Episode 48. The Lanes: A Methodist Case Study

SYNOPSIS

Building upon Professor David Bebbington’s historical analysis of Non-Conformity in Episode 34, the Lanes: A Methodist Case Study takes a close look at Methodism through the prism of one family’s experience: the Lanes. Methodism is one of the Christian denominations which sits outside the Established Church, although it was originally galvanized by the evangelical campaigns among the working classes that were undertaken from the 1740s by the roaming Anglican clergymen, John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield . .

Lifelong Methodist, David Lane, has traced the Lane connection with Methodism on his father’s side back several generations. It can be conjectured that Lanes may have been involved in Methodism from the 1700s, since some distant ancestors moved from Shropshire to Lancashire following coal mining. The family settled in Walkden, Lancashire and through the ‘game changer’, Ned Lane, a house and cotton mill builder, moved up the class structure by establishing capital and making money in the international cotton trade. Three Lane mill owners retired comfortably to seaside resorts, before David’s father decided not to go into the family business, studying medicine at Manchester University where he met David’s mother. After being forced out of medical missionary work in China by local rebellions, the family eventually settled in the mining community of Bolsover, Derbyshire, where David’s father worked as a doctor in a medical practice.

The episode covers some not untypical aspects of 19c and 20c English social history: the class structure within Anglicanism and Non-Conformity, the non-conformist conscience exercised through Christian mission work abroad, the fight for women’s higher education and recognition of degrees, industrial innovation and decline, and the 1945 settlement witnessing the nationalisation of industry, the National Health Service and Welfare State with associated changes in cultural and social behaviour.

GUESTS

David Lane is the retired Social Services Director of Wakefield, Yorkshire and consultant in the field of children’s homes, acting as advisor in the investigation of residential abuse scandals. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, which had been founded originally by John Wesley to educate the sons of Methodist ministers. David then read Classics at Cambridge University where he was head-hunted during an initiative to bring Oxford and Cambridge graduates into the social and residential care services. David is a former vice president of the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years. He was awarded a CBE in 2016 for his services to childcare and social work..

Simon’s interview with David Lane was recorded in the Lane family home in Wakefield on 27 November 2023.