On this day … 6 June 1877

The Preston Guardian was speculating on the contents of the will of Edmund Harris, who had recently died, and carried reports of the funeral sermons preached in St George’s church in the town centre and at St Andrew’s at Ashton, where Edmund Harris lived at Whinfield House.

The will was soon known and the bequests funded the building of some of the most splendid buildings in the town today, including the Harris Museum and the former Harris Orphanage in Fulwood, as well as guaranteeing the future of the now-threatened Harris Institute in Avenham.

What is surprising is the report of the sermons at the two churches, which rather damn Harris with faint praise. Indeed, the sermon delivered at St George’s was very far from charitable, describing Harris as ‘one of the most punctilious men in matters of business that it was any one’s misfortune to meet’.

Edmund Harris was a solicitor, the son of the Rev Robert Harris, headmaster of the grammar school and minister at St George’s church, who had died a few years earlier in his 98th year.

The sermon for Edmund Harris was given at St George’s by the Rev Charles Wood, who had been Robert Harris’s curate and who succeeded him as vicar. The Preston Chronicle carried a lengthy report of the sermon.

After noting at the beginning of his sermon that Edmund Harris was ‘a well known and devoted friend of the church’, he then proceeded to neglect him for the first half of the sermon, which he devoted to fulsome praise for the life and work of the father, Robert Harris.

When he did reach the subject of his sermon, he clearly hadn’t come to flatter:

‘I feel in the outset that the character of the man I have to speak of is one of the most difficult. Edmund Robert Harris … was one of the most punctilious men in matters of business that it was any one’s misfortune to meet with. It often appeared to an unbusiness mind like my own that he carried things to too fine a point; that is, he was more than necessarily cautious. Everything must be done with a propriety of exactness and strictness of integrity – must be moulded in the proper form and fashioned in strict accordance with the very letter of the law; no work must be slighted, no trouble spared in the execution of it.

‘No doubt it was this close attention to detail, aided by his perspicuity of mind, that gained for him the character of so able and erudite a lawyer, whose judgment was to be depended upon, and whose advice was so eagerly sought for, so promptly rendered ; in short, he was the very man for his profession. Had he been anything else, he would have missed his vocation; he was the ideal and personification of a lawyer who could listen to every man’s business and keep his own to himself.

‘His private character was much more difficult to understand than his public. Thus far shalt thou come and no farther. It is my firm conviction that he had a keener perception, a further insight, and a juster estimate of personal character than the outside world accredited him with. His inner conscious life was folded up in his own petals, which, however much you might try to unfold by the genial warmth of social intercourse, you could only partially succeed in doing. He never was what men would call a front rank man in life. His aim and object was to do what he had to do well, humbly and quietly, without ostentation, preferring rather to walk in the secluded paths of life than tread the thoroughfares which lead to fame and glory.’

Poor Edmund did not fare much better in the sermon delivered at St Andrew’s by the vicar, the Rev Alfred Armstrong, if the report in the Chronicle is to be believed. According to the Chronicle, the Rev Armstrong ‘briefly alluded to the death of Mr Harris’ in his sermon, praising his generosity and ending with the rather lukewarm and terse tribute that he ‘could not decently express his approbation of his character – it would be set down to admiration; but from his personal intercourse with him he respected his memory.’