My Scottish and Geordie Protestant Roots and “Temperance” as a Way of Life
March 21, 2010
It has been interesting to learn about my grandparents and their parents and grandparents. On my mother’s paternal side everyone is solidly Presbyterian back several generations to their roots in Leith, Scotland. I have traced this family line back as far as 1801 and would have to make another trip to Edinburgh to search church records to get further back than that. My mother’s maternal family were from Newcastle Upon Tyne and they were Methodist. In fact my great Grandfather Matthew Wright was a lay teacher and youth pastor in Newcastle before he emigrated to Canada in 1911. We have in our family archive several letters “from home” written by his friends and colleagues describing how much they have been missing him since he left England, and how his Sunday School students had been asking after him. I was lucky enough to travel to Newcastle in 1992 and found the church where they worshiped and the home that they lived in before moving to Canada. Both my grandfather Matthew and his wife Martha were members of a benevolent temperance society called the Independent Order of Good Templars. The IOGT, a fraternal organization that encouraged temperance or total abstinence from alcohol was founded in 1850 and modeled on the ritual and regalia of the Freemasons. It was unique in that it admitted both men and women and did not exclude anyone based on their race. I am happy to say that I have both Matthew and Martha’s certificates and some of their belongings, and that my elder sister who is now a minister in the United Church of Canada has some of their hymnbooks and one of their Bibles.
The consumption of alcohol was forbidden in my mother’s paternal grandfather’s very strict Presbyterian household as well. My grandfather served overseas in France during WW I enlisting when he was only 17 years old. When he returned after the war he admitted to drinking with his chums to deal with the harsh conditions of trench warfare, but even this was no excuse according to my great grandfather and the drinking of alcohol was always severely frowned upon. Temperance was so much a part of the family’s religious practice that no one ever dared to bring spirits into my grandparent’s house until my father arrived one Christmas with the proverbial bottle of Canadian Club Rye Whiskey. After all those years of abstinence, my Pop, forty years after returning from the war, asked my father for a sip.
I was baptized in the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1955 at Central Presbyterian Church in Galt Ontario Canada with Dr. David Goudy officiating. I was confirmed in St. George United Church, St George Ontario by Rev. Gordon Hoult as a member of the United Church of Canada (a union church that was formed by Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist congregations in 1925) in 1968 when I was 13 years of age.
Matthew Forster Wright at Newcastle Upon Tyne 1895
My great grandfather Matthew's certificate of initiation into the Independent Order of Good Templars dated 1890
