St John the Evangelist

St John the Evangelist-in-the-East Golding Street see also parish registers

(formerly Grove Street or Low Grove Street) 1869 - 1943

THE CHURCH

When the Revd Joseph Marychurch Vaughan came as curate of the parish in 1865 (living at 33 Nassau Place, Commercial Road), his main task was to establish a church in the very poor area in the northern part of the parish, with a population of about 6,000. Three houses in Grove Street were acquired from Mrs Harris, the leaseholder, in 1867. The church, with 500 sittings, was built on the cheap, at a cost of £3,500. The Bishop of London's Fund gave £1,500, the London Diocesan Church Building Society £300, the Incorporated Church Building Society £150 and Marshall's Charity £100; he had to find the rest. He was a freemason (a member of Royal Albert Lodge, and later of Asaph Lodge), and appealed for help in the Freemasons Magazine & Masonic Mirror of 1868:

The new district of St. John, in the parish of St George-in-the-East, is situated on the borders of the London Docks, and has a poor population of 6,000 souls. Moved by a conviction of the very urgent spiritual need of the district, the working men (the bulk of whom are dock labourers, costermongers, and seafaring men) have formed themselves into a committee, and are going literally 'from house to house,' to obtain contributions to the Church Building Fund. It may be interesting to state further, that the children in the free schools have also united to help on the work, and that there are at the present time no less than 166 contributing 1/2d. a-week, while there are other labourers in the district who are obtaining contributions that vary from 1d. to 6d. a-week. For three years the missionary clergyman has carried on his work in a school-room and from house to house; he has a Scripture-reader, a mission-woman, and a district nurse labouring with him — a free school (of which the Right Hon. the Earl of Shaftesbury is President), with 307 children on the books, and an average attendance of 117 — a lending library, containing about 400 volumes of an interesting and instructive character — a penny bank, in which last year was deposited £54 9s. by 179 depositors — a soup kitchen for giving occasional dinners to the more sickly and destitute children, and for supplying the poor of the district with nutritious food during the winter months — a mother's meeting, average attendance 30 — a sewing class three times a week for teaching the children to make articles of clothing for themselves — and penny readings, with the view of giving the working classes a pleasant and profitable evening, and to encourage in them a taste for intellectual pursuits. But while the above has been done, and these agencies for good are all in active operation, the committee feel that very much remains yet to be accomplished before the parochial system is thoroughly established among them. They are convinced that a church should be built; and that, when this is completed, they will then have secured for the 'labour of love' going on in their midst, that permanency which they so ardently desire.....

The Building and Working Men's Committees venture to make an earnest appeal to all who value the blessed privilege of a House consecrated to the service of prayer and praise, to assist them in the proposed work by contributing at least a shilling in postage stamps. Should, however, any be disposed to make a larger donation, cheques crossed "East London Bank" or Post-office Orders made payable at "Eastern District Post-office,'' Commercial-road, E. may be sent to the Incumbent designate, the Rev. J. M. Vaughan, 33, Nassau-place, Commercial-road, E. or will be thankfully acknowledged by any of the following gentlemen :— Rev. J. Cohen, M. A., Rесtor of St. Mary's, Whitechapel ; Mr. Henry Mosely, 9. St. George's-place, St. George-in-the-East; Rev. J. G. Pilkington, M.A., Clerical Secretary, Bishop of London's Fund, 46A Pall Mall; Rev. T. J. Rowsell. M.A., Chaplain to the Queen, Rector of St. Margaret's Lothbury; Rev. F. W. Russell, M.A., 35, St. Augustine-road, Camden-square, N.W. Contributors of 5s. and upwards will be presented with photograph of the new church.

The architects were the Francis brothers Frederick John (1818-96) and Horace (1821-94), whose practice was at 38 Upper Bedford Place, Bloomsbury; Messrs Dove were the builders. The foundation stone was laid by the Bishop of London on 29 April 1868, and he consecrated the church on 12 February 1869, with the Archbishop of Canterbury present. Mr Vaughan was inducted as the first vicar [drawing left from the Illustrated London News 20 February 1869; ICBS plan 06719 of new church, with gallery, on right].

St John's was built of stock brick, with stone dressings, and consisted of a nave and aisles of five bays, the last bay of which formed the chancel. The construction of the east window suggested that a chancel extension was envisaged, but this never happened. At the south-west was the base of a tower which should have been completed with a belfry stage and a brick spire; this too was never finished, and a single bell was hung in a wooden frame on the top of the tower. Only the south side of the church was visible; it was surrounded by tenement houses.

The organ - 2 manuals, 15 speaking stops - was built by Gray and Davison in 1869, at a cost of £318. Vaughan stressed (no doubt with events at St George-in-the-East in mind) that he wanted to have a thoroughly good musical service, at the same time most carefully avoiding all extremes. See this report from the Musical Standard of 20 February 1869.

St John's never had its own church school. The first Board School built in the parish was in Berner Street [now Henriques Street] 1871. Opposite, on what is now the playground of Harry Gosling School, was discovered in 1888 the body of one of Jack the Ripper's victims - see here for more details. In 1901 another Board School was built near the church in Christian Street (see here for its subsequent history, on the site of what had been London's tallest chimney at Martineau's sugar refinery which burnt down twice in the 19th century. At 44 Christian Street were the works of George Scott & Sons, engineers. His son Frank Walter Scott (1864-90), who had been articled to a German firm and then ran his father's drawing office, designed and constructed a gas-compressing plant plant at the Royal Institution and developed various items of hydraulic machinery (example right); he was an Associate Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. His brother Fredreick, of 94 Cannon Street Road, was a 'county engineer'.

Here is an account of Backchurch Lane, the western boundary of the parish, from the 19th century to the present day.

THE CLERGY

Joseph Marychurch Vaughan, the first incumbent, was one of nine children of a parson, John Vaughan (no relation to D.J. Vaughan's family at St Mark Whitechapel) and Elizabeth Marychurch; two of his brothers, and several other family members, were also ordained or married clergymen. After Cambridge, he trained at King's College London and served curacies in county Durham (ordained in 1859 by letters dimissory from the Bishop of Rochester) and Hove. He stayed at St John's for 14 years, ten of them as Vicar, leaving for a lighter sphere of work, much needed after the long overstrain of mind and body amid a population of more than 10,000 (Coral Missionary Magazine 1880), to become vicar of St Thomas of Canterbury, Dodbrooke, in Devon. But he only stayed there a year, and for a further year as vicar of Englishcombe, near Bath, before returning to London in 1882 as vicar of St Nicholas Deptford, then in Rochester diocese. Sadly, in 1886 he was he fell into trouble over drinking and debts and was declared bankrupt - Lambeth Palace Library holds letters of 1897 on the subject; he went to Queensland, and worked in Townsville.

On 28 September 1864 Vaughan had been persuaded to marry, by licence, a former neighbour from Edmonton, Robert Vaux Zinzan, to his stepmother Mary Ann Green, although they had no connection with the parish and gave false information, declaring her to be a spinster. Zinzan's father (Robert Comport Zinzan), like his son, was a surgeon and apothecary, and had four children by his first wife, in London; she died, and the family moved to the Wiltshire village of Hindon where he married the daughter of the local publican (he was 41, she was 18); this marriage was childless. He died of 'exhaustion' in 1862, and two years later Mary became pregnant by her stepson, who sought to regularise their relationship. The marriage was challenged, on the basis of evidence provided by the parish clerk of Hindon, and resulted in a case at the Aldermans' Court, Guildhall, with a warrant for his apprehension, though this was not executed. The marriage was presumably annulled, since in 1866 he married Isabella Griffith at East Knoyle parish church, and they moved to Onehunga, a suburb of Auckland in New Zealand, where in 1870 he applied for his qualifications to be recognised, dying nine years later of cirrhosis of the liver. In due course the family produced noted Kiwi rugby and cricket players. Louisa, the child of the incestuous relationship, became a sister of Mercy at St Denys Warminster, where she died in 1920. See more here.

Vaughan's successor (1879-1909) was George Thomas Cull Bennett (see Charles Booth archive B222 pp20-35). He was a St Bees' trainee, and had been a curate in county Durham (ordained in 1863) and incumbent of Kenley, near Shrewsbury (where he was involved in a court case over a mortgage in relation to Bishopscourt Farm, Shapwick near Blandford). He was musical, and one of many Victorians who wrote music for Miss Margaret Ann Headlam's harvest hymn Holy is the seed-time. He was a supporter of the Family Welfare Association, the Charity Organisation Society (Serving on its local committee) and the East London Nursing Society, and a regular attender at meetings of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He remained here for thirty years; a widower - his wife Maria had died during his time at Kenley - in January 1902 at the age of 61 he married Louisa Nelhams (aged 43) at St John's, with his long-serving curate Charles Reeder officiating.

The 1886 Religious Survey of London records attendances on 24 October of 98 in the morning, and 128 in the evening; see here for statistics of baptisms and weddings during the lifetime of the church.

Curates

In 1865, in some desparation, Vaughan had advertised in The Ecclesiastical Gazette for a curate, at a stipend of £130 a year - 'views moderate, schoolroom services' - to help him build up the new district.

Thomas Charles Hills was the first to respond, though did not stay long. (This needs confirming: the 1866 Clergy List has 'C. Hills' as curate of St John's, St George's-in-the-East, but it is not recorded elsewhere.) He trained at St Bees and served a 2-year curacy in Derby (then in Lichfield diocese) until 1864, when he became northern and Scottish secretary for the Patagonian Mission (later the South American Missionary Society). He returned to Lichfield diocses in 1867 as Vicar of Bolsover, a poorly-endowed but historic church in the patronage of the Duke of Portland; there he became the first chairman of Bolsover Urban District Council - 'Hillstown' was named after him. He was the custodian of a sugar bowl which was a rare example of 'Bolsover ware' (the kilns were destroyed in 1750).

In the next few years, Vaughan received occasional help from curates of other local parishes, including Coleman Connolly of Christ Church Watney Street, and Henry Hugh Beams Paull of St Paul Shadwell (whose wife Susannah was a translator of children's books, including Andersen's and Grimm's fairy tales).

Stanley Hamilton Hayes (1873-74) was ordained to an Irish curacy from Trinity College Dublin, and after five further brief curacies he came here. In 1888 he became chaplain at the Westminster Workhouse in Poland Street, remaining in post there for many years.
David Nickerson (1875-76) was Canadian, and had served in three parishes in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; after his short time here, he became a Chaplain to the Forces, with postings in this country and abroad for 25 years before becoming vicar of Harlington, near Dunstable. He said at a conference that the best prospect for a Poor Law child was to draft him into the army or navy. He published The Origin of Thought (Kegan, Paul & Trench 1901), an introduction to philosophy in a light and popular manner, said one review, but with a misleadingly abstruse title. His son Major General William Henry Snyder Nickerson was a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross for his service, as a lieutenant in the Royal Arrmy Medical Corps, to a wounded man at Wakkerstroom in the Boer War.

Curates in Cull Bennett's time were:

Edwin Theodore Lewis (1880-86), ordained in South Africa, and serving no less than twelve curacies, in London, Lincolnshire, the Isle of Wight and the north of Scotland, before retiring to Bristol.
Henry John Frye (1883-87), born in Thaxted in 1851 (where his father Philemon was a bookseller), trained at Lichfield (a theological college founded in 1857), and in 1902 after six curacies became the chaplain of Shepton Mallet prison (built in 1625 and still in use, though it has been through many changes; in Frye's time the number of inmates was relatively low). He died in 1913.
Samuel Secretan (1884) is described as an 'Irishman and perpetual curate'! It is true that he had studied at Trinity College Dublin (winning the Hebrew Prize in 1854) - though he had also attended St John's College Cambridge - and also that he served at least eight brief curacies and never held a benefice up to his death in 1911. His name does not appear as an officiant in the baptism or marriage registers at St John's. He was from a French Huguenot family, some of whom achieved distinction (including Charles Secrétan, 1815-95, a Swiss philosopher of religion). Frederick Samuel Secretan, who may have been his father, was naturalised, became a member of Lloyd's and settled in Brecknockshire. For a time Samuel tried his hand as a schoolmaster, at Howden in Yorkshire; here is a caustic critique of a sermon he preached there and published.
Charles Clare Dawson Smith (1887-88) [later hyphenated as Dawson-Smith], was one of our few clergy to train at Chichester (which J. L. Ross had helped to found fifty years earlier before he became Rector of St George-in-the-East). For over 30 years from 1897 he was Rector of Nash, near Stony Stratford (re-appearing briefly at St John's in 1910 to help out), where he put in a patent application for 'improvements in explosives for shot and other guns'. His son Lt Frank Dawson-Smith (who had been a regular contributor to Bird Notes) was murdered by mutineering Somali soldiers of the King's African Rifles at Ramo in Jubaland on the Abyssinian border in 1920. He was a 'communicator' in psychic sittings attended by his mother.
Daniel Radford (1887-92), ordained in 1871, 23 years after graduating from London University; his seventh London curacy, after which he became the last resident rector of Papworth St Agnes near Cambridge until 1916: this was a congregation started in the 1830s by the missionary preaching in a barn of H.J. Sperling (whose family remained patrons of the parish). When Radford left, it was joined to Graveley. He had came under the influence of the English Church Union, and published a courteous 'eirenicon' in response to the evangelical Bishop Charles Perry, formerly of Melbourne, The Theology of Christian Ordinances (Rivingtons 1884) explaining why he had changed his views.
William Alexander England (1890) - from student days, at Jesus and Caius Colleges, Cambridge in the 1860s he had money problems, despite a life interest in the Stibbard estate in Norfolk, which he inherited when his father died in 1871 and mortgaged. He served curacies off and on in various places and became incumbent of Wyke Regis in Dorest, but was declared bankrupt in 1886; he died in Southend in 1912.
John Thomas Hughes (1890-98), who trained at St Bees and served curacies in Cumbria and Newcastle before coming to London; from St John's he went to a further curacy in Tottenham.
Charles Reeder (1892-1902), also St Bees: he stayed here for ten years, but his previous seven curacies, and two later ones, were brief; he became vicar of Clapton, near Peterborough in 1906 until his retirement in 1929. In 1903 from Kimbolton, near St Neot's, he produced a testimonial for the Encylopædia Britannica: question 7 (of 20) asked Is it of practical use to Clergymen?
Andrew Weinstein (1890-93), a Jewish convert who subsequently worked in South Africa, Australia and the USA; he baptized a number of Jewish children and adults during his time at St John's - see more about him here.
William John Thorburn (1902-09) trained at SPCK's Southwark College and served for six years as a chaplain at Madura in South India and then for six months at Gascoyne in Western Australia, at a mission station established by a descendent of Charles Besley Gribble, the first minister of St Paul Dock Street; but he became ill and had to return home; after four further curacies, St John's was his last post and he retired to Oldham and died soon afterwards.

THE VICARAGE

As noted above, Vaughan initially lived at 33 Nassau Place, Commercial Road East, and later at 12 Commercial Place, but later the vicarage was established at 400 Commercial Road [left], a 4-storey terrace house at some remove from the parish and in a noisy location. Next door was the SPCK training college (see here) and at 394-396 a maternity hospital (founded as the Mothers' Lying-in Home in Glamis Road, moving to this site as the East End Mothers' Home, 1902-03, and becoming the East End Mothers' Lying-in Home 1903-26, extended from 384-398 when the college moved out; until closure in 1968 it was known as the East End Maternity Hospital. Ronnie Scott, the jazz musician, was born here in 1927. It now houses Steel's Lane Medical Centre.)

During the Second World War (the last Vicar having left), it was used as a hostel for bombed-out pensioners, and from here the British Federation of Young Co-operators (linked to the Labour Party) published in 1945 a pamphlet Talking to Some Purpose, an outline course for a youth discussion group; Hahn and Co, timber merchants, also had their office here. Ethel Upton, who worked with Fr Groser, lived in the house for a time after the War, as did the Grosers themselves a few years later, while work on St Katharine's was being completed. In 1968 the Church Commissioners bought it to house the newly-appointed Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston CR, who wanted to be among his people. (His predecessor, Evered Lunt, who retired suddenly, had lived in the West End, and then among the Canons of St Paul's in Amen Court). His successor Jim Thompson also lived here for a time, before deciding that he should move somewhere smaller; but it proved too small, so he moved again, to the current bishop's house in Coburn Road E3. 400 Commercial Road later became a cycle shop, and is now split into flats.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Hastings Leonard Langley (Vicar 1909-19) saw St John's through the war years. He had trained at King's College London, and after a year's curacy at Coggeshall in Essex came to work with its previous vicar (Hubert Mornington Patch) at St Mary Charterhouse, a slum parish in Finsbury [now part of the parish of St Giles Cripplegate], from 1897-1909.

When he left, Brian Edward Waud became priest in charge for a short time. He had been one of Fr Dolling's curates at the time of his death in 1902 at All Saints Poplar (where he started a boys' rowing club on the River Lea), after which he went briefly to Edinburgh; he had retired to St Mary's Clergy House in Cable Street. But the tradition of the parish was to change....

The penultimate vicar (1919-39) was Henry Shrubbs. He trained at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and served two curacies locally before coming here. He was involved with the Church Army, and conducted some baptisms at their local headquarters. The parish magazine ('buses 15a, 23a and 40a, trams from Aldgate and Bloomsbury') proclaimed

Welcome to St John's
where the SERVICES are definitely Evangelical, Congregational and understandable,
where the Pure GOSPEL is preached
and where the SACRAMENTS are administered according to Apostolic simplicity
and The Order of the English Branch of the Church Catholic.
Come once - you will come always.

A similar stance was taken by Hyma Henry Redgrave, who had permission to officiate in the parish and lived in the Institute at 20 Christian Street from 1923-34. He was a Durham and King's College London graduate, and in his seventh post at St Paul Burslem set up a 'Cranmer Theological College' there, and was a protagonist for the establishment of Cranmer Hall, within St John's College Durham, as a 'Protestant Hostel', in 1909. In 1912 he had published The practical principles of Jesus: Being a practical precept for every day in the year, each precept being based on an express approval or disapproval of our Lord: with copious Scriptural references (a latter-day 'WWJD' approach!) After two more London posts, in 1937 he became the incumbent of Stow Bedon with Breccles, in Norfolk, before retiring to Hastings in 1949. His brother was the grandfather of the actor Sir Michael Regrave.

For a short time in 1935 Clifford John Nash was a curate here. He was a graduate of the evangelical Ridley College, Melbourne in Australia (from which he received a higher degree in absentia in 1944), and had served three curacies there (starting a scout troop in one parish). He came here under the terms of the 1874 Colonial Clergy Act, and lived at Pierhead House, Wapping. He returned home to become vicar of Christ Church Melton in 1937, and two years later published As in the Days of Noah: A Christian's Guide through World Chaos (Marshall Morgan & Scott). \He died in 1948; his funeral was at Sydney Cathedral.

Dudley James Milne Gray, a Durham graduate who trained at St Augustine's College Canterbury, was curate from 1935-37, following a three year spell as a missionary in China. He went on to build up a new congregation at St Luke Leagrave in Luton.

From 1937 Frank Anderson Moss Ellis is listed as curate, and officiated at baptisms and weddings, but he left when it turned out that he had not in fact been canonically ordained!

Pictured are the church interior, and three street views from this period:
- the corner of Fairclough and Brunswick Streets
- the Beehive public house on the corner of Fairclough and Christian Streets
- and the corner of Christian and Ellen Streets.

In 1938 we find the Vicar appealing for £6,000 to replace the Institute. It had once been a pub, The Comet (he describes as a gin palace in Dickens' day). The brewery from which it was leased had been good landlords, spending more on repairs than they received in rent, and

thousands have benefitted by the warm, hearty, high-toned hospitality...The building has seen rough times during the training and taming of Whitechapel youth, but it has sent out into life stalwart saints. But today the old building literally rocks under the weight of its human burden, and its sighs are heard in creaking floors and windows. .... What was now needed was a new building to house the social, educational, physical and religious organisations so necessary in such a congested parish as St John's. Hundreds of the youth hang about sordid gloomy streets and courts during the dark evenings, waiting for mischief and too often find it; when a bright Institute offering healthy scope for their ever-increasing lesiure hours would certainly draw a considerable proportion and thus save money from the pitfalls confronting them on every side.

Shrubbs' other problem, as he saw it, was the difficulty of keeping Sunday in what was then a Jewish-majority parish (there were several synagogues close by, and Hessel Street market, where Sunday is a busier day than the ordinary Saturday elsewhere - though he hoped that the 1936 Shops (Sunday Trading Restriction) Act, passed amidst controversy, would help matters. And he was cheered by a recent confirmation of 36 lads and maidens from the parish, whose preparation was not through orderly classes, as in the suburbs, but often started over frying bacon and eggs or kippers (one in the eye for his Jewish neighbours!) - decisions for Christ are come to under an alley lamp-post. A few Muslims were also beginning to live in the parish: In the baptism registers for the 1930s are several children with Asian fathers and English mothers - see here for statistics.

FINAL DAYS

In the event, the Second World War came. Henry Shrubbs left in 1939 for Stanstead Abbots, in St Alban's diocese, and in Hubert Alfred Robins became priest-in-charge, becoming the last Vicar in 1940, for what must have been a sad incumbency. He had trained at St Boniface College Warminster (King's College) and served two local curacies. He left in 1943 when local clergy were centred on St George-in-the-East, to become vicar of St Erkenwald, Southend, and then to two parishes in Devon (where he was briefly rural dean of Torrington) before retiring to Cornwall in 1968.

When the church closed in 1943 it was used as a store for furnishings from bomb-damaged churches (the eventual disposal of these items, at the expense of the East End, makes an interesting, and rather shocking, story). By 1960 the building was in a terrible state; vandals had broken in and smashed all the furniture and wrecked most of the windows; even the stone pulpit was broken. The floor was littered with old hymnbooks and bibles, parish magazines and marble wall-monuments from St Peter Regent Square. Locals had dumped mouldering settees and chairs. The diocesan authorities had attempted to prevent entry by overturning the stone font against the main door, but to no avail. The building was demolished in 1964.

St John's House, at the bottom of Christian Street (next to what had been a synagogue until the 1920s - the site was rebuilt, and is now a mosque) remained for a time. Nora Neal lived here, and ran various clubs on the premises. The local Franciscans used space as an extra classroom for English language classes for immigrants.

No Trees in the Street

A 1959 film, rated as sincere but saccharine, featuring Ronald Howard, Stanley Holloway, David Hemmings, Sylvia Sims, Melvyn Hayes and Herbert Lom: a retired policeman who shows a young criminal how a similar lad went astray twenty years previously. Some shots were filmed locally - each pair shows stills of Hemmings and Howard outside the church entrance in Golding Street, and round the corner outside Delafield House and Drewett House in Burslem Street, next to contemporary pictures (now with trees!) of these spots.

SpacE1

In 2003 London Borough of Tower Hamlets agreed to the sale of the former school between Christian and Golding Streets (see here for its history, as a Board School and later as Bishop Challoner Gilrs' Secondary School), and adjacent playing field, for a housing development by Bellway Homes, who proposed 277 units (35% of them affordable housing), with leisure and community facilities. This proved too much for the site, so plans were scaled down and finally agreed in 2007, with 150 units, of which 61 are affordable housing. The development, named SpacE1, is now complete, and most homes have been sold.