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The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at , is thought to be the oldest surviving organisation in the world and is the only remaining in the United Kingdom. It now advocates and is a member of Humanists International.

History
The Society's origins trace back to 1787, as a nonconformist congregation, led by Elhanan Winchester, rebelling against the doctrine of eternal damnation. The congregation, known as the Philadelphians or , secured their first home at Parliament Court Chapel on the eastern edge of London on 14 February 1793.

William Johnson Fox became minister of the congregation in 1817. By 1821 Fox's congregation had decided to build a new place of worship, and issued a call for "subscriptions for a new Unitarian chapel, South Place, Finsbury".

File:South Place Chapel postcard.jpg|Postcard of South Place Chapel File:Front of Interior of South Place chapel.jpg|Front of interior of South Place Chapel. File:Rear of interior of South Place Chapel.jpg|Rear of interior of South Place Chapel. File:South Place Plaque.png|Commemorative plaque describing the South Place Chapel.

Subscribers (donors) included businessman and patron of the arts . In 1824 the congregation built a chapel at South Place, in the district of . The chapel was repaired by , of a family of London architects and builders. This chapel later became the home of South Place Ethical Society. The chapel stood on the site of what is now the office building known as 8 Finsbury Circus; the building has an entrance in South Place which bears a plaque commemorating the chapel.

In 1929 they built new premises, , at 37 (now numbered 25) Red Lion Square, in nearby , on the site of a tenement, previously a factory belonging to James Perry, a pen and ink maker. Conway Hall is named after an American, Moncure D. Conway, who led the Society from 1864 to 1885 and from 1892 to 1897, during which time it moved further away from . Conway spent the break in his tenure in the United States, writing a biography of . In 1888 the name of the Society was changed from South Place Religious Society to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) under 's leadership. In 1950 the SPES joined the . In 1969 another name change was mooted, to The South Place Humanist Society, a discussion that sociologist Colin Campbell suggests symbolized the death of the ethical movement in England.Colin Campbell. 1971. Towards a Sociology of Irreligion. London: MacMillan Press.

The original name, South Place Ethical Society, was retained until 2012, when it changed to Conway Hall Ethical Society. In November 2013 Elizabeth Lutgendorff was elected Chair of the Conway Hall General Committee, becoming the youngest Chair in the society's history. On 1 August 2014 the society became a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with a new charitable object: "The advancement of study, research and education in humanist ethical principles". This replaced the previous object: "The study and dissemination of ethical principles and the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment."

Humanist ceremonies
In 1935 twenty members of the Society signed a document stating that Conway Hall was their regular place of worship. It was therefore certified for marriages by the Registrar-General until 1977 when the Deputy Registrar-General ruled that the Hall could not be used for weddings under the terms of the Places of Worship Registration Act. This followed the report in the winter of 1975 of a marriage solemnised at Conway Hall. He was probably influenced by the 1970 ruling of , that marriages could only be solemnised in places whose principal use is for the "worship of God or to reverence to a deity.
(1986). 9780521266727, Cambridge University Press. .
Until the ruling the Society had an established tradition of performing secular funerals, memorial ceremonies and of children at Conway Hall.

Sunday Concerts
The Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall can be traced back to 1878 when the Peoples Concert Society was formed for the purpose of "increasing the popularity of good music by means of cheap concerts". Many of these concerts were held at the South Place Institute, but in 1887 the Peoples Concert Society had to cut short its season through lack of funds. At that point the South Place Ethical Society undertook the task of organising concerts under the first Honorary Secretary Alfred J. Clements and Assistant Secretary George Hutchinson who continued to run them under the name 'South Place Sunday Concerts'. The thousandth concert was played on 20 February 1927, and the two-thousandth concert was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 9 March 1969. Clements was the Honorary Secretary for over 50 years, from 1887 to 1938. The Clements Memorial Prize for chamber music was set up in his name in 1938. Composer Richard Henry Walthew also had a long association with the Sunday Concerts, from the early 1900s until his death in 1951.Dunhill, Thomas. 'Richard Henry Walthew' in Cobbett's Cyclopaedic Survey of Chamber Music (1929)

The concert series provided a rare platform for the work of women composers during its first few decades. The programming included a still small, but significant number of compositions by women compared to other concerts in London. Women composers featured in the first 1,000 concerts included Alice Verne-Bredt, sisters Amy, Annie and Jessie Grimson, , , , and Maude Valérie White. The women musicians of Conway Hall’s past Conwayhall.orgJessica Claire Beck. The Women Musicians of South Place Ethical Society, 1887 – 1927 , Manchester Metropolitan University thesis (2018) via 1library.net

Hawkins Catalogue
Frank A. Hawkins served as Treasurer of the Sunday Concerts for 24 years from 1905 until his death in June 1929. He collected nearly 2,000 pieces of sheet music of principally classical and romantic chamber music, which were bequeathed to the Society. The collection has been catalogued by composer and instrument combination and is held on the Conway Hall premises. Conway Hall. South Place Sunday Concerts history and archive conwayhall.org.uk

Conway Memorial Lecture
The Conway Memorial Lecture was inaugurated by the Society in 1910 to honour Moncure Conway who died in 1907. The decision to create the Lecture was made in 1908 and the first Lecture, The Task of Rationalism, was given by John Russell and is presumed to have been chaired by Edward Clodd.

Prominent lecturers have included , , , , Edward John Thompson (1942), , , , Margaret Knight, Christopher Hill (1989), (1915), (1992), , Laurens van der Post, (1990), Fenner Brockway, , , , and . No Lectures took place in 1958-1959 and between 1961-1966.

The 2014 Conway Memorial Lecture was given by Professor on 26 June 2014. It was titled "Things I Never Knew About My Father" and detailed the MI5 files kept on her father, Jacob Bronowski, who sixty years earlier had delivered that year's Conway Memorial Lecture. Things I Never Knew About My Father , Conway Hall

Prominent members (past and present)

Other notable people associated with the Society
  • Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the National Secular Society, and his daughter Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner
  • Sophia Dobson Collet, who contributed hymns;
    (1974). 9780719005572, Manchester University Press.
    her brothers Charles, the Society's musical director, and Collet Dobson Collet
  • and her sister Sarah Fuller Flower Adams, who contributed hymns
  • , C20 director of Sunday concerts formerly held at Conway Hall
  • , assistant minister to Fox in 1841
  • , lecturer from 1927
  • , in whose name the Society administers an annual prize since 2009
  • , C20 pacifist and socialist
  • , C19 freethinker
  • , C20 psychic researcher, born on the site
  • , C19 theologian, tutor to Fox
  • Rosemary Rapaport, who launched what would become the at the Hall in 1962
  • Archibald Robertson, popular lecturer 1945–60
    (1986). 9780521266727, Cambridge University Press. .
  • Samuel Sharpe, who joined South Place Chapel in 1821
  • , C20 actor
  • Anna Wheeler, 1820s speaker on women's rights

Journal
The journal of the society, which records its proceedings, is the Ethical Record. The issue shown for December 2012 was volume 117, number 11. This edition outlines the procedure that took place for the historic change of name the previous month.

Sunday Assembly
From 2014, Conway Hall was host to the , a popular secular service which took place on the first and third Sunday of every month until it moved to in 2024.

See also
  • Ethical Movement
  • International Humanist and Ethical Union
  • National Secular Society
  • Rationalist Association

Sources
  • Conway, Moncure Daniel. Centenary History of the South Place Society: based on four discourses given in the chapel in May and June, 1893. London/Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1894
  • MacKillop, Ian (1986). The British Ethical Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

: , , , , , , , ,
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