St Paul Dock Street

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

see HERE for St Paul's Whitechapel CE Primary School

EARLY YEARS

The foundation stone for the church to replace the EPISCOPAL FLOATING CHAPEL, the Brazen, was laid on 11 May 1846 by the Prince Consort. A 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. 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 spire was topped with a ship rather than a cross - which is now mounted on the wall of St Paul's School.

stpauldockstreet dockstreetvicarage 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 surmounted by a weather-vane in the form of a ship. 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 next door [pictured right]. 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

an infernal hole, whole streets teeming with houses of infamy, houses not long built for the industrial classes now let out at a more profitable rent for the pursuit of sinful pleasures. The incumbent reports that he has visited these and helped in rescuing 270 women from their degredation, yet their places are immediately filled by others; that he has often interposed in the fights which go on beneath his windows, that the ears of his family are habitually shocked by the most disgusting language; that, especially between the hours of 11pm to 2am, his rest is broken by screams and fights, while in the summer nights, it is a common thing to see large groups of bared-headed women dancing in a circle with language and attitudes so offensive as to excite pity and shame. For five years the Home Secretary had been respectfully memorialised on this subject....but the incumbent is left in the cruel position of being unaided by vigorous exercise of civil power.

In 1858 the Prince Consort gave a set of COMMUNION PLATE which since June 1990, on the direction of the Bishop, has been on loan to the Treasury of St Paul's Cathedral.

St Paul's ministers (as yet there was no parish created) were also chaplains of the ASYLUM AND SAILOR'S HOME. The first was the remarkable Charles Besley Gribble (1847-58) - see HERE for more details of his life before and after St Paul's, and his family. While at St Paul's he co-operated with the London City Mission, a non-denominational agency founded by David Nasmith in 1835 of which other Anglican clergy were suspicious. Lower Life in London, by George Perkins (1854) describes the lives of individuals in the Well Street area. On one occasion Gribble cared for two kidnapped sailors from the Friendly Islands. He left the parish to become Embassy Chaplain in Constantinople, where he was involved in complex negotiations with the Turkish authorities; he died in 1878.

Robert Hall Baynes (1858-62) is remembered as a writer of religious poetry and a hymn writer and editor (see Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology) – more in the USA, where two of his hymns [below] 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.

Jesus, to Thy table led,
Now let every heart be fed
With the true and living Bread.

While in penitence we kneel
Thy sweet presence let us feel,
All Thy wondrous love reveal.

While on Thy dear cross we gaze,
Mourning o’er our sinful ways,
Turn our sadness into praise.

When we taste the mystic wine,
Of Thine outpoured blood the sign,
Fill our hearts with love divine.

Draw us to Thy wounded side,
Whence there flowed the healing tide;
There our sins and sorrows hide.

From the bonds of sin release,
Cold and wavering faith increase;
Lamb of God, grant us Thy peace.

Lead us by Thy piercèd hand,
Till around Thy throne we stand
In the bright and better land.

God almighty, in Thy temple,
Low before Thy throne we bow.
From Thy dwelling-place in glory,
Hear our supplications now,
While we offer
Earnest prayer and solemn vow.

Christ our Saviour, Thou who carest
For the youngest of Thy fold,
Give us now Thy heavenly blessing,
As Thou didst in days of old -
Priceless treasure,
Richer far than gems or gold.

God the Holy Ghost, be near us,
Ever dwell our hearts within;
Keep them pure, and brave, and earnest,
Give us grace to conquer sin,
And, through Jesus,
Heaven’s eternal crown to win.

Holy Trinity, defend us
In a world with evil rife,
Let Thine angel-guards surround us,
In each sore and bitter strife;
O preserve us
Unto everlasting life!

DAN GREATOREX YEARS

The most famous Victorian incumbent, who served for 35 years from 1862-97, was Dan Greatorex. He became Vicar when a parish district was created in 1864 - the machinations behind this, linked to the rise of ritualism at St George's and its mission church, are explained at the end of the page on ST SAVIOUR & ST CROSS MISSION CHAPEL. Greatorex was a man of pronounced evangelical principles and boundless energy. He founded an astonishing array of schools, nurseries and other institutions, and his story is told in more detail HERE. His architect brother Reuben, who designed ST PAUL'S SCHOOL and Church House, Wellclose Square, is a part of this story. Although work with seamen continued, conducted by lay missioners and various societies, the focus was shifting to more general parochial ministry, including 'rehabilitating victims of vice'. In 1873 Greatorex accepted the status of honorary chaplain to the Home and Asylum at £50 a year (raised in 1874 to £100), and when he retired in 1896 he was granted an annuity of £50. But lawyers advised that there was no need to appoint or pay his successor as a chaplain - an informal arrangement and ad hoc honorarium would suffice!

The 'Churches' section of Charles Dickens Jr's Dictionary of London (1879) lists the Sunday services as 11am Matins (with 11.45 am Holy Communion on the 1st Sunday), 3.30pm Afternoon Service and 6.30pm Evensong (with Holy Communionon the 3rd Sunday). No midweek or holy day services are specified. The black gown was worn for preaching (which by this period was becoming a distinctively Protestant badge), and 'Mercer's Collection' was the hymnbook. (William Mercer, Perpetual Curate of St George, Sheffield, produced his Church Psalter & Hymnbook in 1854, with the help of the poet Montgomery who was a member of his congregation; a decade later, it was in use in 1,000 churches, including 53 in London, and selling 100,000 copies annually. Some of his translations survive in use.)

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. 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).

Among St Paul's Victorian curates were

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.

William Brown Keer (1861-65): son of a devout Methodist farmer in Suffolk, 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!) In 1864 he preached a sermon at Christ Church, Watney Street in response to Spurgeon's attacks on Anglican baptismal teachings. The following year he was approved for missionary service by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel - as was Francis Jephcott [see below] - 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); he then became seamen's chaplain in Singapore and later acting chaplain in Valparaiso, Chile, before becoming curate-in-charge of Heywood in Wiltshire (where he preached the annual Whit Tuesday sermons for the Hawkeridge Benefit Club on themes such as 'Ways of Pleasantness' and 'The Tillage of the Poor'). Many of his talks and lectures were published, including one on 'Paris, past and present' for the Bombay Mechanics' Institute, one on the Greek Easter in Jerusalem, and several on his inveterate travels (including one commending South America as an ideal long vacation project for Oxford students: he spoke there in Union debates, and left a small collection of artefacts to the Pitt Rivers Museum); you can read of his travels in the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates, here. 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 King's College, went from St Paul's as curate, then vicar, of St Giles Northampton and became vicar of Christ Church Birkenhead, from 1877 to his death in 1913, with six years as rural dean.
George Tripp (1862-68) grew up at Altarnun in Cornwall (the 'cathedral of the moors'), where in 1842 his father, vicar there for many years, had 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 King's London and served the second of six London curacies at St Paul's, living in Tamouth Terrace, Philopt 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 Trinity College Dublin - his fourth of five London curacies
John Gilbert Surman (1883-85) - served his title here from King's College, and did further study at Trinity College Dublin; 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 [pictured, further details HERE] and in 1915 wrote a treatise on ecclesiastical dilapidations (the amounts then payable by incumbents towards work on their parsonages).
Basil Silver Aldwell (1887-90) went on to build St Luke's Portsmouth, where he had been born (in 1862), serving there as curate then vicar for nearly 30 years before becoming vicar of Bitterne, near Southampton. His wife co-founded with Miss Hoare the Lambeth Girls Evening Home, known as Queen Victoria Girls Club.
Francis Jephcott (1890-98) [pictured] began ministry as an SPG missionary in Ontario, returning for two further spells in Canada with English parish and prison appointments in between - St Paul's was his thirteenth and penultimate post.
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.)
Henry Mason (1899-1900) trained at St Bees - hix sixth of nine curacies, plus three spells in southern and western Australia.

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*.

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.

franklinwindow

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'

* Franklin led the Royal Navy's 1854 expedition to locate the North-West Passage across Canada, to enable ships to sail to the Far East by an alternative route avoiding the problems of rounding Africa. His vessels were equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and several years' supplies of newly-invented tinned food (though some of his sailors suffered from lead poisoning from the sealing process). When they disappeared, his wife pressed for a major search to be launched. Their remains were eventually found by Dr John Rae, tipped off by Inuit contacts. Rae, from Orkney, had been surveying and charting the area on foot for some years, using traditional skills learnt from the Inuits. As the naming of Rae's Straight (the 'missing link' of the Passage) suggests, he should really be credited with the discovery of the Passage, but Franklin's memorial in Westminster Abbey attributes it to him. This is probably because, unthinkably but correctly (according to more recent research), Rae reported that Frankin's expedition had resorted in extremis to cannibalism. Orcadians are pressing for proper recognition of Rae's achievement. The story of the two men is well-told in a recent episode of Ray Mears' BBC series, and the accompanying book, Northern Wilderness (Hodder & Stoughton 2009).

ISAAC ROSENBERG

From 1897-1900 the poet Isaac Rosenberg, son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a pupil at St Paul's School, living at 47 Cable Street, before moving to Stepney for a Jewish education. He became an apprenctice engraver, and managed to get to art school, before joining the army in 1915 - he was killed in action in 1918. He was the only one of the war poets to come from a deprived background. Here is a fuller account of his life and significance. His poem The Jew describes the racism he experienced, not at school, but in the trenches:

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
    Lit by a lamp in his blood
    Ten immutable rules, a moon
    For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
    With the same heaving blood,
    Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
    Then why do they sneer at me?

TWENTIETH CENTURY

dockstreetorgan dockstreetwindow 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), renovated by them in 1865, was 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 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; later rector of Yelling in Huntingdonshire.
Ernest Potter Oates (1902-) whose brother was curate at St Mark Whitechapel; ordained in 1887, it took him until 1935 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 he went to serve in South Africa and was invalided back from the Boer War on The Assaye in 1901, thereafter serving various assistant posts in London.
George Alexander Dunlop (1908-13), who had studied in Glasgow, and became an incumbent in Leeds in 1914.
John Evans Hughes (1913-??) - came from, and returned to, parishes in the diocese of St Asaph; during his time here, he appears to have lived in West Kensington!

dockstreetaltar 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 retired to Sunbury-on-Thames and died some years later. In 1926 ST MARK WHITECHAPEL closed – the church was demolished in 1937 – and its parish added to St Paul's.

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

St Paul's had always been Protestant and low church, but this changed dramatically with the coming of its most famous Vicar, Joseph Williamson (1952-62), universally known as Father Joe and invariably garbed in cassock and biretta. This deceptively frail figure with a bellowing voice was proud of being a Poplar lad, and believed this gave him 'street cred', and an understanding of people's lives, in the East End, though it also gave him a chip on the shoulder when it came to dealing with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His major project – in which he was staunchly supported by his wife Audrey and two parish workers, Nora Neal and Daphne Jones – was based on Church House, Wellclose Square, where prostitutes and 'girls in moral danger' were rescued and rehabilitated. A fuller account of his life and ministry can be found HERE, and of Nora Neal and Daphne Jones HERE.

After the death of ADMIRAL WOODS in 1954, Fr Joe became also Chaplain of the Sailors' Home and Red Ensign Club at the Red Ensign Club, like his pre-war predecessors).

gordonbudd 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), 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) who had been chaplain of Concepcion in Chile before the war, curate in and around London and vicar of Tilty in Essex for 21 years before his last post here, retiring to Tilty.

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, until his death.

Here is Christmas, East 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. She is now 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.

dockstreetclosure2 After the church closed [pictures left and right], 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', 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.