Information on John Wroe

Southcott: taking the lid off an article by Frank Smith source unknown

The Southcottians survived —despite an over-zealous and well publicised attempt to walk on water and the grim repercussions of a fatal circumcision. Besides, they still had, they claimed, Joanna Southcott’s mysterious box. FRANK SMYTH investigates

MELBOURNE HOUSE is a large building of Yorkshire millstone grit, standing aloof in its own grounds on the lip of the motorway between Wakefield and Bradford. Its boundary walls bear the hallmarks of early Victorian squirearchy; neat notices, carved into the grey stone like epitaphs. warn: ‘No hawkers’, ‘No vagrants’ and, much more alarmingly, ‘Beware man-traps’.

But the house was built by no ordinary country gentleman. John Wroe was the most bizarre of all Joanna Southcott’s eccentric followers - part buffoon, part ‘terrible patriarch’, to quote a contemporary newspaper - but he had more personal charisma than even Southcott herself. Today Melbourne House is still known locally as ‘Prophet Wroe’ s Mansion’.

Wroe saw his duties, outlined to him by an angelic guide, as an obligation to ‘preach to the Jews’. In the first eight years of his ‘ministry’ he traveled first to Liverpool and then to London, where he delivered a message to Queen Charlotte, and then went on to Gibraltar, Spain. France, Germany. Italy, Scotland and Wales. His energy was prodigious, for he traveled mostly on foot, interspersing his foreign trips with bouts of fiery evangelicalism at home.

His peculiarities grew more noticeable as time passed First he ordered the Southcottians to discard the names of months, numbering them instead. Then he began to grow his beard, demanding that all his male disciples do likewise. He made two - -.

publicised attempts to walk on water - first, F in August 1823, on the river Aire near

Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds. and secondly, in February of the following rear, on the Lyne. near Ashton. When his attempts failed hilariously, he hastily announced that he had been undergoing a ‘public baptism’.

Certainly Wroe had the courage of his strange convictions: on 17 April 1823 he was publicly circumcised at a meeting of believers, and was strong enough to proclaim - and show evidence of - the fact at a packed open-air meeting at Ashton-under-Lyne the following day. But the incident had tragic repercussions. One of his disciples. Henry Lees of Ashton. circumcised an infant named Daniel Grimshaw, who bled to death as a result. During the outcry that followed Wroe deemed it politic to disappear for a fortnight.

But despite the Grimshaw incident - Lees was tried and acquitted of manslaughter the following March - Ashton-under-Lyne and nearby Manchester proved for a while to be a goldmine for Prophet’ Wroe. An elaborate Sanctuary’ was furnished for him at Charles-town, in Ashton. by his followers, and on Christmas Day I82~ a more elaborate one, with a fine organ, was opened at a cost of £9500. It was designed to resemble a theatre - indeed for years after Wroe’s death it the Hippodrome music hall, and recently was re-opened as the Tameside Theatre - and had an ‘unclean’ pew where women accused of ‘unchastitv’ sat during services. After the service they were taken to a ‘cleansing room’ beneath the pulpit. were they were stripped naked, then whipped by the prophet with a birch rod. At each cardinal point on the outskirts of the town a square building was erected, marking the four gates of a temple, planned along the lines of the temple at Jerusalem, of which the sanctuary was to form the center. One of these, in which Wroe’s ‘trial’ was held, is now a public house appropriately named The Odd Whim.

Wroe’s trial came about as a result of his sexual tendencies, although the charge of ‘swindler" was also leveled at him. In 1827 a 12-year-old girl. Martha Whitley. accused him of having had intercourse with her. At first Wroe denied the charge, but when three years later three more young girls accused him of sexual interference during the ‘cleansing’ ceremonies, he was called to answer. According to the Dictionary of national biographv of 1917, although Wroe was obsessed by sex ‘there is not a tittle of immoral teaching’.

However, after the trial - an unruly proceeding by all account – ‘a very considerable number of (the Southcottians) left him and shaved off their beards’. including Henry Lees, the over-enthusiastic circumciser. Wroe was never welcome in Ashton again, although for 40 years afterwards many of his followers were found in the town. They included several shopkeepers, who wore long straggling beards and tall felt hats, closed their shops for 24 hours from 6p.m. on Fridays, and were known as ‘Joannas’.

The charge of ‘swindling’ was almost certainly true. In 1856, Wroe ordered his followers to wear gold rings; but although they paid for gold, they were issued with rings made of brass. And in 1842 when his printing shoo at Wrenthorpe, Wakefield, was broken into by burglars. Wroe's perjury convicted three innocent people, a fact that came to light only when the real culprits were caught five years later.

But the setback at Ashton did not disturb the prophet. His ‘breakaway’ group of Southcottians became known as ‘Christian Israelites’, and to their practices of beards and circumcision Wroe added adherence to a strict kosher diet.

‘Beardies’ down under

In Australia. where Joanna Southcott’s influence had already been vicariously felt. Wroe became hugely popular after his first extended visit in 1843 - his followers there were known as ‘beardies’. His Melbourne congregation collected the £10,000 with which he built Melbourne House, ‘dedicating’ it at sunrise on Whit Sunday 1857. Since the Second World War it has been an old people’s home.

Wroe’s final prophecy had the same germ of truth as that of Joanna Southcott; in the 1840’s he had forecast that the Millennium would begin in 1863 - but on 5 February of that year he died suddenly after breaking his collar bone, at Collingwood, Melbourne, and was buried there.

No portrait exists of Wroe, for unlike Southcott he thought such things sinful. Possibly his appearance had something to do with the omission, for he was described as having a ‘savage, haggard look’, with a hump back and very prominent nose’ - to which was added long shaggy hair and beard and a big misshapen hat.

‘There must have been some strange fascination about the man.’ wrote a late - Victorian commentator, ‘for his utterances are but fatuous insipidities with a Biblical twang, having neither the pathetic earnest - of Joanna Southcott nor the crude originality of her other improver, John Ward.’

After Wroe’s death the Southcottians pursued their beliefs quietly for about two years.