Description:An abridged biography from the Handsworth Magazine. The full version is available as a download. The Reverend Tongue lived at 196 Albert Road in Handsworth.
The Rev. Edwin Tongue is the pastor of Union Row Congregational Church. He was born at Louth in Lancashire, in 1860, his father being a Primitive Methodist Minister. During his infancy his parents removed from Louth to Yorkshire and remained there residing in various towns until he was thirteen or fourteen years of age when his father, wishing to graduate, migrated into the Cambridge circuit.
Mr Tongue was about eighteen years old when he first met Dr Barrett, whom he describes as a man of exceptional gifts, both as a scholar and preacher and with a singularly impressive manner in the conduct of worship”. The young Methodist already awake to the fact that frequent changes had deprived his life of those roots which strike into the soil of one’s homeland and of those friendships which go back to childhood, was fascinated by the type of service and pastoral relation which Mr Barrett’s ministry represented.
In 1885, he entered upon his first pastorate – Whitchurch, Salop. He stayed there for six years during which time the church made steady progress. Out of a family connected for many generations with the congregation he took his wife – a sister of Mr Edward Gervas whose work on “Hamlet” at the last Festival was read so favourably and whose “Henry VIII Dances” composed for Irving’s revival of that drama are, if not in everybody’s mouth, at all musical people’s finger-ends.
In 1891 he was called to Union Row Church. He has been very popular here from the first and each succeeding year sees him more and more firmly installed in the hearts of his congregation. He is a cultured preacher and devoted pastor. He has worked zealously for his church and can look back with satisfaction to the many structural improvements the church fabric has undergone during his ministry here. Of able lieutenants he has a goodly company. Prominent among them are Mr Joseph Harris (an ex-chairman of Handsworth Local Board); Alderman Rollason, J.P., one of the most prominent men in West Bromwich; Mr Oliver Floyd, whose portrait appeared in a recent number of Handsworth; Mr Keay and Mr S Rutherford, deacons and leading spirits; Mr W J Harris, church secretary, who has been lately appointed hon. secretary of Handsworth Technical School and Mr Edwin Smith, the treasurer of the church.