page_title: Rayner Stephens
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Rayner Stephens / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephens Memorial, Stamford Park, Stalybridge. Memorial to radical Christian minister Joseph Rayner Stephens, 1805-1879. Having been disciplined by the Wesleyan Connexion in 1834 for advocating separation of Church and State, he resigned and set up his own churches in Stalybridge and Ashton-under-Lyne, and became involved in the Chartist movement and the cause of factory reform. Sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in 1839 after some incendiary speeches.
context_page_description: Joseph Rayner Stephens was a Methodist minister who offended the Wesleyan Conference by his support for separating the Church of England from the State. Resigning from the Wesleyan Connection, he became free to campaign for factory reform, and against the New Poor Law. He became associated with 'physical force' Chartism and spent eighteen months in jail for his presence at an unlawful assembly and his use there of seditious language.
  Born in Edinburgh in 1805, he moved to Manchester when his minister father was posted there in 1819. During his religious career, he worked in a variety of places before arriving in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1832. He was the brother of the philologist George Stephens.; three of his other brothers emigrated to Southern Australia and played their parts in the early years of that colony.
context_section_description: Heavy sureties had to be given for his good behaviour for the next five years, and he did not resume public speaking until participating in a campaign for better enforcement of the Ten Hours' Act (i.e. against the relay system) in 1849., explicitly holding non-compliance and non-enforcement to be responsible for social unrest and the more extreme forms that manifested itself in:  "It is the practice of injustice towards the poor which estranges them from the institutions of their country, and leads them into many wild and unreasoning projects to obtain deliverance from the intolerable yoke that has been fastened upon them"   He supported opposition to the 'Compromise Act' of 1850 and took part in abortive campaigns for legislation for a true ten-hour day enforced by stoppage of machinery.  In 1857, he looked back on his agitational heyday 
  History would do justice to the memory of the benevolent and heroic men who had first devoted themselves to this great work  (factory reform). Nothing gave him so much satisfaction in the retrospect, as the humble part he had been permitted to take in this good cause.  That he, with them, had been misunderstood, misrepresented, and maligned, was only what was to be expected in the nature of things.  It was a hard battle, and he had fought it; hard things had to be said and he had said them. It was no kid glove work they had to do, but work that required roughish handling. He had been impelled by a stern sense of duty in all he had done, and whilst doing it had never stayed to sigh over the sorrow, or quail before the opposition he had encountered.  He was too busy and too proud to turn aside to enter into explanations and defence, knowing well that if he died in harness his motives would receive posthumous vindication; that if he lived the battle out, he should live misrepresentation and prejudice down. And so it had proved
  He campaigned on the inadequacy and mal-distribution of relief during the Cotton Famine; attention was drawn to this and to Stephens' past history when there were riots on the relief issue in Stalybridge.  In 1868 he lectured against disestablishment of the Irish Church.   
  Stephens is buried in St. John's Church in Dukinfield and commemorated by a blue plaque placed on the remains of the former Town Hall in Stalybridge and an obelisk monument in Stamford Park. Rayner Stephens High School in Dukinfield is named after him.
caption: Stephens Memorial, Stamford Park, Stalybridge
exif: {}