Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Whitehaven's turbulent past

Whitehaven was described as a peaceful town before Derrick Bird shattered the tranquillity with his unexplained shooting rampage last week. But it was not always so – Whitehaven had a turbulent C19th past, not least because of religious controversy which attracted some strange characters to the town.

In the mid-1850s Samuel Kuttner was a travelling lecturer who claimed that he had converted from the Church of England to Catholicism. In 1856 he was reported to be touring Ireland & in November 1857 was in Whitehaven.

His activities came to the attention of the Reverend William Darby, recruited from Ireland by Hugh Stowell to be a 'controversial lecturer' in Manchester, specialising in lecturing to the working classes on the errors of Catholicism. Rev Darby took it upon himself to go to Whitehaven to expose the frauds of Kuttner & also wrote a pamphlet on the subject.

Kuttner claimed to be a German native, 'one of the best linguists in Europe', to have a collection of doctorates, to have been an ordained minister in the Church of England & to have been the principal missionary in Jerusalem (on a salary of £500 or £600 a year) for a society whose aims were to convert the Jews. However he saw the error of his ways, consulted with Cardinal Wiseman & converted to Catholicism; as a married man he could not be ordained as a Catholic priest & seems to have relied upon his audiences for contributions to the upkeep of his wife & children. Catholic clergy in Whitehaven at least seem to have believed his story & supported him on his lecture platform in the town.

Darby claimed that Kuttner was in fact a German-Jewish shopkeeper from Granby Row in Manchester who had learned what little he knew of Anglican & Roman theology by attending Darbys lectures held at the National School in Granby Row in 1856.


"He appeared about 47 years of age, of a short, thick, burly figure, dark hair, Jewish physiognomy & spoke with a strong foreign accent. His temper was excitable, his manner pompous & overbearing, his reasoning illogical, his quotations of Scripture inaccurate, & his theological views were a strange compound of Judaism, Infidelity & Romanism. He seemed to despise with equal heartiness [various translations] of the Bible. He was constantly vapouring about his knowledge of the Hebrew original. He asserted that our Lord did not know Greek & other things equally absurd."


In collaboration with a Whitehaven Presbyterian minister, Rev Joseph Burns, Darby attended public meetings there in April 1858 to expose the frauds. A meeting on 22 April 1858 broke up in disorder & the local police refused to be responsible for Darby’s safety

Darby’s pamphlet Romish Frauds (1858) appears to be the only source for details of Kuttner’s story so nothing is known about his life after the Whitehaven incident. It is however interesting that the infamous Murphy gave his last lecture in Whitehaven (in 1871) & there suffered the injuries which contributed to his death.

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