Commemorative services were held a few weeks ago to mark the 100th anniversary of a remarkable outpouring of God’s Spirit that began in the Suffolk town of Lowestoft in March 1921. The movement soon spread to nearby communities and to other towns across the region.

What is especially noteworthy about this spiritual awakening is that it is assumed to be the last widespread revival to occur on the British mainland. In actual fact, as we shall see, the movement was considerably more widespread than revival historians have supposed – extending to all four nations of the United Kingdom!

From war to witness

The Great War had a devastating effect on the coastal towns of East Anglia. Lowestoft saw over 700 men die in action (from a population of 40,000, this was twice the national average).

The town was also heavily bombarded by the German Navy, and there was constant fear of Zeppelin raids. Then, as the war ended, the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic struck, killing many hundreds across the region. On top of all this, the fishing industry, upon which Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth were heavily dependent, was suffering from severe depression, and many faced enormous financial difficulties.

It would seem quite remarkable that a powerful spiritual revival could result from such dire circumstances. But it appears that the dreaded recurring news of the death of some close relative, friend or neighbour through war or plague caused many to seriously consider eternal issues. In addition, the apocalyptic atmosphere of the war led to an increased belief in the imminent second coming of Christ and in the urgency of immediate salvation.

Church growth in Balham

Two years before revival broke out in his Lowestoft Baptist Church, Scots-born Hugh Ferguson was seeing scores of mainly young people attend his weekly prayer meeting. Further south, in London, another Baptist minister, Douglas Brown, had seen his Balham congregation grow spectacularly, with conversions occurring weekly for many months on end. Impressed with reports he was hearing, Ferguson invited Brown to come and preach in Lowestoft.

Brown began his mission on Monday 6th March 1921. A prayer meeting was held each morning, a Bible study in the afternoon, and a gospel address in the evening. Brown’s powerful preaching drew curious town-folk by the hundreds to the London Road church. First signs of a deep stirring occurred at the close of the Wednesday evening service, when those wishing to surrender their lives to Christ were invited to go to the inquiry-room .

Lowestoft’s ‘Cloud-burst’

Ferguson was stunned by the response. “We had been praying for ‘showers’ that night and He gave us a ‘cloud-burst’”, he later shared. Rev Douglas BrownThe people poured down the aisles in their droves. There being far too many to deal with individually, Ferguson opened the schoolroom. “In they came – 50 or 60 people to start with… I had been speaking for only a few minutes, the door opened and another batch came in. Then I tried to speak to them again; and again the door opened and another batch came in. It was a wonderful sight! That night between 60 and 70 of my dear young people, those we had been praying to God for…passed from death to life”.¹

Meetings were transferred to the Fishermen's Bethel, then to Christ Church, and eventually to the larger 1,100-seater St John’s Church. In all these venues the meetings were packed, and the atmosphere electric. People flocked from miles around, and over 500 conversions were recorded in the four weeks of meetings.

East Anglia avalanche

Douglas Brown returned to Lowestoft in May, when he concentrated his efforts on the villages close to the town, before holding missions in Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth and Cambridge. In each of these places there resulted a notable move of the Spirit, with hundreds being converted to Christ.

Another campaign, led by the Salvation Army a few months later, saw hundreds of further conversions across the region.² East Anglia had clearly been witness to one of the most stirring periods of spiritual awakening in its history.

Fire among the fisherfolk

Jock Troup preaching in the open-airBut it didn’t stop there! A further burst of spontaneous revival broke out in Yarmouth a few months later, in October, when hundreds of Scottish fishermen descended on the town in pursuit of the herring migration. Stirrings of post-war revival had in fact begun in Scotland as early as 1919 (notably on the Orkney isle of Westray, and in the Aberdeenshire villages of Cairnbulg and Inverallochy).

But in Yarmouth it was unleashed in full power on the Scottish seamen. Hundreds of lives transformed - many through Jock Troup's passionate preaching - the fishermen ‘carried’ the revival fires home to their native ports, and a massive trail of explosive revival ensued, centred on the Aberdeenshire coast, but extending as far north as Sutherland and as far south as Fife and the Borders town of Eyemouth.

Waves of revival blessing

But even this wasn’t the end of it. Although completely overlooked in revival literature, waves of blessing swept across many other parts of the British Isles during the early 1920s. A movement spread through areas of Cornwall and Devon from the spring of 1921 and into ‘22, as Dave Mathews, a convert of the famed Welsh revival, preached to huge audiences.³

In south Wales, too, a time of awakening began in the Grangetown district of Cardiff as a result of prayer, with Australian evangelist Lionel Fletcher preaching on Sundays to congregations of around 3,000. “Touches of the 1904 revival” were also experienced during a mission in Swansea in the summer of 1921, with 300 publicly accepting Christ, while from New Year’s Eve of that year, a “striking movement of the Spirit” occurred in Newport, the majority of converts of which were married men and women.⁴

Three years of glory

Across the Irish Sea, Ulster was already in the throes of “three years of glorious revival” – amidst mass unemployment, mass emigration and deep political turmoil – when the abruptly-Rev W P Nicholsonspoken W. P. Nicholson undertook a mission in his home town of Bangor in October 1920. From here, and from Portadown, Lisburn, Belfast and Newtonards came a surge of converts, with lasting testimony, and the drawing of comparisons with the great Ulster revival of 1859.⁵

The Lowestoft revival of 1921 was part of a movement of the Holy Spirit right across the East Anglian landmass. But as we have seen, this regional movement was itself part of a much more widespread movement throughout all four nations of the United Kingdom in the early 1920s.

God can!

That this should happen in the immediate aftermath of the first global war in history, with the horrendous death-toll, horrific devastation and deeply demoralising effect on the British populace, is nothing short of staggering. It shows how the Spirit can move when life is precarious, when uncertainty abounds, and when people are compelled to look outside themselves for answers to life’s deepest questions.

A century later, the British Isles faces another plague (albeit less deadly than the Spanish flu), a consequent state of economic meltdown, and an ongoing slip into secularism and anti-Christian sentiment. From almost any angle, the outlook appears desperately bleak. But let us be inspired from the past: God is more than able to surprise us, using those who abandon themselves to prayer and to absolute obedience to his will – even amidst the darkness of present circumstances – for his own purposes and for his own glory.

For more information on the widespread move of God in Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom in the 1920s, see my study, ‘Glory in the Glen: A History of Evangelical Revivals in Scotland 1880-1940’ (2009), and also David Pike’s detailed blogs, ‘East Anglia 1921: A Revival Centenary’ and ‘Wales & the 1921 Revival’.

Endnotes
1 Hugh P. E. Ferguson, 'The Revival in East Anglia', Keswick Year Book 1921.
2 Nigel Paterson, ‘Change of the Tide’, Southampton, 2020, p.182.
3 Christian Herald 19th January 1922, p. 46.
4 The Christian 12th May, 30th June 1921.
5 Stanley Barnes, ‘All for Jesus: The Life of W. P. Nicholson’, Belfast 1996, pp.60-8.