An old mill building located on the northern side of the canal at Bourne Lock and on the western side of the bridge to Bourne Mills, was to become the Bourne Gospel Hall. The building is shown on maps surveyed from 1882, but its use as a Gospel Hall appears to have begun in the early 1930s. Today the site is the overgrown land next to a hand card wash, and the mill which is home to multiple small businesses.
The hall was used by a Brethren congregation, under the ministry of James Dover Disney who had previously worked as a missionary in Burma. A meeting he attended in 1936 suggests his Gospel work followed the path of George Muller, a Christian evangelist, founder of the Open Brethren and the Ashley Down Orphan Houses in Bristol. At the meeting Disney spoke of the excellent work done by the young members who attended services conducted in an old granary, which gave them the nickname of ‘Corn-bin-ites’, presumably a play on ‘Muller-ite’.
From September 1935 the hall was a registered site for marriages, though it seems likely that the Hall was relatively short lived as the following notice announcing its closure was gazetted in August 1939.
NOTICE is hereby given that the Building formerly known as BOURNE GOSPEL HALL situated at Bourne, Brimscombe in the civil parish of Thrupp in the registration district of Stroud in the county of Gloucester which was duly registered for marriages pursuant to the Act 6 & 7 Will. IV, c.’ 85 is now no longer used as a Place of Meeting for religious worship by the congregation on whose behalf it was so registered, and that the registry thereof was therefore on the 15th day of August 1939 formally cancelled by the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages for England and Wales.—Witness my hand this 16th day of August 1939. G. E. G. GADSDEN, Superintendent Registrar.