Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:
Further along North Row, at the opposite side, is the Ebenezer Baptist Chapel, built in 1810, with schools and classrooms added later. Before its erection, Baptist worshippers went to Common Close or walked out to Crockerton, where a small chapel had been built before the 1719 chapel of Common Close. The Crockerton Chapel was built on a piece of land called “The Waste’ to “accommodate worshippers who had been walking from Crockerton and the Deverills to the Old Meeting House in Warminster.” It was a kind of half-way house, still existing as a chapel forty years ago.
Mention has been made of the Halliday Pew being ejected from the Minster. A curious sequel to this was that John Edmund Halliday, by his will of June 1905, left the whole of his £20,000 estate “to his wife Kate for life, after which it goes to Warminster Baptist Church.” The Halliday family, this branch of it at any rate, were supporters of the Old Meeting. John Halliday, born 1671, was connected with the Presbyterians in 1691. John Edmund Halliday, of Yard House, East Street, was his great-grandson.
John Halliday purchased his own pew when the Old Meeting House was built but this was not the one that caused such a commotion in later years, the one ejected from the Minster Church. Edward Halliday purchased the freehold of a pew site in the Minster Church in 1680, and installed a pew five feet high, “in shape resembling a cattle truck.” Apparently, the Trustees of the Baptist Church had a reversionary interest in this pew, which they surrendered in 1914 when the widow of John Edmund Halliday expressed a desire to see the pew, with all rights pertaining to it, restored to the Minster Church.