BATE, WILLIAM JOHN (1866-1952)

BATE, WILLIAM JOHN, Anglican rector, Newcastle and Nelson, 1910-32; b. Plymouth, England, 10 Aug 1866, s/o George John Bate and Ann Bennett; m. 1892, Alice Colclough McMullen (d/o John Mercier McMullen, author of The History of Canada from its First Discovery to the Present Time), of Brockville, Ont.; d. Saint John, 10 Jan 1952.

William John Bate was educated at the ancient Cathedral School in Bristol, and elsewhere in England, and was trained for the Anglican priesthood at St Augustine's College in Canterbury. He graduated in 1888 and came to Canada in 1891. He was ordained a priest at Brockville, Ont., in 1892 and served first as a missionary in that province. In 1897 he transferred to New Brunswick to be rector of Upham and Hammond, in Kings County. He was appointed rector at Dalhousie in 1905 and at Newcastle in 1910.

Bate, who had "a cheery presence and fine personality," enjoyed a successful twenty-two-year term at Newcastle, his only recorded complaint being that he was so short of Sunday school teachers that he had to recruit most of the members of his family for these positions. In 1924 he was appointed to the largely honorary position of rural dean of Chatham. He left the Miramichi in 1932 to become an assistant at Christ Church Cathedral in Fredericton, and he stayed there until his retirement in 1936.

Bate and his wife, Alice C. McMullen, raised four sons and two daughters. Their eldest son, Alban F. Bate, was a prominent clergyman in New Brunswick, whose achievements were the subject of an entry in the British Who's Who. Two of their younger sons served with the Canadian forces in World War I, and Gunner George J. M. Bate died at Amiens in 1918. In 1929 their daughters Muriel and Marian Bate were nurses in New York. Later that year Muriel Bate was married to Hubert LeRoy Crocker of Millerton.