On this day … 8 August 1798

John Owen Parr, the vicar of Preston from 1840 until his death in 1877, was born in London. During his time as vicar, he faced criticism for his bigoted attacks on Catholics and for the gross hypocrisy of his secret marriage to one of his servants.

He was baptised at St George’s, Bloomsbury, London, to where his father, also named John Owen, a member of a Liverpool merchant family, had transferred his operations. His grandfather was lord mayor of Liverpool and one of its principal slave traders: a Liverpool-registered slaver owned by the family and named ‘Parr’ was the largest vessel in the British trans-Atlantic fleet, built to accommodate 700 slaves.

The family was reputed to have been involved in 72 slave voyages between 1727 and 1804. John Owen Parr senior would seem to have continued his involvement in slave trading after moving to London, for he was secretary to the committee of the company of merchants trading in Africa.

Parr arrived at Oxford University at the age of 16 as a Hulmeian exhibitioner at Brasenose College. The scholarship was funded by the Hulme Trust, an educational charity founded in 1691, initially to support four poor students, the sons of Lancashire clergy, through their studies and for four years after graduation, but later seems to have become more lax, funding candidates, such as Parr, from wealthy families.

The Hulmeian connection was to prove useful to the mature Parr, for in 1827 the trust began buying Anglican benefices, including Preston. This gave the trustees the right of presentation when the town’s vicar Roger Carus Wilson died in 1839. They stipulated that his replacement should be a Hulmeian exhibitioner, so Parr was in a very small field of suitable candidates. One of the trustees was Robert Townley Parker, a future Tory MP for Preston, for whom Parr supplied consistent support from the time of his appointment.

As vicar, Parr was a powerful public figure who had the right to appoint the ministers at all the other Anglican churches in Preston, with the exception of Holy Trinity. He filled the positions with men who shared his bigoted hostility to the town’s Catholics, and joined him in supporting the Conservatives.

His time as vicar ended in scandal, when in an early example of investigative journalism, the editor of the Preston Chronicle, Anthony Hewitson, uncovered Parr’s secret marriage to a woman more than thirty years his junior, who he had been passing off as a servant in his household.

In 1858, Parr had travelled to London to marry as his third wife, Alice Stewardson, a servant at the vicarage. On returning to Preston, he continued to describe his wife as his unmarried servant and himself as a widower. He continued the pretence for years, as his census returns for 1861 and 1871 demonstrate.

The marriage raises so many now unanswerable questions. Before it became public knowledge courtesy of the Preston Chronicle, who knew of the existence of the third Mrs Parr? What did he tell his family, which included one son who was a himself a vicar, a son-in-law who was also a vicar, and another son who was a prison governor? Did the third Mrs Parr worship at the parish church, and which pew did she occupy?

Alice Parr outlived her husband by twenty-six years, dying at Torquay at the age of 80. Her funeral was held at Preston parish church, followed by her burial in the town cemetery.