages of the Dry Earth System; Land for the million to Rent; Self Supporting Schools for the Middle Classes; The Testimony of a Portion of the Vegetable Creation of the God of the Scriptures; Scripture Interpreted on Scripture Principles, Supplemental Hymns of Adoration and Praise (1865); 11th Thousand (1870 as well as an important work called Eight letters to Prince Albert as President of the Council of the Duchy of Cornwall.

The Moule Family

Reverend Henry Moule and family on Fordington Vicarage lawn 5th Aug 1869

Identification

Standing (left to right): Arthur Evans Moule; Eliza Agnes (wife of Arthur); Henry Joseph Moule; Elizabeth (wife of Henry); Mathew Evans (Curate of Fordington and Nephew); Handley Carr Glyn Moule: Charles Walter Moule; Horatio Mosley Moule; George Evans Moule; Adelaide Sarah (wife of George); Frederick John Moule; Mary Alicia (wife of Frederick)

Seated: Rev Henry Moule; Mary Mullett Moule (wife of Henry)

The Children of Henry Moule and Mary Mullett Evans

Henry & Mary had 8 sons in all as listed below. Henry Joseph was 4 years old, and his brother George just 1 when the family arrived in Fordington in 1829. All the others were born at the Vicarage in Fordington.

Henry Joseph Moule [1825 - 1904]               [See separate biography]

George Evans Moule [1828 - 1912]              [See separate biography]

Frederick John Moule [1830 - 1900]             [See separate biography]

Horatio Mosley Moule [1832 - 1873]             [See separate biography]

Charles Walter Moule [1834 - 1921]             [See separate biography]

Arthur Evans Moule [1836 - 1916]                [See separate biography]

Christopher Cooper Moule [1838 - 1839]      [Died an Infant]

Handley Carr Glyn Moule [1841 - 1920]        [See separate biography]

Moule family connection with Thomas Hardy [1840-1928]

It is not quite clear how Thomas Hardy got to know the Moule family, nor which member he knew first. It was probably the eldest son Henry Joseph with whom he remained a close friend for fifty years. Although Hardy was also friendly with George and Charles, it was Horatio Mosley Moule [known as Horace] whom Hardy met in 1857 who had the greatest influence on him.

Mary suddenly had a stroke on 29 June 1877 from which she was paralysed and during the next 8 weeks she never spoke again before she passed away on 21st August. She was buried 3 days later in St George’s churchyard & the Teachers of the Sunday School she had befriended for nearly 50 years paid for a wall plaque to be erected inside the church to her memory. Henry Moule died just short of his 80th birthday at Fordington on Tuesday 3rd February 1880 and was similarly honoured. They are buried together in the foremost grave in St George’s churchyard.

In Later Years