THE CHURCH….

The church was built in 1838 by the Metropolis Churches Fund, at a cost of £5,265 11s 1d to designs by Thomas Henry Wyatt and David Brandon (their first London church) and consecrated on 30 May 1839, to serve a poor and populous district. The parish was carved out of St Mary Whitechapel, by Order in Council of 1 April 1841. The Dowager Queen Adelaide provided £25 towards the building of a Sunday and infant school. National Schools, to designs by John Hudson of 40 Leman Street, were established that year between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street (the boys section was rebuilt in 1862), where a parish hall was also built. (Nearby was a boarding school for Jewish orphans.)

The 1851 census lists the population of the parish as 15,790, in 1,757 'households' - an average of 9.09% per household, the highest in East London, and with the highest percentage of Irish and foreign-born residents (primarily from Germany, Holland, Poland and Prussia). Those who were not in 'seasonal employment' worked in tailoring and dressmaking - especially women and Jewish men who were increasingly settling in the area. They worked from home, on a piecework basis, so needed to live near their suppliers. In 1858 the parish was described, at a committee of the House of Lords, as ‘utterly unmanageable’. See HERE for more information about the Goodman's Fields area.    

Church Plans On Line (showing 1874-6 alterations)

Exterior around 1920

W.A. Longmore of Aldgate removed the north and south galleries in 1875 under a faculty of 23 September 1874 and rebuilt the east wall six feet further east to allow a chancel to be formed (see above plan). In 1879 the organ, a 17-stop 2 manual instrument of 1846 by Gray and Davison, was moved from the west gallery and rebuilt in the old vestry at the north-east by T.R. Willis. (It was further rebuilt by Slater of Forest Gate in 1906; when the church closed, it was moved to St James Alperton, but was later replaced by another instrument). Two years later the interior was brightened by some wall paintings.

An intriguing mix of clergy served this church during its near-century of existence, some drawn by commitment to the urban poor, some to the possibilities of mission among those of other faiths, particularly the Jews who for a time made up the majority of its population, several whose interests were primarily academic, and a few who hit the headlines. Some were ritualists and high churchmen, but most were broad church and liberal.

Incumbents

The first incumbent, from 1839, was Neville Jones (formerly of the EPISCOPAL FLOATING CHURCH). In his time the parish received a grant from the 'Metropolitan Society', whose full name was 'The Association for Promoting the Relief of Destitution in the Metropolis, and for Improving the Condition of the Poor, by means of Parochial and District Visiting, under the superintendence of the Bishop and Clergy, through the agency of Unpaid Visitors [later adding and without reference to religious persuasion]'. It was founded in 1845 and was one of a network of agencies which believed that charitable relief must be accompanied by a systematic programme of district visiting to address the social and moral causes of poverty. (See also TRINITY EPISCOPAL CHAPEL.) Neville Jones wrote to them: 

In 1847 he swapped posts with John Lyons at St George Bolton (a curious iron-framed church). This pleased neither the congregation at Bolton nor Mr Jones - he had been assured that the benefice was worth over £330 a year, but he could only manage to scrape together £97. He wrote I am sorry to find, I have been so sadly misinformed by Mr. Lyons in this matter....all the affairs of St George's seem to be in a sad stafe of Confusion. Nevertheless, he remained there for 44 years, retiring after 58 years in ministry (when he was presented with a portrait and a purse of gold) - long enough to 'lose', in 1874, 8,000 of his 20,000 parishioners to the new district church of St Matthew Bolton. (St George's has long been redundant - for a time it was a craft centre - and the central Bolton parishes are now grouped together.) In 1859 he aroused the wrath of the legal profession by announcing, in the Bolton Chronicle, that despite the creation of the new Court of Probate he was still entitled to grant probate and letters of administration without recourse to solicitors! 

John Lyons (1847-52) was ordained in Ireland in 1830. Briefly minister of Long Acre Chapel in London (where he was active in the Irish Society of London) and from 1833-38 of All Saints Chapel, Grosvenor Street in Liverpool (created from a former tennis court in 1798, licensed by the Bishop of Chester in 1832 - and sold to the Roman Catholics in 1845), he was involved in various Protestant associations, and debates with Roman Catholics. After his time in Bolton, and his exchange with Neville Jones, he became vicar of Tillingham in Essex, then in 1859 of Wednesbury, where he died in office. A 'Rev J. Lyons' wrote this poem, 'The Magnetic Telegraph', in The Ladies' Repository of 1849; if it was not him, it's worth including anyway as a pious response to new technology!

Sunday services in 1851 were listed as at 11am and 6.30pm, and Wednesdays at 7pm, with the Lord's Supper on the first Sunday of the month:  Seats to be had at the School-house, Rosemary Lane, or after service, Wednesday evenings. 

Then came John Llewellyn Davies (1852-56), a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, who was a lifelong disciple of F.D. Maurice (as were several of his successors). He corresponded with many leading liberal figures of the day - you can read some of their replies, edited by his son as A Victorian Postbag. Among his many books and pamphlets on theological, moral and social issues was a response to the great Professor Jowett's commentary on St Paul, published as Saint Paul and Modern Thought (Macmillan 1856). At Christ Church Marylebone, where he was Rector from 1856-89, he wrote THE POOR LAW AND CHARITY,  a paper published in Macmillan's Magazine of 1866 which foreshadows the approach to welfare that was to characterise the work of the CHARITY ORGANISATION SOCIETY. He was Vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale from 1889-1908 and retired to Hampstead. Here is his 1916 obituary in The Times. He was a strong advocate of women's rights, and his sister Emily was one of the founders of Girton College.  His son Arthur's five boys were the inspiration of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.

Robert Herbert Quick, a lifelong friend of Davies, served as an unpaid curate from 1854-58, preaching, baptizing occasionally and conducting a number of weddings. He later became a leading educationalist - see his biography The Life and Remains of the Rev. R. H. Quick (Macmillan 1899). More details about his life and work HERE.

David James Vaughan (1856-60) was Davies' exact contemporary (and joint Bell's Scholar) at Trinity, and in 1852 they produced together a widely-used translation with scholarly notes of Plato's Republic.  Influenced by Maurice, Ludlow and Campbell (who dedicated his Evidences to Vaughan) he had moved from Tractrianism to a liberal, broad church position which embraced the emerging Christian Socialism. At Rugby School and Cambridge he had become 'surrogate brother' to T.H. Green, the philosopher of social justice. He was the third of his High Tory father Edward Thomas Vaughan's six sons (there were also eight daughters) to succeed him as vicar of St Martin Leicester (now the Cathedral), following Charles John (1841-44, who became Headmaster of Harrow but left after a well-concealed sexual scandal, which also prevented him from becoming Bishop of Rochester - he became Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff) and Edward Thomas Jnr (1845-59). Apart from his time at St Mark's he spent the whole of his ministry in Leicester - turning down the living of Battersea although it was worth £1200 a year, as against his Leicester stipend of £140. The Vaughan porch to the cathedral's south door (designed by J.L. Pearson) was a memorial to the brothers, and especially to David's adult education work.

In The Health of Towns (1882) he advocated vaccination, better housing and fewer premature marriages. He was an assiduous visitor at the Infectious Diseases Hospital, despite the personal risks. In The Church and Socialism (1889) he raised the issue of poor employment prospects for men over 40: when brain and strength are at their best a man is liable to be regarded as past work. In 1894 he supported an international move to limit conscription to a single year, in the cause of peace. But he opposed non-sectarian teaching in Board Schools, as weakening morality. He is most remembered for founding - after Maurice's example - the Leicester Working Man's College, now Vaughan College (Leicester University's Adult Education Centre). He died in 1905. 

Brooke Lambert [pictured] came from Brasenose College as Bartlett’s curate and then became Vicar (1866-71). Along with Samuel Barnett at St Jude Whitechapel, he has has been described as one of the 'squires of the slums'. Influenced by F.D. Maurice, he was heavily involved in social action, serving on many committees and researching poor law administration, producing statistics that anticipate the work of Charles Booth. Seven Sermons on Pauperism, preached at St Mark's in 1870, were published. He founded a soup kitchen, a mutual improvement society and a working men's club. He became a member of the Guild of St Matthew, and one of his lectures on their behalf was The Republic of Plato and the Republic of Christ. 

He was also an ardent vegetarian, writing about the local slaughterhouses:

He left because of poor health, later becoming Vicar of Tamworth, then from 1880 until his death in 1901 Vicar of Greenwich, where he worked with schools, founded the Greenwich Provident Dispensary, and chaired the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants. His papers were bought by the University of Iowa libraries.

Work among the Jews, and beyond

As the parish population became overwhelmingly Jewish, St Mark's attempted for a time to offer a Christian witness to the diverse diaspora which had settled here (many living in extreme poverty, but with a rich cultural life). Four clergy who were Jewish converts served here - as did two others at Christ Church Watney Street, and one at St John the Evangelist Grove Street; their stories are told in more detail HERE.

Hermann Hirsch was curate from 1868-70, and Alexander William Schapira from 1887-90 (and later at Christ Church). A decade later, Albert Elias Abrahamson was curate (1896-1900), and Secretary of the Hebrew Christian Message to Israel. 

Michael Rosenthal was Vicar from 1899-1907 (he only became a trustee of the parish's National School in 1904). He was given a dispensation to preach in Hebrew. In 1885 Charlotte M. Yonge, sometimes described as 'the novelist of the Oxford movement', wrote to her cousin Mary about a meeting with Rosenthal at which he explained Jewish customs to her. The Booth Archive contains an interview with him [B222 pages 108-125].  His memorial tablet (in dark marble), which was moved to St Paul Dock Street when St Mark's closed, says formerly a Jewish rabbi, he was converted in early manhood to the Christian religion, and enduring much persecution thenceforth laboured unceasingly to bring to his Jewish brethren the knowledge of Jesus Christ.  (His son David became the vicar of St Agatha Sparkbrook, an inner-city anglo-catholic parish in Birmingham, until his sudden death in 1938:  descendants remain active in the Church in Wales.)

But this focus petered out. Rosenthal's successor from 1907-21 was Lionel Smithett Lewis. He was a keen member of the Church Anti-Vivisection League (founded in 1889), whose first annual report stated the torture of God's sentient creatures is a sin. This was one of many of societies campaigning against animal experimentation; others were the Society for United Prayer against Cruelty, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, the Electoral Anti-Vivisection League, the London Anti-Vivisection Society, the National Anti-Vivisection Society, the Society for the Abolition of Vivisection, the Victoria Street Society, and the Working Men's Association for the Suppression of Vivisection. (See Wilkie Collins' anti-vivisectionist novel Heart & Science 1883). It became a local issue in Lewis' time with demonstrations in 1909 at the London Hospital against animal experimentation undertaken to improve the practice of anaesthesia; other less progressive hospitals in poor areas, such as Battersea and the Old Kent Road, were established which opposed both vivisection and vaccination.

However, Lewis' major passion of his 86 years was the Holy Grail. When he left Whitechapel he became Vicar of Glastonbury, and wrote St Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury: or the Apostolic Church of Britain (first published in 1922, and much-reprinted - described as queer but carefully-documented); Glastonbury, the Mother of Saints: Her Saints AD 37 - AD 1539;  and many other books and pamphlets, based on his belief that the Grail legend had a factual basis. He died there in 1953, having devoted much of his energies to the annual pilgrimage (from which, sadly, women priests remain excluded).

Vicars' comments on baptism

(1) John Cox Edgehill (1858-60) began his ministry here before serving in Halifax, Nova Scotia (in 1887 he declined the invitation to become bishop there: Frederick Courtney was chosen in his place) and became an army chaplain, rising to become Chaplain General to the Forces (1885-1901), a Royal Chaplain and Chaplain of the Tower. He was described as 'a definite Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic'. One of his admirers was Juliana Horatia Ewing, a Major’s wife, who died in 1885 aged 44. She told her sister He preaches the gospel of Hope. and gave her an outline of one of his sermons  on the texts What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God and Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light, preached at the iron church in the South Camp at Aldershot.

(2) Charles Voysey

The Appellant is charged with having offended against the Laws Ecclesiastical by writing and publishing within the diocese of London certain sermons or essays, collected together in parts and volumes, the whole being designated by the title of The Sling and the Stone, in which he is alleged to have maintained and promulgated doctrines contrary and repugnant to or inconsistent with the Articles of Religion and Formularies of the Church of England.

His appeal was dismissed and Voysey lost his post. He returned to London and founded the Theistic Church in 1871, which welcomed former Jews alongside former Christians. He also became an advocate of cremation. He befriended Guy Aldred, the ‘Boy Preacher’ of Holloway in 1903. A Corner in the Kingdom of God: an account of some persons and things in St Mark's, Whitechapel, 1861-63 was included in his book Do We Believe? (Upfield, Green & Co., 1903). He died in 1912. His father had been an architect, and his son Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was a leading Arts and Crafts designer. 

(4) Robert Henry Charles, from Ireland, worked briefly in the parish (1883-85) but was primarily a scholar, of great eminence – a professor in Dublin and Oxford and expert on Jewish eschatology, the Apocrypha and the Septuagint, whose many translations of Ethiopic and Syriac texts are still in use. He became a Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1913 and archdeacon in 1919, and died in 1931.

• William Martin Mungeam (1839-42) - from an old Kent family of farmers and maltsters, he studied at St John's College Cambridge, and began his ministry on the Isle of Sheppey; later he became chaplain of the Queen's Prison, Southwark then in 1848 incumbent of St Peter Southwark, and died in Clacton in 1886.
• I Lewis (1840)
• Charles Clark (1842) - from Queen's College Cambridge; became curate of Rotherhithe from 1851-55, and a naval chaplain in 1865, serving with HMS Resistance and from 1970 HMS Jumna.
• Benjamin Luke Poyntz (1848-52) - from Trinity College Dublin, ordained in Ripon diocese in 1842 and curate of Christ Church Bradford; in 1855, as curate of Wycombe, he crossed swords with Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford over neglecting to say prayers in church; the bishop wrote My dear Mr Poyntz, I by no means wish to expose your health to risk; when therefore the weather is wet or stormy I do not require you to go into the church.... but insisted that he should otherwise do so. A month later, he was moved on when a new curate was appointed.  Later we find him as a curate in Stone, Staffordshire, in Awre, Cloucestershire, and finally in Freethorpe, near Acle, in Norfolk.
• John Manley Jackson (1853-4) - an Etonian, from Exeter College Oxford, born in Barking;  he served further curacies in Devon before becoming incumbent of Buckfastleigh, then of Cottered, in Hertfordshire, where he advertised training for 'five gentlemen' for the universities and for holy orders. He left this post in 1870, and later published several popular books: Notes on Fish and Fishing (1877), Notes on Game and Game Shooting (1880), Literature of Sea and River Fishing (1883), and Salt and Other Condiments (1884); he died at Kennington in 1886.
  
• William James Richardson (1854-??), of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; he served his title at Uggeshall with Sotherton, in Suffolk, and after his curacy here became Preacher, and in 1863 Minister, of Archbishop Tenison's Chapel, King Street, Westminster (also known as St Thomas, Regent Street - it closed in 1954 and is now part of the parish of St Anne Soho). A description in the Farmer's Magazine of 1874 describes a Harvest Festival there:  The festival of St Luke was selected ... as the day of harvest thanksgiving; and very tastefully indeed, though not profusely, was the ugly old chapel decorated with fruits and flowers. The altar was crowded with candles - I will not commit myself even to a guess at their number - and bright with flowers.... He was a supporter of the Hospital for Women in Soho Square. Like other clergy who served here, he was a naturalist - he presented a bonnet-monkey (macacus radiatus)  to the Zoological Society of London in 1866 - and also, according to The Archer's Register of 1889, in a variety of ways contributed much to the prosperity of the Society and the interests of archery in general.
• Bradley Abbott (1854-55) - from Trinity College Dublin (despite Bishop Blomfield's reluctance to ordain TCD men - see HERE), after a year's curacy at Holy Trinity Brompton (an unlikely breeding-ground for ritualists today!) and a year here, he spent the rest of his ministry building up Christ Church, Clapham (then in the diocese of Winchester) as a centre of 'advanced' worship - among other things, working hard at adult education three or more evenings a week. A large silk and velvet processional banner of the five wounds of Christ was made in his memory in 1873. There is grudging restrospective approval of his ministry in this anonymous critic's commentary on The Roman Mass in the English Church: Illegal Services described by Eye-witnesses (Charles J. Thynne 1899):

  The name of the Rev. Bradley Abbott has been a well-known one in the annals of Church life in South London. For forty years he laboured in one sphere, and when.....he died, while on his holiday abroad, it was recognised by all parties in the locality that a good, if not a great, man had passed away. 'Father' Abbott, as he was almost universally called, was Vicar of Christ Church, Clapham, a district lying between Larkhall Lane and Wandsworth Road. He built the church, and even to-day it is more often associated with his name than called by its legal designation. 'Father' Abbott was one of the pioneers of advanced ritualism in South London. I remember attending the church nearly a quarter of a century ago, and being impressed by the ornateness of the service. 'Fancy ritual' it was called then, even by some who were in sympathy with it..... [click the link above to read the full account]

• William Eustace Daniel (1866-67) - a scholar, who after his brief ministry at St Mark's returned to Worcester College Oxford as chaplain, divinity lecturer and tutor from 1867-75, and from 1889-98 was Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint. He was the incumbent of three Somerset parishes (Frome, East Pennard and Horsington), a Prebendary of Wells Cathedral, and a rural dean. As well as various local history publications, he translated the Greek Orthodox Holy Catechism of Nicholas Bulgaris (1634-84), ed. R.R. Bromage (1893). 
• William Raymond Scott (1866-68) - of Trinity College Dublin, ordained in Manchester; after four brief curacies he went to Honolulu, where with his wife he founded a 'Female Industrial Seminary', and then to the new, ritualistic, parish of St Michael Shoreditch (which he later omitted from his Crockford record), and after St Mark's became curate at the centre of ritualism in Liverpool, St Martin-in-the-Fields [blitzed in the Second World War] where his predecessor had become a Roman Catholic: see this commentary on the vicar's sermon. Other curacies followed, with various gaps, until his retirement to Marlborough.
  
• James Edward Butler (1868-70) - again, of Trinity College Dublin; ordained in Ireland, he worked in Walworth and then at St Mark's.
• Hermann Hirsch (1868-70) - more details HERE
• William Robert Percival (1869-71) - described as a man of large heart, wide sympathies, loving enthusiasm and religious earnestness: a decade earlier, he had led a successful mission to working men in Carlisle, publishing a pamphlet on the 'dignity of labour' question Letters to Working Men (George Coward 1860) and a collection of aphorisms Thinkings (1862). He had hoped that the Dean of Carlisle would support his call to ordination, but he did not; instead, he led local clergy in opposing his preaching at the Mechanics' Institute and YMCA. Percival's supporters therefore set up a Congregational church and called Percival as their minister. As one reviewer wrote, he was 'far more largely read in Carlyle, Emerson, Kingsley, Maurice, Robertson (of Brighton), Arnold, &c., than beseemed an attaché to that Closeborough'; so it is not surprising that, having trained for Anglican ministry at Queen's College Birmingham, after a curacy in St Helen's, he should serve here for a time among those who shared his views; he then moved to St James Islington.
• Clement Frank Walker (1872-??), of Magdalen Hall, Oxford: he later ran Heath Mount, a prep school in Hampstead, which had been founded as a high-class 'commercial academy' with a classical curriculum - students wore Eton suits and silk hats on special occasions; he died there in 1895.
• Thomas Doughty (1871) - from St Bees, served in Warrington, Norfolk and Bolton before a brief spell here, from which he went to Peckham (south London was still part of Winchester diocese).
  
• Philip Herbert Wentworth Peach (1882-??), who became rector of Elstree, where he unwittingly employed a bogus curate, who when suspicions were aroused was found to have a number of blank and partially-completed ordination forms, and false papers for his own purported marriage to a schoolteacher.
  
• George William Meggy (1885-7) - of Wadham College, Oxford; his eighth curacy before he finally obtained a parish in Bath & Wells diocese: Rimpton, with a population of 208.
• Daniel Felix (1886-90), trained at St Bees, he was ordained in his native Wales and returned there as Rector of Llanhilleth with Aberbeeg for over 30 years from 1895 (becoming rural dean of Blaenau Gwent in 1916).
• Alexander William Schapira (1887-90) - more details HERE
  
• Henry Sidney Brown (1891-99) - of St John's College, Oxford; his seventh of ten curacies since his ordination in 1876 - all in London except for the final one in Scotland.
• Albert Elias Abrahamson (1896-1900) - more details HERE
• John Edmeades Cox Colyer (1899-1903) - his father, the Rector of Fenny Drayton, a keen Tractarian, sent his son to Cumbrae College, a monastic-style foundation in Scotland, built by the Earl of Glasgow to promote Tractarian ideals; after Oxford and a Scottish curacy he served in London and elsewhere, and was a member of the Guild of All Souls (remembered on the anniversary of his death, 23 December).
• Frederick John Swanston (1899-1900) - Worcester College, Oxford: his sixth curacy. Ten years ealier he had been a curate at Wimbourne Minister and present at a wedding which claimed Jack the Ripper connections.
  
• Sinclair Oates (1900-??), whose younger brother Ernest's equally-diverse ministry overlapped at various points: both trained at King's London, served in various parts of London, then Ernest followed Sinclair as priest-in-charge of Tain, 'North Britain' (near Thurso), where Sinclair married a local music teacher; Sinclair later followed Ernest as curate of Alrewas; and when Sinclair came to St Mark's Ernest came to St Paul Dock Street, both as curates. Unlike Sinclair, Ernest finally got his own parish!
  
• Henry Heaton (1904-??), who had trained at Bishop's College, Lennoxville in Quebec (established in 1843 to train clergy and others, but supplanted, perhaps for encouraging 'extreme' views, in the 1870s by the new Montreal Diocesan Theological College; it is now Bishop's University, a small, primarily undergraduate institution teaching mainly in English rather than French). Ordained in 1872, he served in England apart from five years back in Canada.
  

 In the early part of the 20th century, extreme deprivation and poverty continued, and the church struggled to survive. The congregation continued to dwindle, and missionary work among the Jews came to nothing. After the First World War the decision was made to close the church. The school, which for ten years had been in negotiation with the Midland Railway about opening windows onto railway property, closed in 1921.

Ernest James Crosby became

An Order in Council of 30 April 1926 united the parish to St Paul Dock Street, and the building was eventually demolished in 1937. Later the site was sold for £6,000 and the money given to help the building of St Francis, Dollis Hill. The bell, pulpit and two fonts were given to St Alphege, Hendon, and the wall paintings to Wragby Church in Lincolnshire. A warehouse, incorporating the former parsonage as offices, was built on the site.

A memorial to 29 men from St Mark's parish who were killed in the First World War - a ceramic crucifixion, with wooden shutters listing the names [pictured] - was stolen from St George-in-the-East in 1991, to which it had been transferred only a few years earlier. It has not been recovered.

The Scarborough Arms at 35 St Mark Street, built in 1855, survives, and retains something of the local character.