Rev. Alfred Brandon

  Noted events in his life were:

• source. Frank Locke where it is written:
Alfred was the 10th child of Richard and Henrietta Brandon.
The following notes about him come from an article in `The Daily Chronicle' Monday, 9th October, 1911.
"A grand old Londoner - probably London's oldest officiating minister of an denomination, but something much more that that into the bargain! Such is the Rev Alfred Brandon, Baptist Minsiter, tailor, poet, and pamphleteer. Though he is just past his 95th birthday, he still preaches at least once every month in the little creeper clad Baptist chapel that survives amongst the towering new flats and mansions of Drayton Gardens.
During the first few months he has not been able to take his usual place at the pulpit, and has sat at a table to preach, But in rain or shine he never fails each Sunday to make his way in a Bath-chair to the place of his valued ministry.
The actual chapel, old though it seems by comparison with the surrounding buildings, has been built a little more than 30 years; but Mr Brandon has been a minister in Chelsea 64 years, and has lived there 72 years.
How often it happens that men and women who survive to a hale old age are not the timid, secluded folk, but those who have borne the burden and the heat of the day, who have braved the storm, who have striven against tremendous odds and conquered in the end! Ner was there a better instance of this than the Rev Alfred Brandon.
For this wonderful old man, whose whole record has been one of amazing energy and activity, has been a cripple since he was a baby of 2, when one of his legs became paralysed. He has practically educated himself, as he could not attend any school. Yet as tailor and minister he did for many years two men's work, and more. It was to his efforts that the very existence of the chapel in Chelsea was largely due - sprung from a little gathering of five or six earnest souls in a workshop.
He has been in times almost forgotten now, the hero of all sorts of conflicts - local and otherwise. thus he was one of the very earliest of passive resisters - a passive resister while Dr Clifford was still young and unknown. Twice he had distraints levied for conscience sake on his furniture rather than pay the old clergy rate, which has since been abolished.
But the great battle for which Chelsea is hardly likely to forget its champion was that which he once waged against that patch of Babylon that flaunted in its midst thrughout the central decades of last century - namely the old Cremorne Gardens. Over their final abolition Mr Brandon played a leading part in the `cause celebre' before Mr Jutice Hawkins. Curiously enough, many people who have told and written the glamorous hsitory of Cremorne have recounted Mr Brandon's doings as though he were some legendary person, one recent London historian referring to him as `long since dead.'
In the course of one of the most notorious trials of the time, Mr Brandon was able to produce a number of witnesses - notably a waiter at Cremorne itself - who confessed that they owed their moral downfall to the gardens. After a verdict of a farthing damages, the gardens were swept away so successfully that even their boundaries can now be traced with difficulty.
In a talk yesterday with a `Daily Chronicle' representative, Mr Brandon told the story of his fight. "You can have little conception," said he, "of what sort of plague spot this was during part of its career. Under the mask of gaiety it was a hot-bed of immorality, drunkenness, and abominations of all kinds. At all hours of the night there were fast people trooping up from the west end to the dancing floors and supper pavillions, and hardly an evening passed without a brawl of some sort or another. It erupted the whole neigbourhood, house after house falling into disrepute, and in Cremorne itself there wre underground vaults where practices went forward that cannot be described. I know of one promising young man who, after two evenings of depravity at the Gardens went and drowned himself."
He confesses that Chelsea has not changed for the worse to anything like the extent of Rotherhithe, where Mr Brandon was born in the year after Waterloo, when the stage coaches still trundled down the Borough.
"In those days," said he,"Rotherhithe was not only a pretty place of its kind, but quite fashionable in its way. My family were small landowners and had been settled there for over 200 years - not many Londoners can say that nowadays! It is wonderful how small London was, in comparison with what it is today. One could get into the country from the very heart of it by an afternoons walk in any direction."
Rev Alfred Brandon was a pastor not just of any Baptist church but of a Gospel Standard Strict Baptist chapel. He came to London in 1839 at the age of 23, and commenced business in the Kings Road, Chelsea. He became acquainted with two other young men who agreed to meet in a workshop for prayer. This grew later to a room in Mason's Grove converted into a chapel, and then in 1881 they moved to Grove Chapel in Drayton Gardens where a new chapel was built. Alfred guaranteed the amount of the mortgage when the chapel was built and for many years refused a salary so it could be paid off.
Although crippled in both legs, and needing an invalid chair to convey him to and from the chapel, Alfred lived to the great age of 101 (d. 1917). The chapel was closed after WWII when it was badly damaged by bombing. (11)

Alfred married Elizabeth. (Elizabeth was born circa 1820.)