John Sirgood
| John Sirgood | |
|---|---|
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Loxwood Chapel
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| Born |
John Wiliiam Sirgood 1821 Avening, Gloucestershire |
| Died | 4 March 1885 (aged 63–64) Lord's Hill Cottage Loxwood |
| Resting place | Emmanuel Chapel, Loxwood, England |
| Residence | 34 Bromells Rd Clapham London |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Society of Dependents |
| Spouse(s) | Harriet Coxhead |
John Sirgood (14 November 1821 – 1885) was a Christian fundamentalist lay preacher, shoemaker and draper.
John Sirgood was born in Avening, Gloucestershire into a family of weavers. His father George Sirgood (1789–1865) married Sarah Emmery (1796–1851) on 25 February 1816 in Hilperton, Wiltshire. Sirgood had two brothers, Robert and William and a sister Mary. Sirgood is fairly uncommon spelling of the name (more usually Sargood or Sergood) and appears on page 97 of the Ludus Patronymicus, the Etymology of curious surnames (1868). Census records reveal his father and a branch of the Sirgood family living in Kennington south London in the mid 19th Century, which is where John Sirgood settled sometime during the 1840s. He became a disciple of William Bridges (1802 - 1874) a hat block maker based in Southwark who was founder of the Plumstead (London) Peculiars in 1836 and the man Sirgood called his 'father in Gospel'.
It was through Bridges that Sirgood came into contact with James Banyard founder of the Peculiar People, a populist sect originally known as the Banyardites that was primarily based in Essex and grew out of, and eventually subsumed the original Plumstead Peculiars. Both Bridges and Banyard owed a debt to Robert Aitken (1800–1873) whose 'Christian Society' provided a source for Latter Day Saints converts.
Sirgood was originally a fundamentalist preacher with the Peculiar People in Southwark. He evangalized on Clapham Common and around south London, preaching during the winter in "private houses". He married Harriet Coxhead (1811 - 1876) from Godalming in Surry at St Mary-at-Lambeth on 17 March 1845 and worked as a shoemaker out of 9 Market Place, Bromells Rd, Clapham. Witnessing the growing popularity of the Peculiar People (that reached its peak circa 1850), Sirgood grew disillusioned with the response to his own preaching; his ambition and fervour made him "long" for a rural following of his own. In a 1942 article Donald Macandrew asserted that Sirgood received inspiration from heaven when he began to "ask the Lord" for guidance. Sometime in 1850 the Lord answered him "in a dream" and told him about "certain remote places in Sussex" where he might find a following. The next morning he and his wife shut up shop and the couple took turns pushing each other in a "wheelbarrow" on the 41-mile trek from London to Loxwood in Sussex. This unusual mode of transport was necessary because Sirgood "couldn't afford the train fare".
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