Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Nuttall, Enos
NUTTALL, ENOS (1842–1916), bishop of Jamaica, primate and first archbishop of the West Indies, was born at Clitheroe 26 January 1842, the eldest son of James Nuttall, farmer and builder, of Coates, St. Mary-le-Gill, Yorkshire, by his first wife, Alice, daughter of William and Martha Armistead, of Aynhams, in the same parish. His education was such as his mother and the parish school could give him, but he developed powers of self-tuition, and being placed by his father in charge of a farm, gave his leisure to learning. James Nuttall was a Wesleyan, and Enos, while constant in his attendance at church, became at seventeen a ‘local preacher’ of some power. Anxious for mission-work abroad, he applied to the Rev. George Osborn [q.v.], secretary of the Wesleyan missionary society, was accepted, and, after a period of training under the Rev. Andrew Kessen, was posted by the society to Jamaica, for which he sailed on 2 December 1862 in his twenty-first year, to work as a layman.
While, however, his brother Ezra (1850–1915) won distinction in South Africa as a Methodist minister, Enos offered himself in Jamaica for the ministry of the Church of England. He was ordained deacon on 18 February 1866 in the cathedral at Spanish Town, and priest on 8 April in the parish church, Kingston, where fifty years later (23 February 1916) his last sermon was addressed to a departing war-contingent. He was appointed ‘island curate’ of St. George's, Kingston, with a stipend derived from the government, and technically he retained the post till his death. In December 1869 notice was given that state-endowment (saving some life interests) would cease at the end of that year, and Nuttall, young as he was, took a leading part in the reorganization of the disestablished Church of England in Jamaica, helping to draft its canons and to settle its financial system, and engaging in public controversy with the governor, Sir John Peter Grant [q.v.]. He was made secretary of synod in 1870 and of the diocesan board of finance in 1874. Archbishop Tait recognized his work by giving him in 1879 the Lambeth degree of B.D.
In 1880, on the resignation of Bishop George William Tozer, the synod chose Nuttall as bishop of Jamaica, and he was consecrated by Tait in St. Paul's Cathedral on 28 October. From 1881 to 1891 he was also responsible for the supervision of the diocese of British Honduras, while his efforts among the West Indians working on the Panama canal caused that district to be transferred temporarily in 1885 to the diocese of Jamaica. In 1883 the first meeting of the provincial synod of the West Indies was held in Jamaica, five bishops attending, and Nuttall was mainly responsible for drafting its canons and constitutions. He was elected primate of the West Indies in 1893 in succession to William Piercy Austin, bishop of Guiana, and in 1897, in consequence of a resolution of the West Indian bishops passed (30 July) during the Lambeth Conference, he assumed the title of archbishop of the West Indies.
On 14 January 1907 Jamaica was visited by a destructive earthquake. At the moment the archbishop was attending a meeting of the West India Agricultural Conference; his coolness averted a panic, and his immediate organization and guidance of all the measures for relief and reconstruction were beyond praise. Throughout his fifty-four years in Jamaica he was intimately concerned in the daily welfare of the islanders—education, nursing, housing, agriculture—and was in constant consultation with the Colonial Office at home.
Nuttall married in 1867 Elizabeth Duggan, daughter of the Rev. Philip Chapman, a Wesleyan minister, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. In his later years, in spite of frequent visits to England, his health failed, though his hold on the diocese did not relax nor did his pastoral zeal abate. He died at Bishop's Lodge, Kingston, on 31 May 1916, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew, Halfway Tree. There is a portrait in oils at Bishop's Lodge. His publications, besides many charges and sermons, include The Churchman's Manual (1894) and The Jamaica Day School Catechism (1905).
[The Times, 3 June 1916; Frank Cundall, Life of Enos Nuttall, 1922; J. B. Ellis, The Diocese of Jamaica, 1913; Jamaica Diocesan Gazette, July 1924; H. Lowther Clarke, Constitutional Church Government, 1924; personal knowledge.]