St John Beverley Groser (1890-1966)

John Groser [sketch by Ronald Searle] was the most famous – or infamous, depending on your point of view! - priest to serve this parish in the 20th century. He was the Vicar of Christ Church, Watney Street from 1929-48, and when this and other churches were blitzed, Curate-in-charge of St George-in-the-East and St John Golding Street from 1941 to 1947. Much has been written about him and the context in which he worked. This page is indebted to his biography, edited by Kenneth Brill John Groser – East London Priest (Mowbray 1971), to the many writings and web-postings of Ken Leech, recorder-supreme of all things Christian Socialist, 

He was one of 11 children of an American-born father, a missionary who had worked among North American Indians, and an English-born mother, who had worked in Labrador. He was born at (and named for) Beverley, a remote cattle station in Western Australia where his father was Rector. He retained a deep fondness for Australia, where other family members remained, though from the time he came to England as a teenager did not return until he retired.

He lodged with a rather grand family, and attended Ellesmere School, one of the schools of the anglo-catholic Woodard Foundation, before training with the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield (in contrast to his two older brothers, who trained at St Augustine's College Canterbury). Study was a struggle because his education in Australia had been rudimentary.

From 1914 he was a curate All Saints Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a tough slum parish, and the experience radicalised him: he was puzzled when the bishop complained he had been sent there to save souls, not bodies. Service as a front line chaplain to the Forces in France continued to shape his uncompromising views – and turned his hair white. His commanding officer put him in charge of a group of demoralised men in a time of heavy casualties. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1917, sent home wounded and received the Military Cross in the following year. 

In 1917 he met and married Mary Bucknall [pictured together in 1919] at St Winnow Cornwall, where her father was vicar. It was a devoted partnership, and she was central to everything that he later did. They had two sons and two daughters. Her sister Nancy married Charles (Carl) Threlfall Richards, who had been at Mirfield with Groser, and was to serve as his curate at St George's for a time.

It was hard to place such a man after the war; he did a year as Messenger for the Church of England Men's Society in Carlisle, Durham and Newcastle dioceses, but this was no good, because he did not believe men could be brought back to the church as it had been. So he went to Cornwall, as curate at St Winnow, to reflect on his future. Mary's brother Jack introduced him to Conrad Noël and the Catholic Crusade. He was totally captivated by the ethos of Thaxted – the Red Flag, the liturgy, the music, which were all of a piece – and later did temporary duty there. Of the Crusade's manifesto he said a bit unbalanced, but still pretty splendid, don't you think?  Conrard Noël: an Autobiography (Dent 1945, p107f) refers briefly to Groser's time at Watney Street.

The Crucifix, the Red Flag, and the Flag of St George

From 1922-28 John Groser and Jack Bucknall were curates at St Michael Poplar, under Fr C.G. Langdon. The two families lived next door to each other in Teviot Street, where many meetings were held. They rubbed shoulders with the great East End political figures of the day – George Lansbury (Leader of the Opposition), Mary Hughes, Basil Henriques – and were a part of 'Poplarism', a 'can-do' form of direct action in the face of bureaucracy.

John and Jack held many street corner meetings for the Catholic Crusade [pictured left, 1920s], always dressed in cassocks and flanked by the three symbols of the crucifix, the Red Flag, and the flag of St George. (Groser had no time for the Union Jack: scouts at Christ Church were only permitted to parade the George, and their neckerchiefs, significantly, were red.) Whatever the meetings had been called for, the message was always about the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God. So get organised, they told the unemployed; claim your God-given dignity and show the authorities who you really are. John was injured in action in the General Strike.

Other Thaxted-inspired parts of his message may have been more surprising to East Enders. Jim Desormeaux, who attended many of these meetings and became a parishioner at Christ Church, commented The drabness of the Poplar homes was anathema to Groser. Get colour in your lives and in your homes, he would urge. Do away with your lace curtains and aspidistra plants; away with the dark brown and green paints. Did local folk share his enthusiasm for country dancing – or (rather less Thaxted) sword-dancing – as embodiments of the gospel?

There was continual conflict with Fr Langdon and his successor Fr Ashcroft, even though both shared many of Groser's view and ideals, and with Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, who, it was said, didn't understand what he was about but recognised him as a gentleman! There were threats of sacking; in the end, Groser resigned. A year of unemployment followed – he did not sign on, as he threatened, but supported his family by Sunday duties, selling life insurance, and some craft work.

Christ Church, Watney Street

In 1929 he was appointed to Christ Church, Watney Street. A commission on its future had sat for six months, and it was felt that he could do no harm in this hopeless situation. In the event, he transformed it, and put it on the map. High Mass and Solemn Evensong, both with incense (previously only occasionally used) were flamboyantly celebrated with Thaxted-style ceremonial. The church was re-ordered with a more open sanctuary [pictured in 1928 and 1932, showing the contrast] and limewashed, with banners – St George (the parish church) and the blood-red people's banner 'He has made of one blood all nations'. He had become a skilled weaver, and made many of the hangings and vestments himself – we still wear his hand-blocked unbleached holland Lenten chasuble at St George's. Out went sentimental music, and (with Mary as the organist, and from 1936 a new and smaller organ by Cedric Arnold, a Thaxted builder) in came Bach and Byrd, with hymns that combined radical politics and romantic pastoral nostalgia, such as Charles Dalmon's text, usually sung to the tune 'We plough the fields, and scatter', which included the verse (full text here, but in a 'modernised' version by Ken Leech; see here for connections with present-day St Georgestide events):

The congregation expanded, though many on the Electoral Roll were Catholic Crusaders rather than local worshippers. At this time there was factional division among left-wing groups over Stalinism, and after long and bitter discussion John and Mary Groser and the group at Christ Church were driven out of the Crusade in March 1932, shifting to various other alliances, principally the Socialist Christian League [pictured 1937]. In that year, Christ Church held a conference on poverty in the East End and the administration of the Poor Law; Groser wrote and spoke a good deal on unemployment.

Jack Boggis, whose vocation had been inspired by Groser at Poplar, came as curate (1932-36) and produced the radical Christ Church Monthly – he was to succeed Groser as Rector at St George's. Here is his tribute to his great mentor. Controversially, Groser disposed of Planet Street Institute to enable facilities at the church hall ('Dean Street Parish Room', in the vicarage garden) to be improved. The ever-open vicarage [picture 1929], with Mary somehow providing food and welcome for all comers, was at the heart of parish life.

In these years he galvanised local opposition to Mosley, addressing both the community and the police (see Kenneth Leech Struggle in Babylon: racism in the cities and churches of Britain (Sheldon 1988) p97f). He helped found, and was president of, the Stepney Tenants' Defence League, a broad-based grouping, many of whose activists were Jewish; it had begun with surgeries in the vicarage. It was one of the organisations  taking part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, in which Fr Groser had his nose broken by a police baton.

In 1938 he was one of the few churchmen to break ranks and speak out against Chamberlain's policy of appeasement with Germany. On 7 October he wrote to the Anglican Guardian

When war came, he displayed characteristically heroic care for his people, with little regard for his own welfare and reputation. In 1940 he broke into an official food store and distributed rations to homeless people and organized buses to take them to places of safety. He wrote scathingly about the arrangements made for East Enders. He was involved in the creation of a railway arch air-raid shelter in Watney Street. Here is a newspaper article, 60 years on, about his wartime activities, by the great Bob Holman.

St George's and after

Fr Groser's ministry at Christ Church ended abruptly when the church and vicarage were destroyed by a landmine on 16 April 1941; St George's was blitzed the following month. The family, together with their livestock (including chickens, who nibbled the carpets) moved to St George's Rectory, and for the next six years he led the ministry of the combined parishes of Christ Church, St John's and St George's, together with his brother-in-law Carl Richards (briefly), then Geoffrey Lough, and Denys Giddey, as curates, and in due course Ethel Upton as parish worker. The phone number was then (and recognisably still is) ROYal 1345 - perhaps a sign that the radical was about to embrace aspects of the establishment.

The man thought unemployable had become acceptable! He was now much in demand as a speaker and occasional broadcaster; was Select Preacher at Cambridge University in 1941; from 1943-45 a member of the Bishop of Rochester's group which produced the report Towards the Conversion of England (commissioned by the Archbishops to identify a mission strategy for the post-war world: it had limited impact);  was associated with Archbishop William Temple's Religion and Life Movement (an ecumenical campaign launched in1940 stemming from the 1937 Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State); became a member of the Church of England Board for Social Responsibility; toured theological colleges after the war; and was Rural Dean of Stepney from 1945-56. Back home, he was instrumental in setting up Stepney Old Peoples' Welfare Association in 1947 [now Tower Hamlets Friends & Neighbours]. There was even talk of 'preferment'.

In 1948, after a sabbatical in Germany, he was appointed as Master of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, which was being brought back to the East End where it properly belonged (founded in 1147, with a charge to pray daily for the soul of Queen Matilda, it had been displaced from what became St Katharine's Dock to Regent's Park in 1825 - see here for more detail). While building work was being done, the family lived at 400 Commercial Road, the parsonage house of the closed church of St John the Evangelist-in-the-East. He was at St Katharine's for the last fourteen years of his ministry, supported by a lay community of which Olive Wagstaff from our congregation was an original member, before it was replaced by male and female members of religious orders. There he wrote Politics & Persons (1949), and in 1951 helped found, together with the local Franciscans, the Stepney Coloured People's [sic] Association, of which he became President. Pictured is his farewell at the Stepney OAP's Garden Party held at St Katharine's, where he was presented with a tobacco pouch and electric fire (the Lady Mayor of Stepney is seated, and Olive Wagstaff and Tom Whiting are on the right). Right is a 1962 profile, 'Father Figure', from The Guardian.

In 1990 a blue plaque was placed at St Katharine's, describing him as a 'priest and social reformer'. The late Queen Mother, as patron, was closely associated with the Foundation (local clergy remember sipping her discarded glasses of gin and Dubonnet). The Queen is the current patron, and visited in 2011 for the 60th anniversary of the dedication of the chapel - said to have had the first central altar in this country, over which hung a stark metal corona (now gone, and various other changes have been made). A display of photographs, including some characteristic shots of Fr Groser, was mounted for the occasion. Read his Church Times obituary (25 March 1966), and this letter from his one-time curate Denys Giddey, protesting against his depiction by A. Tindal Hart in Some Clerical Oddities (New Horzion 1980).

Film appearances

In 1946 John Groser appeared, as himself (introduced as 'Father John'), in Land of Promise,  a film about urban housing past, present and future, making a plea for decent post-war reconstruction. It was directed by Paul Rotha for the pioneering and left-wing Central Office of Information; the narrator was (Sir) John Mills, with Miles Malleson, co-writer of the script, as 'The Know-All', and made extensive use of 'Isotype' graphics.  Registered users of BFI Screenonline can  stream the whole fim, or excerpts.

In 1949 he played the part [pictured right]  of Thomas Becket in a film of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, directed by George Hoellering, alongside Mark Dignam, Michael Aldridge, Leo McKern and Paul Rogers, with Eliot himself as the Fourth Tempter. Hoellering wanted someone with spiritual authority, rather than a known actor, to play the part. Groser let his hair grow long, rather than wear a wig, and entered wholeheartedly into the experience; its theme of spiritual defiance of temporal authority was dear to his heart. The film was shown in 1952 and received mixed reviews (here is one from the New York Times); it was never on general release, perhaps because of its length (over three hours).

John and Mary Groser retired to Watlington in Oxfordshire in 1962 [pictured in that year in Australia], where he died four years later. 

The John Groser Memorial Trust was set up to help young people in Tower Hamlets to broaden their education by travel and voluntary service overseas.

His papers (including some collected by Dorothy Halsall, a parish worker at St George's and then a colleague at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine) are held at Lambeth Palace Library [MSS 3428-35] and cover a wide range of topics.