The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in England

The LDS Church began in the USA, and was taken to England after a revelation received by Joseph Smith. In 1837, Smith approached Heber C. Kimball in the Kirtland Temple and called him to proclaim the gospel in England. Shortly after, several other missionaries were also called, including Orson Hyde, Willard Richards, and Joseph Fielding. They left Kirtland, Ohio on 13 June 1837. Three other missionaries, John Goodson, Isaac Russell, and John Snyder, were also called to go to England. They joined the missionaries from Kirtland in New York, and the group set off together on 1 July on the vessel Garrick.[4][5][6]

The missionaries arrived at Liverpool on 20 July 1837. They went by coach to Preston two days later,[7] where Joseph Fielding had a brother who would briefly allow them to preach in his Vauxhall Chapel.[8]^:34[9] It was election day in Preston, and as their coach arrived, the missionaries noted a large banner in bold gilt letters that bore the inscription “Truth Will Prevail”, which they took as a good omen for their work.[7]

The following day they were invited to preach to the congregation of the Reverend James Fielding,[10] Joseph Fielding's brother. Kimball spoke first at the meeting, followed by Hyde. The missionaries were invited to return to Vauxhall Chapel twice after that. However, after seeing that some of his members were following the LDS Church, James Fielding no longer allowed the missionaries in the chapel.[4]

Within the week, nine of Fielding's congregation sought baptism, which took place on Sunday morning 30 July 1837 in the nearby River Ribble, before a crowd of thousands. One of these new converts was Ann Elizabeth Walmesley, an invalid who was miraculously healed after her baptism.[4] Another convert was George D. Watt.[8]^:34[9] On 6 August 1837 the first branch of the church was established in Preston, which remains today the oldest continuously functioning unit of the LDS Church.[11][12][13]

In September 1837, the group obtained access to a building in Preston by way of the Preston Temperance Society. The building was known as "The Cockpit", and meetings began to be held there regularly, including the first general conference of the LDS Church in the UK, which was held on Christmas Day 1837.[14][15] By the time this conference was held, there were several branches, or small congregations, established in Alston, Bedford, Whittle, Daubers, Hunter's Hill, Chatburn, and Penwortham, among other cities. Another mission conference was held in April of the following year, and the church had grown to over 15,200 in membership. At this conference, Joseph Fielding was called as the mission president, with Richards and Clayton as counselors. Hyde and Kimball left after the conference for Liverpool.[4]

On 8 April 1838, a second conference was held, at which Joseph Fielding became president of the British mission, and Richards and William Clayton became counselors. On 20 April 1838, the other members of this first mission, who were not staying on, left Liverpool to return to the USA aboard, once again, the ship Garrick.[8]

In 1838, Joseph Smith announced that the Quorum of the Twelve should travel to the United Kingdom on a mission.[16] They arrived between January and April 1840. Among the church's first apostles to arrive was Wilford Woodruff who, in March 1840, was introduced to leaders of the United Brethren and began preaching to their congregation. A constable had been sent by the rector of the parish with a warrant to arrest him. At the close of the meeting seven people offered themselves for baptism, including four preachers and the constable. Within 18 days, two of the most influential members of the United Brethren, John Benbow and Thomas Knighton, were baptised. Thirty days later, Woodruff had baptised 45 preachers and 160 members of the United Brethren, who put into his hands their Gadfield Elm Chapel and 45 houses licensed for preaching. By 1841, nearly 1,800 additional people had converted, including all but one of the 600 United Brethren.[17] The Gadfield Elm Chapel became the first church's first chapel in the United Kingdom and is the oldest extant chapel of the LDS Church and was restored between 1994 and 2000.[18][19]

In May 1840, the first issue of the Millennial Star, a magazine for British Latter-day Saints, was printed.[20] It would be published regularly until 1970, becoming the longest continuously published periodical of the LDS Church. By the end of 1840 there were 3,626 church members in Britain.[21]^:19

In 1841, richly-bound copies of the Book of Mormon were presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert by Lorenzo Snow, who received an audience with Her Majesty. On that occasion Queen Victoria autographed an album of Snow's, which became a prized possession in his family.[22] His elder sister, Eliza R. Snow was a prominent poet and songwriter of the era. She commemorated the occasion of her brother meeting the Queen in her poem "Queen Victoria", which includes the verse: "O would she now her influence bend, The influence of royalty; Messiah's Kingdom to extend, And Zion's nursing mother be. Though over millions called to reign, Herself a powerful nation's boast; 'Twould be her everlasting gain, To serve the King, the Lord of Hosts. The time, the time is near at hand, To give a glorious period birth: the Son of God will take command, And rule the nations of the Earth."[22][23]

By 1850, British membership had risen to 30,747 members (which was slightly more than the total in the United States at that time)[24] and a further 7,500 had already emigrated to the United States. Following the death of Joseph Smith and the subsequent migration west of the Latter-day Saints from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City, migration from the British Isles to the United States increased greatly.[21]^:20 This emigration was aided by the church's Perpetual Emigration Fund.[25]

The Pearl of Great Price, now part of the Standard Works of the LDS Church, was first compiled in Liverpool in 1851 by Franklin D. Richards. Within a year it had been translated into Welsh.[26]

In 1877, half of the 140,000 Latter-day Saints in Utah were of British origin.[27] This migration would leave its mark upon Utah, which as of 2000 had the highest percentage of population claiming English descent (29%) of any state in the USA.[28] By 1892, the church membership still in the British Isles had fallen to only 2,604, despite around 111,330 baptisms occurring between 1837 and 1900.[8][29] In a similar period of time at least 52,000[8] and up to 100,000 members had emigrated to the United States.[24]

Many of these early converts migrated to the USA to join the main body of the church in its pioneer movement West. John Moon brought the first company of 4 converts with him on the ship Britannia from Liverpool in June 1840. Another 800 members made the voyage the next year. Writing of the members preparing for one such ocean voyage, Charles Dickens described these pioneer Latter-day Saints in chapter 22 of his book The Uncommercial Traveller as, by his estimation, "the pick and flower of England".[30] In June 1894, however, Latter-day Saint leaders in America had begun to encourage the European members to remain in their homelands and build up the Church in those countries.

The Emigrants statue, located in Albert Dock, Liverpool, commemorates Mormon emigration from the port of Liverpool

In February 1913 an anti-Mormon riot in Sunderland possibly led to the death of an American missionary, Ralph H. Hendricks[31] though his death certificate stated he died from fever[32] and the LDS Church's own publication's obituary stated he died after a two-month illness.[33]

A well-organised 'anti-Mormon' campaign was mounted by various ministers and Latter-day Saints who had turned from the church. They lectured and published pamphlets accusing the missionary programme of being a disguise for Americans to enslave British girls as polygamous wives.[34] Missionaries were sometimes attacked. Opponents of the LDS Church demanded that Home Secretary Winston Churchill and the Home Office persuade Parliament to expel Latter-day Saint missionaries and refuse entry to more. Churchill opposed exaggerated claims and collected favorable police reports from key cities. When the 'Mormon question' came up in Parliament again, Churchill said that although he had not completed his investigation, he had found nothing against the LDS Church members.[35]

When the First World War began in 1914, all American LDS Church missionaries in the United Kingdom were evacuated back to the USA.[8] The Lloyd George ministry banned the church's missionaries from reentering Britain in 1918 after the war, despite mission president George Albert Smith's protest that they had peacefully worked in Britain for more than 80 years. Missionaries would not return in significant numbers until mid-1920, after United States Senators Reed Smoot and William H. King caused the American State Department to intervene.[36][37] The movie Trapped by the Mormons, inspired by Winifred Graham's book of the same title, inspired widespread anti-Mormon rhetoric throughout the British Isles.[37] The ban on LDS missionaries was in part because of fears of the prewar anti-Mormon violence resuming, but except for one 1922 attack during a church service in Edinburgh, incidents were minor. Although Graham and other anti-Mormons continued to denounce the church, the government told them that there was no evidence that missionaries were acting in a way to justify deportation.[36]

In 1937, leaders in the United Kingdom celebrated the church's centennial in the British Isles. During the first 100 years, 126,593 people had been baptised, and 52,000 of these had immigrated to the USA.

After the outbreak of the Second World War all the church's American missionaries were again evacuated. This was completed by early 1940 when Hugh B. Brown, then serving as president of the British Mission, returned to the USA. In his place a local Latter-day Saint, Andre K. Anastasiou, was appointed. Brown returned to the UK on 29 March 1944 and again began serving as the mission president.. American missionaries would begin to return in 1946.[38] In 1944 an additional 68 congregations were formed across the country.

In the 1950s, emigration to the USA began to be discouraged and local congregations proliferated.[39] The first LDS temple in England was the London Temple, now known as the London England Temple, dedicated in 1958 and located south of London in Newchapel, Surrey.[40]

According to D. Michael Quinn, in the late 1950s through to the early 1960s a new focus on growth in convert numbers led to the introduction of "Youth Baptism Program", which became colloquially known as the "Baseball Baptism Program". This used baseball and other team sports as a way to bring young teenage boys into the LDS Church. Introduced by mission president T. Bowring Woodbury, who led the British mission from October 1958 to January 1962, it dramatically increased the baptism rate for new converts (in 1962 there were 12,000 converts alone) but controversy over the focus on numbers, the pressure on missionaries from the British Mission headquarters and the use of deception to get boys to agree to baptism led to the program being ended by 1965, and excommunications (which was the process of cancelling membership at that time) of most of the inactive new converts followed.[41]

During the same period the LDS Church engaged in a massive building program. Prior to the administration of church president David O. McKay, most British congregations met in rented rooms and buildings. This was considered a detriment to the LDS Church's proselytizing and in the early 1960s a large number of chapels were constructed around the British Isles.[42]

Based on studies of information submitted to the Genealogical Society, it was estimated in 1971 that 80 percent of the members of the church in the world were of British extraction.[43]

In the early 1970s, the Mormon sex in chains case brought the church some unwanted publicity in national newspapers. A young missionary, Kirk Anderson, went missing in 1977, in Ewell, Surrey, after he was abducted from the steps of a church meetinghouse.[44] A few days later a freed Anderson made a report to the police that he had been abducted, driven to Devon, and imprisoned against his will, chained to a bed in a cottage, where Joyce Bernann McKinney (b. August 1949) — a former (1973) Miss Wyoming World[45][46][47][48] — had abducted, attempted to seduce, and then raped him.[49][50] The case became known by many sobriquets, including "The Mormon sex in chains case" and "The Case of the Manacled Mormon". The coverage was extensive in part because the case was considered so anomalous, involving as it did the issue of rape of a man by a woman. in 2010 documentary filmmaker Errol Morris made Tabloid (2010), based on the media sensation surrounding the story.[51]

In 1998 the LDS Church opened a new Missionary Training Centre in Chorley, Lancashire.[12]

In 2014, Tom Phillips, a former church stake president, brought a private prosecution for fraud against the current church president, Thomas S. Monson, through the British courts.[52] After a summons for Monson was issued by Westminster Magistrates' Court, the case was thrown out by Senior District Judge Howard Riddle[53] who ruled that the case was "an abuse of the process of the court" and that "the court is being manipulated to provide a high-profile forum to attack the religious beliefs of others".[54][55]

The LDS Church opens its Mormon Helping Hands programme in Britain. The project runs off of donations and volunteer work from church members, and provides service in local communities by Latter-day Saints who live there.[56][57]

In the summer of 2013, the United Kingdom hosted the first official church pageant outside of North America.[58] Titled "Truth Will Prevail", it told the story of early missionary efforts in Britain.[59] The pageant included 33 core cast members, 300 family cast, and a 150-voice choir.[60]

In 2013, the opening of the Tony Award-winning Broadway production called The Book of Mormon on London's West End, which was widely interpreted to be provocative, by its creators and church members.[61] The LDS reacted by putting advertisements on the London Underground and buses, many of them pointing to a website associated with the "I'm a Mormon" campaign. Many English members have posted their own views and testimonies on this website.[62]