INGRAM, JAMES (d. 1788), Methodist exhorter, and afterwards Independent minister;
the date of his birth is unknown, but his home was Cwm Brith in Cefnllys parish, Rads. (Cylch. Cymd. Hanes M.C., xxxv, 47). As a lad, he came under Howel Harris's influence, and in Nov. 1742 (ibid, 24), at Erwood, it was arranged that he should be Harris's amanuensis and travelling-companion; it was he who, after 1743, took the minutes of the Associations, and much of his work as copyist of Harris's letters appears among the Trevecka records. He was also an exhorter, and indeed is remembered chiefly because he was ‘pressed’ for the army in 1744 (Tadau Meth., i, 222-3) — a common device for persecuting Methodist exhorters, but illegal when applied to Ingram, who was under-sized; strenuous exertions by Harris, by Marmaduke Gwynne (see under Gwynne of Garth), and by the countess of Huntingdon, procured his release and he resumed exhorting. The Trevecka letters include some forty letters by Ingram or to him, between Jan. 1743 and July 1750. He parted company with Harris at the ‘disruption’ (1750); indeed, their correspondence becomes thin from 1747 onwards. A Moravian record at Haverfordwest (Cymm., xlv, 34) tells us that Ingram became an Independent, and that he d. as Independent pastor at Ludlow. This note, however, leaves a blank of fully twenty years in his career, for the pastor of Corve Street church at Ludlow in 1750 was a Jenkyn or Jenkins (he was a Welshman), and according to the ‘Diary’ of Leominster Moravian congregation (Traf. Cymd. Hanes Bed., 1935, 16) Jenkyn did not d. till 1770; then (Eliot, Congregationalism in Shropshire, 102), ‘the next pastor was Mr. Ingram of Maesgronnin, Brecon’ — Maesyronnen, Rads., in fact — ‘this pastor d. in 1788, and was buried in the chapel yard.’ But Ingram can hardly have been pastor of Maesyronnen, for the roll of pastors there is fairly continuous from 1748 to 1775 (H. Egl. Ann., ii, 528), and does not include his name. Possibly Ingram was a member of that (quasi-Methodist) congregation, and acted as lay-preacher there and in the surrounding countryside.
Author:
Emeritus Professor Robert Thomas Jenkins, C.B.E., D.Litt., Ll.D., F.S.A., (1881-1969), Bangor.
