In my teenage years I encountered a number of interesting Christian groups outside the C of E and Methodist mainstream.

I spent two summers working for a business run by a Plymouth Brethren family, devoutly religious and (so the story went) permanently cut off from members of their own family who did not follow their exact beliefs.

There were encounters with various 'happy clappy' churches, then, at the other extreme, 'The People's Mission' in Cambridge, who met in a tin tabernacle dating back to Victorian times and had a tiny dwindling congregation of sweet and very elderly people, some of whom dated back to Victorian times themselves.

Essex is home to The Peculiar People, a sect that combined the exclusive evangelicalism of my Plymouth Brethren employers with a belief in divine healing that is still popular in modern charismatic churches. The name implies 'particular' or 'chosen' rather than its more common modern meaning and is taken from verses in Deuteronomy and 1 Peter.

The movement was founded in Rochford by James Banyard, a farm labourer, poacher and shoemaker who was known for his drunken and dissolute behaviour. His wife Susan despaired of his conduct, and insisted he attended the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel. He became a regular attender in the early 1830s, gave up alcohol and even started preaching locally.

In 1837 Banyard started open-air preaching in Rochford, during which he was frequently pelted with filth including 'rotten eggs and dead cats'. He broke with the Methodists and up his own chapel in a converted workhouse. The 'Banyardites' as they were first called, practised a strict puritanical lifestyle, and cut themselves off even from other Christians if they did not share their beliefs.

Banyard, initially reluctantly, began to lay hands on the sick for divine healing, and a succession of healings led to the movement spreading across Essex, Kent and East London. The name Peculiar People was adopted in 1852, and Banyard and three others were made bishops.

A key part of their beliefs was that only God could heal, and members experiencing sickness should shun doctors or any professional medical help. They were also early anti-vaxxers, refusing the smallpox vaccine.

Banyard fell victim of this doctrine himself when in 1851 his own son became ill, and he called in a doctor. He was deposed in the first of many splits in the church.

The sect also became notorious for their conscientious objection in World War I, though we now look much more kindly upon the stand taken by them and by churches such as the Quakers.

Recollections of 'Peculiar' life vary – some recall the strong community life and the peace they brought to crime-ridden neighbourhoods like Daws Heath, while author Bernard Cornwell had a grim, joyless childhood, and left his family at the age of sixteen, never to return.

The church continues as the Union of Evangelical Churches with fifteen chapels, including at Chelmsford, Cressing, Daws Heath, Little Totham, Rayleigh and Witham. It maintains its strong Bible-based faith, but is much more mainstream on issues such as healing and medical intervention.

The Dengie has two surviving original Peculiar People chapel buildings (neither in religious use), at Steeple and Tillingham. The photograph shows the simple, dignified style of these buildings (but note, the Maldon building is the much later Pentecostal church).