| AdminHistory | Although the original regulations in the first account book (H/M/1/1) prescribed that the General Meetings ('Assemblées Générales') were to be held twice yearly at the French churches of the Petit Savoie (Spring Gardens) on the first Thursday in December and St Martin Orgars on the first Wednesday in June, this was in abeyance by 1738. Instead we find the first General Meeting recorded in these minutes held, after the customary Sermon, at the Church of La Patente in Brown's Lane on 8 October 1741. Successive General Assemblies were held, at first usually on a Sunday, in the first week of April and/or October, but from 1755 always in April, after the Anniversary Sermon. The meeting place, however, was after 1741 an inn, - the Rummer in Gerrard Street, the Turk's Head, the White Hart, Bishopsgate, the Three Tuns, Spitalfields, the White Swan in Grafton Street, Soho, St Anne's Tavern, Soho, the King's Head, Gerrard Street, Tack's Coffee House, The Standard in Lester Fields, the King's Arms, Golden Square, and twice (1755 and 1757) 'chez Rigault'.
The 1755 meeting agreed, by a vote of twelve to four, that in future only one Sermon a year should be preached, on the third Thursday in April, in alternate years at L'Eglise des Grecs and L'Eglise de la Patente. In 1788 the Sermon was given in the Threadneedle Street Church, in which La Patente's congregation had been merged in 1786; and from 1790 onwards it was preached alternately in L'Eglise Neuve (L'Eglise de l'Hôpital) in Spitalfields, and L'Eglise des Grecs. |