Thomas Crowther (1794 – 1859) was an evangelical clergyman in the Church of England who served as perpetual curate of St John in the Wilderness at Cragg Vale from 1822 until 1859.
He was ordained a priest on 14 July 1822 and immediately afterwards appointed to the perpetual curacy of St John in the Wilderness, an episcopal chapel in the parish of Halifax, with an annual stipend of £50.
The completed church, which seated 800 (three times the previous capacity), was consecrated by Bishop Longley on 2 October 1839[4] and Crowther remained its incumbent until his death.
This quoted “Devine” as saying that if any place in England needed legislative interference it was Cragg Vale, where factory children were frequently forced to work fifteen or sixteen hours a day and sometimes all night in “a murderous system” that made their employers “the pest and disgrace of society”.
He spoke of burying two brothers, aged eleven and nine, whose constitutions had been broken by the conditions of factory work, and gave examples of local mill-owners’ indifference to cases of suffering among their workforce.
[10] Crowther, who said he spoke out on account of “the responsible nature of my office”, seems to have confined to the pulpit his public calls for reform, perhaps under advice from Archdeacon Musgrave, the Vicar of Halifax, in whose parish and in whose gift his living lay.
[11] However, Oastler and his lieutenants continued to draw attention to the practices Crowther had exposed, and the name of Cragg Vale acquired an almost totemic significance for some of those calling for greater protection of factory children.
The appeal of his “impressive” and “faithful and appreciated” preaching may perhaps be gauged from what followed his visit to the church of St Michael on the Hill at Lumb, near Bacup, in April 1852; his sermon there raised a relatively modest collection (£6.15s.8d) but when he returned to the district to preach at St John’s, Bacup, three months later, the church was so crowded that many of those wishing to hear him had to be turned away and the collection yielded nearly £70.
In 1857 one of these daughters, Sarah Baldwin, engaged in an ill-tempered exchange of correspondence with Arthur Bell Nicholls after he confirmed that (as asserted in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë) the conditions at the Cowan Bridge school were accurately portrayed in Jane Eyre.
In this correspondence, published in the Bradford Observer, Mrs Baldwin particularly objected to Nicholls’ claim that Thomas Crowther had spoken disparagingly of the school, expressing surprise that “you could condescend to partake of my Father’s hospitality, as you have done, then make such mean remarks about him”.
[18] Crowther is thought to have been the clergyman whom Charlotte, in a letter to her publisher, said she had witnessed reading Jane Eyre and marvelling at the resemblance of Lowood and its characters to the school and staff at Cowan Bridge, without knowing he was in the presence of the book’s author, “Currer Bell”.