Ralph MANSFIELD

MANSFIELD, RALPH (b. Liverpool, England 12 March 1799; d. Parramatta, NSW, 1 Sept 1880). Wesleyan missionary, newspaper editor, businessman.

Mansfield began preaching at 18 and was ordained for mission work in NSW where he arrived in Sept 1820. He was an able and eloquent preacher, far the best of the early Wesleyans. His work was mainly in the Sydney-Parramatta area, though he spent a period in Hobart. He was secretary of the Sydney Auxiliary Wesleyan Missionary Society. In 1820 he married Lydia Fellows, and on 5 April 1832, Lucy Shelley.

With his colleagues, Benjamin Carvosso (q.v.) and Walter Lawry (q.v.), Mansfield started the colony's first religious journal, the Australian Magazine. Despite its promise, its life was short because the London Wesleyan Missionary Committee believed that it would distract the missionaries from their proper labours.

Regrettably, Mansfield and his fellows were distracted by something far more damaging to the Wesleyan cause than a literary magazine. This was a long-running and vehement quarrel with the Missionary Committee itself over the issues of relations with the Anglican chaplains, detailed committee control of missionary work from half a world away, and the level of allowances necessary for the missionaries to survive in Australian conditions.

Mansfield contributed unwisely to the first by preaching a series of mid-week sermons attacking the Calvinist doctrines of some of the chaplains and was a staunch supporter of local control and adequate allowances. Youthful inexperience and personal tragedy (he was in process of losing six of the seven children of his first marriage) perhaps made him more aggressive than was wise, but the mere fact that Mansfield had to conduct the Australian end of the correspondence ensured that he would bear a disproportionate share of the blame in a dispute which rendered Wesleyan work in NSW ineffective throughout the twenties.

The unreasonable restriction of missionary allowances by the Committee led to Mansfield's retirement from the office of missionary on 27 October 1828, though he continued to be a regular preacher in Methodism's Sydney pulpits. Two attempts to re-enter the active ministry were rejected by an unforgiving Missionary Committee.

From 1829-32, Mansfield was editor (at first jointly with Robert Howe) of the Sydney Gazette. In 1831 he printed the first issue of the Government Gazette, while he started the New South Wales Magazine in 1833 and contributed many articles to Lang's the Colonist throughout the 1830s and later edited it for a brief period while Lang was overseas. He tried his hand as a bookseller but quickly left that business.

From 1836, he advocated gas lighting for Sydney and was involved in the formation of the Australian Gaslight Company and was a director and secretary of the Company, holding the latter office until 1879. From 1836 Mansfield was also a Director and Treasurer of the Australian Steam Conveyance Company and Joint-Secretary of the Australian School Society as well as secretary of the Protestant committee to oppose Governor Bourke's attempt to introduce the Irish National Education system.

Mansfield was appointed editor of the Sydney Herald in 1841 and was perhaps the dominant influence behind the paper until he left office in 1854. In 1841 and 1846 he published 'analytical views' of the census, and in 1847 a complete analysis of those figures and those of the 1836 census. This has been claimed to be the first purely statistical work published in Australia.

An ardent temperance worker, Mansfield strongly supported all work for the social advancement and moral well-being of the colony. Yet, while his general contribution to NSW was great, it continued to be a matter for regret that the events of the 1 820s deprived the Wesleyan Church of his great skills as evangelist, writer and administrator.

ADB 2; Australian Encyclopaedia (Sydney, 1959); Wesleyan Advocate 25 Sept 1880; SMH, 3 Sept 1880; J Colwell, Illustrated History of Methodism (Sydney, 1904); D Wright & E Clancy, The Methodists: A history of Methodism in NSW (Sydney, 1993)

DON WRIGHT