Qualla: Jezreel's Tower

Jezreel's Tower: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. James Roland White was a soldier of the 16th Regiment of Foot, stationed at Chatham in the summer of 1875, when he picked up the writings of Joanna Southcott - a Devon prophetess who had died in 1814 still insisting the world was about to end. White was a merchant's clerk's son who would later describe himself simply as a bachelor on his marriage certificate. By the time he had finished reading and rewriting Southcott's followers' manuscripts, he was no longer James White at all. He was James Jershom Jezreel, the Messenger of the Lord, and he meant to build a temple in Gillingham, Kent, where the saved would gather to wait out the Last Judgment.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Jezreel's Tower: The Flying Roll

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Cunningham, CC BY-SA 3.0. The book Jezreel produced was called The Flying Roll, after a passage in the Book of Zechariah. It promised that 144,000 souls - the number named in Revelation - would be sealed and saved when the end came, and that the temple Jezreel was to build would be where the sealing happe...

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Image: User:Cunningham | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jezreel's Tower: A Cube for the Saved

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The temple was designed as a perfect cube - reportedly 144 feet on each side, an echo of those 144,000 souls in Revelation - faced in yellow Gault brick, with a flying roll, a trumpet, and the Prince of Wales feathers embossed across the masonry. It was meant to seat thousands in...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Jezreel's Tower: Queen Esther

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Jezreel himself died in 1885, before the cube was finished, and leadership passed to his widow, Clarissa. The press called her 'Queen Esther', and not kindly. She was caught between two impossible jobs: keeping the construction going, and keeping fourteen hundred believers fed an...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Jezreel's Tower: A Tower That Could Not Be Removed

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Cunningham, CC BY-SA 3.0. Work on the temple stopped before the roof was completed. For decades afterwards the great unfinished cube sat above the rooftops of Gillingham, partially shrouded, partially open to the sky. Tristram Hillier painted it in 1937 for a Royal Dutch Shell poster series; a copy of tha...

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Image: User:Cunningham | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jezreel's Tower: What Stays Behind

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Whippet, CC BY-SA 2.0. After 1961 the site became, of all things, an electroplating works. Smiths Signs owned it; then L Robinson and Company bought it in the late 1960s and made it the home of the firm now known to plumbers and mechanics everywhere as Jubilee Clips - those small worm-gear hose clamps ...

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Image: Chris Whippet | CC BY-SA 2.0