Danish Church

The Danish (and Norwegian) Church, Wellclose Square

A CHURCH FOR DANISH AND NORWEGIAN SETTLERS

Although now usually referred to as 'the Danish Church', Norwegians who had settled in the area were also involved in its foundation, worship and finance. The timber trade received an impetus from the rebuilding of the City after 1666: it was said Norwegians warmed themselves comfortably by the Fire of London. Church regulations were drawn up in 1691, and the 1694 letters patent, granting a licence to build a church in Marine [now Wellclose] Square were issued to two Norwegian merchants, Martin Lionfeld and Theora Wegersloff; Lionfeld was appointed superintendent of the project and treasurer of the funds. A 999-year lease, at £5 per year, was obtained from Sir Michael Heneage [hence Heneage Street] and others.

The Danish ambassador laid the first stone in 1694. Until the church was completed the congregation met in Old Gravel Lane, Wapping. It was consecrated in 1696. King Christian V of Denmark [Christian Street, off Cable Street, is named after him] contributed £2000, plus an annual sum for its upkeep - supplemented by annual collections in Denmark and Norway for the minister and the relief of the poor, and levies on Danish shipments. Over the entrance was the inscription Templem Dano Norwegicum intercessione et munificento serenissimi Danorum Regis Christiani Quinti erectum - MDCXCVI.

The original architect was Thomas Woodcock, but he was replaced by Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700), an Italian-trained Danish sculptor who had settled in England and found favour with William III. His Bethlem Hospital statues Raving Madness and Melancholy can now be seen in the Guildhall Museum; he also designed the bas-reliefs on the plinth of the Monument. Cibber gave his services free; he was, said one commentator, a gentlemanlike man and a man of good sense but died poor.

Millicent Rose, in The East End of London (1951), says He was one of the most accomplished, most European artists working in Stuart England; sculptures by his hand are part of the the fabulous riches of Chatsworth, and Wren welcomed him as collaborator, employing him to make the skyline figures for Trinity College Library, Cambridge, and also to take part in the decoration of St. Paul's and Hampton Court. The influence of Wren is obvious in the Danes' Church; the grouping of round and round-headed windows, the decorative swags of carved stone, the little campanile, all recall elements from the City churches. The most obvious affinity is with St Benet's, Paul's Wharf, a comparison which also emphasizes the difference between the two churches. St Benet's, with its small roofs, lacks the cosmopolitan unity of its eastern contemporary; it was not Wren's custom, in a building of this size, to hide the roof behind a parapet. Cibber's little church has a personality of its own, and though its creator had been in England nearly half a century, he speaks his English with a slightly foreign intonation (p21).

[Interior: engraving by Kip, 1697]

As well as designing the church, Cibber created external and internal sculptures. Outside, on the west front, were figures (in lead) of Faith, Hope and Charity. Charity [pictured] is now in the Carlsberg Ny Glytothek, an art museum in Copenhagen. Inside, there was an elaborately carved pulpit; at its side was an iron and gilt box containing four hour glasses. For the reredos, he carved four baroque figures in wood: Moses, John the Baptist, St Peter and St Paul [see below for their subsequent movements - and also for a picture of a carved boss now located in St Paul's School].

Over the altar was a painting of the angel strengthening Christ in Gethsemane. There were two west-end galleries. One commentator remarked that it was a commodious and elegant structure, and though the architect appears to have understood ornaments, he has not been too lavish in the use of them. Others were less complimentary: one said it was an object of curiosity and ridicule ... a parcel of wainscot Christianity....stinking of pitch and tar ... and seafaring apparel. A fine organ was installed in 1678 by 'Father' Smith (Bernard Schmidt, c1603-1708), one of forty or fifty instruments he built, and is said to have been played by Haydn, Blow, Purcell and Handel. [When the church was demolished part of the console was preserved in St Paul's vestry, but has since been 'lost'. At the Danish Church's present home, St Katharine's Regents Park, is an organ of 1778 by Samuel Green which Mendelssohn once played.]

Cibber's son (by his second wife Jane Colley) was the extrovert dandy Colley Cibber (1671-1757), an actor-dramatist who became Poet Laureate, and whose Apology of 1740 is a mine of information about the theatre of this period. He was interred and memorialised in Westminster Abbey. However, the Revd Dan Greatorex, first Vicar of St Paul's, in a private note of 1883, claimed that Cibber's father and mother were buried in the vault beneath the Danish Church and that when it was demolished in 1869 their coffins were removed into the crypt and there bricked up, under what is now St Paul's School. This remains the subject of conjecture. There was apparently a marble monument to Jane, but it was lost.

Other monuments were to Christian Wegersloff, merchant, and his three wives Letitia (and her sister Mary Collins), Anne and Mary (1767); Anna Penelope, relict of William Jackson and wife of Herman Pohlman, merchant (1734), and Herman Pohlman (1754); Ambrosia, daughter of George Michelsen, widow of Pastor Borneman and wife of John Collett (1740); John Collett, merchant (1759); Claudius Heide, merchant (1774); George Wolff, Danish and Norwegian consul (died 1828 aged 92) and his wife Elizabeth (1770) and relative Ernst Fridrick, an elder of the church who published a book about the church in Copenhagen in 1802 - see Ada Polak Wolffs and Dorville (1988, an English summary of a Norwegian history of the family); and Peter Alsing, the last churchwarden. There were statues of Frederic King of Denmark, and of Charles II and William III.

In 1768 the young King of Denmark payed an extended visit to London, travelling incognito under the name of the Prince of Travandahl, and watched closely by the press. He attended worship at the church one Sunday, attended by 'several of the nobility', and sat in the royal pew, enclosed by sash windows.

According to James Southerden Burn, The History of the French, Walloon, Dutch and Other Foreign Protestant Refugees &c (1846) [p241], all the church records were burned at the end of the 18th century after 'difficulties', leaving only one register, covering the period 1802-16. This recorded many communicants on prisoner of war ships, including the Irresistible and Bahama at Chatham (1809-10), the Brave at Plymouth (1811), the Buckingham, Nassau, Fryen and others. Burn also gives a list of ministers who served the church:

Iver Brink (1690-1702) [or Branck: his portrait hung in the vestry]

Jorgen Ursin
Philip Julius Borneman FRS
Soren Poulsen (1725-48, died in office)

? Michelsen (17??-70, died in office)
Hans Christian Roede (1771-74)
Hans Hammond (1775-??)
Andreas Charles Kierulff (????-1816)

At some stage, the church appears to have been struck by lightning. Gustavus Brander FRS FAS (1720-87) [right - painting by Nathaniel Dance], a Swedish naturalist and dilettante, reported to the Royal Society on its effects (Phil. Trans. XLIV. 298). Brander was a curator of the British Museum and a Director of the Bank of England; inheriting his uncle's fortune, he spent his latter years collecting (including the elaborate coronation chair of the German emperors) and landscaping his Hampshire garden. He gave a significant collection of Hampshire fossils (with notes by Dr Solander) to the British Museum. He also published notes on The Form of Cury [sic], a Roll of Ancient English Cookery.

When the congregation disbanded, the Norwegian government transferred its annual subsidy of £100 to the Swedish Church in Prince's Square, to which some Norwegian members transferred.

When the church was demolished in 1869, Cibber's four carved figures (mentioned above) were transferred to the St Peter's Danish Seamen's Mission Church in Ming Street [formerly King Street] E14. This had been established in 1867 as the 'Danish Seamen's Church in Foreign Harbours' and was reconstructed in 1906. It was restored and brightly redecorated in 1948 after war damage by Caröe & Partners, a distinguished architectural firm of Danish origin. The figures were said to look odd in this typically Scandinavian setting; but this church in turn ceased to function in 1985 and was demolished (though the Mission's office remains at 322 Rope Street in Rotherhithe). The figures are now to be found at the Danish Church in Regent's Park, where in 1952 the congregation took over, and restored, St Katharine's Church which was built in 1827 as the chapel for the Royal Foundation of St Katharine's when it moved from its site near Wellclose Square for the construction of St Katharine's Docks - see here for more details about the Foundation's move, and pictures below of the Regent's Park church, and also of carved cherubs in a classroom at St Paul's School. So by a roundabout route they retain a link with the history of this area, and the seamen's chaplains work from this church base.

Porvoo

porvoo

The congregation is now part of the Danske Sømands og Udlands Kirker (DSUK) - The Danish Church Abroad / Danish Seamen's Church - founded in 2004 through the merger of The Danish Church Abroad and The Danish Seamen's Church in Foreign Harbours. The DSUK is affiliated to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, which on 3 October 2010 became a full member of the Porvoo Agreement (to which they were committed from the outset, but had constitutional difficulties about how they could sign up), so - like the Swedes, Finns and other Baltic and Nordic churches in London - are in communion with the Church of England.

Here [left to right] are pictures of the Danish Church in Regent's Park mentioned above; of St Olav's, the Norwegian Church in Rotherhithe (by the entrance to the Rotherhithe tunnel), which forms part of Sjømannskirken, the Norwegian Church Abroad; and also, for the sake of completeness, of the nearby Finnish Church in Albion Street (also part of the Porvoo 'family'). Although there was never a Finnish Church north of the river, the Rector of St George-in-the-East has Finnish connections, and we often host visits from friends and officers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.

A CHURCH FOR SEAFARERS

As the Danish community in the area declined - tending to move first to Mile End Old Town and then to Essex - and the church was abandoned, it was used by a variety of non-denominational seafarers' missions, such as the Bethel Flag Union and other temperance organisations. It was bought in 1824 by George Charles (Bo'sun) Smith, a Baptist. He referred to the area as 'Satan's Sailortown Seat', and a couple of years earlier had opened a Seaman's Chapel and Sea-boys' School at 42 Lower East Smithfield. Roald Kverndal's Seamen's Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth (1986) gives more details about Smith; and see his Prose and Poetical Works (1824). His vision was:

The Headquarters would be the great rendezvous of the lost and guilty, where the officers of the Captain of Salvation may, under his orders, invite, persuade and impress those poor wretched wanderers who pass by, and graciously compel them to enter the receiving ship of his church universal, from whence they may be drafted to the several cruisers in the glorious service of his Celestial Majesty and in which, according to telegraphic orders, they may war a good warfare against the Lord's enemies and theirs.

But over the years Bo'sun Smith fell out with his committee, who moved to a disused sugar warehouse in the Ratcliff Highway in 1845 without him.

In 1827 this use of the church provoked 'E.I.C.' to write to the Gentleman's Magazine in these terms:

In the area of Wellclose-square, is a Church which was built for the King of Denmark, by Caius Gabriel Gibber, the well-known sculptor of the maniacs formerly in Moor-fields. Its obscure situation renders it but little noticed at this day, or I feel certain it would not have fallen into the disgrace which it at present has.

Your readers will, I am sure, be equally surprised with myself, at hearing that this edifice is converted into a meeting-house for a society of enthusiasts calling themselves the Bethel Union, and they will be the more grieved when they read the description of the edifice. The exterior shows merely a plain brick building, with a small steeple at the west end. The west front is adorned with statues of the Christian virtues. Charity, with its accompanying infants, is placed upon the cornice of the doorway [pictured].

Faith and Hope occupying niches at the sides of it. There are two Latin inscriptions on this part, setting forth the erection and dedication of the building. The interior, however, is very pleasing; its decorations and ornaments are in the best taste of the seventeenth century, and are executed in a style of elegance and profusion not surpassed by any building of the kind in the metropolis. It resembles the primitive Churches in having a circular tribune at the east end, behind the altar screen, leaving a vacancy above it, which has a far better appearance than where it is placed against a wall. It is a fine composition of the Corinthian order, and beautifully carved ; in the centre is a large painting, representing the agony in the Garden. On each side of this, upon pedestals, are full-length statues the size of life, of our Saviour and Moses, and on the cornice St. Peter and St. Paul, of smaller proportions. The table is supported by elegant open work in brass, and is covered with crimson velvet. At the west end are two galleries richly carved. In the upper is the case of an organ, the instrument having been removed. The pulpit, which is situated against the north wall, is polygonal, each face being embellished with a carving in relief from the history of our Lord. Opposite to it is a large pew, glazed and finished with a canopied roof, once appropriated to Royalty. The ceiling is richly worked in stucco, the centre rising into an elegant dome. A stone font stands in a pew near the altar. The royal arms of Denmark, and the cypher of the founder (Christian), is seen in several parts of the edifice. Upon the whole, a degree of richness and splendour are visible throughout the building, met with in few modern Churches.

When I advert to the present appropriation of the edifice, I feel certain your readers will participate with me in the feelings of indignation which arose when I witnessed its degradation. The altar-table serves as a depository for hats, and the statues of our Saviour and Moses are rendered ridiculous by having blue flags stuck into their hands, inscribed with the word "Bethel,'' like those carried by benefit societies, and at other processions of a similar stamp. A model of a ship is suspended from the western galleries, and on the outside of the Church a mast with shrouds and tacking is stuck upon the roof. It would be needless to add more upon the conduct of a party which could offer so great an indignity to the statue of our Saviour as that I have just noticed, nor will it be necessary for any feelings of execration against such conduct; the bare recital of the facts themselves are sufficient. After the service, as it is called, had ended, and the congregation had deposited their offerings in the shape of pence and halfpence, in certain tin boxes, which though less musical, as effectually proclaimed the pharasaical mode of alms-giving, as a trumpet would have done, some men with riddles and clarionets struck up a tune, in which they were vocally accompanied by several others, with voices so devoid of grace and harmony, that I was only restrained from a laugh by the consideration that the building had once been sacred, and the feelings of indignation which arose from witnessing its present state.

Is the Danish Ambassador cognisant of the appropriation of the building? I can scarce believe that the King of Denmark would ever have suffered a Chapel built by one of his predecessors on the throne to be thus degraded. If Royalty, however, should display an unworthy apathy on the occasion, those great bodies, the Commissioners for building new Churches, and the Society for the same purpose, are neither dead nor asleep, and I cannot suppose that either would have suffered the building to have fallen into its present use, when it might have been converted into a Chapel of the Establishment, so much wanted in the neighbourhood, if they had been aware of the change before it took place. It is not, however, too late to redeem the structure. Let me then, Mr. Urban, call upon the two bodies I have named, and earnestly entreat the members of them, if they feel any regard for the honour of the Established Church, if they are actuated by those feelings which ought to guide them in the performance of their high duties, to lose no time in purchasing the structure, and restoring to it a sound form of worship, and to its altar and font their respective sacraments. Let the scriptural liturgy and the episcopally ordained Clergyman supersede the low-lived stories and the coarse vulgarity of the boatswain's mate. If this appeal, however, is received with apathy, and treated with contempt, join with me, in calling upon the liberality of your friends to raise a private subscription for this laudable purpose. I earnestly beg your insertion or this, and let me hope, for the honour of the Church, that it will not be disregarded.

For the final, and very different, stage in this building's history, see St Saviour & St Cross Chapel. When the Rector Bryan King tried to have a district assigned to this church for the Mission, the minister of St Paul Dock Street, Dan Greatorex (who was a firm Protestant), objected, and stirred up other local clergy, including Thomas Richardson at St Matthew Pell Street, to protest about the spread of 'Puseyism' in Stepney. The Bishop settled the dispute by having a district assigned to St Paul's in 1864. (It had not previously had parish boundaries because it was the 'Church for Seamen of the Port of London'). Since the Mission fell into this district, Greatorex closed it, and bought the building for £2,000, intending to convert it into a school - the 999-year leases were assigned to the Vicar and chapel-wardens 'upon trust for schools' in 1868/9. So all the Mission's activities transferred to Wapping.

In the event, when Greatorex' architect brother Reuben surveyed it, the walls were found to be out of true, the south wall by 7½" and the north wall by 9". Rhode Hawkins' second opinion concurred, so it was demolished in 1869. The fine fittings were sold by auction: the font fetched £5 5s, the Royal Arms and altar-piece £35, and the pulpit with its tester and carved figures £24. The organ console was moved to St Paul's church - it later disappeared. A new school, designed by Reuben, was built on the site in 1870 and opened by the Prince of Wales. Its story is recorded in St Paul's School 1870-1995 (produced by The Sunday Times), on this page and on the school website. The school was built directly over the vaults of the old church - pictured right - which were explored during the building work on the site, though with no significant discoveries!

A link with the past: fixed to the eaves of the year 1 classroom is a small carved boss of a group of cherubs (now painted over), which presumably came from Cibber's church - pictured.

For a 1934 account of Wellclose Square and some of its inhabitants, see here.

For an article by the current English correspondent of the Danish national press, who lives in the parish, click here (if you read Danish!)