Little Hogswood before the chapel
Little Hogswood is the oldest building in the group around Spy Lane Chapel. Loxwood History dates its original rectangular form to around 1558, early in the reign of Elizabeth I. It probably began as a small farmhouse or pair of cottages beside an older track through this part of Loxwood.
The 1851 census also records a cottage called Shepherds opposite Little Hogswood, while Old Cottage stood farther along the lane behind the site later occupied by New Cottages. A stream ran behind Little Hogswood and Old Cottage towards the lower ground and the River Lox at Brewhurst.
John and Harriet Sirgood arrive
John Sirgood was a shoemaker and lay preacher living in south London. He married Harriet Coxhead at St Mary, Lambeth, on 17 March 1845 and worked near Clapham. He preached on common land and in private houses, a style that allowed him to speak outside established churches and to take his message directly to working people.
Local Dependant tradition remembers John and Harriet leaving London in about 1850. They are said to have taken turns pushing a wheelbarrow because they could not afford the railway fare. Roger Nash, who wrote a modern history of the Dependant Brethren, records the related tradition as a handcart journey into Sussex. After reaching Loxwood, Sirgood walked among farms and cottages, distributing Bibles and preaching in fields, barns, houses and on common land.
Preaching among Loxwood’s working families
Sirgood’s message was direct and demanding. He treated the Bible as the authority for belief and conduct and taught that faith had to be proved in daily life. Repentance from sin, forgiveness, sober behaviour, righteous living and readiness for Christ’s return were recurring themes. He preached against excess alcohol and used his own earlier drinking as part of that teaching. His followers called themselves the Dependant Brethren because they believed themselves dependent upon Christ in every part of life.
In a published reply written in 1861, Sirgood said that Loxwood received a formal church service only once a fortnight. He asked whether a fortnightly service could sustain Christian life and pointed instead to daily meeting. His preaching reached agricultural labourers and other working families in scattered cottages and farms, and his early congregations gathered in homes, barns and on common land. Loxwood History’s analysis of the 1861 census found that nearly four-fifths of the men associated with the local Dependant group were labourers.
Sirgood remained an itinerant preacher rather than a resident minister tied to one pulpit. He moved between the Surrey and Sussex communities, sometimes walking and sometimes travelling by cart, and appointed local elders to continue the meetings between his visits. He also wrote constantly to the congregations, signing himself ‘Brother John’. Many surviving letters were addressed to women as ‘Dear sister’, while others went to whole groups of Brethren. The letters carried teaching, advice and correction into cottages and shops when he was elsewhere.
Joining the Brethren involved a change of conduct as well as attendance at meetings. Sirgood taught converts to prove their faith by action, with repentance, sobriety and a disciplined Christian life. Open-air preaching and visits to cottages continued as the movement grew, so new listeners could encounter the Dependants without first entering a chapel. Some came to heckle, while others became members and joined the local meetings led by Sirgood or the elders.
Four Houses and Old Cottage
Before the chapel was built, the Brethren met in private homes. Roger Nash’s study places an early indoor meeting at Four Houses on the Guildford Road, where several Dependant families were living. Meetings were also held at the small Old Cottage in Spy Lane. The cottage had once been divided into two dwellings and stood beside the path later used between the Combination Stores and the chapel.
The 1861 census records John and Harriet Sirgood lodging at Old Cottage Spy Lane with Thomas and Ann Overington. Thomas was an agricultural labourer who became one of the Loxwood elders. Other Dependant households lived close by, at Four Houses towards Alfold Bars, in Pancake Lane and on the ridge towards Cuckolds Corner. Ann Overington was recorded as a schoolmistress in 1871 and later Dependant recollections remembered her work with village children.
A chapel in Spy Lane
By 1861 the Loxwood congregation had enough support to build its own meeting house. A newspaper report published in January 1864 records an incident at ‘Loxwood Chapel’ on 27 December 1863 and states that disturbances had occurred during the previous two years. The legal title followed in an indenture of 1865, when the chapel land was transferred to trustees. A later trust document described a one-acre plot west of Spy Lane, the largest of the Dependant chapel sites listed in that document.
The chapel was plain: a brick meeting house with a simple gable, circular window and small entrance porch. An early interior photograph shows rows of wooden benches divided by a central aisle. Oil lamps hang from the ceiling and a wooden platform stands at the preaching end.
Loxwood became the first of a small group of permanent Dependant chapels. Local elders led services between Sirgood’s visits. By the early 1880s the same trust arrangements covered meeting houses at Northchapel, Warnham, Lordshill and farther afield. Roger Nash records that seven chapels had been built before Sirgood’s death in 1885.
What happened in a Dependant service
Early Dependant meetings centred on preaching and personal testimony, when members spoke about their faith, conduct and religious experience. After permanent chapels were built, regular long services became the norm. Sirgood, known to his followers as ‘Brother John’, or one of the local elders preached from the Bible. Sirgood also wrote hymns, which were passed between congregations orally or in letters and sung to traditional tunes without musical accompaniment. Children attended with their parents.
The preaching returned repeatedly to repentance, the Bible and a changed life. The 1883 trust document described the chapel’s wider use in practical terms: public worship, the instruction of children and adults, church meetings and other religious work.
From congregation to community
Sirgood used the word ‘combination’ for cooperative work in which members pooled money, labour and commercial skills. One Dependant testimony explained that many young women were working in domestic service and had little freedom to attend meetings. Sirgood wanted work that could give them greater control of their time while keeping them close to their congregation.
Dependant families were trading in groceries and drapery in Loxwood by the late 1870s, and the larger Combination Stores developed beside the village pond. The cooperative businesses employed men and women as shop workers, clerks, managers, carpenters and tradespeople; women also appear in the business records as managers and directors. Roger Nash records five community stores established before Sirgood’s death. In 1896 Aylward, Smith & Co Ltd took over the Loxwood community’s commercial property and trading interests. Sirgood had died at Loxwood Stores on 19 October 1885 and was buried beside the Spy Lane chapel five days later.
The Retreat and Little Hogswood
Around 1897 Aylward, Smith & Co built the tall row known as New Cottages directly opposite the chapel. Dependant records associate the houses mainly with members of the Brethren, especially older members, and the row also became known as The Retreat. Old Cottage remained behind the new houses, preserving the much smaller dwelling where Sirgood and the Overingtons had lived in 1861.
Little Hogswood was enlarged between about 1897 and 1909, changing from a rectangular building to an L-shaped house. Its timing alongside The Retreat suggests that the extra rooms also supplied accommodation for the Dependant community. An early twentieth-century photograph shows Little Hogswood on one side of the lane, New Cottages opposite the chapel and open fields immediately beyond them. Spy Lane was still narrow and unsurfaced in 1909.
Spy Lane in the twentieth century
The 1937 Ordnance Survey map labels the chapel as a ‘Noncon. Church’, the contemporary map abbreviation for a Nonconformist church, and marks the burial ground beside it. Photographs from the first half of the twentieth century show clipped hedges around the chapel and the long row of New Cottages opposite. A view from about 1950 includes electricity poles and a motor car, while fields still begin close behind the buildings.
Emmanuel Fellowship, an independent church, now meets in the building under the name ‘The Old Chapel Building’ and regular Sunday worship is still held there.
