The Preston vicar and his slave-trader relatives

A Grade II-listed warehouse links a Victorian Preston vicar with the Liverpool slave trade. The clue is in the address, No 57, Parr Street, Liverpool. The street was named after Thomas Parr, a Liverpool merchant, and the warehouse was built for him.

Thomas was the grandfather of John Owen Parr, vicar of Preston from 1840 until his death in 1877. He 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 transatlantic fleet, built to accommodate 700 slaves. The family was reputed to have been involved in 72 slave voyages up until 1804.

The Rev Parr’s father, also John Owen Parr, 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 to Africa. There is no suggestion that the vicar himself had any connection with the slave trade.

According to the Historic England listing:

‘Evidence relating to Parr’s business interests suggests that the warehouse … may have been used to store iron. Iron goods were taken to Africa, where they were used to purchase the slaves with whom the ships were then filled. Other iron goods, such as the shackles with which slave ships were fitted, were also necessary to the slave trade.
‘By 1805 Parr had retired to Lythwood Hall in Shropshire, where he lived the life of a country gentleman and formed a notable collection of coins. Charles Darwin, who encountered him in 1840, described him as “an old miserly squire”.’

The Rev Parr led a seemingly conventional life as a Victorian Church of England minister: he instructed his parish clergy to ensure their congregations voted Tory at each election, he was a virulent opponent of Catholics, both Roman and Anglo-, and he routinely set the bailiffs on anyone of whatever faith who objected to paying him his tithes and Easter dues.

But behind the closed doors of the vicarage he was hiding what was for Victorian Preston a shameful secret that when revealed created a major scandal in the town and laid bare the hypocrisy that he had presumably hoped to keep hidden.

The editor of the Preston Chronicle, Anthony Hewitson, in an early example of investigative journalism, uncovered Parr’s secret marriage to a woman more than 30 years his junior, who he had been passing off as a servant in his household, while he maintained the fiction that he was a widower.