Revd Dr Thomas Stantial (1825-1906) graduated from Hertford College, Oxford, with an MA (1856) and a Doctorate in Civil Law (1864). Prior to coming to St John’s in 1884 he served as headmaster of two educational institutions, Bridgwater Grammar School, Somerset (1848-62) and Ramsgate College School (1862-75), being ordained to the priesthood while at the former. He was Vicar of St John the Evangelist Church, Clapham Rise, London, from 1875-84, and an Acting Chaplain to the Forces in 1884. He died in office at St John’s, Bury, on Maundy Thursday, 1906.
Stantial was an active member of the English Church Union (ECU) and president of the local branch. Founded in the 1860s, the ECU was committed to defending the Church’s faith, laws and practice, which it interpreted in a Catholic sense, in the face of those who defined the Church as Protestant and Reformed. Stantial disapproved of the idea of a memorial in Bury to Protestants martyred under the Catholic Queen Mary, referring to it in a sermon as ‘raking up the ashes of the past.’ He was strongly criticized for his views by Protestant organizations of the time.
Stantial’s Test-Book for Students… Preparing for the Universities or for Appointments in the Army and Civil Service, published in 1859, was widely used at the time by students cramming for the examinations for which it catered.
Stantial had two daughters and a son. The latter, the Revd Arthur Evered Stantial (1859-1949), was sometime Rector of Bacton, near Stowmarket, and Vicar of St John the Baptist, Felixstowe. Stantial is memorialised in the Church by a pair of windows at the east end of the south aisle.