Walter Scott Adams

Walter Scott Adams was born in Manchester on January 27th 1877, the son of Rev. Richard Adams and his wife Frances Lucy Harriet Lane.

He was educated at Bolton Grammar School and Selwyn College, Cambridge, gaining a B. A. degree in 1899, and a M. A. in 1919. He, and his three brothers, Henry, Philip and Bernard, were all ordained as priests in the Church of England, and his sister Hilda Mary, became a missionary.

Between 1899 and 1910 he held the position of curate in several parishes from Cornwall to Glasgow, and between 1906 and 1909 he was chaplain to the Government Leper Hospital at Emjanyana in Cape Colony, South Africa. He became the curate at Christ Church in Glasgow on his return to Britain.

In 1911, he arrived in Daresbury as the curate at All Saints, where the Rev. Thomas Thorpe Lee-Jones was the vicar, and was soon involved in the life of the parish, acting as the secretary for the Rifle Club, as well as occasionally shooting for the team in competitions. When war was declared in 1914 he took the role of scoutmaster to the newly formed troop of Boy Scouts.

He was involved in encouraging volunteers to be trained in First Aid, and in raising funds for the Red Cross Sewing Meeting, when he sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at a concert held in the Milner Institute. In April 1915, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. and served in Malta and France.

In 1916 he was appointed chaplain to His Majesty’s Forces, serving in Corfu.

After the war, and gaining his M. A., he went to Manchester as vicar of St. Philip’s, Gorton, but he kept up connections with Daresbury, and in 1932 he was married to Elsie Mona Lee-Jones, the daughter of the late vicar, in a service at Daresbury Church, which included music he had composed especially for the occasion.

His new parish was at Corton in Norfolk, and eventually the couple retired to Newlyn in Cornwall, where Rev. Walter Scott Adams died in 1958. Elsie Mona Adams died in Wiltshire in 1977, at the age of 92. They are buried together in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard at Corton.