In 1857, Charles and Susannah left New Kent Road and moved down to 99 Nightingale Lane, in the Clapham area, West of Brixton. The house they moved into afforded for much more room than they previously had in Newington, while also offering the rural feel and slower pace they desired.
This illustration represents the pulpit stairs used by me at New Park Street Chapel after the enlargement. When that building was sold, I removed them to my garden at Nightingale Lane, and fixed them to a huge willow tree. I remember reading, with some amusement, of Lorenzo Dow, who is reported, many years ago, to have slipped down a tree in the backwoods, in order to illustrate the easiness of backsliding. He had previously pulled himself up, with extreme difficulty, in order to show how hard a thing it is to regain lost ground. I was all the more diverted by (he story because it has so happened that this pretty piece of nonsense has been imputed to myself. I was represented as sliding down the banisters of my pulpit, and that at a time when the pulpit was fixed in the wall, and was entered from behind f I never gave even the remotest occasion for that falsehood; and yet it is daily repeated, and I have even heard of persons who have declared that they were present when I did so, and, with their own eyes, saw me perform the silly trick. F22
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper – June 23, 1861
ROBBING THE REV. C. H. SPURGEON.—
Two youths, named Thomas Freemantle, aged seventeen, and James Taylor, seventeen, were charged with stealing a horse-cloth, the property of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. Ann Page stated that she lived at the lodge at the entrance of Mr. Williams’s carriage drive, adjoining the premises of the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, in Nightingale-lane. On Friday morning, about eleven o’clock, she saw the prisoners walk up the avenue belonging to Mr. Williams, and supposing they were going to the hayfield she took no notice of them. A short time afterwards she saw them return, and at that time Taylor was carrying something under his arm. She pursued them, as she thought there was something wrong, and they ran along the road, and the prisoner Taylor dropped the rug. She saw a constable at the bottom of the road, and she believed the prisoner was induced to drop the rug from seeing him, and not from her pursuing them.—George Coulson, coachman to the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, identified the rug as his master’s. He said it was seen on the fence at the back of the coach-house. The fence divided the two premises, his master’s and Mr. Williams’s.—Taylor said he did not take the rug off the fence. It was lying on the grass under the fence, and he took it up and put it inside the lodge.—Payne, (summoning officer) said Taylor had been in custody several times and convicted; the other had not been in custody before.—Mr. Dayman said he should pass a light sentence on Freemantle, as he might have been led away by the other. He sentenced him to fourteen days’,
Marker Photo Spudgun67 Wikipedia
