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Hackney has long had a proud
tradition of non-conformity, but one of the stranger sects associated with the area, if
only briefly, has today been all but forgotten. Probably not many people know that a
century ago, a certain John Hugh Smyth-Pigott declared himself the messiah. And it's
almost certain that no one knows he did so in neighbouring Clapton, at what was then known
as the Church of the Ark of the Covenant, which had been built by members of the
Agapemonite sect some ten years earlier, in 1892.
Somerset,
where they purchased a 200-acre plot of land and set about creating what was intended to
be a self-supporting community of some 60 disciples, all of them dedicated to the sect's
eccentric views on marriage, the messiah, immortality and the sect leader's
'unconventional' views on the role of women, his specially chosen spiritual 'brides', in
the newly established order.
John Hugh Smyth-Pigott fitted the bill to perfection. A charming,
feckless womaniser, he travelled from Dublin to the Clapton church on the corner of
Rookwood Road and Clapton Common to announce to an astonished and largely unprepared world
that he was the new messiah, 'God not man'. In the ensuing riots, and unable to provide
proof of his claim that he could walk across Clapton Pond, he left Hackney swiftly,
travelling to the quieter and less hostile environs of Somerset, where he Imodernised' the
order and committed himself to an even more vigorous and demanding succession of 'brides'
than had his predecessor: seven a week, according to one report. What his longsuffering
wife, Catherine, thought of this arrangement is not known.
March 1927. To have lost not just one immortal
messiah but two, in succession, was too much for the surviving community, which fell into
decline and eventually disbanded.