Bournemouth, Lansdowne Baptist Church, Lecture (October, 1920)

Unlike its neighbours to the east and west, Southampton and Plymouth, Bournemouth could claim no special relationship to the Mayflower story. Nevertheless, the wide reach of the Free Church Council meant that Bournemouth too had an opportunity to mark the Mayflower Tercentenary in 1920, if only in the form of a lecture at the Lansdowne Baptist Church. The lecture was by Dr J.D. Jones and according to local newspaper reports it “recounted the untold sufferings and privations” of the Pilgrims, as well as their “quiet strength, their unpretending courage and their unwavering staunchness”. Moreover, they had no pretensions to gold or riches; the Mayflower men merely sought freedom of worship. Such heroic portrayals were typical of lectures given to audiences whose sympathies with the Mayflower Pilgrims were based on a notion that they were coreligionists. Lecturers like Jones could use this imagined sympathy as a way of inculcating to their audience that they should try to emulate the belief in God’s will “which was the granite of the Pilgrims”. The lecture ended with a collection for the “Save the Children Fund”.

Bournemouth Echo, “’The Pilgrim Fathers’”, 10 October 1920.

See also the website of the Lansdowne Baptist Church