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 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, which he persuaded the directors to let on a 100-year lease for £20 a year, reasoning that as the trains were cable-hauled from stationary steam engines there would be no engine noise!  The drawing [left] is from the National Society's archive in Bermondsey. The handwritten note says There is communication with each arch by a door in the centre - and to warmed [sic] by an Arnotts' Stove.

Originating as the Commercial Railway, the 'Fourpenny Rope' ran from Minories [station pictured c1840]  before Fenchurch Street was built, its 7-mile hemp (later steel) rope slipping off carriages at each station on the outward run and picking them up on return; but this system failed, the line was changed to standard gauge and steam engines, lighter than later suburban stock, ran from 1849.

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 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 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 Saunders, 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. The church's first organist was the young prodigy William Rae (1827-1903), appointed at the age of sixteen, an enthusiast for the music of Mendelssohn (whose oratorio St Paul was performed at the church). Rae later 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.)

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 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 [pictured], designed by George Smith and begun in 1848, providing places for a further 550 children, 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.] He claimed he never remembered any child from 'his' schools being in prison. When asked Supposing a child who had been in prison applied to one of your schools, would you admit him? he replied Certainly not.

• 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. A fellow-enthusiast was the Hon. Mrs Jane Stuart Wortley, 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 was also 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. 

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 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.

NINETEENTH CENTURY MINISTRY

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. 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.)

McGill was also Chaplain to the St George-in-the-East Workhouse. Here are three contemporary accounts from his time: from  RAGGED LONDON, his own 'model district census' (both from 1861) and Dicken's All Round the Year on the PENNY BANK (1859). 

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.

In his 13 years at Christ Church McGill raised £26,000 for various charitable purposes. But there was no fixed endowment, only pew rents of about £250 and sporadic collections of about £15 until 1864, when £108 a year was granted from leases in Finsbury, to ensure a stipend of £300. As a consequence, patronage passed from Brasenose to the Bishop of London. In 1868 McGill was presented by the Marquis of Westminster to a wealthier living, Bangor Isycoed (Bangor-Monarchorum) where he became first rural dean of the revived deanery of Bangor until his death in 1896. His son Champion (an old family name) was Vicar of Isleworth.

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 not a success, for 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.

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 Devonshire [later Winterton] Street, the 'worst and most populous street of the parish'. There were schoolroom services, 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.

After this burst of energy, Machonecy 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. 

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 a small school in Devonshire Street run by the Ragged School Union (now the Shaftesbury Society), 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. He wrote 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. 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;  here is a recent account, from Church Times, of his ministry there, and some corrections. 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:

Dear fellow Farther, 
We are members of one farthers meeting held at Christ Church, Watney Street, and we long to see you with us again. 
I do not forget your address when last you came. We were all very much disopointed on Boxing Night. We did expect you, 
do come as soon as you can. Will you axcept of this little present from me as a fellow farther, belonging to the sam meeting as 
yourself, and I am glad to be able to say belonging to the sam Saviour and looking forward to the sam rest at last. 
Yours truly, J. G. 

Mrs Jay's grand-daughter still has a blanket chest - used for its original purposes - presented to Mrs Jay by the members of the Christ Church Dorcas Society [see above] July 1889. It was in 1888 that the decorative scheme of the church was completed, 'cheaply [£1400] and in good taste' said his successor, 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. Despite excellent reports for 1881, the boys school was closed in 1883 and the girls and infants in 1884-5. The premises were declared unfit - though the authorities were happy to use them for a while until the new Betts Street Board School was ready (which Henry Dimsdale, admitting that the old premises perhaps were quaint, somewhat peevishly described as palatial....replete with all the luxuries that art and faddism can supply). 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). 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 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.

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. 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 long list of 19th century CURATES includes

• James Sanderson Clarke (1844-47), who then served as Vicar of Goudhurst in Kent for 47 years
  
  
• George Mockler, who was one of the twelve chaplains who died in the Crimean War, to whom there is a memorial at the Royal Garrison Church, Portsmouth. A tablet over the north-west door of Christ Church reads
  

  Erected to the memory of the Rev. George Mockler M.A., formerly Curate of this  church and later Chaplain attached to Third Division of the British Army in alliance with France and Turkey engaged against Russia in actual warfare. He had endeared himself during a ministry of 7 years to his late Congregation who have raised this memorial of their attachment and esteem. The zeal evinced by him for the welfare of the dying, sick and wounded after the battle of the Alma so enervated his physical energies that he sank under the heavy labour imposed upon his exhausted nature. He died on the 2nd day of October 1854, in the 34th year of his age. His remains were interred upon the heights of Sebastopol.

  
  
• George Gustavus Morton (1860-62) - from Trinity College Dublin and an Irish curacy, he went on to Acton, then became vicar of Ulverston from 1868-78, where he had difficulties with an independent Sunday School; he later served in Exmouth.
  
  
• Alfred Conder (1863-65) - ordained to the parish from Queen's College Cambridge (he published his farewell sermon The Future Meeting), his father-in-law then appointed him rector of Middelton, a village of 71 souls near Bognor (and on his death Conder himself became the patron). Here, until his own death in 1895, he ran a private school for boys, took a leading part in the affairs of the town, and maintained a household of eight children and six servants. But services at the church were often cancelled for want of a congregation. He wrote on education matters, including giving approval to the New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children developed by the American Dio Lewis, and based on callisthenics, dumb-bells and 'pangymnastikon':

• Robert Wilson (1864-66), who then briefly joined the new parish of St Peter London Dock.
  
  
• John Francis Nash Eyre (1870) - one of nine brief curacies around the country before he became vicar of Ilkeston in Derbyshire.
  
  
• Coleman Connolly (1871-??), 4th son of a gentleman farmer from Lettermullen, Galway, he studied at Glasgow University and after his time here (loding at Colet Place, off Commercial Road) enrolled at Worcester College Oxford when he was 47, where he took part in union debates. By 1889 he was living in St John's Wood.
  
  
• William Joseph Rundell (1874-??) - one of the first students of St Aidan's College Birkenhead, which opened in 1847, he was ordained in 1850 and served several curacies; in 1869, while at All Saints Paddington, he was declared bankrupt; by 1884 he had become vicar of Westmarsh in Kent.
  
  
• Joseph Thomas White (1877-79), coming here after three previous posts.
  
  
• E.J. Norman (1880-??), later chaplain of St George's Workhouse.
  
  
• Ernest Charles Evans (1883-86) - his first post; after a second curacy at St Dunstan Stepney he became vicar of Holy Trinity, New Charlton.
  
  
• Aaron Emmanuel Suffrin (1883-85) - click HERE for details of the Jewish convert clergy in the parish.
  
  
• Frank Phinehas Hill (1884-87), most of whose ministry was in his native Wales.
  
  
• James William Brodrick Sproule (1886-88), from Bath - his fourth of eight curacies.
  
  
• Joseph Hick Lewthwaite (1887-89), who later became Precentor of the new Liverpool Cathedral.
  
  
• Arthur Edward Whatham (1887-88), who trained at St Aidan's Birkenhead and alternated between English curacies and missionary posts in Canada and the USA, finally settling in Louisville, Kentucky, where he started an American branch of the CHARITY ORGANISATION SOCIETY. He wrote many articles on the parallels between Hebrew, Assyrian, Bablonian and Sanskrit mythology (related to the Genesis creation narratives, the Exodus account and the 'sign of the mother-goddess'). Later he turned to more racy articles about sex (writing on original sin, and phallic symbolism, in The American Journal of Urology and Sexology) and birth control, until his death in 1922. He claimed in a pamphlet that
  
  

  neo-Malthusianism [one of the influences on the COS] is the only means of preventing the alarming increase of pauperism, sickness, crime and immorality, and, from a Christian point of view, is perfectly lawful... I say it becomes the duty of every thoughtful man and woman to think out some plan to stop, or even check, the advancing tide of desolation; and the only plan, to my thinking, that is at all workable, is artificial prevention of childbirth .... Immorality would largely diasppear, and the Christian ideal of marriage be raised.

• Arthur Bernard Littlewood (1888-95), beginning his ministry here after Sidney Sussex College Cambridge; from 1904 vicar of East Farleigh, Maidstone. He married the daughter of a French judge.
  
  
• John Henry Bovill (1888-90) whose Cambridge studies were at Ayerst Hall, a short-lived private hostel;  he later became a missionary in Lebombo, Rector of the Cathedral at Lourenço Marques [now Maputo], and Her Majesty's Acting Consul there, and was an early writer on the evils of racism.
  
  
• Edward Frith Everett (1890-92), born in Stamford, beginning his ministry here after Pembroke College Cambridge; later vicar of Little Bowden (Market Harborough) and St Lawrence Northampton until his death in 1933.
  
  
• Herman Caplan (1890-92) - cick HERE for details of the Jewish convert clergy in the parish.
  
  
• William Geoffrey Munk (1892-98) - his third curacy after Worcester College, Oxford; he then served ten years as vicar of St Mary Cable Street and a further ten years at St Ursula's Home, Plymouth, returning to London as chaplain of the Sisters of Bethany at Clerkenwell, and then as a chaplain at the London Hospital, and back to Devon as incumbent of Dunchideock for seven years until his retirement in 1936.
  
  
• James Humphrey Poole (1892-96) - trained at Lincoln Theological College and served his title in that diocese before coming here; after two posts in Yorkshire, he returned to Lincolnshire, as incumbent of Holbeach Marsh and then Northfield, near Boston, retiring in 1917.
  
  
• Alexander Wilhelm Schapira (1895-97), previously curate at St Mark Whitechapel - click HERE for details of his Jewish roots.
  
  
• Hugh Randolph Cavendish Smith-Marriott (1897-99), of Magdalen College, Cambridge; this was his third curacy, after which he went to the family living of Horsmonden in Kent, as curate for 17 years then rector from 1922; he was briefly, before his death in 1944, the 9th Baronet Smith-Marriott of Sydling St Nicholas.
  
  
• Gilbert Gervase Elliott (1897-1905), from a well-to-do Borders family and of Pembroke College Cambridge and Wells Theological College. After his title here, he became vicar of St John Limehouse, then of St Alban Fulham, then of St Bartholomew Brighton, before becoming a UMCA missionary in Dar-es-Salaam for three years, and then (after a spell as chaplain in Cannes) Archdeacon in Zanzibar - all of these posts being of a definite anglo-catholic tradition! He returned to England in 1937 as chaplain to Nugent Hicks, the Bishop of Lincoln (who had been Vicar of Brighton during Elliott's time there), and Canon and Prebend (with the resounding stall of 'Sexaginta Solidorum') of the cathedral.
  
  
• Arthur Mirrielees Cazalet (1898-1902) - click HERE for more details of his cosmopolitan life, including his connection with Jewish missions.
  
  
• Arthur Harold Barlee (1898-1908), from Donnybrook, ordained to this parish after Trinity College Dublin and then vicar of St Mary Cable Street for six years before going to Australia; after eight years back in England as vicar of St Aidan, Small Heath in Birmingham, he went to the West Indies - first to St Vincent, then to Barbados, working at the cathedral.
  
  
• Charles Harcourt Blofeld (1905-06), who served three separate stints as chaplain of the training ship Mercury before succeeding Fr Arthur Tooth – once imprisoned for ritualism offences – as Warden of the school he founded, St Michael's at Otford, Kent from 1931-38; his younger brother Thomas Guest Blofeld succeeded him in this post.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Arthur Stevens was vicar from 1909-16. Ordained in Durham where he had studied, he had served five curacies and four incumbencies in various parts of the country before he came to the parish at the age of 60; in retirement, he held permission to officiate in five further dioceses.

William Holmes Shuter succeeded him (1916-29); he trained at Trinity College Dublin, was ordained in Chester diocese in 1888 and had been a curate in  Croydon for 19 years before coming to the parish. 

Among the curates of this period were

• James Howell (1910-12) - from King's College: his fourth curacy, after which he became vicar of Ratley with Radway, near Banbury, in Coventry diocese, from 1912-33, retiring to Folkestone.
  
  
• Edwin Castledine (1911-12) - pictured -  also from King's; he later moved to and fro between Sheffield diocese and California, where he studied at the Pacific School of Religion. Returning in 1925, he served in Balby, the new parish of Herringthorpe, and the ancient parish of Thorne, and then went to become Rector of Belize Cathedral from 1940-42.
  
  
• Edward Fisher (1913-16) - a London science graduate (Huxley Scholar)  who later trained at King's London, he served in various parishes in and around London, and as a forces chaplain in the war; after a short incumbency  in St Alban's diocese, he retired to Exeter.
  
  
• Frederick Burton Norie (1913-15) - ordained in Canada in 1889, he had served six missionary posts there, and then alternated between parishes in London and Scotland.
  
  
• John Alfred Hultgren (1915-22) - a London graduate, he began his ministry here, and went on to various posts in Oxford diocese, becoming vicar and rural dean of Buckingham in the 1940s.

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. The remarkable story of his ministry, here and at St George's, is told HERE. Pictured is the patronal festival parade of c1936. 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).

From 1937-40 Edward Godfrey Denholm Denholm-Young [latterly Denholm] was curate - from King's College London, this was one of five London posts before he became chaplain to the Community of St Katharine of Alexandria at Parmoor, near Frieth between Henley-on-Thames and High Wycombe. They had been bombed out of Fulham and moved there in 1947, remaining for 51 years (when the last sister died); the house is now run by the Sue Ryder Prayer Fellowship. It had been Sir Stafford Cripps' family home - he was born there - and King Zog of Albania lived there during the Second World War.

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 [pictured 1943] 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.

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