KNOTT, James Edward 1880 - 1961

Born at Holmfirth in 1880. He was trained for the teaching profession but became a candidate for the Wesleyan Ministry through participating in a Foreign Missions debate in his home circuit.

His ministerial training was at Didsbury College, which he entered in 1906 after a pre-collegiate year at Wigton. The circuits in which he travelled were Withernsea, Christchurch, Norwich, Wellingborough, Bacup, Chorley, Hornsea, Shotley Bridge, Cannock. Malton, Ripon and Barton-on-Humber.

In all of them he displayed a faithful and conscientious service to God. He had a strong sense of the gravity of his calling and of the solemnity of the momentous truths about God and man, life and death.

His four years in the Ripon Circuit provided much opportunity for work amongst servicemen, and tributes to the effectiveness of this ministry were received from the many parts of the world to which soldiers and airmen were sent.

In preparing the plan his consideration for his fellow preachers was exemplary, and he exercised much time and patience in assessing the physical capabilities of aged preachers serving in wide country circuits.

The death of his son, at an early age, and, later, the untimely death of his only son-in-law, clouded the later years of his life, but amid the changing scenes he never spared himself in the service of God and His Church.

He died on 4 October 1961, in his eighty-first year of age and the fifty-fourth of his ministry.

©Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes 1962