PRITCHARD, William Hugh 1870 - 1950

Born at Holyhead in 1870. After a striking conversion, he began to preach, and his candidature for the Ministry was strongly supported by Hugh Price Hughes.

After two years in the Welsh work at Cardiff, he went to Handsworth College, and then spent two years in the Minehead and Dunster Circuit. For the next forty years he served in town and country circuits in the Midlands and the North of England, with extended terms at Stourbridge and Blyth. He spent seven most fruitful years in the Black Country, at Willenhall and Wednesbury, where he is still remembered with deep affection.

Friends recall how he once quieted a crying child in a crowded Sunday-school anniversary service by throwing her a bunch of keys, and thus won the staunch and generous support of her parents.

He was equally at home with old people, whom he loved to visit in the course of his zealous pastoral ministry in every circuit. His nine years of retirement were spent at Bridlington, where he preached regularly in both circuits; and monthly for three years at a Congregational church which was without a minister during the Second World War.

A man of deep convictions, tenaciously held, he preached the evangelical doctrines with Welsh passion and fervour. He was a cheerful Christian, with a family life approaching the ideal.

His sense of humour remained keen and active to the end, supporting that living faith which enabled him to endure his last illness with courage and fortitude, until his death on 25th January 1950, at the age of seventy-nine and in the fifty-first year of his ministry,

©Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes 1950