James Fleming

James Fleming (1830–1908) was an Irish clergyman of the Church of England, public speaker and fund-raiser. A canon of York Minster, he became chaplain in ordinary to Queen Victoria and Edward VII, and was a close friend of the British royal family.

Early life Born at Carlow on 26 July 1830, he was from a Scots-Irish background, the youngest of five children of Patrick Fleming, M.D., of Strabane, who had married in 1820 Mary, daughter of Captain Francis Kirkpatrick. From 1833 to 1836 he was in Jamaica, his father having become paymaster to the 56th Regiment; and on his father's death in 1838 his mother, who survived to September 1876, moved to Bath, Somerset. His two brothers, William and Francis, were sent to Sandhurst, but ultimately took orders; William, a traditional Protestant, died vicar of Christ Church, Chislehurst, in May 1900.

Fleming went to King Edward VI's Grammar School, Bath, in 1840, and to Shrewsbury School in 1846, under Benjamin Hall Kennedy. He was in the school cricket team, and won the Millington scholarship, matriculating on 15 November 1849 at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. there in 1853, proceeding M.A. in 1857 and B.D. in 1864. Three times — 1901, 1903, and 1907— he was appointed William Jones lecturer (sometimes called the Golden lectureship) by the Haberdashers' Company. He published a manual on The Art of Reading and Speaking (1896), Our Gracious Queen Alexandra (1901) for the Religious Tract Society, and sermons. Fleming explained in an open letter that he had transferred a sermon by Thomas De Witt Talmage from a common-place book to Science and the Bible (1880) inadvertently, in reply to an 1887 pamphlet accusing him of plagiarism from Talmage's Fifty Sermons. His rendering of Edgar Allan Poe's The Bells, where the first three verses occupied one 10-inch single-sided disc, and verse 4 took the whole of a second disc, exhibits throughout his fine control of spoken and extended pitch. The phonetician Daniel Jones employed the first of the 'Bells' discs as one of his illustrations of 'intonation curves'. He also recorded part of the Gramophone album of discs in 1908 giving a service for the Church of England Morning Prayer, but died before completing the set (which was taken over by the Reverend Joshua Parkyn).

Family Fleming married, on 21 June 1853, at Holy Trinity, Brompton, Grace Purcell, elder daughter of Admiral Purcell; she died on 25 May 1903. They had three sons and three daughters.