Percy Widdrington
{{Short description|English minister and socialist activist}}
{{Infobox person}}
Percy Elborough Tinling Widdrington (5 June 1873{{cite book |last1=Skeet |first1=Francis John Angus |title=History of the Families of Skeet, Somerscales, Widdrington, Wilby, Murray, Blake, Grimshaw, and Others |date=1906 |publisher=M. Hughes and Clarke}} – 13 February 1959) was a British socialist activist and religious minister.
Life
Born in Southampton, Widdrington studied at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he co-founded the university Fabian Society and also joined the Independent Labour Party. He met Enid Stacy, and married her in 1897. That year, he was ordained as an Anglican minister, and began working at St Philip's Church, in a deprived area of the city. In 1901, the couple relocated to Calderbrook in Lancashire, but Stacy died in 1903.{{cite web |title=Percy E T Widdrington (Reverend) |url=https://map.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk/items/show/179 |website=Mapping Women's Suffrage 1911 |publisher=University of Warwick |access-date=11 November 2024}}{{cite book |last1=Edwards |first1=Joseph |title=The Labour Annual |date=1896 |publisher=Clarion Publishing Company |location=Liverpool}}{{cite book |title=Crockford's Clerical Directory |date=1947}}
Following Stacy's death, Widdrington became a curate in Halton-with-Aughton. The vicar was J. H. Hastings, who with Widdrington and others founded the Church Socialist League.{{cite book |last1=Goodfellow |first1=I. |title=The Church Socialist League 1906-1923 : Origins, development and disintegration |date=1983 |publisher=Durham University |location=Durham |url=https://core.ac.uk/download/108398.pdf |access-date=11 November 2024}} In 1906, Widdrington was appointed as vicar at St Peter's Church in Coventry. There, he became active in the women's suffrage movement, supporting the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and in particular local activist Alice Lea. In 1911, Widdrington married Helen Dawson, joint secretary of the local WSPU branch, who he had originally met in Calderbrook.
In 1918, Widdrington moved to become vicar at St John and St Giles' Church, Great Easton in Essex. In 1922, he co-authored Return of Christendom, which argued for the combatting of individualism and moral decay which the authors saw as caused by capitalism.{{cite book |last1=Moses |first1=John Anthony |title=Trade Union Theory from Marx to Walesa |date=1990 |publisher=Berg |isbn=9780854961863}} This led, in 1923, to the dissolution of the Church Socialist League and its replacement with the League of the Kingdom of God. The new league endured but did not grow, and Widdrington gradually became less prominent. He died in Lichfield in 1959.
References
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Category:Alumni of St Edmund Hall, Oxford