The Great Acceptance

By Guy Thorne

It is impossible today to imagine the poverty, violence and vice in the East End of London in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Guy Thorne writing about it in 1912 makes the same comment!
William Charrington, an heir to the famous brewery, gave up his inheritance of over £120,000,000 in today’s money to work in the East End, with the support of several friends. In the 1880s there were 375 musicals in Greater London. Those in the East End were run partly as brothels, with many of the dancers being prostitutes, with rooms set aside within the theatre for their use.
When Frederick Charrington tried to expose the situation at a time where girls as young as 13 (the legal age of consent) were trapped into the abhorrent trade, the outside world was initially sceptical, and content for things to continue as they were.
Author Guy Thorne was appointed as Frederick Charrington’s official biographer, and with the help of eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, and reports from the courts of the time, he has pieced together a horrifying but readable account of the period, with amazing results of the change in many people’s lives.
Frederick Charrington initially hired the music halls on Sundays for Christian services, but the numbers coming were so great that a special hall had to be built. And then another! Thousands of the starving poor were fed every week, with many of them especially anxious to hear the Gospel. Charrington’s ministry was not just preaching, but involved practical help.
This White Tree Publishing edition has been abridged considerably from the original to make a more readable account. Sentences and paragraphs in the original have been broken into shorter lengths. Extensive details of some events and people involved, which would not be of great interest today, have been edited.

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Tree Publishing
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913950743

Book preview

About the Book

It is impossible today to imagine the poverty, violence and vice in the East End of London in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Guy Thorne writing about it in 1912 makes the same comment!

William Charrington, an heir to the famous brewery, gave up his inheritance of over £120,000,000 in today’s money to work in the East End, with the support of several friends. In the 1880s there were 375 musicals in Greater London. Those in the East End were run partly as brothels, with many of the dancers being prostitutes, with rooms set aside within the theatre for their use.

When Frederick Charrington tried to expose the situation at a time where girls as young as 13 (the legal age of consent) were trapped into the abhorrent trade, the outside world was initially sceptical, and content for things to continue as they were.

Author Guy Thorne was appointed as Frederick Charrington’s official biographer, and with the help of eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, and reports from the courts of the time, he has pieced together a horrifying but readable account of the period, with amazing results of the change in many people’s lives.

Frederick Charrington initially hired the music halls on Sundays for Christian services, but the numbers coming were so great that a special hall had to be built. And then another! Thousands of the starving poor were fed every week, with many of them especially anxious to hear the Gospel. Charrington’s ministry was not just preaching, but involved practical help.

This White Tree Publishing edition has been abridged considerably from the original to make a more readable account. Sentences and paragraphs in the original have been broken into shorter lengths. Extensive details of some events and people involved, which would not be of great interest today, have been edited. The unedited original is still available from some sources.

The Great Acceptance

Guy Thorne

(1875-1923)

This White Tree Publishing Abridged Edition ©2022

eBook ISBN: 978-1-913950-74-3

Published by

White Tree Publishing

Bristol

UNITED KINGDOM

More books on https://whitetreepublishing.com/

Contact [e-mail]

Bible verses are from the King James Version (KJV)

Cover illustration by AdobeStock 287164669 and 162298035

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Book

Author Biography

Chapter 1 The Great Acceptance

Chapter 2 Beginnings

Photo of Frederick Charrington at the start of this work

Chapter 3 More Beginnings

Chapter 4 David and Jonathan

Chapter 5 The Battle of the Music Halls

Chapter 6 The Fight on the London County Council

Photograph of Frederick Charrington in 1912

Chapter 7 The Fight For the Purity of the East End

Chapter 8 Fruition!

Photograph inside the Great Hall

Chapter 9 The Apostle of Temperance

Chapter 10 Lord of the Manor of Osea

About White Tree Publishing

More Christian books from White Tree Publishing

Author Biography

Perhaps better known today as Guy Thorne, the writer of this book’s real name was Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull. He was given this long series of names by his father, the Rev’d Joseph Edward Gull, curate of the parish church of St. John the Baptist, in Little Hulton, a village between Manchester and Bolton in the north of England. Ranger Gull was born on 18 November 1875, and grew up with an interest in the church and the Christian faith, identifying with the Anglo-Catholic (High Church) Protestant branch of the church as he got older.

Ranger Gull’s education was at Denstone College in Utoxeter, Staffordshire, a Church of England school with the motto Lignum crucis arbor scientiae (The wood of the cross is the tree of knowledge). He was also at Manchester Grammar School, founded in the 16th century as a free grammar school.

After such a promising start in education at two of the top English schools, it was natural for Ranger Gull to go to either Oxford or Cambridge, and he chose Oxford. But not for long. Obsessed with publishing, he soon left, without a degree, to work for The Saturday Review, at the same time contributing to The Bookman and The Academy. In spite of having no university degree, Gull managed to be employed as a staff member at the Daily Mail, and later at the Daily Express.

Writing was in his blood. While working for London Life, Ranger Gull’s first book was published anonymously in 1898 (now commanding a huge price on the used book market, and for serious collectors only). It was titled The Hypocrite, and was a fictional account of life in London and Oxford, using carefully veiled real events he had witnessed. This book unleashed a whole series of novels from 1900 onwards. Until his death in 1923, Gull wrote over 100 novels, using his own name of C Ranger Gull, that of Guy Thorne, and Leonard Cresswell Ingleby for his biography Oscar Wilde: Some Reminiscences.

Ranger Gull’s is best know for his fiction books. Indeed, as far as we can tell, The Great Acceptance is his only non-fiction book. His most famous novel was, and perhaps still is, When it was Dark, published in 1902, with sales of half a million copies. It concerns a fake inscription ‘discovered’ in a tomb outside Jerusalem, supposedly by Joseph of Arimathea, claiming that he had taken the body of Jesus from the first tomb, and there was therefore no resurrection. This is also published by White Tree Publishing in abridged form, and we strongly recommend this title.

The book was well received by the Christian church. Although there was some criticism that at the time Guy Thorne (the name he used as the author for the book) had little time for non-Anglicans, he is very positive in the book about some chapel members, implying that a believing Christian is a Christian, no matter what their label. On his own admission here in The Great Acceptance, he had never before attended an evangelistic service, and it was clearly a pleasant and enlightening shock!

Returning to his fictional works, Ranger Gull was keen on aviation, and in The Secret Seaplane published in 1915, early in the First World War, he imagines a huge British seaplane that can set down and take off from both land and water. On water it is also a boat, capable of approaching enemy coastal territory silently after a long flight. Four years later, Gull takes this concept further in The Air Pirate where huge seaplanes are crossing the Atlantic. This quote from the book:

Connie was to leave the sea-drome at eight-thirty in that fine flying-liner Atlantis. She was a Royal Mail ship, and about the fastest and finest flyer in the Transatlantic service, with a carrying capacity of three hundred and fifty passengers, and a thousand tons dead weight of cargo. Her crew numbered forty, and she was commanded by Captain Swainson, one of the most reliable pilot commanders in the air. He was a man I both knew and liked.

The Air Pirate, published in 1919, looks forward to the early thirties, ten years or so after Ranger Gull’s death in January 1923. He sometimes refers to these aircraft as airships, which term we now apply to dirigibles and similar craft. In The Air Pirate, a Japanese bodyguard is actually (and unusually) a protagonist!

The City in the Clouds is another example of Ranger Gull’s forward thinking, where a wealthy Brazilian builds a city on top of high steel towers in south London. Here it is the Chinese who get some racist references. It would be wrong to pick out Ranger Gull’s offensive terms for criticism, as though he alone was guilty. Even if, as some think, political correctness has now gone too far, terms that were standard and acceptable in popular fiction and comics until well into the 1980s, would not be used today. It was standard fare at the time.

Cornwall features in several stories, and it is obvious Ranger Gull was writing from firsthand experience of its people and scenery. His address at one time was Lelant, in the far west of Cornwall. What seems to be Gull’s final book, The Dark Dominion, was published in 1923. When the World Reels, published in 1924, a year after his death, was serialized at least three years earlier. It can be seen in the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1921, showing just how much international interest there was in Ranger Gull’s work.

Two warnings. If you are reading Ranger Gull’s/Guy Thorne’s books in their original unabridged format, there will be some shocks. North View Publishing have produced some excellent abridged versions more suited to today’s readers. Secondly, the name of Guy Thorne as the author is often applied to all Ranger Gull’s books. This is important to be bear in mind when searching for his used books on the internet. You will need to use both Gull and Thorne as the author of any particular title.

For readers wanting to know more about C Ranger Gull, aka Guy Thorne, a biography, Guy Thorne: C Ranger Gull: Edwardian Tabloid Novelist and his Unseemly Brotherhood, by David Wilkinson was published in 2012 by Rivendale Press, High Wycombe, and at the time of writing is available directly from the publisher.

Note

At the end of this book are advertisements for our other books, so this book may end earlier than expected! The last chapter (10) is marked as such. We aim to make our eBooks free or at a nominal cost, and cannot invest in other forms of advertising. However, word of mouth by satisfied readers will also help get our books more widely known. And of course a positive review always helps!

Chapter 1

The Great Acceptance

In the year 1882, Sir Walter Besant wrote this in his novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men about the East End of London:

"Two millions of people, or thereabouts, live in the East End of London. That seems a good-sized population for an utterly unknown town. They have no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture galleries, no theatres, no opera ‒ they have nothing.

"It is the fashion to believe they are all paupers, which is a foolish and mischievous belief, as we shall presently see. Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London. It is even neglected by its own citizens, who have never yet perceived their abandoned condition.

"They are Londoners, it is true, but they have no part or share in London; its wealth, its splendours, its honours, exist not for them. They see nothing of any splendours; even the Lord Mayor’s Show goeth westward: the City lies between them and the greatness of England.

"They are beyond the wards, and cannot become aldermen; the rich London merchants go north and south and west; but they go not east. Nobody goes east, no one wants to see the place; no one is curious about the way of life in the east.

Books on London pass it over. It has little or no history; great men are not buried in its churchyards, which are not even ancient, and crowded by citizens as obscure as those who now breathe the upper air about them. If anything happens in the east, people at the other end have to stop and think before they can remember where the place may be.

It will be a somewhat startling reflection to many of us, and it is more profitable to inquire how true the words I have just quoted are today. It is unquestionable that a great improvement has taken place.

It is no longer true [writing in 1912] in the main to say that the East End of London is wholly neglected. The pages of any book of reference will bear witness to the innumerable philanthropic and religious missions which have sprung up in the City of the Poor. Yet, to the average man and woman of some place and position, both in London and in the country, I venture to say that the East End is just as remote and visionary a place as some distant land.

As an average man myself perhaps ‒ owing to my profession as a writer, having seen even more of life than the average man, and being endowed with a rather eager curiosity and liking for new scenes ‒ I had never visited the East End, or been nearer to it than Liverpool Street Station, until the early part of the present year.

About the time of which I speak, certain facts came to my knowledge about the work that was being done by Frederick Nicholas Charrington, Honorary Superintendent of the Tower Hamlets Mission. It was in a casual conversation with one of the great experts on drunkenness that I first even heard of Mr. Charrington’s name.

What I heard seemed rather extraordinary and out of the way. From what was said, I suspected that a strange personality, and one offering considerable interest to a novelist, was hidden away ‒ at least, as far as I was concerned ‒ in the East End of London.

I heard more of