Christ Church Watney Street (1841 – 1951)

WHAT A LONDON CURATE CAN DO IF HE TRIES

Three of the sons of William Quekett, the master of Langport grammar school in Somerset from 1790-1842, achieved a measure of fame: John Thomas and Edwin John, as histologists and microscopists, and their older brother William Quekett (1802-88). He had studied at St John's College Cambridge, reading as widely as possible (he attended lectures on fen drainage), and was ordained in 1825, serving at South Cadbury, in the diocese of Bath and Wells. He was by conviction an Evangelical. Four years later a friend told him there was a post as curate and Lecturer at St George's. He came for interview, only to discover that it was not St George's Hanover Square, as he had thought, but the more challenging situation of St George-in-the-East. To his credit, he stayed anyway, and achieved great things in his 24 years here (curate 1830-41, incumbent of Christ Church 1841-54). He was applauded in Charles Dickens' Household Words (16 November 1850) in an article 'What a London curate can do – if he tries' which you can read here. It includes an account of the curious circumstances of his appointment.

The elderly Rector, Dr Farington, in post since 1802, was unsupportive of Quekett's efforts, being content to leave the parish as he found it rather than tackle its huge social problems. Quekett's first project was to fit out as boys, girls and infants schools three arches east of Cannon Street Road under the viaduct of the new London and Blackwall Railway: further details here.

Building a new church in the parish had been mooted in 1831 by the Church Building Commissioners, and by the Bishop of London in 1837 (who hoped for three others in Stepney), but all depended on local initiative, and the Rector argued that church rate had to be spent on the newly-purchased extension to the burial ground and on church restoration, so no funds were available. But in 1838 a local builder, George Bridger, offered the CBC the sites of three houses in Watney Street, which he held on lease from the Mercers' Company. He was willing to make a gift of these leaseholds, valued at £1,130, paying the Mercers £350 for the freehold, and compensation of £35 to the tenants, on three conditions:
- it should designed by John Shaw junior
- it should be built by himself, and
- there should be no burial ground.

The CBC agreed; the site was conveyed to them on 27 March 1839. A foundation stone was laid on 11 March 1840, and Messrs George & James Weddell Bridger, of Aldgate Street, built the church, which was consecrated on 3 May 1841, with 1200 sittings. The total cost to the CBC was £7,251 9s. 11d. including the site (which in the event they rather than Bridger bought). In 1845 two adjacent houses were adapted to provide a vicarage, adding a hall and four large rooms at a cost of £1400; Quekett's children laid the foundation stone (his wife Harriet [pictured] died in 1849, aged 37). He had previously lived at 51 Wellclose Square - with his scientist brothers at number 50. 

Although he had built the church and was presented to the living, pew rents were the only source of income, so for a while he retained his post at St George's, working both churches with a fellow-curate John Sanders, until the death of Dr Farington and the installation of Bryan King, after which he was formally installed. He set to work to raise £350 for fixtures, fittings and a heating system. He bought an organ, insuring his life for £100 as security for the balance [see handbill, right].

The Era announced on 31 October 1841 a magnificent organ, from the factory of Messrs. Gray and Davison, New-road, was opened last week at Christ Church, St.-George's-in-the-East, by Mr. Thomas Adams, in the presence of upwards of 2000 persons... In December 1841 it announced (though mis-naming the church as 'St George-in-the-Fields') that Edward Cruse (b.1807) had been appointed organist. He had already published well-reviewed psalm chants and settings, and went on to produce other liturgical music, and to serve at the ritualistic church of St Barnabas Pimlico, whose current organist David Aprahamian Liddle is working on a biography of his predecessors, and has kindly provided us with information about Cruse. His successor two years later was the young prodigy William Rae (1827-1903) - see ch 7 here - appointed at the age of sixteen, an enthusiast for the music of Mendelssohn (whose oratorio St Paul was performed at the church). He was a pupil of William Sterndale Bennett, and, after a period at St Andrew Undershaft, went on to study in Leipzig and Prague. From 1860 he became became a key figure in the musical life of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 

Quekett borrowed communion plate; but on Christmas Day 1843 a cab drew up at his house, leaving a box containing an anonymous gift of silver vessels. The paten was engraved A QUIBUSDAM EXTERNIS QUI NOMINARI NOLUNT - 'from certain outsiders who do not wish to be named'. (Sadly they were stolen in 1890.)

In 1847 he contributed to a survey carried out by the Statistical Society of London (founded in 1834, now the Royal Statistical Society) which detailed housing conditions, rents and wages. Batty's Gardens, between Backchurch Lane and Berners [now Henriques] Street was described thus: Many of the houses in this street have no back premises, neither light nor ventilation from behind, and consequently are close, damp and unhealthy ... at one corner of the narrow part is a dust heap on which is thrown night-soil and refuse of every description, which saturates and penetrates through the walls to the premises behind, creating a most disgusting nuisance to the tenants...  Its 'solution' to the area's problems was ...since the population is, to some extent, the drainage from the grades next above them, we should rather hope to find a cure by cutting off the supply of degradation than by attempting to reform and elevate it in the lowest depths to which it can sink. Quekett, however, had other ideas.

The 1851 census showed the population of the parish to be 12,497, in 1,664 households - an average per 'house' (in some cases, a single room) of 7.51 (in two Whitechapel parishes, the average was over 9 per household). Quekett, however, gave higher figures: a population of 17,124 in 2618 households, across 77 streets and courts, with 50 brothels, 21 pubs and 22 beer shops. The district, he said, covered 63 acres; the average rent of a house was low, at £8.10s. a year. 

Many other projects followed:

• In 1842 he instituted a Penny Savings Bank in Christ Church School, which later amalgamated with the Tower Hamlets (subsequently East London) Savings Bank, and in 1890 finally became part of the Post Office Savings Bank, set up by Palmerston's government in 1861 when Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
  
  
• The schools were overcrowded, and Quekett tracked down and threatened to expose the absentee slum landlord of King's Arms Gardens, commonly known as No Man's Land. This became the site for St Mary's Schools - described in more detail here - and also for St Mary's Church Johnson Street, built and endowed by Lord Haddo (afterwards the fifth Earl of Aberdeen) and consecrated in 1850. When this became a separate parish, Christ Church 'lost' 7000 parishioners and the schools. [Now usually known as St Mary Cable Street, it remains a separate parish, though is 'clustered' with its founding parish of St George-in-the-East and others.]
  (The career of James Haysman FRGS began in the Christ Church schools; born locally in 1839, he assisted in junior classes from the age of 12, and was apprenticed here for five years before completing his training, specialising in art. He developed a system of 'international education' and stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal parliamentary candidate several times (including Mile End in 1892 and 1895): see The International Magazine (1885) p82ff.)
  
  
• Quekett took up the cause of 'distressed needlewomen' - exploited young pieceworkers - and saw assisted emigration to the colonies, to address the inbalance of men there, as a solution (as did Charles Dickens); together with Sidney Herbert MP he founded the Female Emigration Society in 1849; her served on the committee, as did W.W. Champneys, the Rector of Whitechapel, and another local priest, the Revd B.C. Sangar. A fellow-enthusiast was the Hon. Mrs Jane Stuart-Wortley [pictured], wife of the Recorder of London, who maintained a keen interest in Christ Church until her death in 1900, and writes here about 'emigration work'. She paid for a nurse for the sick-poor in the parish, and was one of the founders of the East London Nursing Society, set up in 1868 in the wake of the cholera epidemic to nurse the local 'sick poor'. The charity continues, with one of our congregation a trustee.
  
  
• He also set up a lending library and reading room (1d. a week) for the district; a Dorcas Society for church needlework; a Blanket and Rug Loan Society; and worked for the creation of 'idiot asylums' for children, on the lines of the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster (which the current Rector used to visit in its latter days).

In 1851 he was consulted by the incumbent of Holy Trinity, Minories over a mummified head, found in its vaults (preserved in tannin-impregnated sawdust); he said It looked just like a New Zealand chief's head of which I had seen a great many. The countenance expressed great agony; the eyes, the teeth, the beard were perfect; and at the back of the head a very deep cut was visible above the one that separated the head from the body. He referred it to Lord Dartmouth, whose family was responsible for the church, and who claimed it was that of a family member who had survived the first blow of the executioner's axe - but the legend that it was the head of the Duke of Suffolk came later. (Holy Trinity closed in 1899 and was joined to St Botolph Aldgate, where the head was buried some time after the Second World War.)

When Quekett left in 1854, the parish was served by a curate, two scripture readers and fourteen district visitors. The Sunday School had 25 teachers. He was rewarded, on the nomination of Lord Aberdeen, with the rich living of Warrington, whose previous rector, the Hon. Horatio Powys, has been made Bishop of Sodor and Man. By strange coincidence, Robert Farington's father had been Rector here 80 years previously, and the one book Quekett was given from Farington's library was a copy of his father's Warrington sermons. There, at St Elphin's, he built what was then the tallest spire in the north-west at 281 feet. He died in office, on Good Friday, 34 years later. 

• What a London Curate can do...
• My Sayings & Doings
• Quekett on Baptisms
• Quekett on Baths & Wash-houses
• Quekett on Dr Farington

THE CHURCH BUILDING

John Shaw junior (1803-70), was the son of John Shaw 1776-1832 who had been articled to George Gwilt the Elder, the architect of St Dunstan Fleet Street. Shaw junior had worked on Christ's Hospital. Christ Church was in the 'Lombardic' Romanesque (or 'Round') style, in grey bricks with stone dressings, with slated pyramid spires on the two west end towers. Inside, he addressed one of chief chief architectural problems of the age – providing maximum seating without ugly wooden galleries – by creating in the nave an arcade of two tiers of round-headed arches, the upper one like a triforium containing the galleries, with a clearstorey above (a solution that can be found elsewhere).

In a letter to Bishop Blomfield about a new church in Bethnal Green, John Shaw argued that the Romanesque (rather than the Gothic) option contains in an eniment degree the qualities now so important. These appear to be, first, economy; secondly, facility of execution; thirdly, strict simplicity combined with high capability of ornament; fourthly, durability; fifthly, beauty (quoted in Kathleen Curran The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics and Transnational Exchange (Penn State Press 2003) p206). The undisguised brick and iron columns of Christ Church were an example of this. However, another view was that this was a building of startling ugliness, with cast-iron pillars and Norman arches of grimy brick.

New vestries were added in 1894-96 [ICBS plan 09835, architect E.M.S. Pilkington], the former vestry becoming a side chapel - this altar [right] is now in the side chapel at St George-in-the-East.

The organ was rebuilt around 1900, with 2 manuals and 21 speaking stops, with an experimental electrical piston action, by the Belgian builder Alphonse Noterman, of Shepherd's Bush. In Fr Groser's time, it was replaced by a much smaller (9 stop) instrument by Cedric Arnold of Thaxted.

NINETEENTH CENTURY MINISTRY

See here for details of the many curates who served in the parish, and here for statistics from the registers.

As the district had been carved out of St George-in-the-East, Brasenose College Oxford acquired the patronage, and they appointed a former Scholar as Quekett's successor. George Henry McGill (1854-67) was from an old Irish family but was born in Manchester and attended Manchester Grammar School. He had served curacies in Stockport, Edale, Stepney and Norfolk, and been Vicar of Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. He came to the parish in a harsh winter, with fear of bread strikes among dockers. 

Education preoccupied him, as it had his predecessor. New classrooms for the railway arch schools were built, and Sunday services were held here. In 1855 the Middlesex Society Charity School in Cannon Street Road was still short of subscribers and qualifying children, so was refounded as a National (church) School for children in the Christ Church district by a scheme of 1862, the minister chairing the Committee of Management. New buildings were opened by the Bishop of London. This meant that 1700 children were being educated in schools currently or formerly connected to Christ Church. (In the 1860s the a unit of the 10th (Tower Hamlets) Volunteer Corps of Engineers was based at the schoolrooms. C.H. Gregory was the Captain Commandant and J.A. Coffrey and W.J. Fraser the Lieutenants.)

In 1856 he baptized King William Pepple of the Niger Delta, who was confirmed three years later by Bishop Tait [see G.O.M. Tasie Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864-1918 (Brill 1978)]. At the lunch following the service, Pepple refused wine, saying Water is best - which delighted Thomas Richarsdon, the teetotal Vicar of St Matthew Pell Street, who was also present.

McGill was also Chaplain to the St George-in-the-East workhouse (a post that was later held independently). During his time in the parish he had two curates (with grants of £80 for the senior and £40 for the junior from the Curates' Aid Society, both of which he made up to £100 from his own income), a team of district visitors, a Scripture Reader (paid by the Scripture Readers' Society - was this a national or a diocesan body?), a nurse for the sick-poor, financed by Mrs Jane Stuart-Wortley and a 'parochial mission woman' paid by Lady Wood (wife of Sir William Page Wood, MP for Oxford, briefly Solicitor-General, and then a vice-chancellor of Oxford University) and the Parochial Mission Society (see this 1863 report, right, from the [high-church] English Church Union Kalendar). So in comparison with other East End parishes, it was well-staffed, but funding for church and schools was always precarious, and depended on charitable-well wishers (including also Miss Chapman) rather than official sources of income. In his 13 years at Christ Church McGill raised £26,000 from private sources; but there was no fixed endowment, only pew rents of about £250 (falling) and sporadic collections of about £15 a year.

Here are four documents from his time, showing him to be an astute and well-organised pastor:

• Dicken's All Round the Year on the Penny Bank (1859)
• from John Hollingshead Ragged London (Smith Elder 1861)
• his own 'model district census' (1861)
• evidence presented on behalf of the Stepney deanery clergy to the Select Committee on the Ecclesiastical Commission (1862), specifically in relation to the the claim of local churches on the Finsbury prebendal estates (explanation and full transcript here), but touching on all other aspects of parish finance.

James Maconechy (Vicar 1868-71) was a Balliol man, who came from a curacy at St George Hanover Square (where Quekett thought he had been going!) His first challenge was a noisy congregation, with young people courting invisibly in the high-backed gallery pews, and sidesmen struggling to keep order. He dealt with this - but at the cost of losing the young people. He made the customary but controversial 'innovations' of the time - a choral service with a surpliced choir, the Litany as a separate service and the new-fangled Harvest Festival (which became very popular). He also abolished some pew rents in favour of a weekly offertory; this was less successful, as it was about this time that the better-off began to move away from the area. In his time the chancel was created, as explained above. He complained when he came that the most prominent object in the church was the pulpit, secondly the reading desk and thirdly the clerk's desk. 

The church responded to the shipbuilders' strike, when many skilled men had moved elsewhere, leaving unskilled labourers in their wake, by laying on twice-weekly sewing classes for the wives, with 200-300 attending at church and the Middlesex Schools and receiving 6d. an hour for their needlework, funds provided by the Mission and Relief Society. Meetings ended with a short service and address. Halfpenny dinners were also provided by the Destitute Children's Dinner Society. Help with 'migration' - to the north of England as well as Canada - was given: see other references on this site to this 'solution'.

Maconechy played a leading part in a London-wide mission in 1869, and in his time several initiatives were pioneered at Christ Church. A total of 26 mission rooms were hired around the parish, with house-to-house visitors inviting people who would never come to church to attend evening 'cottage' services, led by a large clergy and lay team. The first of these was at the Ragged School in Devonshire [later Winterton] Street, the 'worst and most populous street of the parish', where Machonecy's predecessor had begun to hold services, led by a home missionary. There were schoolroom services at the railway arches school, teas for the 'unchurched' (popular, but too costly to repeat) and open-air services of hymns and preaching, especially in Holy Week. All of this was moderately successful, but very hard to sustain. The Rev H.W. More Molyneux, a Surrey curate, came up for two days each week to lead this work; the Rev G.P. Ottey also responded to an appeal for help (see here for details of his brief time as curate).

After this burst of energy, Maconechy spent the next 22 years at All Saints, Norfolk Square in the West End, and his final two years before retirement at Wiggonholt with Greatham in Sussex.

William Pimblett Insley (Vicar 1871-80) also came, after curacies in Yorkshire, via the West End - from Christ Church Chelsea. As he arrived, the parish boundaries were adjusted slightly. He continued work on the church, re-pewing it, adding a new pulpit and restoring the organ. He started a temperance society, a cricket club and a drum and fife band. A room in Buross Street was hired, next to a pub; here Miss Rose began a night school for girls in 1877 and a women's bible class in 1879. 

As explained here, in 1877 the Middlesex Schools were taken over by Raine's Foundation (as a result of the 1870 Education Act). This meant that Christ Church lost much of its educational clout, and the attendance of scholars at church in their charity uniforms; but Mr Insley ensured that the scheme provided £600 towards the building of a hall next to the church in the vicarage gardens, known as Dean [now Deancross] Street Mission Room - pictured. It was opened by Bishop Walsham How, Bishop of Bedford (the first 'bishop for East London') in 1881. The Sunday School of 500 scholars transferred from the railway arches, as did some of the Buross Street work; a senior boys club was started. Mr Insley left before the work was completed, becoming Rector of Bow until his retirement in 1892.

Alfred Leedes Hunt (Vicar 1880-83) had worked in Islington and Spitalfields. He arranged for the church to take over the small school in Devonshire Street run by the Ragged School Union (now the Shaftesbury Society), where the parish had held Sunday evening services for some years. This was supported by a fund created by Charles and Maria Sterry (parents of the next Vicar's wife - he was chief clerk at the Mint). The need for such schools had declined with the coming of public funding for education under the 1870 Act. The school was closed, and the fund supported work at a mission room in Smith's Place [later renamed Agra Place - pictured] which Harry Jones at St George's had started. Buross Street activities also moved here, as that room was required by the landlord. Another mission centre was set up in an old cottage in Joseph Street. The East London Church Fund made a grant of £150 for a curate, and a few years later a further £50 (matched by the Duke of Westminster) for a second one. 

Mr Hunt was also a committee member of the Charity Organisation Society, and a local Board Schools manager. His handwriting (in the registers) was neat but tiny! He wrote a commentary on the Book of Ruth for Sunday School teachers. He had another attempt at abolishing pew rents, keeping collections on the first Sunday for himself in lieu! But he became seriously ill and was told to leave London. He became Rector of East Mersea, where he succeeded Sabine Baring Gould (who while there had used the local landscape in Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes). It was said that the 'islanders' preferred Hunt to Gould because he was more low church and accessible. From there he went to Great Snoring in Norfolk.

Willie Parkinson Jay (Vicar 1883-89) had previously been a curate at St George's, running the work at Smith's Place. He too was an advocate of the methods of the Charity Organisation Society and served on its local committee, His flamboyant brother Arthur Osborne Montgomery Jay was Vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch from 1886, serving the slums of the notorious Old Nichol and creating a boxing club in the church basement;  see here for an account (with corrections) of his ministry there. Mr Jay and his wife offered a less controversial, but equally innovative, style of ministry at Christ Church. As well as supervising the provision of halfpenny dinners (41,000 pints of soup one winter) and running the Mothers' Meeting, Mrs Jay is credited with creating the first ever Fathers' Meeting. Bishop Walsham How was an honorary member, and after a visit in February 1888 a member sent him a pair of red leather slippers with this letter:

Mrs Jay's grand-daughter (whose help and encouragement we gratefully acknowledge) has a blanket chest presented to Mrs Jay by the members of the Christ Church Dorcas Society July 1889 - still used for its original purpose [pictured right].

In 1886 a thousand musicians, mostly in uniform, marched to the church for the annual demonstration of the bands of East London, where after a short service the Bishop of London addressed them (Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine 1886 p31).

It was in 1888 that the decorative scheme of the church was completed, 'cheaply [£1400] and in good taste' said Dimsdale [below]  whose book describes everything in great detail. He also completed the task of abolishing pew rents, making all seats 'free and unappropriated' - despite the fact that the living was still poorly endowed.

The loss of the railway arches schools was a major blow - see here for details. For a few years the arches continued in parish use, and to house the curates, until they were sold back to the railway in 1890.

There were more parish initiatives. The House for Lady Workers at 27 Dean Street, a centre for mission 'amongst the rougher girls of the parish' who worked in factories, meant that for a few years there were three such bases: this one in the east, Smith's Place in the centre, and Joseph Street to the west. But funds ran out; Joseph Street was given up in 1886, and Dean Street in 1888. However, clubs for men and lads 'under the arches' flourished - including what was reputedly the largest drum and fife band in the country; girls clubs were started; the provision of cheap and free dinners continued; and there was the great London Mission of 1884. 

From 1889-94 Mr Jay was Rector of Toppesfield in Essex (taking with him 'Watney', a sample of a coster's donkey), then for 41 years of St Anne Eastbourne.

Marmaduke Hare (Vicar 1889-92) led a colourful life. Born in Knottingley, Yorkshire, he trained as a doctor at King's College London (at the behest of his father - who was a friend of the poet Matthew Arnold) and practised for a while before ordination training at Dorchester Missionary College. As a deacon, he served at Dorchester Abbey, then joined the army and served in the first Boer War. Priested in South Africa, he worked there for four years, and married the Premier's daughter; she died in 1897. In his short time at Christ Church he set in motion the building of Planet Street Institute [pictured], using most of the £3220 paid in the form of stocks by the London and Blackwall Railway for the arches site - the rest was held as a maintenance fund (and still features in our parish accounts). Planet Street, known for a time as Star Street, was one of the grimmest in the area, and was described in detail by John Hollingshead in Ragged London (1861).

Also in this period, the endowment of the living was increased by £2000, to raise the stipend to £160.

When he left Christ Church he was Rector of Bow for ten years (where George Lansbury became a friend); in 1898 he wrote to the Daily News defending Bryant & May's record of concern for their workers, in the 'phossy jaw' controversy. He then moved to the USA, eventually becoming Dean of Trinity Cathedral, Davenport, Iowa in 1907 [pictured here a few years later with some members of the cathedral choir]. He was a freemason, and active in many societies and organisations, and remained as Dean Emeritus into the 1930s. 

Henry Cockfield Dimsdale (1892-1909) was an Etonian who left the school after 'four happy years' because of serious illness. After Cambridge and a spell of foreign travel, he spent a year at Leeds Clergy School but left, to study law for a time. As a layman, he became one of a famous pioneering trio (with Willy Carter and Algy Lawley, both ordained) at Eton's mission in Hackney Wick. After ordination and a further period of rest he was appointed to Christ Church.

When Planet Street Institute opened in 1892, Smith's Place was closed and the Sterry Fund transferred. Most parish activities moved here, and new ones were started, including a Saturday School initiated by Miss Helen Cunliffe (who was previously linked with the Sisters of the Church at Kilburn). This attracted about 200 children, pictured here in 1900, with a mixture of activities, play in the vicarage gardens, and an annual examination. 

The 1886 Census of London church attendance, conducted on 24 October, had recorded large congregations - 234 in the morning, and 254 in the evening. A decade later, now with three curates (one of them, A.M. Cazalet, secretary of the East London Mission to the Jews), and a lay team of locals and volunteers from further afield, plus two Clewer sisters, an astonishingly busy weekly programme was run - displayed, with a picture of the clergy team, here - including twelve bible classes for various groups which fed into the two main ones run by the vicar and senior curate. The club for 'rougher girls' continued, as did one long-standing 'cottage' meeting. There was a communicants guild with four wards (St Alban, St Anne, St George and the St Mary the Blessed Virgin); various men's activities, including a Chapter of the Brotherhood of St Andrew, replaced the Fathers' Meeting. 'Mr Elliott's Club' (the junior curate) met every night of the week except Sundays; he clearly won the confidence of those who, as Dimsdale put it, were verging on criminality...possibly the world would call them hooligans. And the number of daily services increased, with a daily eucharist. New vestries were built, and the old one became a side chapel.

For the third time patronage was transferred, this time to the Dean and and Canons of Canterbury (together with two other East End parishes), and the endowment increased through the voidance of All Hallows, Lombard Street to produce a stipend of £468, ending its claim of being the poorest parish in East London.

Watney Street remained a 'colourful' thoroughfare. In Round London: Down East and Up West Montagu Williams QC commented, in 1894,

There is an 1897 interview with Dimsdale in the Booth archive. In that year, when his mother Catharine died, he and his sister gave a set of gilt communion vessels (patens, cruets and chalice) which we still use in festal seasons at St George-in-the-East. In 1901 he wrote Sixty Years' History of an East End Parish, Christ Church, St. George's-in-the-East (Henry Bailey 1901), from which much of the detailed information above is taken. The British Archaeological Association patronisingly hailed this book as a fine example of what can be achieved even with a most unpromising subject, because modern and poor.

An intriguing remark from his latter years (he died in 1918) was the white motor ambulance is almost as much as part of our city life as is the red motor omnibus.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Arthur Stevens was Vicar from 1909-16. Ordained in in 1882 in Durham where he had studied at the university (as a non-collegiate member - a system instituted in 1871), he worked his way south with four further curacies along the way, becoming Rector of St Mildred Canterbury in 1896 (receiving a testimonial from his former parishioners in the city). After two further incumbencies, in Burgess Hill and Kilburn, he came to the parish at the age of 60. In retirement he held permission to officiate in no less than six dioceses at various times, eventually settling in St Leonards-on-Sea, where he died in old age.

William Holmes Shuter succeeded him (1916-28); from County Tyrone (he played rugby football at Dungannon Royal School), he trained at Trinity College Dublin, was ordained in Chester diocese in 1888 and had been a curate in two south London parishes for 22 years before coming to the parish, from which he retired to Herne Hill, living to a good age.

Pictured is the interior in 1927; see here for the story of the shops and stalls of Watney Market next door.

In 1929, when the church was in the doldrums and its future uncertain, St John Beverley Groser was appointed as Vicar, on the basis that he could do littlle harm! In the event, he re-energised the parish, and the remarkable story of his ministry, at Christ Church and then at St George-in-the-East, is told here. One of the thurifers in those days was J.C. (Jimmy) Mooney, now living in Colchester. He has fond memories of Frs Groser and Boggis, who had the sad task of burying nine family members killed in Blakesley Street during the Blitz (several other relatives died in the Far East). For details of Fr Groser's curates, see here.

Dan Regan, who later was to become Director of Finance, and then Chief Executive, of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, also lived in Blakesley Street - his family were members of St Mary & St Michael's Roman Catholic Church on Commercial Road. In 2011 he wrote

Church and vicarage were wrecked by a land-mine on 16 April 1941, when the congregation was forced to move to St George-in-the-East. The ruins of the church stood for some years before the site was cleared.

In 1952 the Archdeacon sent the Rector (by recorded delivery) an 1839 shilling found under the foundation stone during demolition, commenting I am only sorry that we were not able to unearth something more substantial in the way of treasure. The coin remains in our archives.

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