Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

This New Testament belonged to William Randell (1823-1880). He acquired it in Dorset and took it with him when he sailed for Australia in 1854. The flyleaf records the date and place of his marriage to Sarah Randell, and the names and birthdates of their ten children.

William Randell, a mason and bricklayer, and Sarah Gillard, a housemaid, married at Weymouth Independent Chapel on 5 July 1854. The couple sailed as immigrants to Melbourne straight away, and then travelled on to New Zealand, arriving in Wellington on 12 February 1855. In 1865 William purchased land in St Mary Street in Thorndon, and in 1867 built a four-room cottage there. He added two more rooms to the cottage in 1874, and for a short while it housed all twelve members of his family.

As a young man William joined the Plymouth Brethren in Dorset, an evangelical assembly which taught that biblical study and prayer, rather than the intervention of ordained clergy, would lead the faithful to God. The Brethren believed that all the words in the Bible were literally true, and were sure that the Last Judgement was imminent. They had a narrow view of who would be saved from eternal damnation so as William’s great-granddaughter Beverley Randell notes, it was ‘a bleak rather than a comforting faith’. On one page of the Bible William wrote ‘William Randell Prepare to meet thy God’ – possibly a suggested tombstone inscription reflecting his worries about the afterlife and his preparation for the dreaded Day of Judgement. According to the family, these worries never left him.

The New Testament is well-worn, as it would have been used for daily Bible readings around the Randell family table in the 1860s and 1870s. When William died in 1880 Sarah and her children all left the Brethren with relief, and while some subsequently avoided religion altogether, others attended Anglican or Methodist services. Daughter Emily became Roman Catholic. The Bible, with the births of all the Randell children recorded on the flyleaf, was one of Sarah Randell’s most precious things, and she kept it with her until her death in 1921.

For Beverley, the list of names written in the Bible was an invaluable source of genealogical information and set her on the path of researching and publishing her family history. A Crowded Thorndon Cottage: The Story of William & Sarah Randell and their ten children was published in 1992, and because of that publication Beverley and her husband Hugh were able to convince others that they had a serious interest in saving the cottage and what might lie beneath it. When it came up for auction two years later they managed to buy it.

References
Randell, Beverley. 1992. A Crowded Thorndon Cottage: The story of William and Sarah Randell and their ten children. Wellington: Gondwanaland Press.
Randell, Beverley, and Susan Price. 2021. Unpublished research notes provided to curator.