History

St Luke's Chapel was built in 1835 by Richard Hippisley Tuckfield of Shobrooke House in order to supplement the capacity of nearby Holy Cross Church, Crediton, which had become overwhelmed by the number of its parishioners generated by the prosperous and expanding town of Crediton. The governors of Crediton Church took legal advice as to whether it was lawful for them to fund the building of a second church. An Act of Parliament passed during the reign of King William V (1830-1837) relaxed the rules governing the building of additional churches to cater for populous parishes. The requirements of the Act, which sought to avoid parish churches competing for scarce parishioners and funding, were that the existing parish church should have a specified minimum number of parishioners, that site of the proposed new church should be at least two miles distant from the parish church, that at least three hundred persons were resident within one mile of the new church and that a maintenance trust fund should be established. Rev. Samuel Rows, rector of Crediton Church, declared his Sunday services to be attended by between even and eight hundred, and the conditions thus were met.

The new chapel, dedicated to St Luke, was built at Posbury in 1836 on a site owned by Mr Tuckfield, formerly called "Blackadown", alias "Pethams Postbury". R H Tuckfield established the required maintenance fund, in the same of £1000 plus £4 or every £100 in building costs. The land, chapel building and fund were transferred into the legal ownership of trustees appointed for the purpose, prominent members of the local gentry namely Sir Stafford Northcote, 7th Baronet (1762-1851), of Pynes, Newton St Cyres, Sir Humphrey Davie, 10th Baronet (1775-1846) Bart of Creedy House, Sandford, James Wentworth Buller (1768-1865) of Downe House, MP for Exeter (1830-1835) and for North Devon (1857-1865) and John Sillifant Esq.

The chapel was consecrated on 18 October 1836 by Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, and at the same time the land and building were re-grantd to the ownership of Mr Tuckfield, with the maintenance fund alone remaining in the ownership of the trustees. Mr Tuckfield became owner of the advowson, and thus patron of the living, which office was held until recently by his descendant Sir John Richard Shelley, 11th Baronet (born 1943) of Shobrooke House. He appointed as the first curate Rev. Frederic Shelley (1809-1893), later 8th Baronet of the Shelley Baronets, who in 1845 married Charlotte Martha Hippisley (1812-1893), Sir Richard Hippisley's niece, and whose eldest son Sir John Shelley, 9th Baronet (1848-1931) in 1880 inherited Shobrook Park and all his other estates including Posbury

Posbury School

At about the same time as Richard Hippisley Tuckfield was building St Luke's Chapel, his wife, Charlotte Mordaunt (1777-1848), daughter of Sir John Mordaunt, 7th Baronet, was building a small school in the lane opposite. She had an "ardent zeal for training of the deaf and dumb and of school masters for the poor" (as commented by the educational pioneer Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet (1809-1898), both of whose wives were Charlotte's nieces. Charlotte had developed an interest in teach the deaf and dumb after a visit to her friend Grace Furson at Fursdon House, where she met her deaf and dumb protege, who aroused her sympathy and interest. She travelled to Paris to study the teaching methods at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, the institution for the deaf and dumb run by the Venerable Abbe Sicard (d. 1822). On her return home she sought out two similarly affected children and taught them herself. She was successful in her methods and was instrumental in establishing a school in Alphingtonn Road in Exeter, the precursor of the present Royal west of England School for the Deaf. She wrote a series of articles later published in a book entitled "Education for the People". In 1838 Sir Thomas Acland established the Exeter Diocesan Education Committee, the first in Great Britain, which by 1840 had established St Luke's Teachers' Training College in Cathedral Close, Exeter. Thursday there was little further need for Posbury School which closed and was for a while used as a Sunday School. In the 1920s, by which time it was serving only as a storage shed, it was demolished and its building stone served to make buttresses for the walls of St Luke's Chapel.