Manchester, Coldhouse Lane Baptist Church 

Manchester, Coldhouse Lane Baptist Church. The following account is taken from R. Ashton, “Manchester and the Early Baptists,” The Christian Pathway, March 1915, 90-94; April 1915, 119-23; May 1915, 151-55.

Coldhouse Chapel began in the 17th c.   In 1769 Edmund Clegg became the pastor.  John Sharp [later at the Pithay in Bristol] was the most popular preacher at Coldhouse.  Under his ministry a new chapel was built in Lever Street in 1786, but it was sold to the Methodists and another chapel built for the Baptists in Rochdale road in 1789. Sharp’s successor was Hindle, “a most eloquent minister,” who died in 1800--both are buried in the chapel. Knott says that from 1760 to 1765 the Manchester chapel was without a pastor, as Nathaniel Winterbotham had died.  The church was very unsettled and in danger of dividing … A number of them wished those Baptists who were members at Bacup (where Joseph Piccop was pastor) to obtain their desires and form another church at Manchester & they would unite with them.  The church at Bacup opposed the action.  A letter dated 22 May 1760 from a member of the Bacup church to Piccop contains the reference “We are willing to join them if Joshua H [Joshua Harmer?] could be peaceably settled amongst them.”  A George Mercy is referred to, & a John Moult, whom Mr Piccop appears to have received with the church on his preaching at the Coldhouse. The church at Coldhouse wrote Piccop in August 1760 requesting the Bacup church allow him to come over to administer the ordinance, they being without a pastor. 

In August 1761 members of the Bacup church in Manchester wrote the church at Bacup that Mr Piccop did not attend to ordain the one they had chosen to pastor them, but  Piccop said he would come over and administer the ordinance. In January 1762 the Tib Lane Baptist members of the church at Bacup wrote and complained that the church at Bacup and refused them assistance and they sought to be separated from them, and the letter was signed by Edmund Clegg and John Clegg, among others, but not Arthur Clegg.  The Bacup church excluded these Tiblane people for a time, but in 1763 they were reinstituted.  By 1765 a group had reformed to meet at Coldhouse, which had been destitute since Winterbotham had died.  On 3 February these members of the Bacup church were dismissed to the Coldhouse chapel, where apparently Edmund Clegg was preaching, though whether he was the stated preacher is unclear.  See “Antiquarians at a Manchester Baptists Chapel,” in The Baptist, 30 May 1890, p. 341; James Hargreave, “Short Sketch of the Rise & History of the Baptist Church at Bacup (Rochdale, 1816); O. Knott, MS. notes on Manchester Baptists and Coldhouse Lane Chapel, BU 4/4/1, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

James Winterbottom preached at Coldhouse from 1724 until his death in 1759.  The chapel was in Thorniley Brow, Shudehill, and built in 1740. Congregants had seceded in many cases from the Cross Street Chapel (Independent).  In 1745 Joseph Piccop became pastor at nearby Bacup, and the two churches worked closely together for many years.  “In 1756, three years before his death, Winterbottom ‘Came to the conclusion’ with another minister, named Caleb Warhurst, and it was agreed that for three years he shuld assist Winterbottom in the ministry at Coldhouse. The new minister was not a Baptist, but was a most excellent ‘Independent,’ and became an honoured instrument in the conversion of many” (94). Warhurst was a friend of Newton, who said of Warhurst, he was “a truly humble, pious man” (119).  After Winterbottom’s death in 1759, Warhurst became the primary preacher at Coldhouse, although other Independents are found supplying the pulpit as well until 1765. Some friction developed between the Baptists and the Independents, and in April 1762 a group of non-Baptists withdrew to a new chapel in Cannon Street.   John Byrom records in his diary that Newton came to Manchester on 20 April 1762 to attend the opening of the new Independent chapel and see some of his minsterial friends.  Warhurst was the pastor and several from Coldhouse followed him to Cannon Street. Warhurst died in November 1765; during those three years the Coldhouse chapel fared very poorly.  Warhurst was 43 when he died (120).  Between 1762 and 1786 services at Coldhouse were held infrequently, often by Piccop walking the 20 miles from Bacup! (120-22). After Winterbottom’s death, the church at Coldhouse became “luke-warm and quarrelsome,” Ashton writes (151). Edmund Clegg, a silk trader, tried to keep things going at Coldhouse, but the trustees refused him the premises and he too some other “High Calvinists” with him to a new place in Shudehill, but by 1781 Clegg had left the church. The congregation at Coldhouse continued in a distressed state until John Sharp arrived in 1786 and turned the church around in his three years.  He would leave in 1789 for the Pithay church in Bristol.