1882 Religious Census of Ilkeston

On Sunday March 30th 1851 a Religious Census of most of the religious establishments in England and Wales took place.
The results of this census as they relate to Ilkeston are referred to at relevant points throughout this site.

On the first Sunday of April 1871 the ‘Dissenters of Ilkeston’ conducted their own ‘informal’ Religious Census, not organised by either Central or Local government, and was subsequently the subject of much local criticism. The published returns stated that 201 people attended the Ilkeston Parish Church for morning service while over 1500 attended the equivalent service at Dissenting places of worship. And in the evening, while 302 people found their way to worship at St. Mary’s, there were between 1600 and 1700 at the chapels. However Edwin Trueman, then employed by the Ilkeston Pioneer and a member of St Mary’s congregation, wouldn’t accept these figures, arguing that this unoffocial census was deepy flawed.
He contended that the Dissenters had kept the taking of the census a secret from the “Church people“, though amongst their own community it was well-known, and they were counselled to attend their chapel at all costs, “and bring half-a-dozen more with them if they could“. And their tellerss were placed at only some and not all of the entrances to the Parish Churches of St. Mary’s and Christ Church in Cotmanhay..
When the full ‘results’ were published they showed that 402 people attended at the two parish churches in the Sunday morning while in the nine nonconformist chapels the attendance was 1476. The corresponding numbers for the evening were 501 and 1763. But these figures had omitted all the children attending Church Sunday Schools; they would have swelled the 402 to nearly 800 !! Edwin had his own figures, of 1000 attending the two Churches though he wasn’t entirely forthcoming about how he arrived at this number.
All of this came during fierce debate over the Disestablishment of the Church of England.

On March 5th 1882 the Ilkeston Advertiser decided that another Religious Census in the town would be a good idea.
” We hold that the fairest estimate of the power and influence of a religion is that obtainable from an enumeration of its bone fide active members, and not from a column in the Registrar General’s decennial census giving the aggregate number of nominal members”.
With the exception of Edward Thomas Straton Fowler, Vicar at Christ Church, Cotmanhay, all  relevant clergymen and ministers agreed to take part. The newspaper employed its own counters to calculate the Cotmanhay attendances.

* These returns include two or three morning services.
** Of the attendances at the United Free Church services about a half were those of children.
‡ In the numbers at the Salvation Army evening services those who attended in the afternoon seem to have been included.

The (Liberal and Non-Conformist) Advertiser then helpfully summarised its findings.
While the Established Church welcomed 954 worshippers in that morning and 1017 in the evening, the Non-Conformist establishments respective figures were 1910 and 2751.
The newspaper calculated that of an Ilkeston population of 14,000, 31% of them were regular attenders at church.
(The average of other places where a voluntary census had been taken was about 25%).

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And now we glide effortlessly from religion to Education in Ilkeston