There was one English writer that Nick revered above all others and that was William Hale White who wrote under the pen name Mark Rutherford. His Libris publication of The autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford’s deliverance was an act of love more than a money-making venture. The book was launched at Bedford Central Library in 1988 with a talk by Don Cupitt, author of The sea of faith, who wrote the introduction. I was in charge of the Central Library and had found two suitcases of Rutherford material in the Local History Library, now called the Heritage Collection, which was donated to the library by Hale White’s great grandson, John Hale-White. This formed the basis of the Mark Rutherford Collection. 



William Hale White was born in Bedford in 1831 and several of his six novels, depicting provincial dissenting life and the ‘loss of faith’ of the Victorian period, are based on Bedford and the surrounding area.



I cannot remember when I first met Nick but it must have been in the 1980s. I would call on him for coffee sometimes when I was in London, leaving the train from Bedford, my then home, at Kentish Town. We once had coffee in the Pret a Manger there and another time lunch, probably at the Pineapple pub, around the corner from his flat in Lady Margaret Road. When we formed the Mark Rutherford Society in 2003 he was a founder member along with Mark Crees, Bob Owens, Mike Brealey, David French, and John Monks. I acted as secretary and subsequently, with Professor Bob Owens, editor of the Mark Rutherford Society Newsletter. This was published occasionally, initially as an A4 stapled publication and latterly as an A5 periodical with a stiff cover. Nick would write for this from time to time. 



Nick was, not surprisingly, very enthusiastic about the dissertation by the German scholar Hans Klinke which, in 1930, was the first critical assessment of Hale White. Hans Klinke had visited Hale White’s second wife, Dorothy, at her home in Sherborne, Dorset. In 2013 the Society held a symposium at Dr Williams Library to mark the centenary of his death. Nick’s short talk ‘Notes on two European scholars of William Hale White: Hans Klinke and Ursula Buchmann’ was published with the other papers in Bunyan Studies: a Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture (no. 17, 2013). 

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Nick attended the one-day symposium Literature and the Woman Question organized jointly by the Mark Rutherford Society and The Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance (RIMAP) at the University of Bedfordshire in 2018. He also attended other events including the occasion when the American Paul Zahl visited me in 2007 and gave a talk on his enthusiasm for Rutherford at Bunyan Meeting.



I remember a wonderful day out with Nick and the architectural historian Andrew Saint visiting Rutherford’s last home in Groombridge, Kent, and well as other buildings, ending with a very important, to Nick, cream tea. Another time Wagner’s Ring Cycle was performed on two nights in Bedford rather than the usual three and I accompanied Nick to one performance. ‘Cheaper than seeing it in London’, he said. 



My last contact with Nick was over finding somewhere to donate his collection of books by and about Hale White. We first thought of the University of Bedfordshire which was setting up a Bedfordshire Literary Archive but, sadly, by end of the Covid-19 pandemic this idea appears to have been abandoned; leaving books to the library required filling in a form that gave them the right to dispose of the books should they wish to. This is not what I thought Nick would have wanted and we really wanted them kept together to form the core of a collection to which others could add. However the idea of asking the Bunyan Museum to take them was accepted, following a meeting in April 2023 between myself and Chris Damp, the minister. This was agreed with Nick and arrangements were made for their collection. Nick found it very difficult to part with the books and only a portion was transported. However Robbie and Lizzie Jacobs have agreed that the rest of the collection will be sent to the Bunyan Museum. The White family were very much part of the history of Bunyan Meeting and it will be a fitting home in perpetuity.

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Nick Wilde is Secretary of the Mark Rutherford Society. The Mark Rutherford website is here.