St Paul's Church for Seamen, Dock Street (1847-1990)

EARLY YEARS

When the London Docks were constructed in the early 19th century, the lane known as Saltpetre Bank (marking the area's 18th century links with glassmaking) became Dock Street - a sign of the ever-changing nature of the area. It was after visiting her aunt and uncle in this street that the maidservant Elizabeth Canning disappeared on New Year's Day 1753, later claiming to have been held captive for a month in a hayloft, but the verdicts against the accused were overturned and she was convicted of perjury, imprisoned for a month and transported for seven years.

The foundation stone for a church to replace the Episcopal Floating Chapel, the Brazen, was laid on 11 May 1846 by Albert, the Prince Consort. This picture in the Illustrated London News shows him lowering the stone by turning a small handle on a block and tackle. The cost of £9,000 - including £1250 for the Dock Street site - was met by public subscription, and it was consecrated in 1847. As part of the process, Henry Roberts, the architect (see below) and several residents of Wellclose Square had issued a householders' certificate of inadequacy of existing churches in the parish of St Mary Matfelon (in which the new church was situated) - though if fact it did not become a parish church until 1864: see below. The evangelical Rector of Whitechapel from 1837-60, the Rev W.W. Champneys, was one of the prime movers, and built three other churches in the area, largely maintained by the Church Pastoral Aid Society.

The architect was Henry Roberts (1803–76), who was born in Philadelphia but came to work in Britain, in the office of Fowler and Smirke before setting up his own practice in 1830. He had liberal and Evangelical connections. In 1832 he won the competition to design the Fishmongers' Company Hall by the new London Bridge, and the result, in Greek Revival style showing Smirke's influence, was much admired. His practice (with George Gilbert Scott as a pupil) flourished, with houses for the aristocracy in a range of styles - Jacobean, Tudor Gothic and Italianate. His essays in Gothic Revival churches, however, of which St Paul's was an example, did not meet with the approval of the Ecclesiologists. Reviewing the designs in 1846, they judged it (somewhat unfairly) extremely poor - a vulgar attempt at First Pointed....the whole is stale and inspid. It was in Early English style, of stock brick, with stone dressings, and a tower and spire at the north-west which was surmounted, not by the customary cross, but by a weather-vane in the form of a ship (now mounted on the south wall of St Paul's School). The interior was plain, with no chancel and a west-end gallery (the organ was in the first stage of the tower.)

Roberts also designed the vicarage at number 11 next door. Messrs William Cubitt were contracted to build both the church and the vicarage, which is now tenanted by business students and was recently visited by the Rector and Tony Williamson (who grew up in the house) and his family.

The district, previously quite up-market with its music halls and theatres, and gracious residences around Wellclose Square, was in decline. As the merchants moved out, the houses became tenements and warehouses, the open spaces and gardens filled up with hovels, cafés and doss houses, and vice was rampant. An account of 1857 speaks of

Robert Hall Baynes (1858-62), of St Edmund Hall Oxford, is remembered as a writer of religious poetry and a hymn writer and editor of various publications (see Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology) – more so in the USA, where two of his hymns [right] still appear in hymnals, than in this country. However, he also edited a book on international law! During his time in the parish, he opposed the style of worship at St George-in-the-East, but when Joseph Rowe was convicted of 'brawling' in 1860 Baynes denied in court the claim that he had encouraged him to shout out the responses over the choir - and wrote to The Times to make his position clear. He reported 13,541 ship visits in 1861, with 415 meetings held; by the following year, he had three city missioners and two scripture readers under his direction.

He left to work in Maidstone, and them in Coventry (where in 1873 he was made a Canon of Worcester, having three years earlier been appointed Bishop-designate of Madagascar, resigning the following year). His final post was in Folkstone.  

DAN GREATOREX YEARS

There were two royal visits during this time. The Prince and Princess of Wales came to open the Day Schools on 30 June 1870. On 23 June 1874 the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh came to open the Infant Nursery ('for the children of seamen and others') and Mission Room. There was a Déjeuner (with tickets for those who contributed five guineas to the steward's list), a Presentation of Purses by young people in the Grand Marquee, and a four-day Grand Flower and Rose Show and Exhibition of British and Foreign Birds. See this poster about the Committee for the Systematical Decoration of the Intended Route! In addition to the National Anthem, the choir sang the Russian National Hymn and God bless our Sailor Prince, despite the 'serious doubts about the propriety of the words' expressed by the Bishop of Rochester, who led the proceedings in place of the Bishop of London. [The most recent royal visit was by Princess Margaret in 1956.]

Victorian curates of St Paul's

Some were Oxbridge graduates (as had been all the Floating Church and Sailors' Asylum clergy), but a good number were from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) - despite Bishop Blomfield's prejudice against them - see the note here on ordination training. And like Dan Greatorex himself, some came from St Bees in Cumbria; and others from King's College London (KCL).

• Daniel Ace DD (1850s): born in Devenport, where he was later briefly vicar, he studied at Cambridge and came here after a curacy in Malton. Like Gribble he was an astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; he wrote widely on subjects as varied as auricular confession, railway statistics, foot and mouth disease, prison reform, ecclesiastical courts and marriage law! When he was vicar of Dacre near Ullswater, and returned to Malton to preach, the church was dramatically struck by lightning. His last post, until his death in 1893 was at Laughton near Gainsborough.
  
  
• Alexander Eccles Auchinleck (1855): a clergyman's son from County Fermanagh born in 1825, he studied at TCD (where he was awarded a 'catechetical premium'), was ordained in 1843 in Lincoln diocese, and served curacies in Chichester diocese and Dronfield in Derbyshire before becoming Vicar of Car Colston in Nottinghamshire in 1879, where he died in 1904. The family's home was at Castle Lodge, county Tyrone; both his marriages, in 1862 and 1870, were in Ireland.
  

• Edward James Laughlin (1858): another TCD man, taking an ad eundem or courtesy degree from Oxford in 1857 (a practice that continued with Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin after it had ceased elsewhere); he served further curacies in the dioceses of Norfolk and Ely.
  

• Robert Henry Vickers (1860), also graduated from TCD, in 1855, and was ordained that year by by the Bishop of London to serve as a CMS missionary in India, setting sail with his wife from East India Docks; he was based in Travancore, from where he sent letters on the Indian Mutiny and other papers. He returned in 1859. In 1869 (when he was living in Kilburn) he produced a verse translation of La Nobla Leyczon, a late 12th century text in Old Occitan which is the foundation document of the early Protestant Waldensian movement. He died in 1971, and his widow returned to Madras; his son Wildred Constant Vickers was a Surgeon-Major in the Indian Medical Service.
  

• William Brown Keer (1861-65): son of a devout Methodist farmer in Suffolk (of whom he wrote a memoir in the 1868 Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine), he trained at St Bees. As a curate in Liverpool he was attacked and beaten by a Catholic mob in June 1858 and was protected the following week by Protestant bodyguards (compare the riots at St George-in-the-East the following year!) He came here after a further curacy in Bradford. At Christ Church, Watney Street he preached a sermon  'Baptism, Regeneration & Discipleship' in response to Spurgeon's attacks on Anglican baptismal teachings, and also 'Numbering our days; or, thoughts for the old and new year' (both published by William Macintosh 1864). He was then approved for missionary service by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel - as was a successor-curate Francis Jephcott - and for 7 years took up new work as chaplain in Bombay, living on a warship in the harbour (shades of the Episcopal Floating Chapel that preceded St Paul's): see these notes of a mission tour in Ceylon and South India, and in Kattywar and Cutch, and also various published talks there, including Navigation Ancient & Modern (1866), Paris, Past and Present, a lecture at Bombay Town Hall for the Mechanics' Institution (Education Society's Press 1867) and Books and Reading as a Recreation (Bombay Gazette Steam Press 1871). He then became seamen's chaplain in Singapore (see this sermon preached at St Andrew's Cathedral, Singapore on 25 June 1871). After a period as acting chaplain in Valparaiso, Chile, he returned to England and became curate-in-charge of Heywood in Wiltshire in , where he published his annual Whit Tuesday sermons for the Hawkeridge Benefit Club on themes such as 'Ways of Pleasantness', on Proverbs 3.17 (1881), and 'The Tillage of the Poor', and an 1886 Accession anniversary sermon preached at Fittleton On Prayer for the Queen. Among his other publications was one on his 1873 travels in the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates; A trip to the Vienna Exhibition and back (1873), an 1874 paper on the Greek Easter in Jerusalem, and one on The Sign of the Cross: its use in the baptismal service of the Church of England explained (1882). In Down South in 'The Long' (1877) he commended South America as an ideal long vacation project for Oxford students (he spoke there in Union debates, including supporting the temperance cause in 1873, and in 1897 gave a small collection of artefacts to the Pitt Rivers Museum). The Canberra Times of 27 July 1927 reported his death:

  A Career of Adventure Recently passed away a remarkable man in the person of the Rev. William Brown Keer, who had the courage to ride alone across Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean in order to visit the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. He did some hard work at Liverpool and In the East End of London before he went to India for seven years' work as harbour chaplain at Bombay, and as chaplain at Chili [sic], for which place he started from Oxford at a few hours' notice. In 1892 he sailed in a native ship to the Persian Gulf, bought a horse, and started on a perilous ride to Nineveh and Babylon. When he encountered robbers, who must have known that he had a considerable amount of money about him, he repeated very impressively the texts from the Koran as to hospitality to strangers and was never molested. He was a frequent contributor to magazines, and his death is said to be due to his never eating anything after his tea at 6 o'clock, and going out three years ago to an early service on All Saints Day without food, when he was seized with a stroke of paralysis from which he only partially recovered.

• Canon William Henry Fairfax Robson (1861-62) - trained at KCL, went from St Paul's as curate, then vicar, of St Giles Northampton (becoming an honorary canon of Peterborough in 1875) and then became vicar of Christ Church Birkenhead, from 1877 to his death in 1913, with six years as rural dean. He published hymns, and various sermons.
  
  
• George Tripp (1862-68) was born in 1837 and grew up at Altarnun in Cornwall (the 'cathedral of the moors'), where in 1842 his father, vicar there for many years, built the parsonage house (now Penhallow Manor) which is said to be the inspiration for Squire Warleggan's rectory in Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn - and is also said to be haunted by the ghosts of Mary the housekeeper and the vicar with whom she had an affair. He trained at KCL and served the second of six London curacies at St Paul's, living in Tamouth Terrace, Philpot Street; but by 1881 was a curate in Sutton, Lancs, lodging in New Street. He died in 1896 in a workhouse, said to have given away £20,000 over the years to any who asked him for help, including foreign missions.
  
  
• Moses Clarke (1868-70), of TCD - his fourth of five London curacies

• Enoch Reddall (1869-??) was born in Birmingham in 1825, and graduated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford. His first curacy was at Morley, near Leeds, from where he moved to Northamptonshire and published Latin Synonyms and Phrases for the use of Grammar Schools &c (1844). He became Master of Woodstock Grammar School and Chaplain of the Woodstock Union in the 1850s. He served briefly at St Paul's [see below], but The Scholastic Register of 29 March 1873 reported that he had been ordered to be confined during Her Majesty's pleasure as a lunatic; he had been charged with committing a very violent offence upon a police constable. He died in confinement.
  
  
• C Burn (signs in registers as 'Curate in Charge' 1872)
  
  
• Henry Thomas Heffell (1874-82, but with previous links at the church - see below: his daughter was married here in 1873), was born in Dover in 1828; prior to his extended curacy at St Paul's, when he lived at 159 Cable Street and was well known in the Dock Street area, he had been employed by the Spanish Evangelical Society during the period of the Great Exhibition. The Revival for August 1862 (p36) reported
  

  Most important operations have been commenced among the Spaniards and Portuguese visiting the great International Exhibition in London. An earnest and efficient English missionary, who can speak the Spanish and Portuguese languages with the utmost fluency, has been engaged by the committee, and has been at work in this way since the beginning of June. William Long. Esq., of London, under whose superintendence he was placed, accompanied him on his first visit to the Exhibition, and writes:—I have just returned from the Exhibition with Mr. Heffell, and I think there is every prospect of an opening among the Spaniards and Portuguese. He addressed four or five Spaniards and Portuguese at the Portuguese Court, and I was surprised at the readiness with which they listened to him, and accepted some Spanish books. I deeply regret being obliged to give up this interesting work, but shall watch it from time to time. In consequence of Mr. Long's absence from London, Mr. Heffell labours at present under the direction and superintendence of Wilbraham Taylor, Esq., who meets with him and the foreign agents for natives of other countries, every morning for prayer and conference, previous to their entering upon the work of the day.

   
  The Christian (Morgan & Scott 1870) includes this testimonial:
  

  St Paul's Church for Seamen, Day-schools, Wellclose-sq, Jan 26th Having held six classes for instructing Spaniards in this place, we are witnesses to the fact that, by the help of the Rev. R. Hunt's phonetic Spanish Key, Spaniards, who previously know not the alphabet, have quickly had power to read more or loss fluently, and also to teach other illiterates to do the same with like facility. Dan Greatorex, Vicar.     Enoch Reddall, Curate.    H. T. Heffell, Spanish Missionary.

  
  From 1882-99 he was Chaplain to the Dreadnought Hospital Greenwich - which in 1870 had come ashore from former hospital ships moored in the Thames. (He was briefly succeeded here by Brooke Lambert, formerly of St Mark Whitechapel, now Vicar of Greenwich, until his death the following year.)
  

• John Gilbert Surman (1883-85) - served his title here from KCL, and did further study at TCD; from 1887 to his death in 1917 he was Rector of Healing, near Grimsby (to which he was presented by a relative), where in 1898 he was fined a third of his stipend by Lincoln Consistory Court because of prolonged absence from his parish giving musketry instruction to volunteers. In 1899 he patented a non-refillable bottle and in 1915 wrote a treatise on ecclesiastical dilapidations (the amounts then payable by incumbents towards work on their parsonages).
  
  
• Samuel Evans (1885), of TCD, was ordained in Ireland, as curate of Irvinestown, Derryvullen; two London curacies followed before his time here, after which he was appointed as Rector of Taxal [haley Bridge, then in Cheshire but now in High Peak, Derbyshire].
  

• Basil Silver Aldwell (1887-90), from Corpus Christi College Cambridge, was the son of Basil Duckett Aldwell (of an Irish family), the noted evangelical founder of St Luke Greetham Street, Southsea (Portsmouth) in the 1860s; after serving his first curacy here Basil jnr. went to St Luke's as curate, then vicar, for nearly 30 years  before becoming vicar of Bitterne near Southampton from 1920-29, then of Mancetter, then from 1934 of Flordon in Norfolk (joined with Hapton in 1937). His wife co-founded with Miss Hoare the Lambeth Girls Evening Home, known as Queen Victoria Girls Club.
  
  
• Francis Jephcott (1890-98) [right], from Queen's College Birmingham, began ministry as an SPG missionary in Ontario, returning for two further spells in Canada, interspersed with English parish and prison appointments in all parts of the country. St Paul's was his thirteenth of sixteen posts, and he worked hard during his time here. He retired to Coventry.
  
  
• George Horlock (1898-1900), ordained in Toronto in 1875 and served briefly there before a series of ten London curacies, of which this was the eighth; his wife owned property in Rochford, near Southend (where they had a home) and sold land for Poor Law homes. (Rochford became the centre of the Peculiar People, a puritanical Wesleyan sect founded in 1838, who refused medical treatment and embraced pacifism - later the Union of Evangelical Churches.) In 1895 the Anglo-Papalist Frederick George Lee inscribed a copy of his essay 'The Sinless Conception of the Mother of God' to Horlock, with the kind comps of the author.
  
  
• Henry Mason (1899-1900) trained at St Bees - hix sixth of nine London curacies, plus three spells in southern and western Australia.

See here for baptism and wedding statistics throughout the period.

Nautical memorials
Two Arctic explorers are commemorated in the church.

Tiles set In the north aisle wall mark Rear Admiral Sir William Edward Parry, who had read the lessons for four years and died in 1855.

The west window depicts scenes on the Sea of Galilee - Christ teaching from a boat, Christ rebuking the wind and waves, the miraculous draught of fishes and Christ walking on the water - in memory of Captain Sir John Franklin who, with the crews of Erebus and Terror, perished on an expeditionary voyage.

In memory of Captain Sir John Franklin RN, KCH one of the founders of this church  who died on board HMS Erebus in lat 69°, 37 42” N, long lat 98° 41” W erected 1872 Dan Greatorex, Vicar He rebuked the winds and the waves saying 'He that hath ears let him hear' 'Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men'  'Thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt'

Many other memorials, and model ships, followed, including the Peril of the Hecla, forced against an iceberg in 1825, and the wreck of the Gossamer off Prawle Point near Dartmouth, where Captain Thompson and others drowned en route to Australia, having attended the church on the previous Sunday.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

By 1900 St. Paul's church was in a poor state of repair and the walls were badly stained by damp. Photographs show the interior unchanged: the pulpit and large reading-desk dominated and the altar was small and insignificant. A £1,600 restoration was undertaken, during which the galleries were removed, a raised chancel formed in the eastern bay of the nave, the east wall was painted with Gothic arches to match the old reredos, the reading desk was removed, and the pulpit either replaced or radically altered. The organ, an 1848 2-manual instrument of 14 stops by Gray and Davison (costing £278, with one of the earliest 'piperack' cases), renovated by them in 1865 (which is probably when the pipes were decorated), and rebuilt in 1901 as a 3-manual instrument by Hele & Co of Plymouth [pictured]. When the church closed, it was rebuilt by Peter Collins for St Philip Earl's Court, Kensington.

Another memorial to those who perished at sea, on board the barque Brier Holme off the coast of Tasmania in 1904, was erected; the story is told here.

Greatorex' successor as Vicar was Edward Griffith Parry (1897-1918) – the Charles Booth archive contains an interview with him [B222 pp90-107]. He and his brother John, from a 'Liverpool Welsh' clergy family (they studied at Jesus College Cambridge) had both been curates in Liverpool and Bromley, and their younger brother Joshua Powell Parry served his first curacy at St Paul's. Curates in Parry's time were

• Edward John Clark (1900-02) - his only spell in London during nine curacies; he became an incumbent in Hull in 1921.
  
  
• Thomas Elms Fisher (1901-03) - from Trinity College Dublin; this was his third of seven London curacies, before he became rector of Yelling in Huntingdonshire from 1912-27, and retired to Hove. A Musical Times reviewer in 1924 slated one of his compositions as unspeakably bad.... with all respect, I commend the old saw about the cobbler and his last.....
  

• Ernest Potter Oates (1902-) whose brother was curate at St Mark Whitechapel; ordained  in 1887, he served curacies in London, Scotland and the Midlands - it took him until 1925 to get his own parish, in Newborough (near Peterborough).
  
  
• Joshua Powell Parry (1903-07) - brother of the Vicar; he left St Paul's to serve in Malaya the held posts in various parts of England before his death in 1930.
  
  
• Matthew Henry Boden (1907-08) - ordained from St Bees in 1887, after two brief incumbenices in Peterborough diocese he went to serve in South Africa and was invalided back from the Boer War on The Assaye in 1901, and thereafter held assistant posts around London - this was the second of six.
  
  
• George Alexander Dunlop (1908-13), who had studied in Glasgow, and became the vicar of St Mary Leeds from 1914 until the mid-1903s.
  
  
• John Evans Hughes (1913-??) - came from, and after the War returned to, parishes in the diocese of St Asaph; during his time here, he appears to have lived in West Kensington!
  

Another long incumbency followed: Charles Davey Weekes (1918-48). He had previously served in South Africa, and during the First World War on the Isle of Dogs. He had no curates during his time, though when St Mark Whitechapel closed in 1926 (and demolished in 1937) and its parish was added to St Paul's, he worked with E.J. Crosby, its last priest-in-charge, for two years until 1928. He retired to Sunbury-on-Thames and died some years later.

Frederick Walter Crooks was Vicar of the combined parish from 1948-52. Like many others who served here, he had trained at Trinity College Dublin, and began his ministry in Ireland before wartime service as a RNVR chaplain. He left for Guildford diocese, serving twice as a rural dean (in Godalming and Epsom) and was made a Canon; his last post, until his retirement in 1980, was at Shalfleet, Isle of Wight.

FATHER JOE, 'ADMIRAL WOODS', THE 'BACCY PARSON' AND OTHERS

St Paul's had always been Protestant and low church, but this changed dramatically with the coming of its most famous Vicar,

Two stipendiary curates served with him. Gordon Budd [left] came from 1953-55, after many years in the Navy. He and his wife lived in poor accommodation in Chamber Street. They ran a successful youth club; he was very practical (especially with electrical items) and she was the sacristan. They went on to Stoke Newington, Bacton and for twelve years to Stirling; he retired in 1971.

Samuel (Sammy) Hugh Stowell Akinsope Johnson (1955-58) [right], a Nigerian 'adopted' by St Martin-in-the-Fields came for three years (1955-58), living on the top floor of the vicarage, before studying theology at London University (the parish gave his hood when he graduated). He was popular as a visitor, with local folk as much as with incomers, and played cricket and football with the boys and adults of the parish. He returned to Nigeria and later became head of religious broadcasting, and Provost of Christ Church Cathedral, Lagos, where he still lives.

The last Vicar of St Paul with St Mark was Hugh Sainsbury Cuthbertson (1963-68): see here for an extended account of the 'Baccy Parson' and his Christian Socialist connections.

These advertisements from a 1967 church booklet show the continuing German and Jewish presence in the area. Freimuller's shop backed onto Wilton's, which from 1891-1956 had been under the aegis of the Methodist Church.

FINAL DAYS

In 1971 St Paul's parish was joined to St George-in-the-East – Dan Greatorex no doubt turned in his grave, given his hostility a century earlier! - but the church remained open for worship until 1990. During that period, the enigmatic Joseph Thomas Davies, known as 'Father Aquinas', was curate-in-charge from 1971-79. Remembered with affection by some for his enthusiasm, he broke all the rules: finances were dodgy, he let vagrants live in various parts of the church, and drove young people around in an untaxed van despite never having taken a driving test. He left to become Rector of Roos in the East Riding, then of four Suffolk villages near Sudbury, from 1989 until his death. Here is Christmas, Easter and Harvest at St Paul's in his time.

Curates and members of St George's then led worship, among them Olive Wagstaff, a licensed Parish Worker who has vast experience of the area from the 1950s onwards. She worked at St Dunstan Stepney, was one of the lay community members at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in St John Groser's time, and did pioneering work with the elderly. Until recently she was our sacristan at St George's.

In 1989 the St Katharine's Dock area of the parish (south of East Smithfield) was transferred to St Peter Wapping.

After the church closed [pictures left], it was used in 1991 for the filming of the first series of the first ever TV show about computer and video games, Gamesmaster, presented by sporting stars of the day, including John Fashanu, Eric Bristow, Jimmy White, Pat Cash, Gary Wilson and Emlyn Hughes.Various schemes for the church were considered - including a restaurant, and continued use by other Christian denominations who had been meeting there since it closed for Anglican worship. Unfortunately, there was little consultation with the parish. It was on the market for a year, with a £1.5m price tag. The East London Advertiser on 14 September 1990 dubbed it 'the church no-one wants' [right], and the agent commented 'we will push it more aggresively when the property market picks up'. In the event, it was successfully converted into a private nursery. Across the road, at 22, is the former Sir Sidney Smith pub (named after an admiral who served in the French revolutionary wars), rebuilt in the 1930s to distinctive designs by A.E. Sewell, and re-named the Pepper Pot in 1998 [far right].

See here for baptism and wedding statistics throughout the life of the parish.