“The only Black Anglican clergyman in Great Britain”

Old photographs—though often overlooked and relegated to dusty cupboards—can provide insight into a forgotten past. The 1912 Wycliffe Hall annual photograph is one of those. Graduate student Russell Risden explains the story behind the photo.

Principal Harry Grey, a former Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary in the Middle East, is surrounded by 19 young men in suits and ties—several of them moustachioed—the entirety of the Wycliffe community in those days. But in the back row, jumping out from this photograph among these English Oxbridge graduates, is an African student listed with the unusual Christian name ‘Edenslight’. Who was he?

Born in Sierra Leone in 1882, Edenslight was among the first Black graduates of Wycliffe. Though educated at Foronbay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, he moved to England and completed his theological studies at Wycliffe, graduating with an Oxford B.A. in 1913.

Edenslight was ordained to the diaconate in Liverpool by Bishop Francis Chavasse, the redoubtable evangelical Anglican leader who previously served as principal of Wycliffe. Appointed curate at St James, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, Edenslight was placed at the heart of a multicultural and industrialized city. 

During his five years at Liverpool, Edenslight’s name often appeared in the local newspapers as an advocate for the Black community. As chaplain to the Elder Dempster African Sailors’ Hostel, he officiated at the funeral of Charles Wotten, a Black Bermudian ex-naval reserve fireman who was murdered during race riots in June 1919. Aside from ministerial duties, according to Lancashire Biographies (1917), Edenslight enjoyed playing tennis and hockey, in addition to ‘studying human nature’. 

Edenslight married a Scot, Mary ‘Maisie’ Colquhoun—such an interracial union was exceptionally rare in Edwardian England. After the First World War, the couple moved to Freetown, Sierra Leone where Edenslight served as curate of St George’s Cathedral, headmaster of the cathedral school, and later as a teacher at the Government Secondary School (now Prince of Wales School). The Ejesa-Osoras returned to England in the 1940s where Edenslight worked as a chaplain for Black colonials—a post that led him into a variety of ministerial settings from hospitals to night clubs. But his ministry was not confined solely to adults. In 1950 he hosted a New Year’s party for Black children in the East End of London. 

The Nottingham Journal described him as the only Black Anglican clergyman in Great Britain and noted his ‘wide smile and wide range of duties.’ But Edenslight believed that the ‘whole country’ was his parish as far as the Black population were concerned. 

He died suddenly at his home in Worthing, West Sussex in February 1961, aged 78. Edenslight, whose ministry spanned nearly half a century, travelled a great distance since his days as a Wycliffe ordinand, but his ministry maintained a distinct emphasis on serving those on the periphery of society. 

May his story - that of a clergyman who remained faithful to Christ's call on his life to serve others - continue to inspire us today.
 

Wycliffe Hall, 1913: Edenslight Archdull Ejesa-Osora pictured first row second from left