The Story of the House of Cassell
There was, however, in the chair at this meeting a man prepared to befriend him. It was Mr. John Meredith, the honorary secretary of the New British and Foreign Temperance Society. He and the Rev. W. R. Baker, a Congregational minister, sometime travelling secretary of the society, conceived a warm interest in this lonely young man with a mission when he called on them at their office in Tokenhouse Yard. Mr. Baker's sister, who saw him there, said there was nothing particularly prepossessing about him except " his simple and candid manner of expressing himself." And she adds, in her own homely style: "He had but little book education, and hands accustomed to labour, but he had a mind bent on improvement and a heart filled with love towards his deluded fellow-countrymen. My brother saw that he possessed considerable natural talent waiting opportunities to develop itself. He encouraged him, introduced him to many meetings, and met him at many more. From that time, whenever he required counsel or friendly sympathy, John Cassell knew where to seek it, and thus . . . my brother had the satisfaction of seeing, after a lapse of a few years, the same individual rise to an enviable position in our great metropolis."
Cassell spent six months in London, holding temperance meetings wherever he could get anybody to listen to him. One of the early teetotal reformers was John Williams, w^ho had been a chief carpenter in the Navy, but in the 'thirties was in business as carpenter and undertaker in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, now Sardinia Street. Williams was a devout Methodist, zealous for missionary work in such unpromising regions as Clare Market, and had helped to start one of the first total abstinence societies in London. To him Cassell brought an introduction from a tradesman of the same craft in Manchester, and they joined forces at once. Williams's grandson, Mr. Farlow Wilson, late printing manager at La Belle Sauvage, thus describes their methods in his "Recollections of an Old Printer":
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