New Mulberry Garden Chapel was built for the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion in 1805 - its story is told HERE. [A section of Horwood's 1792 map is shown on the right.] The Connexion left the area in the 1840s, and the building stood empty for a time. Although it was very close to the parish church, it was bought in 1847 by the London Diocesan Church Building Society for £1,300 and initially opened as a mission chapel. Bryan King, the Rector, raised some concerns over creating a new district, but gave his consent. Ewan Christian, architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, surveyed the building and insisted that it must be repaired and refurnished before it was fit for purpose. This was done, at a cost of £400 (provided by Mr Coope of Brentwood), and it was consecrated on 4 November 1859, with 650 sittings, and assigned a district by Order in Council on 7 March 1860, with the Bishop of London as patron. The Commissioners made a grant of £100 towards the minister’s stipend, which the Home Mission Fund matched. The parsonage was at 17 Prince's Square, near St Matthew's National Schools. 

It was opened at the height of the ritualism riots at the parish church, and some attempted to disrupt the services at St Matthew’s as well, even though it was evangelical and low church in style. A Band of Hope met there in its early years. Despite his connection with St George's, its first incumbent was among those who supported the minister of St Paul Dock Street in his bid to get a district assigned to his church, thereby enabling the closure of St Saviour & St Cross Mission Chapel, claiming that Lowder, of the very high party, will subvert the work of the sailors' church and must be stopped.

VICARS & CURATES

The first Vicar (and also Lecturer at the parish church), from 1859-70, was Thomas Richardson. He was born in Lancaster, and as a young clerk in the City became involved with Christ Church Chelsea, whose vicar was an early total abstainer and keen distributor of tracts. Richardson trained at St Bees in Cumbria, since his uncle, the Mayor of Leeds, who financed him, disapproved of the 'Puseyite' universities. He served three curacies, in south London and the City, and preached regularly at the Royal Exchange. He was among the clergy mentioned by Lord Shaftesbury in a House of Lords debate of 1860 seeking to prevent religious services being held in theatres:

The Church Pastoral Aid Society provided curates, financed to the tune of £100 annually by William Wainwright, owner of a local SUGAR REFINERY. Many German sugar workers came to St Matthew's for weddings, because the fees at the German Church were high, and Richardson learnt German in order to conduct the services. This pattern continued in his successor's time: at no less than 131 of the 381 weddings during the lifetime of St Matthew's either or both partners were German. He established a branch of the Band of Hope (a temperance organisation for working class children, founded in 1847 and continuing as Hope UK helping children to make drug-free choices). He continued to preach around the country for the Home Mission Union, and throughout his life remained a keen distributor of tracts, both through organised congregational visiting and in the streets. (On one occasion he walked from Bournemouth to London distributing them.)  From 1870 to his death in 1901 he was the first vicar of St Benet Stepney; there he wrote a series of tracts under the title Faithful Boughs, and in 1876 founded a Bible and Prayer Union which claimed 30,000 members worldwide by the end of the century. I was awakened, he said, but did not find Christ  till I read my Bible personally. Richardson’s wife Anna (whom he married during his time at St Matthew's) wrote a memoir of her husband under the title Forty Years' Ministry in East London (Hodder & Stoughton 1903); HERE are some extracts from his notebooks, from his time at St Matthew's, and a paper read at a meeting of the Rural Deanery of Limehouse in 1864, advocating parochial temperance societies. He was secretary of the Church of England and Ireland Temperance Reformation Society, and listed among the 500 Anglican clergy who were 'total abstainers'.

John Mortier Fidler [pictured] was the next Vicar (1870-89). Born in Grenada, where his father was a Methodist missionary, he worked as a chemist in the Midlands for nearly 20 years before training at King’s College London, serving curacies in Battersea and Spitalfields, and a short spell with the London Diocesan Home Mission; his wife died soon after his ordination. At first he lodged in Philpot Street, later moving to Princes Square. He died of nephritis, aged 58, and was buried by C.H. Brooke, the curate.

Charles Davies - who may have served for a time in this parish, and whose story is told HERE - included this description, in his 1873 book Orthodox London, of the MIDNIGHT MEETING for street workers held at St Matthew's Schoolroom, one of the various local attempts to address these issues. His journalistic style is the clue to the popularity of his works!  

Among the curates who served here (including those prior to its status as a parish church) were:

J.S. Hanna (1840s) - though his name does not appear in any of the church registers

Algernon Sidney Thelwall (1848-50 and 1852-53, in between which he served as full-time secretary of the Trinitarian Bible Society) had been admitted to the Bar in 1816 and spent eight years at the English church in Amsterdam as a missionary to the Jews. He was a prolific writer of tracts and polemical works, attacking Roman Catholics and Irvingites and defending the Church of England’s position - for example in 1835 Letters to a Friend whose mind had been long harassed by many objections against the Church of England. In 1839 he produced The iniquities of the opium trade with China: being a development of the main causes which exclude the merchants of Great Britain from the advantages of an unrestricted commercial intercourse with that vast empire; With extracts from authentic documents, drawn up at the request of several gentlemen connected with the East-India trade. He also published translations of the Odes of Horace. 

In 1843, when he was (briefly) minister of Bedford Chapel in Bloomsbury, he arranged a lecture series which the Protestant Magazine advertised thus:

From 1850 until his death in 1863 Thelwall was the Lecturer on Public Reading at King’s College London. His introductory lecture was entitled The importance of Elocution in connexion with Ministerial Usefulness. Breathing through the nostrils to avoid fatigue to the vocal organs was the secret, he claimed. In this, he continued the work of his father John Thelwall (1764-1834), who was a pioneer teacher of the new science of elocution - publishing Treatment of  Cases of Defective Utterance  -  though was better known as a political radical (naming his sons Algernon Sidney and John Hampden after 17th century republicans); he was unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1794 on a charge of high treason.

David Brown Moore was curate at St George's from 1851 and Lecturer from 1854-59; he worked at St Matthew's as well. He had been a workhouse chaplain in Birmingham, and from 1846 was the first incumbent of the new church of St Andrew, Watery Street (or Garrison Lane), Bordesley, which was carved out of Aston parish, in the diocese of Worcester - before the creation of Birmingham diocese. A school was established there for 120 boys, 120 girls and infants, with an evening school on four evenings for those who worked during the day.  Soon after he arrived here, he was plaintiff in an Old Bailey fraud case in 1851 (scroll to case 123) in relation to the house at 18 St Ann's Terrace Hackney of which he was the leaseholder. His own home was at 78 Virginia Terrace [now Street], just off The Highway.

Thomas Tenison Cuffe is a bit of an enigma. He was a distant descendent of Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury 1694-1715, owning one of his bibles. As minister of the Carlisle proprietory chapel in Lambeth, and later Vicar of Colney Heath, he was a member of the Protestant Association, speaking at its meetings in TRINITY EPISCOPAL CHAPEL schoolroom, and then founded the rival British Protestant League in 1851, but it died within a few years. He seceded from the Church of England in 1850 at the time of the Gorham judgement (when the Privy Council, a secular court, overturned the ruling of the Court of Arches, a church court, ruled that the Bishop of Exeter was entitled to refuse to institute a priest because of his views on baptismal regeneration: a printed note of protest from local clergy is pinned into the baptism registers of St George-in-the-East at this time). He joined the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion; Carlisle chapel ceased to be episcopal and he remained its minister. In 1851 he published Reasons for Secession; or, Objections to remaining in the Established Church. But he conducted baptisms at St George-in-the-East in 1854, and twice at St Matthew's in 1858, 'irregularly' according to a note by Bryan King in St George's baptism register, since St Matthew's church (formerly, of course, a Countess of Huntingdon's chapel) was not yet consecrated and did not have registers, and at the time of his death at Prince's Square in 1858 he was listed in the The Gentleman's Magazine as Perpetual Curate of St Matthew’s from 1856. 

Charles Lacy Kingsmill (1864-67) was an Irishman from Kilkenny who went from the East End, with a wife and five young children, to be a chaplain at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, teaching at the gymnasium in Salemba; but he did not feel sufficiently stretched there, so moved to New South Wales where he was rector of a succession of five parishes and became a Canon of St Saviour’s Cathedral, Golbourn. He was keen on European military history, and said in a sermon at the start of the Boer War war often saves more war, and there are worse things than war. He died in 1910 at Manly, having broken his leg trying to stop a bolting horse. See Peter Edwards Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006) pages 7-8.

Richard Hitchman (1869??), like the vicar Thomas Richardson, was listed by the Church of England and Ireland Temperance Reformation Society as a 'total abstainer', and curate of the parish. He had trained at St Aidan's College Birkenhead, served curacies in Derby and Kent before coming to London,  and published several books. He became committed to the cause of Canadian emigration, through the East End Emigration and Relief Society, while attached to the new district church of St Paul Clerkenwell.

Frederick Haslock (or Hasluck) (1872-75) was born in Arnee, Madras in the East Indies; he married Hannah Ladbury in Stourbridge in 1863 (they had four children) and was ordained to St Matthew's in 1872; the following year he proposed the creation of a Total Abstinence Society at his masonic lodge, St John's. After a stint at St Luke, Millwall he became curate-in-charge of the new Grove mission district at All Saints, Grays Thurrock - an iron church, a mission hall and an institute - until his death in 1906. He was involved with poor law schools, and was chaplain of the ship Exmouth, moored off Grays and providing training for poor boys for the regular and merchant navies [picture 1893].  In 1881 fourteen of the boys (aged 12-15) were from St George-in-the-East district. It was replaced by a newer vessel in 1905.

Alfred Enoch Wicks (1876-77), born 1846 and trained at St Bees; St Matthew's was the fourth of seven curacies, before be became in 1881 vicar of Tosside (or Tossett), a small community in the Forest of Bowland, until 1912 - quite a contrast! - and retired to Sherwood in Nottinghamshire.

George Rogers (1881-82) trained at St Bees and began his ministry in Scotland;  this was the second of ten curacies, mostly in London, including a spell as assistant chaplain at St Katharines, then based in Regent's Park.

John Jones (1883-85) was ordained by the Bishop of Missouri in 1872 at the behest of the Ecclesiastical Authority of Illinois; he officiated at many baptisms during his time here.

THE END OF THE LINE

Charles Henry Turner was the last Vicar. He was Rector of St George-in-the-East from 1882, and then of the united parish of St George-in-the-East with St Matthew (created by Order in Council on 30 July 1891) until 1897, when he became the one – and only! – suffragan bishop of Islington: see ST GEORGE'S files. The 1886 religious survey of London records healthy attendances:  131 at the morning service and 207 in the evening, 24 October of that year. 

Charles Stanton Gray was the final curate (1895-97) and left, explained Turner, because of the reduction of clerical staff to normal limits. Ironically in view of the first vicar's ardent teetotalism, Gray's family owned and ran a brewery in Chelmsford [pictured], founded by a namesake ancestor in 1828 and finally sold in 1974 to cover death duties. St Matthew's was Gray's third of seven curacies, before he became incumbent of Hasleton in rural Gloucestershire. He retired to Bournemouth and died in 1938, leaving a benefaction to his college, Emmanuel Cambridge, for those intending to seek ordination (now used to help fund research students).

Table of baptisms and weddings during the life of St Matthew's

This map (undated, but from the turn of the century) shows the former boundaries of the parish (St Matthew's is the area marked in green), and key buildings.

There is a very good evening gathering at the sub-parish church of St Matthew's, reported The Sunday At Home in 1895. But St Matthew's was the first Stepney church to close – and had probably always been somewhat surplus to requirements. The building was used for some years as a parish hall. By the 1920s the girls' club activities had transferred to the parish church under the name 'St George's and St Matthew's Girls' Club', and the building became a non-parochial boys’ club. The official parish title remained 'St George-in-the-East with St Matthew' until further pastoral re-organisation after the Second World War. Here is a view of Prince's Square in 1921. 

In 1937 the officials of the boys' club asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners if they might buy the building. The Commissioners were surprised to hear that it was still standing as the Order for closure specified that it should have been demolished. The club was ejected, and the building duly pulled down! The site was sold for £400 which was given, after the War, to the building fund of St Mark’s South Ruislip. 

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