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Crown Church

The Crown – also called “Barnhill” - area of Inverness was originally outwith the Burgh boundary and comprised primarily farmland until the 19th century. The town itself nestled along what is now High Street, Bridge Street and Church Street. As it grew however, the town expended up on to the plateau above. Much of the housing was required to accommodate those employed in the Highland Railway and associated industries. As the number of houses increased, so consideration was given to providing a place of worship locally.

The following information is taken from the Church website, www.crown-church.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=149178 where the Session Clerk, Bill Mein, has written a fascinating account of the history of the church.

In 1889 individuals in the Free Church started to talk about the need to provide a place of worship amongst this new housing.

The key instigator was the Rev D Connell, minister of the Free West Church, who issued an open letter inviting prominent men from the community to a meeting in the YMCA rooms in the town centre to consider whether a place of worship was needed and, if so, how to go about setting up a church. Around forty men attended this meeting and agreement was reached to form a committee to take forward the project of setting up a place of worship. The committee was asked to approach the Inverness Free Church Presbytery to ask it request permission for setting up a preaching station in the Hill District. This would not have a full-time minister but would simply be a preaching station with different ministers taking services as and when possible. There was a hope that it might become a permanent feature. The Presbytery approved and appointed its own committee to co-operate with the other committee in exploring how to proceed.

The first problem was to find a site on which to build and no fewer than nine possible sites were considered; amongst these were those now occupied by St John’s Episcopal Church, St Stephen’s Church and the Old Academy (College) building. It is remarkable to think that Crown Church might well have occupied one of those sites. However the project was abandoned in December 1890 for reasons which are not recorded but probably lay in disagreement about which site to choose and concerns about the likely cost of the project. From start to finish this had occupied eighteen months and now lay abandoned for almost six years.

Although it had permission from the Inverness Presbytery to establish a preaching station in the Hill District, the original committee abandoned its plans at the end of 1890. However, over the next six years, there was an increasing feeling that there was a need to provide a Free Church presence in the Hill area. A meeting of ministers and members of the local Free Churches on 25th September 1896 agreed that action was needed and a plan was drawn up. The site, occupied by an old farm steading, was purchased for £1000. A competition to design a hall and a church was opened to local architects and, from the six submitted, that of the architect Mr James Rhind was selected. The Hall (the present Lower Hall) was the first part of the church to be built. The foundation stone was laid by Lord Overtoun in August 1897 when the name which had been chosen by the Committee, “The Crown Free Church”, was announced.

The Committee then ran into a great deal of difficulty in deciding that it was to be a church rather than the preaching station originally planned. It was only when the building of the Hall was nearly completed that they prepared to ask the General Assembly of the Free Church for permission to establish a regular charge and appoint a minister. Obtaining the support of Presbytery for their petition proved to be very difficult as there were serious doubts about the need for the church, worries about the effect it would have on the membership of the existing Free Churches and hurt feelings that the committee had chosen the name, normally the responsibility of Presbytery.

Worship in the Hall began on Sunday 26th December 1897 when Dr Whyte, Moderator of the Free Church Assembly conducted the first service. Thereafter a succession of ministers conducted worship; attendance at services was consistently high despite there being no formal congregation; many attended their regular church as well as the new one and were jocularly referred to as “half-crowners”. Indeed this proved to be a difficulty when trying to recruit a minister as this was a church in name only, with no members and no adherents. It took a year of searching and the influence of prominent members of the national church to find a minister. In his seventh year of ministry, the Rev William Todd MA accepted the call to be the first minister of the Crown Church. He was inducted to the charge on Tuesday 19th September 1899 from his previous post at Auchterarder. Morning worship was followed by a public luncheon in the Waverley Hotel and a reception in the evening. This was an induction done with style. Mr Todd proved to be the first in a succession of distinguished preachers and pastors at Crown.

In 1900, the union of the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church took place and the congregation agreed to enter the United Free Church. In November 1900 the Memorial Stone for the church was laid.

In November 1901, The church building was completed but without the spire included in the drawings. It was considered that the additional cost of £1000 to add the spire was too great.

The plans of architect Mr James Robertson Rhind included a steeple, but it was decided that to limit the cost of construction of the church building the steeple should not be built; the new congregation after all was having to take a succession of short-term loans from members and friends, repaid through continuous fund raising efforts and the final debt on the building paid off from the proceeds of a three-day bazaar, ‘Ye Olde Clachan Fayre’, held in the Victorian Market in September 1906.

The idea of building a steeple did not disappear. Newsletters of the late 1920’s carried an artist’s impression of how the church would look if it had a steeple. Mr Alexander Fraser, Maryfield, had a very successful cabinetmaker’s business and was one of the founder members of Crown Church, elected one of the first deacons in 1901 and made an elder in 1905. When he died he left a bequest for the purpose of constructing the missing steeple which would only become active when the full terms of the will were in operation. In 1953 the Deacons’ Court authorised Mr Robert M Young (solicitor) to negotiate with the residuary legatees in Alex Fraser’s estate to obtain their approval of the Deacons’ Court proposal that the bequest should be utilised for the proposed improvements in the east end of the church rather than for building the steeple.

In more recent years, one of the senior elders, the late Mr George Currie, initiated an investigation into creating a steeple which would afford views of the town and be easily accessed. The plan was imaginative and would have realised a recurrent dream of the congregation but it was rejected after serious consideration as too expensive.

In 1929, on the union of the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland, the congregation voted to join the Church of Scotland.