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In 1809 the Reverend William Cowherd established the Bible Christian Church, in Salford, as a breakaway from the Swedenborgian New Church in King Street, his congregation had to take a vow not to eat meat.
Chapels were also established in Manchester at Ancoats and Hulme. The central idea of vegetarianism - that there is a kinship of all nature - stretches back 2500 years to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. But Cowherd was in the right place at the right time to make it into a popular movement.
Nineteenth-century Salford was ripe for vegetarianism for a number of reasons. The rapid growth of the Manchester-Salford conurbation threw like-minded people together. A reaction to the industrial revolution was leading some to a more romantic view of animals and nature. A series of coincidental personal ties among the local clergy led to a theology emphasising the kinship of nature taking root. And the area was receptive to religious innovation because the established church never really had a firm hold on the hearts and minds of Lancastrians. When Cowherd died in 1816, his ideals - which linked his belief in the kinship of nature with a general liberal, egalitarian and democratic position - were pursued by his followers, led by his successor as Pastor, Joseph Brotherton, who became Salford’s first MP in 1832.
In 1847 Brotherton presided over the meeting held to create the The Vegetarian Society. It elected James Simpson, a deacon of the Bible Christian Church, as its first president. When Simpson died in 1859, his father-in-law, William Harvey, then mayor of Salford, took over as president until his own death in 1870. (Harveys sister, Martha, was married to Brotherton and wrote the first vegetarian cookery book.)
The Church continued to provide the Vegetarian Society with its Leadership, notably in the person of Reverend James Clark who was pastor for nearly fifty years following Brotherton’s death in 1857. Clark not only served as secretary of the Society but also helped to found the International Vegetarian Union.
This mainly involved links with the American Vegetarian Society, established in 1850. The founding father of the American movement was also a Bible Christian. The Reverend William Metcalfe left Salford in l8l7 with a group of pilgrims from the Bible Christan Church and set up a branch in Philadelphia. Among his converts to vegetarianism was Sylvester Graham, whose ‘Graham bread’ is still to be found in the United States and who influenced the development of the Kellogg range of foods.
The Salford Church later moved to new premises in Cross Lane, where it continued until 1930. Unable by then to attract enough vegetarians, it merged with the Pendleton Unitarians.
- adapted from Derek Antrobus in ‘History Today’, April 1998