The Revd Philip Thresher: Chaplain to Fareham Union

The Revd Philip Thresher was born in Fareham in 1802 into a well-established local family.

He studied at University College, Oxford, matriculating in March 1821 at the age of eighteen. He graduated BA in 1824 and proceeded MA in 1827. Oxford’s alumni records later identify him as chaplain to the Fareham Union.

The Fareham Union had been created under the nineteenth-century Poor Law system and brought together a group of surrounding parishes to provide relief for people in poverty. Its workhouse served people who were elderly, sick, disabled, orphaned, unemployed or otherwise unable to support themselves.

As chaplain, Philip’s ministry therefore took him into one of the hardest parts of Victorian society. He would have provided Christian worship, pastoral care and religious instruction for people living within the Union’s institutions, including many whose lives had been marked by illness, bereavement or extreme poverty.

His role gives us a different picture of nineteenth-century clergy from the parish vicars whose names appear elsewhere in Fareham’s history. Philip’s ministry was closely connected with people who had reached the edge of the social and economic system.

The Thresher family itself had strong links with Fareham. Philip was the son of William Thresher of Fareham, and other members of the family served both the Church and the wider community in Hampshire. His own children continued this tradition: one son, James Henville Thresher, also became a Church of England clergyman, while another, Philip, studied at Oxford and became a barrister.

Philip Thresher died on 10 March 1868.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul preserves the story of a Fareham clergyman whose ministry was exercised among some of the most vulnerable people in the district. Through him, the church is connected with the Victorian workhouse system and with the long Christian tradition of pastoral care among those facing poverty and hardship.