Mrs. Anne Nicholson

Mrs Anne Nicholson was the lady who gave St. Melyd’s church the stained glass in the east window and also the two panes that depict our Lord as the The Bread of Life and The True Vine in the chancel. She also helped pay for the brass eagle lectern.

Her obituary states that she was born at Talargoch House in 1823 as Annie Roberts. Her maternal grandfather was the lead mine agent and I suspect that she had been born in Talargoch Villa, the house we know as Plas Deva which is behind the wall next to the car sales place. Anyway, her life changed when she married Benjamin Nicholson, son of a Liverpool doctor and moved to Australia. Later, they spent many years travelling throughout the Empire before returning home to settle in Thornton Heath, Surrey. Her husband was a director of the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway and left her a fortune when he died in 1891. After the death of her husband she returned home and bought Nithsdale, a large house on Dyserth Road leading into Rhyl.

In 1892 she placed two stained glass windows in Christ Church, Welshpool, one in memory of her late father and mother-in-law, and the other of her late husband.  Also in that year she made her gift to St. Melyd’s. Our east window bears no memorial inscription but the chancel window is dedicated to her brothers Robert and John Roberts who had both been in the Royal Navy.

In 1893 the church, in what was then known as Newmarket, was restored and Anne Nicholson gave twenty guineas and a stained glass east window.  Also in 1893 she had St. Ann’s in Rhyl built at her sole expense of £1,500—about £150,000 in present-day value but remember that it was only a third of the size of the church we see there now. There was an incredible fuss but that must be a topic for the future—it was as sensational as the great Gwaenysgor School Rumpus.

She was in great demand as an opener of sales of work, fétes, garden parties and flower shows and her name was seldom missing from the local papers.  It was at a sale of work in Rhyl Town Hall that she made an unexpected revelation. The sale was to raise money for Bethel Chapel on Vale Road and the Rev Richards introduced her and thanked her, saying how much they appreciated the presence of Mrs Nicholson, who, though a member of the Church of England, had at all times shown her broad and true Christianity by helping every good cause in Rhyl and elsewhere. That drew a very surprising response from Mrs. Nicholson—she was not a member of the Church of England!

She died in October 1905 and was buried with her husband in Welshpool.  Her will was published—which they did in those days—in the Rhyl Journal. She looked after her family and servants but a great deal of her money went to charity. The list is much too long to include here but locally, she left £500 to the Alex of which she was particularly fond and had already donated two cots. (The Alex was a children’s hospital in those days.), £100 to the Rhyl Boys’ Brigade, £200 to the Men’s Convalescent Home, Rhyl and £100 for the endowment of St Ann’s Church.  By far the greater part went to hospitals, homes, asylums, institutes, orphanages and missions in Dumfries, London and Derby. She gave about £6,650—that is about £644,000 in present-day value to those charities but there was one curious omission, with the sole exception of St. Ann’s in Rhyl, there were no churches.