Brooke Lambert

Brooke Lambert (1834–1901) was an English cleric and social reformer. He played significant roles in the Charity Organisation Society (COS) and the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS), and as an ally of the settlement movement in London. In 1927, Clara Collet wrote that in Lambert, the reformer Charles Booth "seems to have found a kindred soul". Early life He was born at Chertsey, Surrey, the fourth son of Francis John Lambert (1798–1876), son of Sir Henry Lambert, 4th Baronet, and his wife Catherine Wheatley. His maternal grandparents were Major-General William Wheatley of the Grenadier Guards who died during the Peninsular War, and his wife Jane Williams, a daughter of Thomas Williams of Llanidan. He was brought up in Kensington, schooled at home and by the evangelical James Compigné Chase, and was sent in 1849 to Brighton College. He then became a student at King's College, London, where he encountered F. D. Maurice and the furore over his 1853 ejection. Lambert matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1854, graduating B.A. 1858, M.A. 1861, and B.C.L. 1863. He was ordained deacon in 1858, and became a curate later that year at Christ Church, Preston, Lancashire. He was there when he was ordained priest in 1859, by Horatio Powys. In 1860 he moved to a curacy at St John's, Worcester. In 1863, after a short time at Hillingdon, he then took another curacy, with the Rev. Robert Edward Bartlett at St Mark's Church in Whitechapel, London. Vicar in Whitechapel Bartlett received preferment in 1865, to the parish of Pershore in Worcestershire, and Lambert replaced him as vicar of St Mark's, Whitechapel. The parish church was St Mary Matfelon, and St Mark's, which opened in 1841, was a chapel of ease for it. It was in the Goodman's Fields area of east London, between Alie Street and Prescot Street, and was demolished in 1927. At the time of its building, an initiative of Charles Blomfield, Whitechapel was a "hotbed of crime" with "one dingy church" for a population of 36,000.