Frederick Spurrell
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Frederick Spurrell (2 August 1824 – 23 February 1902) was an Anglican priest and archaeologist.
Frederick Spurrell was born at 23, Park Street in Southwark at a time when his father, Charles Spurrell (1783–1866), was employed by Barclay, Perkins & Co. as a senior manager at the nearby Anchor Brewery. His mother, Hannah Shears (1790–1882), was the daughter of the London copper merchant James Shears. In the 1830s the family moved to Anchor Terrace on Southwark Bridge Road.[1]
He studied at King's College London and was awarded an Associateship (A.K.C.), before going up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. in 1847 (promoted to M.A. in 1850).[2] At university he was a member of both the Cambridge Camden Society and the Cambridge Architectural Society.
Career and interests
Spurrell was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Chichester in 1847 and priest the following year, when he began his work as curate of Newhaven, Sussex. While there, he was among a small party of local officials that called on Louis-Philippe I, who had fled to England following the 1848 revolutions in France.
In 1849 Spurrell travelled through Belgium, Prussia and Denmark to Sweden, having been sent by the Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Charles James Blomfield to serve as the Anglican chaplain in Stockholm. He provided weekly services in the upper gallery of a chapel at 12 Lilla Trädgårdsgatan, which had been loaned by the Moravian Church.[3] Following his return to England, he served as curate of Barcombe, Sussex, from 1850 to 1853.
Spurrell was appointed rector of Faulkbourne, Essex, in 1853, where he remained until his retirement in 1898, having been made a surrogate in the Diocese of St Albans in 1894. In 1886 he commissioned Arthur Blomfield to restore the parish church.
Spurrell was a keen amateur archaeologist who published a number of papers. He was a member of the Essex Archaeological Society and the Sussex Archaeological Society, and also served on the Council of the Royal Archaeological Society alongside prominent Victorian archaeologists such as Augustus Pitt Rivers and Flinders Petrie.[4]
He died in Bath in 1902 and was buried in the churchyard of St Germanus' Church, Faulkbourne.
