William Cadman (priest)

William Cadman was born in Billinge, Lancashire on 13 May 1815, the elder son of a farmer William Cadman and his wife Mary Rigby. He came from an observant Anglican family and according to his biographer he possessed ...a deeply religious spirit from his boyhood ... Cadman showed a precocious ability to communicate his knowledge to an audience from an early age and before his adulthood was conducting catechism classes with young people in his local parish. Cadman was part of an evangelical movement that was gathering pace in the 1840s and there was tension between the parish clergy and some parishioners who regarded his methods as over-zealous and Methodistical. This was not unique to Cadman's parish in Suffolk. In many rural parishes Church congregations were in decline, partly as a result of demographic changes as many left the countryside for work in the burgeoning cities but also as a consequence of the entrenchment of evangelical non-conformist churches who offered their members a simpler and often more fervent form of Christianity. In 1847 the uneasiness between traditional Anglican doctrine and the new evangelicalism was controversially exposed by the Gorham judgement that the Calvinistic view of baptismal regeneration was incompatible with Anglican doctrine. This caused years of intellectual conflict within the church. Cadman's biographer Rev. Leonard E Shelford is vague about Cadman's position in this controversy other than saying that he was in full sympathy with the Evangelical party. of William Cadman c.1860 ==Rector of St George The Martyr, Southwark ==

In 1844 Cadman accepted the curacy offered to him by the Rev. Henry Montagu Villiers, Rector of St George's, Bloomsbury in London and later Bishop of Durham from 1860 to 1861, In 1852 Cadman accepted the Rectory of St.George the Martyr, Southwark, one of the largest parishes in London with a nominal congregation of 30,000. The church in 1852 was capable of holding 1,000 persons but on Cadman's arrival was almost empty with its days at the centre of the local community apparently past. As Henry Mayhew had highlighted in articles for the Morning Chronicle in the 1840s the area contained much destitution and dire poverty. Cadman was able to fulfill a spiritual void for many and within a few months church services were full to hear Rev. Cadman preach. In January 1859 Cadman reported that there was nearly 200 voluntary agents employed in schools and institutions who met for a service at New Year to celebrate the work within the parish. Cadman was not a man to often articulate his thoughts on paper but at the inaugural Church Congress, held at King's College, Cambridge in November 1861, he gave expression to the system that he had adopted in Southwark. He told Congress that the mother church was the centre of operations from which a body of volunteers worked in all parts of the community. Each clergyman was to associate with him: lay volunteers, a scripture readers, deacons, Bible women. He recommended establishing either a National or a ragged school in each sub-district with Scripture lessons provided by the local clergy. Schools could be licensed for worship and lectures commenced. The local congregations were to be empowered to lead on the construction of new churches and chapels. He also recommended entrusting the help of evangelical societies including the London City Mission and the Church of England Young Men's Society. ==Rector of Holy Trinity Church, St Marylebone==

In 1857 the Rev. Shelford reported that there was concern for Cadman's health and that the toil and anxiety as he bore could not be indefinitely continued. Thus in 1859 Rev. Cadman accepted Prime Minister Henry Palmerston nomination of him to the important crown living of Holy Trinity, Marylebone, a post he would occupy for thirty-two years until his death. It was a smaller, more wealthy parish that had benefitted from the work of his predecessor Rev. Thomas Garnier who had been promoted to the Deanery of Lincoln. The church was well attended and the benefices substantial. Nevertheless, there was scope for Cadman's evangelical instincts to be exercised in reaching the thousands of poor families for whom contact with the Church was negligible. In 1871-72 Cadman occupied the post of Select Preacher at Cambridge University and Canon Allan Smith, Chancellor of St.David's. In 1886 Cadman was elected by the clergy of the diocese as a Proctor to Convocation. A memorial to Cadman and his wife in the form of an inscription on the reredos in the Chapel of St Anselm in Canterbury Cathedral was erected in 1895. == Notes==

• Shelford, Rev. Leonard E. (1892). A Memorial of the Rev. William Cadman M.A., Paternoster Buildings E C, London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. ==Bibliography==