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The First Dissenters' Chapels

IX. THE FIRST DISSENTERS' CHAPELS. 

When William III. ascended the Throne there were three bodies of Nonconformists in Dover — the Baptists, who still worshipped in a part of Captain Tavener's house off Market Lane ; the Society of Friends, who met in a loft in Mr. Samuel Walton's carpentry establishment near the bottom of St. James's Street; and the Presbyterian followers of the Rev. John Davis, the ejected minister of St. James's Church, who met in a part of an old malt house in Last Lane. Prolonged persecution had made these Dissenters timid, and had so reduced their circumstances that when the day of comparative religious liberty came they were not prepared to launch out in chapel building. The private houses that had sheltered them during the storm had still to serve. 

It was Zion Chapel, on the site of the old malt house, at the junction of Last Lane and Queen Street, that first came into existence. It looks as though the small congre- gation of Presbyterians that had gathered round the Rev. John Davis had occupied the old malt house on suffrance; and in the year 1703, the year following the death of Mr. Thomas Papillon, M.P., his son, Philip, who was a candidate for the representation of Dover, purchased and leased the old malt house to the Presbyterians, who trans- formed it, without much structural alteration, into a chapel. In 1708, when David Papillon succeeded Philip as Member for Dover, he gave them the chapel and helped to improve it, but Presbyterians being few in Dover, the congregation dwindled, and the chapel was closed from 1769 to 1771. Then some preachers of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion re-opened it, and re-built it, with the exception of the north wall, in 1782. In 1802 the chapel was handed over to the Congregationalists, the Rev. W. Mather being the minister; and in 18 14 the chapel was re-built and enlarged. 

The Baptists were the next body of Nonconformists to build a chapel. After Captain Tavener's imprisonment in Dover Castle, he went to London, where he remained until he could safely return. He then acted as Baptist minister in Dover, the congregation meeting in his own house, where Messrs. Dickeson's and Co.'s warehouses and counting houses are, in Market Lane. In 1692, the south-west end of his house was regularly licensed as a place of religious worship. Tavener died in 1696, and was buried in the adjoining ground, which now forms part of St. Martin's Churchyard, but the congregation still continued to worship in his house, Richard Cannon (a descendant of Captain Cannon, who was Deputy Governor of the Castle in the Commonwealth time, and the second son of John Cannon, of Cannon Street, sometime Mayor of Dover) succeeding Tavener as minister. So the meetings were continued in the private house until 1745, when their first chapel was built at that part of Market Lane where the central block of the business premises has since been erected. 

The last of the three before mentioned Nonconformist bodies to build a permanent meeting house was the Society of Friends. The exact date of its erection is in doubt, but it was about the year 1797. A meeting of the Society of Friends was originated in Dover in the year 1655, and in the early part of 1660, just before the Restoration, the members purchased a piece of land outside the Town wall at Eastbrook Gate as a burial place; hence it is supposed that their first meeting place was thereabouts. Owing to the persecution which they suffered from the Presbyterians before the Restoration, and from the Govern- ment afterwards, for many years they had no certain abiding place. In the Eighteenth Century their meeting was held in a loft near the bottom of St. James's Street, which they vacated about the year 1797, when their permanent meeting hou.se in Queen Street was ready. It is curious that the exact date of the building of the Queen Street Meeting House is left in doubt by local historians. One records it as 1790; another 1802; and others 1800. It seems pretty certain, however, that it was built in the year 1797, or a little earlier. A prominent Dover Quaker, Richard Low, who di&d on the 20th October, 1797, made a bequest in his will, as follows: — "Upon trust to lay out and invest such sum of money in the names of the said trustees, Richard Baker, George Finch and Thomas Barton Beck, as will accomplish the purchase of one hundred pounds capital stock in the funds of 5 per cent, annuities at the Bank of England, and I direct that the interest and dividends thereof shall from time to time for ever, as occasion may require, be applied to and expended in repairing the Meeting House belonging to the Society of People called Quakers in Dover." As it is natural to infer that the Meeting House was in existence when this bequest for its repair was made, it may be safely inferred that the Meeting House was built in 1797, or earlier. At that time the days of persecution were then lon^! past, and moiit of the members of the Society called Quakers in Dover were people of good social position; but this Richard Low was one of Dover's early passive resisters. He did not like to pay the King's taxes because they were used fur war purposes, and when the tax-gatherer called at his boot and shoe shop in Last Lane, he used to point to the open till, saying, " Take what thou claimest as the King's dues." So the good Quaker's conscience and King's demands were satisfied. The Meeting House in Queen Street was built on a strip of land between the street and the boundary of St. Martin's graveyard, a high brick wall screening it from the public thoroughfare. 

Such were the three first meeting houses where the Dover Nonconformists worshipped. 
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