Sunderland and Alexander Boddy

Boddy had trained as a solicitor, and he wrote travel books as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He came to All Saints as curate in 1884 under a vicar debarred from preaching for drunkenness, and he took full charge two years later.

He stood with Evan Roberts in the pulpit at Ton-y-Pandy and carried Roberts's message home to Sunderland. His procession went to sing beside Roker football ground, and a paper he later reprinted says about fifteen thousand were at the match, their cheers breaking into the singing. He wrote later that Wales “was intended by the Lord as a preparation” for the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.

At the start of March he crossed the North Sea and went on through Germany, Denmark and Sweden to Kristiania, now Oslo. He knelt in the upper room of the mission and received his baptism there. He was in eight meetings over four days and wrote that the scenes there “were more supernatural” than those in Wales.

That summer he took a pamphlet, Pentecost for England, to the Keswick Convention, and Taylor says it was coolly received. Boddy wrote in it that “not more than perhaps half-dozen persons in Great Britain” were known to him to have the experience.

Barratt arrived on Saturday 31 August. The meeting of the next night ran until four in the morning. Two seekers, Boddy wrote in a leaflet Taylor quotes, “entered right in and went right through into Pentecost”. Barratt stayed about six weeks by Boddy's reckoning and seven by Taylor's.

The Sunderland Echo reported the meetings on 30 September, and the London papers followed. The Daily Chronicle of 8 October wrote of one seeker, “He writhed like an animal in pain, but nothing came of his raving”, as Taylor quotes it. Boddy wrote of the reporters, “We did not want them, but could not help it”, and he said cranks and mischief-makers came too.

Taylor writes that Barratt names 17 who spoke and that there were no more than 50 by December. Boddy's own later counts for all Great Britain are “Perhaps 800” a year on and “probably more than a thousand” in 1910, and they have no list behind them.

The first convention ran from 6 to 11 June 1908. Barratt, Jonathan Paul, Wigglesworth and the Jeffreys brothers came in those years, and Cecil Polhill first met Boddy at the first of them.

Confidence reported perhaps 300 delegates from out of town in 1912, with others turned away at night, and no tally stands behind that. Boddy gave no count for 1908.

Confidence began that April as a free monthly. Taylor counts 141 issues to 1926 and writes that it never went above 6,000 copies. The Pentecostal Missionary Union followed the next January, with Polhill at its head and Boddy as its editorial secretary.

He wrote in 1912 that “We do not ask them to leave their Churches”. His daughter said that Wigglesworth and others pressed him in 1922 to start a denomination, and that he felt he could not leave the Church of England. Taylor writes that his Pentecostal work went on without resistance from his bishop, Handley Moule.

He backed the war on the ground of the promise to Belgium, and the parish hall became a military hospital. He pointed conscientious objectors to an article against their view. Taylor writes that this patriotic stand alienated many Pentecostals, and his son James was shot down over France in 1917.

In 1922 he moved to the quieter parish of Pittington, and he warned from 1923 that each issue might be the last. He had granted in 1910 that “Some have been permitted to go back”, and in 1914 that others had gone into fanaticism. He died at Pittington in 1930.