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Home , Algernon Markham, All Saints Notting Hill, Archdeacon of Hampstead, Archdeacon of Middlesex, Bill Westwood, Bishop of Fulham

FAITHFUL CROSS A HISTORY OF HOLY CROSS CHURCH, CROMER STREET

by Michael Farrer edited by William Young

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FAITHFUL CROSS

A HISTORY OF HOLY CROSS CHURCH, CROMER STREET by Michael Farrer edited by William Young, with additional contributions by the Rev. Kenneth Leech, and others

Published by Cromer Street Publications, Holy Cross Church, Cromer Street, WC1

1999

© the authors

Designed by Suzanne Gorman Print version printed by ADP, London.

The publishers wish to acknowledge generous donations from the League and members of the Regency Dining Club, and other donors listed in the introduction, which have made this book possible.

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Contents

Foreword ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 The Anglo-Catholic Mission ...... 5 Late Victorian Cromer Street ...... 17 Holy Cross and its Architect ...... 23 The ...... 28 The Rev. and Hon. Algernon Stanley ...... 33 The Rev. Albert Moore ...... 37 The Rev. John Roffey ...... 42 The Rev. F.E. Baverstock ...... 45 The Rev. L.D. Rutherford ...... 49 The Rev. F.R. Langford-James ...... 53 The Rev. R.H. Le Mesurier ...... 57 The Rev. Napier Pitt Sturt ...... 61 The Rev. John Ball ...... 67 The Rev. P. Wheatley, of Edmonton ...... 70 The Rev. T. Richardson...... 72 The Holy Cross Project ...... 82 The Rev. B. Clover ...... 86 The Present and the Future ...... 90 Pondering the Past and Facing the Future ...... 98 The Church in the Back Streets ...... 102 APPENDIX: The Rev. A.H. Patten ...... 108

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Foreword by the Right Reverend and Right Hon. the ,

Joseph Peacock’s small but handsome church, dedicated to the Holy Cross, lies tucked into the very heart of a busy and varied residential community south of the Euston Road. It took a good deal of hard work to raise the necessary funds to build the church a hundred years ago and it is recorded that in the 1960s there were still some elderly local people who could remember, as children, giving their pennies to buy a brick.

From the very beginning, the and people of Holy Cross were de- termined that their reverential liturgical would not distract them from their primary concern for the poor of the . The history of this Chris- tian service, which continues today in the impressive work of the Crypt Project, is worthy of a wider readership. It is an eloquent testimony to the faith which has been nurtured at Holy Cross through the years, through prayer and attention to the need of neighbours. It is also an excellent ex- ample of what can be achieved when a church befriends the community generously in the name of Jesus Christ.

It is sad that Bishop Brian Masters, who had a deep affection for Holy Cross, was never able to complete his contribution to this history. All those who have contributed have pieced together their memories with a similar love and admiration for a place where God has been discovered in all His freshness and power. I commend this work to you in celebration of the centenary, and in faith and confidence for the years ahead.

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Introduction

William Young

First mention must be given to my great-grandfather, G.S. Drew, a Hulsean Lecturer and Select Preacher, who, in the middle of the 19th cen- tury, was at St Pancras Church and, briefly, in charge of after its extensive renovation. Although an Evangelical, he, like Newman, was famed for an altercation with Charles Kingsley. Great- grandfather’s connection with this area, albeit some 20 years before this history begins in 1876, gives me, a deracinated immi- grant who has spent some 15 years in Judd Street, round the corner from Holy Cross, a double connection with the parish.

A full list of acknowledgements is on another page, but since beginning this history, occurred the tragic death, at a young age, of Donald Findlay, of the Council for the Care of Churches. For many years, I had served with him, on the Guild Church Council of All Hallows, London Wall. A metic- ulous scholar, he had produced a model history of All Hallows. I received two helpful letters from Donald, on the pitfalls of this project, just before he died. I dedicate this history, which he had hoped to supervise, to his memory.

This book was originally to have been produced under the expert guidance of Dr Gavin Stamp, and was intended to have been part of the Centenary celebration of Holy Cross in 1988. Through pressure of work, Dr Stamp was, unfortunately, not able to compile it. He sent me valuable material when Fr Clover and his PCC most kindly allowed me to undertake the work. I was on Gavin Stamp’s original committee, and well remember plaintive parishioners looking forward to a work written by this eminent architectural historian.

My credentials, I fear, are slender, but I have received invaluable assis- tance and have found the story of Holy Cross quite absorbing – a complete contrast to the archives of St Martin-in-the-Fields which I have supervised for the last fifteen years. It has been found convenient, and I hope not out

1 of proportion, to start this history with a brief résumé of the Movement. This is fundamental to all that follows.

My colleague, Michael Farrer, to whom I owe an immense debt of grati- tude, has brought a lifetime of expertise to this earlier part of the book. We have attempted to produce material on each of the priests at Holy Cross up to the present day, although in some cases there was a dearth of available detail, and contemporary background has had to suffice. I have to thank Dr Alan Powers, in the midst of a crowded life, for producing the chapter on Peacock, the architect, and his work. Like Ian Nairn and Sir John Summer- son, he finds distinction in the commonplace.

Coming nearer to the present day, I would have welcomed Donald’s help as to what part the present day should play in this story. I was myself, for some five years, a Founder-Volunteer in the Crypt venture, about which Mark Hyder has written, with the help of the director Julian Hopwood. My very good friend Fr Kenneth Leech has rightly given due and deserved ac- claim to the work done here; as has David Sturgeon, Consultant Psychiatrist, at UCH. It has proved a superb brainchild of Fr Trevor Rich- ardson and incidentally, of a parishioner, Ian Byatt (Director of OFWAT). This said, the principal object of the history was to portray the church it- self, its priests, its people and the quite extraordinary atmosphere it has generated – and continues to do. Here the word numinous might be appro- priate. Readers of the last few chapters will find a diversity of views about historical events and more general issues. I have encouraged each author to speak his mind rather than trying to give an ‘official’ account.

The landlord of The Boot, an historic public house opposite the church, remembered with affection by succeeding congregations over the years, made to me a perceptive observation. Packie Hughes had attended a Req- uiem for Princess Diana. He remarked to me afterwards in the pub,

‘That is a real church. That is a Holy Church.’

In the last letter that Donald Findlay wrote to me, he said, ‘Don’t be dis- couraged, William. I wrote a painstaking history of a church, and the manuscript was discovered unread, abandoned, in a vestry’. Holy Cross has not thought in terms of numbers. It has believed itself to possess some- thing of supreme excellence to pass on – to the few.

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For exceptional assistance, I thank the Catholic League and Mr O’Brien, of St Mary’s, Bourne Street; also Mr Packie Hughes of ‘The Boot’ Public House, Miss Judith Scott, OBE, Mr Hamish McCrae of The Independent, and Fr Brendan Clover, former incumbent, who gave from his own singing fees. I thank also Sir Roger Wheeler, Chief of the General Staff, the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields (my long-suffering boss) and his curate, David Monteith. To all at St Martin’s, a big thank you for encouragement.

Donations have been given by Mr Tom Hibbert of the Club, Mr Rob van Mesdag, long-term Crypt volunteer at Holy Cross, Fr Anthony Andrews of St Michael’s, Ladbroke Grove (also a provider of invaluable advice). Of my own personal relatives I wish to thank my sister, Mrs Mac- naghten for a donation, and Mr Charles Macnaghten, her brother-in-law, for a generous gift from a Trust Fund. Mrs Rachel Palmer, Magistrate, and Mr Graham Searjeant of The Times, have been consistently generous.

Finally, I would like to thank the Church Wardens of Holy Cross for their weekly pocket money during most of the project, that enabled the history to be completed under the watchful eye of the landlord of The Boot.

I hope that, in these pages, something of that supreme excellence may per- colate through. In an age avid for spiritual truths, an age which relishes colours, sounds and symbolism, Holy Cross bears witness from its rich and varied heritage to an evangelism which is valid and relevant. Anglo- Catholicism, if you have to have a label, need be neither moribund nor dead. You will read of a House of God in Cromer Street, which depicts a way of conveying the of Jesus with exciting integrity.

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The Anglo-Catholic Mission

Michael Farrer

The Victorian age was a time of tremendous change, both in the economic and everyday life of the people and in the religion of the country. The in- creased industrialisation of the country and the growth of the major towns and cities developed at a fantastic rate. We go in those dramatic sixty years from a London where you could still walk out into the countryside, or go by stagecoach along rutted lanes with the fictitious Mr Pickwick and his friends, to a large sprawling London with miles of suburbs of grey brick houses and terraces where Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson went by Han- som cab and train to search out crime and mystery. Within one lifetime the old London became very much as we see it now, still surviving in vast are- as of inner London left after the great destruction and rebuilding engendered by the damage of the Second World War and the concrete and glass revolution of the 1960s.

In religion changes had become very necessary. The Church of , for most of the 18th century and into the earlier years of the 19th century, was wrapped in a more or less torpid slumber. The dominance of the Han- overian Crown had well-nigh stifled any understanding that the was the same Church brought to Britain in Roman times and for which St Alban had suffered martyrdom, to be restored by St Augustine with his mission from Rome at the end of the 6th century. It regarded itself as part of Protestant Europe despite its and ancient churches and cathedrals; its structure and institutions still retained some of the less de- sirable habits inherent from medieval times.

The did not, as some myths may try to teach, turn all its cler- gy into diligent, devout pastors, devoted only to the service of God and the humble poor. The senior clergy, bishops, deans, canons and rectors of wealthy drew large stipends for what amounted to very little real work in sinecure positions. In a lot of cases they held more than one posi- tion in plurality, while living a life of ease and passing off the carrying out of their duties to poorly paid deputies. These often just read their way through dull and stultifying services, accompanied by a long, boring ser- mon read from a book compiled by another, more industrious and learned

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Divine. So many of these were directed more to instruction on worthy morals and ethical goodness than to the ancient teaching of the faith once delivered to the saints and regard for instruction in the Sacra- ments of Christ’s church.

The pervading religious thought still carried with it a lot of the old Calvin- istic idea that some, being God’s elect, were inevitably due to heaven while others were fated for eternal destruction. Those who were destined for salvation would, of course, include the preachers themselves and the worthy, prosperous aristocratic and middle-class hearers. The fatally damned, with no power to help themselves, naturally included most of the drunken and feckless poor who poured into the fast growing cities, living in the seething slums, whole families in one room.

With some clergy the old teachings of the old school formu- lated by Anglicans like Archbishop Laud, Bishops Lancelot Andrewes and John Cosin still lingered. In the seventeenth century they and others had held on to the Catholic nature of the Church of England against the Puri- tans’ attempt to wreck the true Church in the Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. They had managed to overthrow the worst of extreme Protestant influence and bring about the of church and monar- chy in 1660, sealing their endeavours with the of 1662. The eventual disputes at the Bloodless Revolution of 1689 which brought in the Dutch Protestant King William III forced the resignation of five of the best of England’s High Church bishops, including William Sancroft, the then , and the great and saintly Thomas Ken, , together with about 400 priests, who are known as the Non Jurors. Despite the dull formalism which grad- ually overcame the remainder, there were still some who taught the importance of devout acceptance of the Sacraments and devotion to the ancient creeds and Catholic Faith embodied in the Prayer Book.

The great Evangelical Revival in the middle of the 18th century, led by , which taught the neglected poor that Christ’s redemption could be open to all that called on Him and all who took Him as their per- sonal Saviour, was frozen out by pompous, listless bishops who had been recorded as saying that ‘enthusiasm is a dreadful thing’. Most of Wesley’s followers left the Established Church after his death to form the Methodist Church. A notable party remained in the Church of England to hold an in-

6 fluence over a number of devout people of all classes who strove for the bettering of the condition of the poor and led a life in which prayer and Bible reading and the devout hearing of enlightening sermons from suita- bly devout and industrious clergy were held important.

Nonetheless, most of the Church was still in a slumber. Churches were of- ten nearly in ruins, vast areas of the new working-class slums in towns and cities were without Churches at all. The Holy Communion was usually on- ly celebrated four times a year, often without regard for any real solemnity and a total absence of reverence for the Real Presence of Christ in His Sac- rament, taught in the Prayer Book. Observance of the Sacrament of Absolution, less obviously shown, but nonetheless enjoined in the Prayer Book, had all but died out completely. had become infre- quent, perhaps because it would have put the Bishop in the disagreeable position of doing some work. Baptism was, however, still kept up as the norm for any child of a respectable family. Examination of the Parish Reg- isters of Old St Pancras Church in the 1830s will show a tremendous list of Baptisms on Day. This is a rather sad reflection on the fact that Christmas was the only day, apart from , that was a Public Holiday and the only day most people could be free to gather the family for this sort of occasion. This meant the poor certainly did not have a holiday!

Churches were disfigured by huge box pews (wooden enclosures about 4 feet high), in which the better-off, who paid rent for their pews, could slump, unseen, through the interminable and dreary sermons, and perhaps indulge in a little slumber. The poor, who could not afford pew rents, were shoved into galleries put in at the sides or rows of backless benches in the rear. Usually, a large three-decked pulpit dominated the east end of the church. In the bottom part sat the Parish Clerk who answered the responses in the service, in which the dormant congregation could not be bothered to join. In the second tier was the clergyman, reading the service of Morning Prayer or to which the Clerk responded. Into the top tier climbed the clergyman to deliver his hour-long , timed very often by an hourglass fixed on the ledge. Many clergy, after the hourglass had drained its sand at the end of one hour, would turn it over to record another, second hour’s length of sermonising. This ‘three-decker’ completely overshad- owed the ordinary, unadorned table, shoved almost unnoticed in the chancel, behind which the infrequent communion was celebrated. Never

7 would the traditional be worn, never would a cross and candlesticks stand at the , except perhaps in a cathedral, and there the candles were never lit. The only vestments worn would be a long sur- plice, very often worn straight over the suit, without a , replaced by a black gown for preaching.

Things had to change. The greatest revolution the Church of England had seen since the Reformation was about to take place. A group of Oxford dons (all ordained clergy, as nearly all fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were at the time), inspired by a sermon preached by one of their number, , at St Mary’s Oxford on July 13th 1833, decided the time had come to bring the Church of England back to a realisation of its real position as a true part of Christ’s , rather than the de- partment of State ruled by the Crown and Parliament most people thought of it as being. Initially under the leadership of John Newman, helped by Keble, the great scholar and theologian Dr Edward Pusey and others, they brought out a series of as many as 90 ‘’. These put over the almost forgotten Catholic doctrines about the church and the sac- raments and the sort of lives of sacrifice with and abstinence the clergy and active lay people should be leading.

At first, what became known as the was an entirely ac- ademic movement amongst dons at Oxford and the more receptive clergy. Its adherents became known as Tractarians, after the Tracts put out by the leaders. Very soon, however, the younger clergy, particularly those who had studied at Oxford in those early days, were smitten by the implications of these exciting ideas and carried the operation of these theories into the parishes they were to serve. One of the first of these was William Dods- worth who, after serving as an assistant at the Margaret Street Chapel, just north of Oxford Street, came to be made first vicar of the newly built Christ Church, Albany Street, by Regent’s Park, in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s coming to the throne. He started almost at once to change his Church by having the great ‘three-decker’ pulpit moved to one side to open up the view to the altar at the east end. He also went on to in- troduce the daily recitation of Matins and Evensong and hold Holy Communion every Sunday, steps almost unprecedented at the time. In 1839, two years later, Frederick Oakley took charge of the Margaret Street Chapel and, as well as reforms similar to those of Dodsworth, introduced the first instance of a sung Holy Communion, carried out with dignity and

8 some little ceremonial as a regular tradition on Sundays. Oakley was to become a in 1845, at the same time as his mentor J.H. Newman. He was reordained as a Roman Priest and served the Church of the Holy Angels in Duncan Terrace, Islington. His great and enduring gift to English and tradition is the English version of the popular Christmas carol ‘Adeste Fideles – O Come All Ye Faithful’.

Christ Church, Albany Street was built as part of a great operation in church building in London engendered by the then Bishop of London, Dr Blomfield, a man of far greater energy and devotion than nearly all his contemporary bishops. London and its population had been growing fast since the middle of the 18th century and Bishop Blomfield was very aware of the great areas of streets and houses, containing the very poorest people as well as more middle-class families who had no local church. He raised huge amounts of money from concerned folk and went ahead with a tre- mendous programme of building all over the now urban parts of the Diocese, and Christ Church was one of the first. Among the donors, with quite a hefty sum, was Dr Pusey, the Tractarian leader. The church was to serve the district formed out of the existing Parish of St Pancras east of Regent’s Park where there was a mixed population, ranging from the rich in the Regent’s Park Terraces to really poverty-stricken slums further to the east. The whole district had been built at the beginning of the century.

In 1845, the year that Newman, who was of course to become famous as Cardinal Newman, and now beatified by the Pope, and Oakley and others went over to the Roman Church, Dodsworth, with the encouragement and support of Dr Pusey and the young, up-and-coming politician, William Gladstone, set up in a charming little house, still to be seen in Park Village West, the first for women in the Church of England since the Reformation. They were to lead a life of regular prayer, based on the daily Offices of the Prayer Book, supplemented by English versions of the lesser Offices said by Religious throughout Western Catholicism. They were to spend most of their time in teaching the children of the poor and visiting the sick and needy in the district. They were later to merge with, and eventually to be taken over by, another Order, set up by Dr Pusey and an indomitable lady, Priscilla Lydia Sellon in Devonport and to move in 1852 to a building at the corner of Euston Road and Osnaburgh Street, which was the first purpose-built convent in England since the Refor- mation. It was pulled down in the 1960s.

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From there some of the Sisters went in 1854 as nurses with Florence Nightingale to tend the wounded and sick men in the Crimean War. They were some of the only women at that time trained and experienced as nurses, and had the advantage from Miss Nightingale’s point of view of living a life of devotion and disciplined obedience. They shared this histor- ical duty with some Roman Catholic and other trained nurses, and it is no doubt that their dedicated and sterling work of love and mercy went a long way to destroying the prejudice that Protestant England had against these ‘Popish’ Sisters. Although prejudice still remained for quite a long time, it seemed as if the floodgates were open.

Other Orders of nuns were established in the 1850s, at Wantage in Berk- shire and at Clewer, near Windsor, at All Saints Margaret Street (which took the place of the old Margaret Street Chapel), as well as one in East Grinstead, founded by Dr J.M. Neale who before his death in 1866 at the early age of only 44 wrote a large number of hymns, as well as translating numerous of the old Greek and Latin hymns of the early and medieval Church. His enduring gift to English tradition, among so many other works of his, is the popular Christmas carol, ‘Good King Wenceslas’. Novels, storybooks for children and religious books, including the first exposition by an Englishman of the faith and practice of the eastern Orthodox churches, flowed from his busy pen. Somehow he found time to be War- den of Almshouses, known as Sackville College in East Grinstead, to direct and encourage the growth of the Sisters and as well to be a loving and devoted father to his family. He also took a lot of time and trouble in encouraging others to see that worship in the church should be conducted with beauty and dignity, drawing on the traditions of the whole of the Catholic Church even to the extent of introducing the service of Benedic- tion of the in the Chapel of his Sisterhood long before any parish church would have dared to. By coincidence, he was born not far from Cromer Street, in Lambs Conduit Street, Holborn, although his parents moved from there very soon after.

Religious orders for men followed. The first attempt to have any effect was the foundation of an order based on the ancient and widespread Bene- dictine order, so prominent in western Christendom. This was started by an extremely odd and eccentric man called who was known as Father Ignatius. He was born in 1837 and brought up in Hunter Street very near Cromer Street. He was a strange combination of firebrand,

10 hellfire Evangelical preacher and extreme neo-Romanist. His ideas of building a Benedictine Abbey of which he would be Abbot led to a disas- trous attempt in and later to the fulfilment of his dream in a lonely valley near Llanthony on the Welsh borders. Full of his own dreams and determination, he could never accede to any authority. Though or- dained as a , he was never to be ordained as a priest, as no bishop could exercise any authority over him. Unlike the noble, dedicated ladies who joined the Orders of nuns, only odd misfits seemed to come to his Or- der. Some stayed for a while, most left. When he died in 1908 his Abbey at Llanthony fell into disuse and is now run by another organisation.

Another boy brought up in Bloomsbury plotted a different and far sounder path. Richard Meux Benson founded the Society of St John the Evangelist, at Cowley, a suburb of Oxford where he was vicar. This flourished later all over the world and as the Cowley Fathers his mission priests became shin- ing lights of the . Other Orders followed later in the century. The Community of the Resurrection, after a couple of moves, set- tled eventually at Mirfield in Yorkshire in the 1890s. The Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham in Nottinghamshire was set up about the same time for the training of young men for the priesthood, particularly those who had not been able to go to university. In the 1920s a Franciscan order was set up at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, which eventually took into itself oth- er small bodies which had been founded earlier on Franciscan lines. An Order of St Benedict was established and still continues. The Orders for women also increased at an even greater rate during the late part of the century, so that by the 1920s it was reckoned that there were more and nuns in England than there had been at the time of Reformation!

In 1851 an event took place which was to presage an era of tremendous trial and tribulation for the nascent Catholic Movement. Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter was about the only Bishop in England to support the principle of the movement, having inherited the tradition of the old Laudian Anglican- ism of the 17th century which had still trickled down through all the deadness and protestant torpor of the intervening years. So strong were his principles that he refused to institute a clergyman called Gorham to the liv- ing of Bampton Speke in on the grounds that he denied what the Church of England and its Prayer Book clearly taught about the soul of a child being made regenerate at Baptism. Gorham appealed to the courts, and the case was finally heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy

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Council, a completely secular and state-imposed court, not of the Church’s making, who decided that Gorham could be justified in his heretical belief, overriding the Bishop’s learned, theological and Catholic-minded decision.

This horrified the Catholic party. The notion that a secular Court could de- cide what the doctrine and practice of the Church should be ran completely contrary to their teaching that the Church of England was only a part of the whole Catholic Church, founded by Christ as His mystical body on earth and taking its authority from Him through His apostles, whose successors the bishops were. This so upset certain of them that a few more followed Newman into the Roman Church, notably Manning from Sus- sex who was to become later well known as Cardinal Manning, and William Dodsworth of Christ Church, Albany Street, the co-founder of that first Sisterhood.

However Dodsworth had a curate called Edward Stuart, who had already built a new church, out of his own money, called St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square, near the corner of Osnaburgh Street, where the Sisters were to have their new Convent. This was one of the first churches to be built in London with a definite intention of being used for a more Catholic style of worship, and also one of the first to be built of stone in a Gothic style to look as much as possible like a church of the Middle Ages. Here very definite moves were made to bring Anglican worship in line with the traditions of the whole of Western Catholicism. At the of Christmas 1854, it became the first Anglican church since the Reformation to introduce the use of incense. To have a Midnight Mass was extremely unusual and the use of incense even preceded by some years Stuart’s in- troduction of Eucharistic vestments. Stuart was also to develop the tradition of a daily celebration of Holy Communion which had first come in Devonport when the Sisters were working their hearts out in a terrible outbreak of cholera. He was one of the earliest users of the expression ‘Mass’ and was adamant that the old tradition of Pew Rents should be done away, so that every seat in his church would be free for all comers. The aristocrat could sit next to the pauper and all were equal in the House of God – a concept quite shocking to a lot of people at the time!

This was part of a general move forward in other places. The church of St Barnabas, Pimlico had been built in the late 1840s, a year or two before Munster Square, with buildings round a courtyard where Priests and a

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Choir school were to live in a collegiate style. From here, in 1856, a curate called went to help a struggling parish in the dingiest, slummiest part of the East End, St George’s in the East, near London Docks. Later their mission was to become the separate Parish of St Peter’s, London Docks. He and others founded a Society of Priests called the Soci- ety of the Holy Cross, known by the initials SSC (Societas Sanctis Crucis), whose members were to aim at a definite rule of life in the parishes, of prayer, using the regular Offices of the Church. These included those mi- nor Offices used in the Roman Church: daily celebration of Mass; fasting; alms-giving and devoted work for the poor in their Parishes with definite teaching of the full Catholic Faith. Lowder and his colleagues in the East End were emphatic about the rightness of the wearing of traditional vest- ments at Mass to express this Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament as a restatement of Christ’s sacrifice of Redemption on the Cross. The Sac- rament of Absolution through the private of the penitent to the Priest as Christ’s minister was put forward energetically, although Protestant England, particularly shocked at this and obsessed with the idea that a priest might take pleasure in inquiring of young ladies all sorts of juicy details about their sex lives, used to thunder its prurient prejudice.

In 1851 the Roman Church established its own hierarchy of bishops in England, causing all sorts of Protestant horror. Puseyites, or Ritualists as Anglo-Catholics were known, were victims of this hatred and fear, and or- ganised riots took place during services at St Barnabas, Pimlico, and other places. The most nasty, vicious and long enduring were at St George’s in the East where Lowder and his friends were helping the Vicar, Bryan King. His parish held 40,000 people and before the arrival of Lowder and others he had been struggling on alone since 1842. His predecessor had not bothered to be in the parish or to visit the church, leaving the bare duty of taking services to a succession of .

The example of the priests of the SSC and others led to the appearance of a type of clergyman very different from the old model. Instead of the easy- going man who, whether scholarly or not, did as little as possible to upset his surroundings, there came these energetic, devoted men who believed that their priesthood meant a life of sacrifice on their part to live in line with Christ’s own sacrifice which they pleaded before God every day at the Altar. They lived often as celibates, together in big clergy houses shar- ing a frugal life. Every hour of the day was used up in work among the

13 poor, teaching the children in schools they set up for the ragged, half- starved children, visiting the sick, comforting the mourners, relieving indi- vidual poverty where they could. They arranged frequent services in Church: Matins, Evensong and daily Mass.

On Holy-days and great Festivals they offered music and ceremonial, can- dles alight and standing crosses on their clad with silk and velvet embroidery drapery, similar to the coloured silk vestments they wore themselves. Incense rose in clouds as a sign of the prayer and sacrifice they were offering to God: ‘Here we offer unto Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies, to a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto Thee.’ Very of- ten they were men of considerable wealth, but this was to be devoted to this sacrifice. Instead of enjoying the easy life of the grand gentleman, they used their money for building churches, like Stuart at Munster Square, or Fr Kirkpatrick who purchased the necessary land to build that vast edifice, St Augustine’s Kilburn, entirely out of his own pocket. They beautified their churches with pictures, statues, altars, vestments and . They set up their slum schools and dispensaries for the sick and encouraged their richer lay friends to do the same. Their people began to honour them with the title of ‘Father’ as they saw them go about the slum streets in their and cloaks, with on their heads.

Impressed though many people were at the admirable self-sacrificing work of the Anglo-Catholics, protestants could not let this great movement alone. The very word protestant implies a continual protest, a continual finding out what they are doing and getting them to stop. In 1863 Alexan- der Maconochie, one of Fr Lowder’s assistants, became vicar of the newly-built St Alban’s Holborn, in Baldwin’s Gardens off the southern end of Grays Inn Road, and hence a near neighbour of Cromer Street. Ma- conochie settled in the large Clergy House with a staff of five or six curates, including the great Fr Arthur Stanton who was to serve there, un- paid, until his death 50 years later and became renowned throughout the Anglican world for his compelling preaching and his devoted pastoral love for his people. Right from the start the worship at St Albans was directed in a Catholic way, with vestments, incense and candles on an altar where the priest and his assistants faced east. The ancient traditions of adding a little water to the in the and the use of unleavened wafer bread were upheld. All these elements – the vestments, the candles, the eastward position, the incense, the mixed chalice and the wafer bread –

14 became known as the Six Points, and their introduction was the aim of every Anglo-Catholic priest in an age when every step was to become a battle with protestant prejudice.

As in the days of the Gorham Judgment, the State Courts were called on by Protestant objectors determined to prove that the vestments worn and the sermon and ornaments used by the Anglo-Catholics were illegal. This was despite their being clearly described in the of the Prayer Book which ordered the Chancel and the vesture of the Minister to be as they were at the time of the First Prayer Book of 1549. Again and again Fr Maconochie was dragged to a Court whose authority over himself and the Church he could not in conscience recognise. At times he was sus- pended from his priestly duties by the anti-Catholic Bishop Tait, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and by his even more virulent successor, Jack- son. Eventually, bowed down and harried by the continual malice, he resigned in 1882. His mind clouded with forgetfulness, perhaps suffering a form of mental breakdown caused by his troubles, he became lost on a wild wintry Scottish hillside and died of exposure in December 1887.

With the aid of the Prime Minister Disraeli who wished to oppose the Catholic faith of his rival , Tait forced the Public Worship Regulation Act through Parliament in 1874, setting up a special State Court to hear disputes over Church teaching and Church Ritual. This was just the sort of Court that Anglo-Catholics could not recognise as hav- ing any authority over Christ’s Church, whether it be Established or not. Five Priests, the first being the noted Fr Tooth of St James’s Hatcham in South East London and Fr Pelham Dale of St Vedast’s Foster Lane in the City, went to prison for contempt of court in refusing to answer the sum- mons from this state-made, unecclesiastical Court. Yet nothing was to daunt the onward march of the greatest and fastest-moving movement in Anglican history. Despite the malice, despite the threat of prison or re- moval from stipended positions, the heavy hand of the Public Worship Regulation Act drove those fighting priests ever onward in defiance of its machinations towards ever more advanced positions in their exposition of the full Catholic Faith in all the glory of the traditional worship of Eng- land’s Catholic past and hoped-for Catholic future. In this climate of hate and suspicion, of warfare and spiritual bravery and in the now hard won tradition of the fighting Catholic Movement, came and Hon-

15 ourable Algernon Stanley to set up a new Mission of the Holy Cross in Argyle Walk in October 1876.

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Late Victorian Cromer Street

Michael Farrer

It has nearly always been found in the 20th century that, when a by-pass road is built to divert traffic round the outside of a town, further develop- ment of housing and factories tends to follow on either side of the new road. The earliest instance of this seems to be in the latter part of the 18th century when the so called ‘New Road’ was built round the north side of London to divert traffic away from the congested centre of the City with its narrow streets. This New Road was built to allow traffic from the West, particularly bodies of troops, that might need easy passage, and took the route of what is now the Marylebone Road, followed by the Euston Road and Pentonville Road, known to motorists by the dreary name of A501.

As 20th-century experience has shown, its construction inevitably led to housing developing on either side as the earlier elegant development of Bloomsbury spawned less grand housing northward towards the New Road. Later development spilled out on to the other side to see the great swathes of houses and streets in Somers Town and the areas around Re- gent’s Park by the end of the 19th century. These were mainly pleasant houses intended for the middle classes who would have worked in the City and developing West End. As the new century progressed, the social tone sank quite rapidly and the middle classes moved out, leaving the district of multi-occupancy by poorer people. By the 1840s the district round Argyle Square, Judd Street and Cromer Street had become a typical London slum district, together with Somers Town and the streets to the west, up behind the grand Regent’s Park Terraces and on northwards up around Camden Town. Whole families lived in one room and the district became notorious for prostitution and the inevitable drunkenness of Victorian life in those sorts of areas.

As the streets and houses spread it was decided that something should be done by the church for the spiritual sustenance of the area, particularly as, at that time, a lot of the population was still fairly wealthy and ‘respecta- ble’. The old original Parish Church of St Pancras, tiny and much worn with age, had become quite inadequate. The new St Pancras Church at the

17 corner of Upper Woburn Place was built in 1822, in the Greek Revival style.

Old St Pancras, in Pancras Way, to the north of the New Road, was almost derelict until its restoration in the 1840s. The original Parish of St Pancras covered a very wide area, stretching right up to the heights of Highgate, so that subdivision was necessary. St Peter’s Regent Square, built originally as a Chapel-at-Ease to St Pancras in a similar Classical style in 1826, later became a District Chapelry in 1851 and an independent Parish Church in 1868. This church was bombed in World War II and subsequently demol- ished. All the old buildings in the square were demolished to make way for new blocks of council flats in the 1950s.

The demand for new churches to service the area was becoming so strong that further moves were made to build other new churches and establish new parishes in all parts of the original parish of St Pancras. To the south of the New Road, which we should now call Euston Road, came the build- ing of Holy , Grays Inn Road in 1838, now demolished, and All Saints, Gordon Square, also demolished. The St Pancras Church Building Fund was established in 1842 to fund the building of a number of new churches. The three churches built south of the Euston Road at this time were St John’s, Charlotte Street, St Jude’s, Grays Inn Road in 1847 and in 1860, St Bartholomew’s, Grays Inn Road. All have been demolished.

In 1875 a further ‘church extension’, the expression used in those days, was proposed. It was decided to form a new parish, using parts of the ex- isting parishes of St Peter’s Regent Square and St Jude’s Grays Inn Road. One can now best quote from an account written, but never published, some years ago by Gordon L. Barnes, ‘The area which was to become the parish of Holy Cross belonged to two landowners: the Judd Estate, bound- ed by Euston Road, Cromer Street, Judd Street and Whidborne Street, had been bequeathed to the Skinners Company by Sir Andrew Judd in the 16th century, to be held by that Company in Trust to provide an endowment for . The remainder of the parish was owned by two sisters, the Misses Lucas, of Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, who had inherited it from their ancestor, Joseph Lucas, who had bought it in 1787 when it was open farmland. Lucas developed his land by building houses between 1800 and 1820. Cromer Street, the whole of which became part of Holy Cross Parish, had been called Lucas Street until 1834.’

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Mr Barnes continued, ‘The and Chapter of St Paul’s decided, in June 1875, with the consent of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that a new par- ish should be formed in St Pancras, an area of about 600 square yards, taken out of the parishes of St Peter’s Regent Square and St Jude’s, Grays Inn Road. When unwanted City churches were being closed and demol- ished from 1860 onwards the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were empowered to use money from the sale of the sites, some of which fetched enormous sums, for the building and endowment of new churches in the growing suburbs of London. One of these city churches was St Antholin, Budge Row which was demolished in 1875. The patrons of St Pancras and the other newer parishes, the Dean and Chapter, proposed to the Commis- sioners that the money from the sale of the site should be used for the new church in St Pancras, dedicated to St Antholin. If this were done the Dean and Chapter were prepared to grant £100pa from the City benefice of St Peter-le-Poer, provided the Commissioners would endow the new living with £200 per annum. In 1876 the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend , a notorious persecutor of ‘Ritualists’, decided that Nunhead in South London had greater need than St Pancras and the money was transferred there. In spite of this setback the Dean and Chapter, still anx- ious for a new church in St Pancras, suggested the dedication of St Chrysostom.’

It seems to have been the practice in most cases when a new parish was to be formed that initially a ‘District Chapelry’ was set up as part of an exist- ing parish before a worshipping community was formed around a small chapel and that a new official parish was only formed when a proper church had been built. This was done by an Order in Council on August 12th 1878, but not with the title of St Chrysostom. The Reverend and Honourable Algernon Stanley, who had previously been a curate in the very poor and tough parish of St Mary’s, Charing Cross Road, and who was of a distinctly ‘Ritualistic’ tradition, was appointed the Parish’s first Vicar on October 25th, the same year.

Previous events were to decide the title of the new parish in a dramatic way. Fr Stanley had a great friend, Commodore James Goodenough R. N., whose brother was married to Stanley’s niece. The Commodore was ap- pointed Captain of the Australian Station and started on an extended tour of the Antipodes in May 1873. Fr Stanley resigned his curacy in order to accompany his friend, perhaps as chaplain aboard his ship, HMS Pearl.

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During the voyage, in 1875, they visited the Solomon Islands where, in 1871, the saintly Bishop Patterson had been killed by natives. The place names in the Solomons were often of Portuguese origin because of explor- ers from that country having first discovered these islands on their way to Ceylon and India. On one of these islands, Santa Cruz (Holy Cross), Goodenough and his party landed in August 1875. There, in some fighting with the natives, the Commodore was wounded by a native arrow. The wound seemed not serious at first, but tetanus developed and Goodenough died on his way back to Australia. He was buried at Sydney on August 24th 1875. On his return to England and his appointment to the new par- ish, Stanley was able to persuade the Commissioner to dedicate the parish to Holy Cross as a memorial to Commodore Goodenough.

This tiny area of 600 square yards was by this time a terribly overcrowded slum. An account of 1848 gives the population of St Peter’s Parish as ap- proaching 7,000 people, ‘sometimes as many as five families in a house, the occupants being labourers, beggars and street traders.’ Drunkenness and squalor were described as ‘prevalent’. The overcrowding had probably got far worse by the 1870s.

Fr Stanley left in 1879, to become a Roman Catholic, having probably started services in a rented room during his Anglican days. Fr Moore, his successor, started a Mission Chapel in Dutton Street, together with a ‘Rag- ged School’, so named because poor children, whatever state of rags they might be in, were admitted. Efforts to find a site for and to build a proper church ran into a lot of difficulties. Slowly little bits and pieces of money were got together, including pennies and sixpences that the poor people who came to the Mission could give. It is recorded that in the 1960s there were still old people in the parish who could remember, as children, giving their pennies to buy a brick. The most difficult task initially was to find a suitable site in this crowded area. The Skinners Company and the Judd Es- tate were not allowed, under the terms of their Trust, to dispose of any of the land, though they exercised a great deal of good will and help towards the new parish. By this time, the freeholder of the Lucas estate was Miss Marcia Lucas who held it in entail to her nephew, the Reverend George Ferris Whidborne, a Curate at St Pancras Church, at that time a very Evan- gelical establishment. The family, particularly aunt and nephew, were violently opposed to the Anglo-Catholic principles of Fr Moore, and prob- ably Fr Stanley’s departure for the Roman jurisdiction had aided their

20 prejudice considerably. They probably thought Fr Moore should really do the same, though his married state would have precluded his taking Roman Orders as Fr Stanley had done. Fortunately Mr Whidborne’s departure to St Paul’s Onslow Square must have made the atmosphere a little lighter.

The situation was such that in 1881 the Vicar of St Peter’s Regent Square, who was supposedly of a similar Protestant frame of mind, proposed to the Commissioners that the £5,000 which had been set aside for the building of the new church should be spent on repairs to his own church and the two parishes united, thus killing the parish of Holy Cross. Fortunately this did not come about. In 1884 the Dean and Chapter, the Patrons, even pro- posed, we are sure with a lot of regret, that the Parish should be united with St Pancras and run as a Mission under the control of the Parish Church. The Chapter, at that time, contained a number of distinctly Trac- tarian members, namely Dean Church, Gregory and the great theologian Canon Liddon, and it must have been pain and grief for them to contemplate this little bastion of the Catholic Movement slipping from their control. Fortunately this move, as well, came to nothing. At last re- demption came. Miss Lucas had another relative, the architect of St Jude, Grays Inn Road, and previously of the notable church of St Stephen’s Gloucester Road in Kensington. He seemed to have at last prevailed on Miss Lucas to forget her Protestant prejudice and to sell to the church the freehold of six homes on the south side of Cromer Street (nos. 105-115) for the sum of £2,200, on the site of which he would himself design the church to be built.

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22

Holy Cross and its Architect

Alan Powers

Joseph Peacock died in 1893 at the age of 72. Holy Cross Church is the last significant architectural work by him. His connection with the area was not just through Miss Lucas, for he designed the church of St Jude in Gray’s Inn Road in 1863 (demolished in 1936) and in 1871 was on the vestry committee of St George’s, Bloomsbury, being a resident in Great Russell Street and afterwards Bloomsbury Square. He designed the paro- chial school at the back of St George’s, in Little Russell Street.

Peacock is best known for his churches, which also included St James’s and St Thomas’s, Derby. In London, his other surviving churches, in ‘re- spectable’ neighbourhoods, are St Simon Zelotes, Milner Street, Chelsea and St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, built in 1864 to provide a place of worship for the rapidly developing terraces of houses that followed the opening of the District Railway. In terms of architectural creed, he was one of a group of architects who refused to conform to the rules for style laid down by the Ecclesiological Society, a body devoted to finding archi- tectural expression for the Tractarian or High Church Movement. Their favoured architects, such as George Edmund Street and William Butter- field, have returned as the ones who attract the interest and affection of modern historians. Peacock was not consciously part of a group, until an architect-historian, H.S. Goodhart-Rendel, invented a memorable catch-all title ‘Rogue Architects of the ’ in a lecture in 1947. He in- cluded several of the Ecclesiologists’ least favourite characters in his survey of the eccentric and unusual in Victorian architecture, written at a time when the whole subject was considered only worthy of humour. Goodhart-Rendel said of St Simon’s, ‘Peacock has been determined that anyone inspecting his church shall not be dull for a single moment.’ Pea- cock, like the other church-building ‘rogues’ and like his aunt, Miss Lucas, belonged to the party and, in Goodhart-Rendel’s words, ‘knew how to provide places of architectural entertainment for Sundays without either profanity or ’.

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By the time he came to design Holy Cross, Peacock’s style had calmed down considerably compared to his heyday in the 1850s and ’60s. Even in modified form, his version of the Gothic style was rather out of date in terms of the development of church building. A church like St Michael’s, Camden Town (next to Sainsbury’s) by G.F. Bodley, 1880-94, gives a bet- ter idea of the increasing refinement of Gothic, but Holy Cross is nonetheless a highly appropriate design. It must have stood out as it was meant to among the sooty terraces tucked behind the shabby gentility of Regent Square and it holds its own in the new context of the 1940s and ’50s St Pancras Borough and LCC housing blocks. Gavin Stamp, formerly a member of the parish, and Colin Amery, in their book Victorian Build- ings of London 1837-1887 describe it as ‘interesting, decent’. Canon Basil Clarke called it ‘quite small, simple and, in its way, satisfactory’.

The church is raised up on an ample crypt which provided facilities for its Mission and, presumably in order to give a reasonably dignified access to the church itself, the entry is from a raised terrace at the west end rather than directly up steps from the street. The west wall carries a bellcote, and the westernmost bay of the church has a lean-to roof, before the gable of the roof rises steeply with the west window. This rather unconventional ar- rangement gives visual interest for those passing by the corner of Cromer Street on the busier thoroughfare of Judd Street. The other windows are very simply designed as lancets, without any elaborate Gothic tracery. The most eloquent praise of Holy Cross comes, however, from the architectural writer Ian Nairn who was particularly sensitive to the social meaning of buildings, whether or not they were the works of famous architects. It oc- curs in his Penguin book Nairn’s London of 1966, and must be quoted in full:

‘The outside is cheap and shrugged off; there are a hundred like it in Lon- don’s suburbs. Inside it is as honest and selfless as King’s Cross station which is only a few yards away. Nothing unnecessary and nothing put on for form’s sake, as the big boys would have done. Narrow aisles, tall clere- story, high-reaching-out east end. The church itself is worshipping, something much deeper than Pearson’s tinselly wish to ‘bring people to their knees’. Five eastern lancets, backed up mightily now by a -beam with three German-looking figures on it, designed by Sir Charles Nichol- son. All the other modern fittings have a rightness which you might strain after for half a century and never get to.’

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In fact, it was Sir John (architect of St Cyprian, Clarence Gate, among many other churches), not John Pearson (de- signer of the font at Holy Cross and of St Augustine, Kilburn) who said that a good church should bring you to your knees. Nairn’s idea of the church ‘praying of itself’ was probably also borrowed from Comper’s pamphlet The Atmosphere of a Church. It is not inconsistent with the idea he disparages, for the furnishing of Holy Cross displays just the kind of harmonious accretion that Comper and his late Victorian generation felt to be necessary for the proper functioning of a church. This was considered particularly important for what were then called ‘slum missions’, where the beauty of the church and its worship were offered as an alternative at- traction to the Evangelical concentration on the word and the individual conscience.

Comper used the phrase ‘Unity by Inclusion’ to describe a reconciliation between the Gothic and Classic styles of architecture that had been at war with each other through the middle years of the century. The shell of Jo- seph Peacock’s church became, rather surprisingly, a perfect foundation for the creation of a church interior in the early twentieth century Anglo- Catholic style. The scale is sufficiently intimate, and the height is made more impressive thereby. The short chancel with its high steps makes the high altar both near and distant at the same time. The side chapels have a slightly mysterious air of separation. The mixture of red brick in with the London stock brick gives warmth of tone.

One of the main contributors was Sir Charles Nicholson (1867-1949) who designed the rood. He was good at making alterations and additions to ex- isting churches, and was responsible for the difficult task of making Portsmouth Cathedral out of a parish church between the wars. The rood beam, with figures of Our Lord crucified flanked by Our Lady and St John, was a feature of Catholic revival, an elegant device for framing the chancel without the visual interference of a full medieval screen, and it ef- fectively divides the body of the church.

Among the fittings which were installed at Holy Cross in the years follow- ing its completion were, appropriately enough, some from Peacock’s earlier church of St Jude’s, Grays Inn Road, of which Goodhart-Rendel commented, ‘that was fun, that was!’.

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Like some of Goodhart-Rendel’s fittings for another Victorian brick Goth- ic church, St Mary’s, Bourne Street, in the 1920s, many items at Holy Cross show the influence of continental baroque in the early twentieth cen- tury. Although this style was routinely condemned as meretricious and decadent by the Victorians, it marries surprisingly well with the Gothic re- vival, giving the piquancy that comes from mixing dissimilar flavours. This is seen at close quarters with Pearson’s fine, severe geometrical font and its more elaborate painted cover.

One of the most surprising later fittings at Holy Cross is the confessional which was designed by the architect Raymond Erith (1904-1973) for Palmerston Hall, Manningtree when it was converted into a Roman Catho- lic Church in 1966. When this building became a public library in 1980, the confessional was moved to Holy Cross. Erith was the most famous classical revival architect of the post-war period and particularly skilled in the design of subtle Georgian-style joinery.

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The Consecration

Michael Farrer

The day of the Consecration of the church of Holy Cross came on All Saints Day, November 1st 1888. We know some detail of the occasion from the report of the issue of November 9th. The Church Times being, in those days and for many decades to come, a partisan An- glo-Catholic journal, note was made by the reporter that the whole enterprise in a district like that could not have succeeded under the ‘private box and black gown system’ and he hinted that only a Catholic system could have prevailed here.

The day was one when ‘Cromer Street and the purlieus thereof, were wrapped in fog, dense enough to be exceedingly uncomfortable, but not so dark as to obscure the interest taken by the inhabitants in the consecration of their new church.’ Those were the days of the ‘London Particular’ oth- erwise known as ‘pea-souper fog’. Clean Air Acts have subsequently abolished that once familiar feature of London winter life. There was quite a considerable crowd of locals in the church and in the street outside to witness the occasion. The assistant clergy and assembled in the old Mission Church and went in with Cross and banners to the church to be met by the Vicar Fr Moore and the , a Suffragan to the Bishop of London, who was to carry out the Consecra- tion. It should be noted that, for rather remote reasons, the Suffragans to the Bishop of London carried titles of other places nowhere near London. Very soon after this the Suffragans had more relevant titles we know now, such as Willesden and .

The petition to consecrate the church was presented to the Bishop, and the choir processed up the nave singing Psalm 24, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is: the compass of the world and they that dwell therein’, containing also the verse, ‘Lift up you heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors: and the King of Glory shall come in.’ After conse- crating the church the Bishop celebrated the Eucharist. Candles were lit on the altar and the Bishop took the Eastward position throughout, both these facts being noted signs in those days of the Anglo-Catholic Movement in operation. The Bishop also preached the sermon.

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After the ceremony a large company gathered in the crypt for speeches and a glass or so of something or other, as toasts were given and received. The Bishop proposed toasts to ‘Church and Queen’ and to ‘Success to the new church and parish of Holy Cross.’ In his speech he made a great point of reminding people that the deprivation and poverty that was so often asso- ciated with the East End was also to be found in areas in the west and north of London like , Kensal Green, parts of Hammersmith and King’s Cross and that these parts were just as deserving of the support by richer people as the East End.

The Vicar replied to the toast and paid tribute to certain ladies who had worked in the district almost as long as he had through whom had come the anonymous gift of £1,000 which had made it possible to purchase the site for the church just at a time when, to his mind, the whole work ap- peared utterly hopeless. The Headmaster of Tonbridge School, the Reverend T.B. Rowe, also spoke and said that he felt somewhat ashamed in responding on behalf of the benefactors for he felt he was in the position of being over-thanked for the little he had done for the parish. He com- mented that it would have been very strange if the school had not taken some interest in the work as the foundation was supported by rents from property in the parish.

One other speaker, Admiral Robertson McDonald, on behalf of the visi- tors, expressed his gratification at being present at the opening of a church connected with the name of a most promising naval officer, Commodore Goodenough, who had lost his life on service in Santa Cruz. He also ex- pressed gratification that the church was free and open to all, believing, as he did, that nothing had more alienated the working classes from the church than the pew-rent system. So the notes of the great virtues of the Catholic Movement of the time were there: a hardworking, dedicated priest, dignified worship and the presentation of the Sacraments in a church open to all with no distinction between rich and poor. Christ was to be there for His poor.

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The Parish of Holy Cross in Victorian times. Above: Detail from Plan of the Borough of St Marylebone by George Oakley Lucas, 1852, showing the area before the construction of the rail- way termini. Below: Detail of map indicating areas of poverty, from Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, 1891-1903

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The Rev. and Hon. Algernon Stanley

Michael Farrer

The Reverend and Honourable Algernon Stanley was appointed Priest-in- Charge of the new District of Holy Cross, St Pancras on 25th October 1876, soon after the District had been formed by Order in Council on 12 August that year, prior to it becoming a parish at the time of the consecra- tion of the church in 1888. We are indebted to accounts by Charles E. Lee, ‘A Holy Cross Centenary’ and by Gordon Barnes, ‘A Short Account of the Building of the Church of the Holy Cross in Saint Pancras’, for notes about this, the pioneer of Holy Cross. Neither of these accounts was actu- ally published in any form. Some information on his later life also comes from the archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster.

Stanley was born on 16 September 1843 and was educated at Harrow, Rugby and Trinity College Cambridge. He was ordained in 1868, served a curacy in Kidderminster and between 1870 and 1873 had been serving as a curate at the Church of St Mary’s, Charing Cross Road, which served a very poor slum district of Soho. This was one of the pioneer churches of the Catholic Movement and was notable in its work amongst the desper- ately poor in that impoverished and crowded area, under its hard-working Vicar, Fr J.C. Chambers. Fr Stanley had the experience to take on the equally terrible huddle of poverty, dirt and destitution in the parish of Holy Cross. He was a son of Baron Stanley of Alderley in Cheshire and came of a very unusual family. His generation of Stanleys seemed to have taken to adopting as wild a divergence of religious stance as was possible for even the most eccentric Victorian. His eldest brother, who succeeded his father to the Barony, even became a Moslem. Another was to become fiercely atheist, being as different from Algernon as could possibly be. He was of undoubted ability, as his subsequent career was to prove.

It is thought by Gordon Barnes, writer of the unpublished ‘Short Account of the Building of the Church of the Holy Cross in Saint Pancras’, that he would originally have rented a room in Argyle Walk or thereabouts to start services for the Mission. The building of the first little Mission Chapel in Dutton Street (now Tankerton Street) came later. We have only a scanty record of his work there, but it does seem that he was able to do very little

33 to make much headway in a godless district. He certainly seems to have been known for his personal generosity to the poor. In that way he was very much in the tradition of those clergy of the Catholic Movement who, from their personal wealth, were inspired to give great sums to the glory of God and the work of His Church.

Perhaps a sense of frustration may have contributed to his eventual resig- nation after only three years in 1879, to leave the Church of England and to submit to the Roman Church. There is a rather nasty hint by Nancy Mit- ford in her book The Ladies of Alderley that he did this to annoy his brother Henry who refused to give him the family living at Alderley, of which he was patron. This does seem a little unkind. To submit to Rome was a very severe measure by an Anglican Priest at that time, even if he did have the private financial means that Fr Stanley probably had. There had always been a trickle of priests of a Catholic persuasion away from the Church of England to the Church of Rome since the time of Newman and Manning. The prevalent Protestant stance of so much of the establishment compelled some to despair of the true Catholic nature of and the trickle continued. Some who were married had to live as laymen. Oth- ers who were single were able to be reordained and work as Roman Priests.

At any rate, Algernon Stanley’s subsequent career had distinction. He was received into the Roman Church soon after his resignation in early 1879, by the ex-Anglican Cardinal Manning. The next year he was reordained as Priest after a year at the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics in Rome and served subsequently at St James’s Spanish Place from 1883 to 1893. He moved to Rome in 1893 where he was made a Pronotory and Domestic Prelate by Pope Leo XIII. In 1903 he was consecrated Bishop in the Dio- cese of Westminster for a few months during the final illness and death of Cardinal Vaughan. He returned to Rome, where he was a Canon of St Pe- ter’s and made many generous gifts to the English College there including bursaries for students and a fund to support the and Vice Rector. He died in 1928 and is buried in Rome.

A description in the Archdiocese archives gives us a picture of a man standing well in the tradition of his unusual family, ‘He was not without eccentricity, for example he would enter the Refectory while all was silent except for the , and go straight to the high table and hold loud and

34 prolonged speech. In church he would shuffle to his place noisily, throw hat, stick or anything else on to the floor and give several grunts before composing himself. At the opera he would sing along lustily if he hap- pened to know the work performed, and if he was delayed (by a previous penitent) when going to confession, he would open the door and remind the overlong penitent that others were waiting.’

It is impossible, of course, to speculate on what his career might have been had he stayed at Holy Cross and stayed in the Church of England. Every movement has casualties and we might well wonder what his reaction might have been to the tremendous advances that the Anglo-Catholic Movement was able to make by the time of his death.

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The Rev. Albert Moore

Michael Farrer

At the resignation of Fr Stanley a new priest for the nascent parish was soon found and the Reverend Albert Moore was appointed. He had been a Scholar of Magdalene College Cambridge where he obtained a BA in 1861. He was ordained as a deacon at Salisbury in 1864 and as a priest in 1865. From 1864 until 1873 he served as curate at Westbury in Wiltshire where an earlier predecessor, Alexander Maconochie, the notable first Vicar of St Alban’s Holborn had served in the 1850s. From there he went for another four years to King’s Lynn, Norfolk. He left there in 1877 to become Assistant Organising Secretary for the Metropolitan District for the Additional Curate’s Society, which still carries out its object of provid- ing funds for stipends for Curates in poorer parishes of a Catholic tradition. It would seem strange nowadays for such a body to provide a salary for an Assistant Secretary for just one District, but we might con- clude that either the Society in its early day was suddenly awash with money or that the position was unsalaried and that Fr Moore was endowed with a private income and able to work without payment.

As Moore recorded later, he preached his first sermon in the Mission Chapel in Argyle Walk on Good Friday 1879. It must have been a daunt- ing task to take on. It would seem that the original Mission Chapel was just a rented room, before a more secure site was found in Dutton Street (now Tankerton Street). At his first Whit Sunday, a few weeks later, there was only one communicant. We tend to think of our Victorian ancestors as being very much into churchgoing. This was true of ‘respectable’ people but not of the very poor who inhabited the parts immediately round the Mission. There was drunkenness and violence and other forms of depravi- ty just as there are in parts today, though no distinction was made between legal and illegal drugs. Certainly there is recorded that services at the Mis- sion were frequently subject to riotous interruption in the early days, and this was not because of ritualistic ceremonial. There is record of an occa- sion, one Sunday evening when Mrs Moore was on her way to the Mission carrying her little baby daughter, Una. Her path was blocked by a large and truculent drunkard. On being told, quietly but firmly, by Mrs Moore that she would not have her entry to the Mission prevented, the man asked

37 her if he could carry the child. Trustfully she gave him the baby to carry and they proceeded together into the building.

It seems that this incident opened up a new era of acceptance and even re- spect towards the church and its priest with his family. Whether many people came or not in those early days, Fr Moore in true Tractarian tradi- tion organised a lot of services every Sunday: Holy Communion at 8am, Litany at 8.45, Matins at 11 and Choral Holy Communion at 11.30. In the afternoon there was a Children’s Service at 4pm, Evensong at 7pm and a Prayer Reading at 8.15. There was not quite a daily Holy Communion dur- ing the week, only Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7.15 and on Saints Days, with Evensong and Sermon every Wednesday at 8pm. He would have slowly broken down the antipathy by continual visiting, day in and day out.

There was no welfare in those days, no Social Services Department. De- voted, self-sacrificing priests like Fr Moore did it all: trying to find money to provide food and clothing for the destitute, comforting the afflicted, at- tempting to quiet domestic disputes, being on hand for all personal crises, never having a day off, missing meals, losing sleep, working to exhaustion because Christ demanded it and a priest’s life should be lived as part of that Eternal Sacrifice that Christ made on the Cross. How apt that the Par- ish was called Holy Cross! A lot of Fr Moore’s fellow Anglo-Catholics who worked in this way were unmarried, so that no other person had to share this heavy burden. He, however, was married, and with two children.

Bit by bit he must have broken down the walls and brought more and more people to realise the other life, the other world of Christ’s love through His Church. Not only did he have to break down the hostility and antagonism but he also had to build for the future and see to the building of the even- tual church of Holy Cross we know today. His achievement is a tribute to the heroism of his life, to be echoed in the similar heroism of so many oth- er Priests all over the country at that time. The church was eventually built and Fr Moore could show to the people how much the worship of God meant to those who cared, those who had contributed, some in multitudi- nous small amounts, some few with flourishing largesse. This was really only the beginning and work had to go on and on and flourish further to justify the input of expense and faith that had been put into the great pro- ject.

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There seem to be no issues of a Parish Magazine before 1901 and we are unable to know details of what the life of the parish was like in this early period. The worst of the slums around Dutton Street had been pulled down and the improved blocks of flats we see there now had been built. The immediate district of Holy Cross must have seemed a respectable working- class area rather than the dirt-ridden slum it had previously been. There must have been an influx of new inhabitants to be visited and revisited, to encourage into the fold of Christ’s flock. As in any story of slum-clearance of the period there seem to be no details about what happened to the previ- ous occupants. It is well recorded that in the great St Pancras Housing Trust schemes in Somers Town in the 1920s and 1930s under Fr Basil Jel- licoe care was taken to house occupants in temporary in the district until their new blocks of flats were ready, but it is felt that ear- lier schemes were rather more casual in their approach, and it is likely the slum dwellers just scattered across London wherever they could find lodg- ing, never to return to King’s Cross. The new landlords would take care to house more respectable working families who would pay their rent regu- larly and look after their homes properly and soberly. It may have been that Fr Moore found this new tide of people easier to influence with Christ’s Church and His Sacraments, but it would still mean work, in sea- son and out of season.

The building of the new church meant that the more public aspects of the Catholic Faith could be demonstrated. Eucharistic vestments, the , , and in silken colours according to the Church Sea- son or came into use the day after the consecration. Ornaments and fittings were brought in to beautify the building and at a fairly early time, the Blessed Sacrament was reserved in an Aumbry installed in the sidewall. This is reputed to be one of the first churches in the country to have perpetual reservation of the Sacrament. These were still pioneer days for the Catholic Movement. It would seem that the use of incense, another notable mark of full Catholic worship, must have begun at a fairly early point.

The first Parish Magazine came out in January 1901, with Fr Moore’s first letter beginning with ‘At last we have a Parish Magazine of our own! It has been a long time coming.’ It was bound together with a monthly mag- azine called The Banner of Faith which was issued by the Church Extension Association and was made up of articles and stories of both a

39 practical and a spiritual nature. We notice in the magazine that Fr Moore was living at 24 Argyle Square and that his curate, Fr Dew lived at 24 Handel Mansions in Handel Street. Naturally the Moore household would have taken up the house in Argyle Square and there would not be room for a lone curate.

The were Holy Communion at 8am with Morning Prayer at 11am followed by Holy Eucharist (Sung, with Sermon) at 11.45, an ar- rangement very common in those days in Anglo-Catholic churches which made for a very long Sunday morning. There was at 4pm and Evening Prayer with Sermon at 7pm. There was a daily celebration of Ho- ly Communion every weekday morning followed by Morning Prayer, and Evening Prayer said every evening, that on Wednesday including a ser- mon.

Parish life had developed with Sunday Schools, Bible Classes, Catechism, Bands of Hope, a weekly Men’s Meeting, a Women’s Meeting, Young Women’s Sewing Class, Parish Library and various guilds and societies. District Visitors, ladies who volunteered to continually visit the parishion- ers in a street consigned to each of them, were able to take a lot of that chore off the shoulders of the Clergy who would then follow up on cases of need notified to them. Later the Parish Magazine was bound with an- other magazine called The Sign, which replaced The Banner of Faith, and increased in size from its fledgling first issue.

So the years went on until towards the end of 1907 when a terrible blow befell the Parish. The magazine of December 1907 notes, ‘In the early morning of Monday November 11th, Mr Moore celebrated the Holy Communion, and later saw his various church workers in the ordinary course of work. Immediately after the last one had left him he began an Letter to his parishioners for publication in this Magazine. This was never finished, for he was immediately seized with the breaking of a blood vessel in the head – the result of years of overwork and worry. He never recovered consciousness and died on the following Thursday night, just before 11 o’clock.’ The funeral took place the following Tuesday 19th November after the body had lain in state in the church. The Bishops of London and Islington conducted the service in church and then the body was taken to the cemetery at Finchley where his body was committed to the ground by Fr Eden of Old St Pancras Church. The magazine goes on to

40 speak of Fr Moore as a ‘hidden saint’ and speaks of his love of the chil- dren who used to wait for him as he came out of church and of his fearless teaching of the Faith. He is referred to as ‘belonging as he did to the older school of clergy, who were all in the best sense of the word typical English gentlemen…’

There are letters from his son, Harold Moore, (who later moved to Highgate and became a Churchwarden of Holy Cross) on behalf of the family and from the Bishop of London and Canon Scott Holland of St Paul’s, addressed to Fr Roffey, the Curate who was now Priest-in-Charge. It is in this letter that the Canon says that a year or two before, noticing that Fr Moore was much worn with fatigue and illness, he had the oppor- tunity to offer him a quiet country parish where he might have more leisure and rest for his latter years. Fr Moore had refused the offer because he did not want to leave the people on whom he had concentrated so much affection.

So passed the only Vicar of Holy Cross, so far, who died in office. He would have been in his sixties, not a great age, but an age spent in such conscientious work for Christ’s people and His Church that he disregarded his own health and well-being for His Master. He was very typical of the best of those priests of the Anglo-Catholic Movement of that period who believed that with Christ’s eternal Sacrifice presented at the altar we also present ‘our selves, our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice unto Thee.’

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The Rev. John Roffey

Michael Farrer

John Roffey took a degree in History at Oxford University. He was or- dained Deacon in 1885 and Priest in 1886 in the Diocese of Southwell. He served as Curate at Long Eaton and subsequently at Worksop and at East Markham in Nottinghamshire. He came to London in 1894 and served cu- racies at St Mark’s Notting Hill, St Mary’s Plaistow, St Andrew’s Hillingdon and St Jude’s Peckham before coming to Holy Cross in 1907 as Fr Moore’s curate. He had been there a month or two when Fr Moore’s sudden death occurred and he was left on his own as Priest-in-Charge. He had assistance for a few months from a Fr Voigt but remained in charge until the beginning of 1909 when Fr Baverstock was appointed. He was al- ready in his late forties and this was his seventh curacy without ever having been appointed as Vicar anywhere. This was not unusual at that time perhaps. He lacked ambition to take charge of his own parish, possi- bly having sufficient private financial means not to have to seek the highest income an incumbency would have given him.

After leaving in 1909 he went as Curate to St Luke’s Nutford Place until 1911. This seems to have been his last actual position. He appears to have been living in Lee in south-east London until his death in or about 1927 without having held any other position in the church. His letters in the Par- ish Magazine seem to complain often of a falling off in the devotion and frequent attendance at Mass among the people, but he shows as a con- cerned pastor who took care to teach the people the meaning of all the Church’s festivals as they came along.

Part of the reason for the long interregnum after Fr Moore’s death is ex- plained by a proposal put by Bishop Winnington-Ingram that the Parish should be united with that of St Pancras. This was put to a Parish Meeting on July 28th 1908 chaired by the . A resolution to the effect that this would be contrary to the interests of religion in the district was passed unanimously by the 60 people present and the ap- pointment of a new Vicar was requested.

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This seems strange in view of the fact that Holy Cross seems to have been well attended and thriving. However, it became apparent that Bishop Win- nington-Ingram was often striving to reduce the number of parishes in inner London, where the population was falling. Obviously the Parish’s concerns and needs won the day. That proposed amalgamation has now come about, but the conditions of the 1990s are very different from those of the 1900s. We are living now in a most different world for the Church of England.

Fr Baverstock was later noted as having to work extra hard to build up par- ish life, but it would be unfair to blame any falling away on Fr Roffey if he was faced with this uncertainty about the parish’s future, engendered by, if anybody, the Bishop and other diocesan officials. There may, for all we know, have been people of influence about who would have liked to see the emasculation of an advanced Anglo-Catholic church like Holy Cross, but Bishop Winnington-Ingram was always friendly towards the Catholic Movement and admired the witness to Christ of those hard-working Priests, even if they did insist on ‘naughty’ things like Incense and Reser- vation of the Blessed Sacrament.

In the same issue of the Parish Magazine which noted this meeting was a typical warning from Fr Roffey: ‘The congregations during June and July have not been particularly brilliant and the slackness of many people in this respect… is something of a scandal.’ He comments that those who stay away are often those who would complain most if the Parish were to lose its status. This is the case seen a hundred times over more recently. Do we ever learn?

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44

The Rev. F.E. Baverstock

Michael Farrer

After the sudden and lamented death of Fr Moore in 1907 there was a long interregnum at Holy Cross when Fr John Roffey acted as Priest-in-Charge. He was eventually succeeded by Fr F.E. Baverstock in 1909.

Francis Baverstock came of a devout Anglo-Catholic family who lived originally in the Parish of St Alban’s Holborn and who were life-long sup- porters of that . He had an older brother, Alban Henry, who also became a priest and was particularly known as Vicar of Hinton Martel in Dorset for many years, where he established a great and flourishing Catholic tradition, to the extent that many lay supporters of the Catholic Faith in the Church of England of independent means came to buy houses in the village to enjoy the Catholic privileges and teaching found there. He was also well known as an active writer in support of the Faith. Both boys were inspired by the priestly example of the great saint of St Alban’s, Fr Arthur Stanton, to follow in his footsteps into the priesthood.

Baverstock went to King’s College London where he took a Degree of A.K.C. (Associate of King’s College) with a First Class. He was ordained as Deacon in 1899 and Priest in 1900, serving his first Curacy at St Mi- chael’s Bingfield Street in Islington. His Vicar there was Fr A.H. Reeves who later became Vicar of in Norfolk. He left there in 1905 to serve as a Curate at All Saints, Notting Hill until he came to Holy Cross in 1909. It seems that the Clergy House was established at 62 Cartwright Gardens, whereas Fr Roffey and his assistant lived at 39 Street. It may well have been that the delay in his appointment was occa- sioned by this change of location.

One of the first two curates, Fr Barrett, is noted in the Parish Magazine of the period as ‘Precentor and Choirmaster’, so obviously the music of the church was held in great importance. The organist was a Mr W.H. Carpen- ter. There later came as a third curate, Alfred Hope Patten, who is the subject of an appendix here. There is a description in Fr Colin Stephen- son’s book Walsingham Way of life in the Clergy House, apparently from the memories of either Fr Bailey, the other early curate, or Fr Barrett, in-

45 cluding Fr Patten’s certain belief that the house was haunted. Needless to say there is no mention of this in the Parish Magazine! One thing is appar- ent: the Book of Common Prayer was strictly adhered to, despite the ‘advanced’ Catholic reputation of the Parish at a time when a lot of churches of a similar standing were making the Order of the Mass as well as the ceremonial far nearer the Roman pattern. This we know from one of Fr Baverstock’s notes in the Magazine instructing the people to remain kneeling after the Communion at High Mass until the Blessing because the Blessed Sacrament was still unconsumed at the Altar. This would have meant that they were observing the Prayer Book rubric that the remains of unconsumed and consecrated bread and wine should be consumed after the singing of the Gloria in Excelsis, which occurs in the Rite at the end of the Service, not early in the Service as it appeared in the and also in our more modern Rites. Many advanced Anglo-Catholics at that time were adopting the Roman practice of emptying and cleaning the chalice immediately after the Communion. This was known as ‘’ (Taking the Ablutions in the Right Place). So, at Holy Cross they were still not ‘Tarping’ in 1915!

One other thing to be noted in a Parish Magazine of that year, 1915, is the Day of Prayer arranged by Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London for the country in the terrible time of the First World War. This constituted a Ser- vice in St Paul’s Cathedral, to which London Parishes gathered, some of them, like Holy Cross, going, Priests and people, in procession through the streets to St Paul’s. It is noted in the Magazine that as the people of Holy Cross processed, headed by the and with their robed clergy, bystanders removed their hats and men in uniform saluted. We were still basically a Christian country in those days. Not many men wear hats nowadays, but would a present day procession with a cross be saluted by policemen?

It was in November 1915 that Fr Baverstock announced in the Magazine that his health showed signs of breakdown, owing to seven years of over- work, and he was taking medical advice in resigning his position and taking rest. Such is the burden taken on by a devoted Priest whose Catho- lic Faith leads him to sacrifice his own health and comfort in working for his Master, the Christ who sacrificed His own life for us on the Cross. Cer- tainly it was noted by the Bishop of London that he had been under a tremendous burden of hard work bringing the parish up to a good working

46 level after it had been a little in the doldrums during the long interregnum. His Curates remember how he insisted on all of them being out visiting all day or engaged in some other parish activity, and he never expected more of them than he would expect of himself. He led from the front in an era when the best of English clergy used to say that the way to build up a par- ish was visiting, visiting and more visiting.

It is unclear where he went immediately, but in 1918 he was appointed Vicar of St Clement’s Notting Dale, a poor district to the west of Ladbroke Grove and north of Notting Hill. He stayed there the rest of his life until his death in the 1950s teaching the Catholic Faith in the uncompromising fullness of his tradition to the end. It was while he was there that he would have suggested that his former Holy Cross Curate, Alfred Hope Patten should succeed his old colleague, Fr Reeves, at Walsingham.

He is described in Walsingham Way as a difficult, moody man, given to long silences that could be disconcerting for the sensitive in his company. Nonetheless his reputation also remains as a dogged, authoritative uphold- er of the faith and practice of the Church. Two anecdotes from his days at St Clement’s underline these qualities. In his latter days there, a family in the parish had a boy who was ‘educationally sub-normal’. It was thought by the social services that he should be placed in a Home. His family were very upset by the idea and wanted to keep him at home. Fr Baverstock, with probably tremendous painstaking patience, drilled the boy to recite, by heart, the Creed, the Our Father and the . He led the boy to the officials concerned, made him recite his piece, and marched him out, saying, ‘There you are! The boy can say his Creed, his Our Father and his Hail Mary. Of course he’s perfectly normal!’ Such was his authority and dominant manner that the officials conceded defeat and the boy remained at home. Again, some years after his death and after his successor Fr Ar- thur had left, Fr Mason, previously Curate at St Mary Magdalene’s Munster Square, was appointed Vicar. This was in the 1960s when great changes were happening in the Church discipline and practice. The long held insistence on fasting before Communion was relaxed and Mass could be celebrated in the evening. On the first occasion Fr Mason celebrated an evening Mass on a great Festival on a weekday he was approached after- wards by two tremulous old ladies saying, ‘Oh dear, Father! How can we ever meet Fr Baverstock in Heaven now?’

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When he came to die, he was buried in the churchyard at Walsingham Par- ish Church because of his unique place in having inspired Fr Patten to go there to restore the Shrine of . His grave can be seen there, near that of his distinguished former curate. The hearse that took his body there along icy roads from Notting Dale was accompanied by two men from St Clement’s as it drove through the most awful bliz- zards of snow. One man said to the other, ‘He always was an awkward old bugger, wasn’t he?’ ‘Awkward old bugger’ he might have been, but is not that the mark of the staunch, indomitable old warrior for Christ and the Catholic Faith that he was?

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The Rev. L.D. Rutherford

Michael Farrer

When Fr Baverstock announced his departure from Holy Cross, the Pa- trons of the living, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral moved very quickly indeed. This was in marked contrast to the long interregnum suffered by the Parish after Fr Moore’s death. Fr Baverstock announced his leaving in the October 1915 issue of the Parish Magazine. The Decem- ber issue announced the appointment of the Reverend Leslie Rutherford and his induction on 1st January 1916. Parish Magazines are unfortunately not extant from the end of 1916 until 1922, apart from a copy of one issue of July 1920, kindly supplied by a correspondent, Rosemary Headley, so we know little of Fr Rutherford during his time at Holy Cross.

He was a Scholar of Downing College, Cambridge where he obtained a BA in Natural Science in 1906. He only obtained a 3rd Class Degree, which must have given pain and grief to his tutors as a Scholar should usually be expected to do much better than that. He went on to Theological College at Lincoln and after a year there was ordained Deacon in 1907 and Priest in 1908. He served as Curate at St Benet and All Saints, Lupton Street in the northern part of Kentish Town, a more suburban area than Holy Cross, although in the same Borough of St Pancras and originally in the same parish. Like Holy Cross, the church there was built in 1887 with a very Anglo-Catholic tradition, and the original building was by Joseph Peacock. However the original building had to be pulled down and rebuilt in the 1920s because of subsidence on the site, so nothing of the original Peacock church remains. He went in 1914 to be Curate at the Annuncia- tion, Marble Arch, soon after that glorious building of tall, soaring elegance by Walter Tapper had been completed. He was then, as we have seen, appointed to be Vicar of Holy Cross and took up his post on the first day of 1916.

From the earlier Parish Magazines it seems that he was living at 25 Argyle Square and his Curates at No. 11, so it seems that Fr Baverstock’s Clergy House at 62 Cartwright Gardens had been given up. By 1920 his address is given as 26 Guilford Street, which is some way from the church. It may well be that he was married with a family and that the original accommo-

49 dation was not suitable for his family’s needs. Perhaps Fr Hope Patten’s idea of a ghost at Cartwright Gardens was true after all and the baleful presence had driven out even its priestly tenants!

The Parish Magazine of 1920 that we have shows that the main Sunday morning Service is described as High Mass rather than Holy Eucharist as it was called in Fr Moore’s and Fr Baverstock’s time. This was at the time of similar changes in usage in a number of Anglo-Catholic parishes. We find, before about the time of the First World War, that, although the term ‘Mass’ was used in conversation and sometimes in the body of the text of a Parish Magazine it was always described publicly as ‘Eucharist’ or ‘Cel- ebration’. The same is true, at the same period, of the custom of referring to a Priest as ‘Father’ Rutherford or ‘Father’ Baverstock. Anglo-Catholics had been used to addressing their Priests as ‘Father’ for some little while, but only did the custom have official written support in the years immedi- ately prior to 1920. The title ‘Mister’ had always been previously used.

With the end of the First World War a very exciting time came for the An- glo-Catholic Movement with the first of a series of Anglo-Catholic Congresses in 1920. The organisers of this first Congress did not, at first, realise what a tremendous success it was to be. First one hall was hired, then another and another as each became too small for the expected num- bers. Finally they filled the Albert Hall, and one of the greatest eras in the life of the growing movement began. The old battles and suspicion and hate were over, their influence was making compelling changes on the whole of the Anglican Communion. Most of this was to affect Holy Cross in subsequent years, because Fr Rutherford was to leave in 1922, but that first exciting Congress of 1920 was in his time.

He was offered the noted Anglo-Catholic living of St Andrew’s Worthing, which was to be a very different job to an inner city Parish like Holy Cross in very different air to Cromer Street. Whatever Fr Rutherford’s regrets at leaving Holy Cross might have been, these would have been overcome by this very tempting offer.

It could have been that this move to the more congenial atmosphere of Worthing was motivated by health, as in the case of his predecessor, be- cause, only a little over two years later on the Feast of the 1925, we hear of his sudden death, at what must have the age of barely 40. There

50 is no note as to the cause of his early death, but sudden heart attack is not unknown at that relatively young age, only just the threshold of middle- age, and this might well have been what was to cause such grief at both Holy Cross and Worthing. This could well have been another instance of a noble and dedicated Priest of a Catholic tradition over-working himself to ill health or even to death.

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52

The Rev. F.R. Langford-James

Michael Farrer

Fr Francis Langford-James came of one of those families which have been pillars of the Anglican Church, several of whose members served the Church. He had two uncles who were Priests who both preached at Holy Cross on occasions and a brother whose name is also seen in lists of preachers and who had distinction as a Scholar and as a musician respon- sible for nurturing the early days in public notice of Dorothy Kerin, being the mystic and visionary who founded the Nursing Home at Burrswood near Tunbridge Wells.

Fr Francis himself was at Trinity College, Oxford where he gained a BA in Modern History in 1900. He went on to Wells Theological College and was Ordained as Deacon in 1901 and Priest in 1902. He served his first cu- racy at Tewkesbury Abbey from 1901-1908, going from there to be Vicar of Twyning in Gloucestershire for five years until 1913. It is not known where he went and why he left his first Parish as Vicar after only a com- paratively short time. Later on, from 1915 he is noted as being with the Red Cross in France, where he was probably acting as a Hospital Chaplain on the Western Front during the terrible slaughter going on in the First World War. He returned to England at the end of the War in 1918 and went to be a Curate at St Saviour’s Pimlico until coming to Holy Cross as Vicar in 1922.

Fortunately, we have Parish Magazines for some of Fr Langford-James’s time at Holy Cross, whereas all those for Fr Rutherford’s time seem to be missing. We have those dating from June 1923 to June 1927 with the inset Magazine The Sign being replaced from January 1924 by Credo, which was taken over at the beginning of 1925 by The Fiery Cross, the magazine of the Anglo-Catholic Congress.

It is interesting here to look at the life of the Parish of Holy Cross at this time. This period is often regarded as the high water mark of the Anglo- Catholic Movement. The earlier battles and struggles for acceptance were over and the great Anglo-Catholic Congresses which filled the Albert Hall with thousands of people moved by the words of men like Frank Weston,

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Bishop of Zanzibar, and Father Vernon Johnson, and as much as £40,000 pouring into the coffers in one night, were upon us. We see at Holy Cross a Vicar with two curates. Fr Langford-James was living at 23 Brunswick Square with the Senior Curate. The other curate, a Fr Bartlett, lived origi- nally at St Philip’s Vicarage in Holford Square. He seems to have left for a year or two and then returned to Holy Cross, living now at 9 Lloyd Street. The Parish Magazine shows Masses on Sundays at 7 and 8am on great Festivals. There is a High Mass at 11am with Sermon, and Solemn Even- song, Sermon and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at 7pm (similar to what we now know as Benediction, but without the actual blessing with the ). On weekdays there is at least one Mass a day and Even- song every day, with set times for each of the three Priests to hear Confessions.

There is an impressive list of Societies and other activities going on. There is a Sunday School for children over 12 in the Church on Sunday after- noons, another two for children aged 7-12 and for children under 7 at the Schools in Manchester Street. There are Communicants’ Guilds for Elder Lads, Younger Lads, Elder Girls and Younger Girls, all to keep the newly confirmed up to the mark with their duties and devotion. There is a Branch of the Companionship of Simon of Cyrene, which supported the work of the Universities Mission to Central Africa, a Branch of the Mothers’ Un- ion and a Confraternity of Prayer. As well as this, the Tonbridge School Lads’ Club is in full swing and operating very closely with the Parish. There is also a Boy Scouts’ Troop with a Wolf Cub Pack. For the girls there was a Girl Guide Group with a Brownies’ Pack. There was also a Girls’ Club. The Parish was divided into three Districts, each of them looked after by women, who took on regular visiting in a street or a block of flats, so that contact from the Church was perpetual and ubiquitous.

All this meant that being Vicar of Holy Cross, as in so many other inner city parishes at the time, was a job with a tremendous amount going on all the time, but with professional and voluntary help. There seemed to be a supply of Churchwardens, Scoutmasters, Guide Leaders, Sunday School teachers, District Visitors, Organists, Choirmen and Choirboys, Servers, and other devoted souls who would do this or that. Nobody in the small ar- ea the Parish covered could have been unaware of the Church’s presence and influence, and a tremendous number of lives would have been touched by it. This must have been so particularly of the children and young people

54 catered for by the Tonbridge Club, the Scouts, Cubs, Guides and Brown- ies, the Sunday Schools and the Choir, or serving at the Altar.

As there were three Priests, nearly every Sunday would have warranted a full High Mass with Celebrant, Deacon and Subdeacon. The music was usually a setting by Mozart or Schubert, mixed with other Masses by Walmsley, Stainer, Stanford and others. Full and rich then was the life of Holy Cross, both inside the Church with its beautiful worship and outside with its Clubs and Societies and constant activity. Although much has changed, we must be thankful that Holy Cross is still there and meeting today’s problems as best it can, and with the great venture of the Crypt making a very apt use of resources in a way that Christ’s work can contin- ue to touch the lives of men and women.

To read the insets to the monthly Parish Magazine gives us an ever-richer picture of the atmosphere of those times. The intention to teach the tradi- tional Catholic Faith is clear and full. The teaching about the Sacraments was particularly apparent. Just before the Fiery Cross took over there had been a series on the Seven Sacraments. As soon as the Fiery Cross started there was another series on the Seven Sacraments. There were also articles about the notable Anglo-Catholic figures of the period, like Fr Waggett of the Cowley Fathers, Bishop Carey of Blomfontein and others. There were articles on notable churches of the Anglo-Catholic movement and their history. All through – particularly in the Fiery Cross which was edited by one of the great characters of the Movement in that period, Fr Rosenthal of St Agatha’s Sparbrook, in Birmingham – is the excitement of the Anglo- Catholic Congresses of 1920 and 1933. The Anglo-Catholic Movement was up and running, its people were proud of the battles and the heroes of the past, the future was for the taking. They were definitely a force to be reckoned with. Whatever other, more Protestant minded, people thought about vestments, incense, Confession, prayers to Our Lady and the Saints, devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, there was no way anybody could stop Anglo-Catholics doing what they believed they should do. There were still one or two very nasty bits of official opposition to come, one affecting Fr Rosenthal himself, but we knew where we were going and people were flocking to the banner.

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There had been a school of thought and tradition among Anglican clergy that once you were vicar of a parish you stayed there till infirmity or death overtook you. However others, perhaps more sensibly, have thought that it does not do to get stale by staying too long in one place. Consequently Fr Langford-James, after nine years at Holy Cross, went, in 1931, back to St Saviour’s Pimlico, where he had previously been Curate, as their Vicar. He remained there until 1944, and from there he went to be Rector of Lit- tleton in Middlesex for three years until 1947. He is subsequently noted in Crockford’s as having Permission to Officiate in the , so it can be assumed that he had retired from full-time exercise of his Priesthood and helped in a parish there until his eventual death.

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The Rev. R.H. Le Mesurier

Michael Farrer

Fr Le Mesurier arrived in the Parish in 1933. He had an unusual beginning compared with other Vicars of Holy Cross in that he was Canadian in origin and that he served as a Sergeant in the Army in the First World War, which experience came to colour his opinions strongly in the future when he took up a positive and active pacifist stance. After the War he studied for a BA degree at McGill University in Montreal, Canada which he obtained in 1922. He went on to Keble College, Oxford where he achieved another BA with a 2nd Class in Theology in 1924. He was or- dained Deacon in 1924 and Priest in 1925 in the Diocese of Chester. He served as Curate at Bunbury in Cheshire from 1924 till 1926. He then came to London and served Curacies at St Philip’s Tottenham from 1926- 1929 and at Holy Trinity, Stroud Green from 1929 until becoming Vicar of Holy Cross in 1933.

It is unfortunate that Parish Magazines for Fr Le Mesurier’s period as Vic- ar are no longer available. It does seem though that the moving caravan which was the Vicarage or Clergy House of Holy Cross had moved again and had settled at No. 47 Argyle Square, where it remains. It is rather pleasantly ironic to note that 28 years after the proposed merging of the Parish with that of St Pancras, the neighbouring Church of St Jude was closed in 1935 and its Parish merged with Holy Cross. There were too many churches in a small area whose population had shrunk since Victori- an times and so it was deemed that one of them should go. It must have been that Holy Cross was now the more active and viable of the two, so much credit must be given to the hard work of successive Vicars, Fr Baverstock, Fr Rutherford and Fr Langford-James, to create this situation. St Jude’s church was eventually demolished and a lot of its fixtures and fittings found their way into Holy Cross.

Fr Le Mesurier was one particular Vicar of Holy Cross who became known extensively outside the Parish. For one thing he was an author. Be- fore coming to Holy Cross he had published The Inner Circle in 1929, Prayer Book Counsel and Penance in 1931 and Mysterious Motherhood in 1932. After his arrival he wrote The Hidden Life in 1935, The Priest and

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His Server in 1938, and Hope of Glory a little later, together with a book of poems and a book of short stories. There are extant typescripts of an- other book, The Church and the Just War – Now and also a play. There is no record of these having been published. The pacifist sympathies of the former may have made it rather too hot to handle during wartime.

This leads us to his main claim to fame as one of the founders and early leading lights of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship (APF), which was founded in 1937, largely at the inspiration of the famous priest Dick Shep- pard. This had arisen out of the horror with which so many Anglican reacted to the thought of another horrific and bloody war so soon after the carnage of 1914-1918 and their conviction that, as Christians, they could have no part in the conduct of war in any shape or form. For them the thought of any supposed follower of Christ engaging in the killing of other people in the course of war was horrific and their consciences were strong. Fr Le Mesurier was the original Honorary Secretary and his Vicarage at 47 Argyle Square became the first official address of the APF. He was also prominent in the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), an association of more gen- eral membership than the Anglican body.

We are indebted to The Reverend Clive Barrett of the APF for notes about Fr Le Mesurier and his part in the APF’s early years. He is noted here as always being careful to point out the distinction between ‘High Church’, being the delight in all the frills of Catholicism without the Faith and dis- cipline, and his position as a Catholic. He is quoted as describing ‘Our spiritual mother is the grand old Church of England. We believe that she is a branch of the one true Church founded on earth by Jesus Christ, and can thus claim to be called, in the fullest and truest sense, Catholic.’ This goes well with other memories people have of him as describing himself as be- ing a Prayer Book Catholic as opposed to those of later times who have tended to drop the use of the Prayer Book in favour of the Roman Liturgy in either its traditional or modern form. Naturally both the Vicarage and the Church of Holy Cross became used for gatherings of the APF, and the Association still uses the church twice a year to this day.

When War eventually came in 1939 it must have been very difficult for Le Mesurier and his colleagues to hold the public stance of Pacifism, particu- larly as the Blitz came in 1940 onwards, and men and women and children were being killed and maimed by bombs rained down by an evil and ag-

58 gressive power. Accusations could have been poured on the fact that as a priest he would not have been liable for Conscription, but it cannot be said that he was living in a dream world. He probably would have been over the age anyway, but as well as that he had seen enough of the real and ac- tual horror on the Western Front in the 1914-1918 war. One parochial effect of his convictions may have been the fact that, whereas in Fr Lang- ford-James’s time the parish paraded a Boy Scout Group, these seem to have been superseded by Fr Sturt’s time by the Church Lads’ Brigade. It is known that some pacifists took a dim view of the Boy Scouts because of their somewhat militarist tone.

It seems that illness forced Fr Le Mesurier to give up the secretaryship of APF in 1939, though he remained active in the Association and in the PPU all through the War. He retired from Holy Cross in 1945 and went to live in Mevagissey in Cornwall where he eventually died some years later. He was revered by many as one of a notable strand of Anglo-Catholic Priests who took up a pacifist position, at great cost to themselves in public life in those difficult and troubled times, but for whom the Sacrifice on the Cross which they pleaded on the Altar at Mass could not be abused by the filthi- ness of war.

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The Rev. Napier Pitt Sturt

A personal account by Ted Brack

I must have first met Fr Sturt when I joined the Church Lads’ Brigade (CLB) in 1947 or ’48. To be a member of the CLB entailed weekly attend- ance at Mass and a monthly Church Parade. The CLB met twice weekly, Tuesday (parade night) and Thursday (games night). Fr Sturt was diligent in his attendance, on Tuesdays to conduct prayers, and frequently on Thursdays as an apparently sometimes bemused observer of very boister- ous games rather than a participant. Other organisations were the Girl Guides and Brownies – and I have no doubt that he gave these the same at- tention. This must have meant a dedicated commitment on his part – which on the part of the children was completely unappreciated. Father was just expected to be there, and he was.

The Church Parades were for me and for many our first experience of Church. The Mass was something happening way ‘up there’ – in the sanc- tuary in a haze of incense, mysterious, often inaudible but somehow compelling. The sermons were usually equally mysterious. I can’t remem- ber any ‘children’s chat’ or any concessions at all to the presence of children. I don’t think we expected to understand any of it, but we knew it was something to do with God – and that just being there must make us ‘better’.

Fr Sturt was an accepted figure of the neighbourhood, children grew up to middle age having seen and known him all their lives – the familiar cas- socked and cloaked figure walking from ‘presbytery’ (not vicarage) to church between tall blocks of depressing Victorian ‘East End Dwellings’ at least three times a day to ring the , celebrate Mass, say ‘the of- fices’. Many people who may never have entered the church doors knew ‘Farver’ and that they were prayed for day to day – week by week.

Once, the then , , spent a day in the parish. Whilst walking through the parish with one of the churchwardens the Bishop stopped a passer-by. The following dialogue ensued:

Bishop: ‘Do you know your local church?’

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Passer-by: ‘Yes!’ Bishop: ‘Do you go?’ Passer-by: ‘No!’ Bishop: ‘Do you know where it is?’ Passer-by: ‘Yeah! – Up there.’ (pointing to Whidborne Street in the direction of Holy Cross.) Bishop: ‘Do you know the Vicar?’ Passer-by: ‘Yeah!’ Bishop: ‘Does he visit you?’ Passer-by: ‘No.’ Bishop: ‘Would you like him to?’ Passer-by: ‘No.’ Bishop: ‘Would you go to him if you were in trouble?’ Passer-by: ‘Of course! Where else would I go?’

Fr Sturt also introduced the Bishop to various parishioners – leaving him at one house for an hour with a grandmother, mother and daughter – three generations of divorced women, man-haters who had on/off, love/hate re- lationships with Holy Cross and its Vicar. At the end of the day the Bishop, addressing the PCC, after celebrating Solemn Benediction said, ‘I think your Vicar is a very brave man… possibly a saint, but, as we know, saints are almost impossible to live with!’

He lived in Edwardian splendour protected from parishioners and general public by Miss Holland, his devoted housekeeper who would guard the door of the presbytery. ‘I will see if Father is in – I’m afraid he is unavail- able. I’ll tell him you called.’ I managed entry to the Vicarage drawing room, complete with grand piano, on very few occasions – always, I think, after Sung Mass on Day, for a glass of sherry to celebrate the end of the arduous round of and Easter services, always a fraught and tense time, hoping that the meticulously rehearsed and complicated cere- monials had been carried out successfully – which meant faultlessly.

Fr Sturt was an enigma who, although somewhat distant, inspired great loyalty. The Guide Captain and mainstay of a small voluntary choir lived between Dalston and Stoke Newington but made the difficult journey to Holy Cross at least twice during the week and twice every Sunday. Anoth- er choir member came from Baker Street. The leader of CLB travelled from St Alban’s for weekday choir practice and twice each Sunday. For

62 early morning (6.30) masses on Saint’s Days people were expected to be there, if necessary making their own arrangements to stay overnight, which they did.

This has become an assessment of Fr Sturt, albeit a rather sketchy one, ra- ther than of Holy Cross church, but I think this is almost inevitable. Both the Vicar and the church were something of an enigma, almost the last vestiges of a former age, standing apparently changeless and mysterious in a changing age, a building and a person to remind us of the presence of God in the midst of His people. Fr Sturt, it eventually transpired, was a man of considerable personal wealth, but lived quite frugally.

The Sunday Services were 8am Low Mass, 9.30am Low Mass, 11am Sung Mass/High Mass and 6pm Evensong, Sermon and Benediction. It was ex- pected that Communion would be made fasting. The 11am Mass was non- communicating except for the Celebrant. This meant that most worship- pers attended twice on Sunday mornings, early for their Communion and at 11am for the Parish Mass – ‘not just personal devotion’ we were told, ‘but a corporate act of public witness.’ The Celebrant at 11am would also have celebrated at 8am and would have been fasting since midnight, over 12 hours at the end of the service. Tea and toast would be ready for him in the Crypt. This eventually expanded into a parish breakfast of toast, ham and boiled eggs, this at lunch-time (12.30pm). For some – not for the Par- ish Priest – this was a prerequisite to a visit to a local pub, usually ‘The Boot’ or ‘The Wellington’.

Some final anecdotes about Fr Sturt. One concerning a young Server, about 12 years of age, who did a paper-round, and one Sunday fainted dur- ing the 9.30 Mass. His mother went to the Vicar to tell him to let her son know that it would be all right for him to have a cup of tea and something to eat between his paper-round and serving at Mass. This Fr Sturt did, alt- hough he would never have indulged in this luxury himself.

On another occasion one of the church families was moving house. Fr Sturt offered the services of Miss Holland to provide lunch. The family opted for sausage and mash – ‘as it would be easier’. Only afterwards did one of the family realise that it was Friday – a meatless day – and, rather embarrassed, apologised to Fr Sturt for eating sausages on a fast day. ‘That’s quite all right, my dear’, was the response, ‘You are excused under

63 a traveller’s dispensation’ – another luxury he would not have allowed himself.

The first Sunday of every year he would stand in the pulpit to announce the dates of Major Festivals and Holy Days of Obligation, including Holy Cross Day, 14th September – ‘So that the faithful may arrange their holi- days accordingly.’ And we did! He was rigid with himself in his own religious observance and obligations and expected the same of others – es- pecially the curates – who lived in attic rooms in the vicarage – and were expected to eat communally – well, just the two of them.

Dinner was served, by Miss Holland, every evening promptly at 7pm. On one occasion the Curate arrived at 7.20, to be confronted by Fr Sturt sitting in his place – two bowls of cold soup on the table – greeting him with the words, ‘I waited dinner for you, Father.’ Not easy to live with, but two successive curates lasted about 13 years – Fr Ridley seven years from 1949 and Fr Wallace from 1956 to 1961. They must have found it very dif- ficult to live under such close scrutiny, especially Fr Wallace, a large brash New Zealander.

One of the curates, after leaving, regularly referred to Fr Sturt as ‘Fr Sad- ness’. Fr Sturt was tall, aloof and regal – reminiscent of Queen Mary in widow’s weeds – or of Cardinal Newman.

Mr Westwood, the church organist, referring to Fr Sturt’s rather precise form of speech, once said, ‘I just can’t understand how someone who in- variably says “Sech” and “Semthing” always says “MUCH”.’

Other curates were Fr Paul Lewis, who only remained for about a year, Fr John Ball, who succeeded Fr Sturt as Vicar, and Fr Christopher Bedford, who eventually became Vicar of St Matthew’s Bethnal Green and more recently a Roman Catholic layman. The only time Fr Sturt was seen out of a cassock or full clerical dress was at the annual CLB camp on the Isle of Wight. He took them with him but was occasionally seen in the sea in very ancient swimming shorts.

He also carried on a tradition, which apparently he had started at Notting Hill during the War, of Bank Holiday walks on Easter Monday and Whit Monday. He would still wear full black, but as we approached Wendover

64 on the Metropolitan Line (the invariable venue), Father would remove his clerical collar and stock to reveal an ancient open-necked shirt.

A priest of the old school who did not form personal friendships within the parish, but who was respected, he will be remembered with affection and gratitude by all who knew him. He and Holy Cross seemed inseparable. He carried on a worthy tradition and brought many local residents into the worshipping life of the church – without in any way attempting to popular- ise or water down the faith and practice, so that, even now, 30 or 40 years later, it is impossible to enter the church without expecting to see him there, or at least to be aware of his presence.

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The Rev. John Ball

Michael Farrer

Born and brought up in Lancashire, John Ball suffered an attack of polio as a child, which left him with physical disabilities and contributed to his early death. In 1959 he went to Manchester University to read History and during the time that he was there he offered himself for to the priesthood of the Church of England. After training at St Chad’s College, Durham, he went to serve a curacy at Cleckheaton, Yorkshire. In 1967 he returned to Durham for post-graduate work, and remained there until mov- ing to London in 1969. He became first curate then subsequently Vicar of Holy Cross, St Pancras. The latter part of his time there was marred by ill- health. A number of his poems date from this period. In 1977 he returned to Yorkshire and spent a year on the staff of Huddersfield Parish Church, before dying suddenly of a heart of attack while on holiday in Germany in the summer of 1978.

John was a person of rare sensitivity and insight, coupled with a ready wit and humour. Over the years he was trusted and loved, both as a priest and as a friend, in the many and varied circles where he moved. This collection has been brought together, particularly for those who knew him, trusting that something of his personality still speaks through the poems.

Travelling from Durham on the early train we would arrive without warning, and in no time, you half into your cassock, there would be coffee. If there was no reply, then either you were tired of passing traffic; or were saying mass in church, which was reached from the square with the plane trees, through a parish of tenements and seedy hotels. Your other parish was us. We came to you because like your favourite poet Stevie Smith you sat still; and had a private voice which only carried as far as it needed. News of your death came as no surprise. I sensed that one day I would turn up and you would not be able to rise, tiny priest,

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on the one, strong, slender hand that did for two.

Ted Brack has written of Fr Ball as follows: ‘Fr Ball was as unlike Fr Sturt as it is possible to imagine, both in physical stature and personality. He was not more than five feet tall, with a humped back and what appeared to be one arm but I believe he actually had a tiny perfectly formed hand growing directly from his left shoulder. He was no less Catholic than Fr Sturt but less often to be seen in a cassock, more frequently in a sports jacket or, when dressed up, a velvet one.

‘The force of his personality soon made his physical disabilities hardly no- ticeable. Those who remember him will recall his wide-eyed face with a high domed forehead and ready smile. When fully vested his missing arm was hardly noticeable. His head was only just above the top of the altar so it was a relatively simple matter for him to have a silver chain attached to the and slip the chain over his head and round his neck and so administer the wafer with one hand. His very large, strong right hand could easily administer the Chalice. He could also hold a , both the top and bottom of the chains in one hand, and cense as surely as anyone else. It was easy for others to forget his handicap. I remember on one oc- casion he was holding a cigarette and sandwich in his hand and was offered a glass of wine, and just put the cigarette in his mouth and took the glass. When the person was out of earshot Fr Ball remarked quite cheerful- ly, ‘Perhaps I should take a shoe and sock off’, but managed to rotate the 3 items. He was a worthy successor to Fr Sturt but slightly easier to identify with, especially for younger people.

‘Fr Ball suffered a nervous breakdown whilst at Holy Cross and the Bish- op of Edmonton, Bill Westwood, drafted in a curate of St Alban’s Holborn, Leonard Boyd, who moved into the vicarage and acted as Priest- in-Charge of Holy Cross. Some while after his full recovery Fr Ball moved to become a parish priest in Huddersfield, where he was very happy. Very sadly, after a very short time he suffered a heart attack and died whilst on holiday.’

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The Rev. P. Wheatley, Bishop of Edmonton by himself

When I was appointed to Holy Cross in 1978, it was after the resignation of Fr John Ball and during a period of time in which the parish had been looked after by the assistant curate of St Alban’s, Holborn, Fr Leonard Boyd. While studying at Cambridge, I had been involved in the College Mission, Pembroke House, Walworth, and had seen at first hand the way in which the traditional college settlement could be made to work effec- tively. So I resolved to open the vicarage to people who would live in the house with me communally, sharing costs but without rent, and who in re- turn would contribute to the life of the Parish. Putting the word round amongst friends and acquaintances led to an ordinand, Tim Edgar, and his wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, living in the housekeeper’s flat on the top floor, Robin Walker, a musician, John Gash, another ordinand, and others later joining me in the house. One of the strengths of the church was that the congregation was made up both of local people and of others attracted to the worship and ethos of Holy Cross. When I arrived, it seemed to me that we needed to build up the local element through visiting and being in- volved much more in the local community. At the same time we began a Children’s Mass at 11.30, using the skills of people living in the house for more informal teaching and worship. The Tonbridge Club, run by Tom and Sheila Hibbert, welcomed me warmly. Sheila quickly involved me in other work with young people and with the King’s Cross Community As- sociation. The Women’s Centre in Tonbridge Street was also very welcoming, as was Argyle School where I later became a governor. Of the local businesses and institutions, the link with the City and Guilds Institute was the most productive, with my attending their Christian group and peo- ple working there worshipping during the week at Holy Cross. Maintaining regular times in the confessional led to a ministry to passers- by as well as penitents.

These were the elements and thrust of ministry in my short time at Holy Cross. The key inspiration was the college settlement and the sense of community in the house at the service of the parish. There were some wonderfully faithful people there, and considerable characters too, many

70 of whom are still alive, and so I won’t mention names. The Church itself moves one to pray, and it was a terrible wrench to leave.

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The Rev. T. Richardson

Interview by Rob van Mesdag

Surely in the eyes of God each priest’s ministry is as important as that of those before or after him because each incumbent tries to serve the Lord in the way he thinks best. But somehow some incumbencies make more waves than others. Fr Richardson’s term of office was particularly agitat- ed.

After obtaining his degree in theology at Oxford in the 1960s Richardson did not proceed to ordination. Instead he took up teaching at Tulse Hill School, where he was Head of General Studies. It didn’t last. A search for wider horizons brought him in contact with the world of journalism, music in his case. As editor of a leading classical music magazine he enjoyed the advantages of ‘being entertained at sumptuous promotions in delightful cities all over Europe.’ But that didn’t last either. Now his call to duty did come, in the shape of his Oxford friend, Canon Charles Smith, vicar of St Mary Magdalene, who asked him, ‘Trevor… when are you going to get ordained?’

Upon completion of his training at Westcott House, Cambridge in the late 1970s, Richardson, now 40, was appointed curate at St James’s Church, West Hampstead, where he stayed for four years. Then Bill Westwood, Bishop of Edmonton, offered him the choice of three parishes, Holy Cross being one of them. Richardson picked it, explaining, ‘To my mind, Holy Cross represented Anglo-Catholicism at its best in an area of great chal- lenge.’

How right he came to be! One of his first problems was the division he no- ticed between what seemed to be two congregations: one composed of younger people attending the early service and another of older parishion- ers coming to the second, later Eucharist. This disturbed him. ‘I noticed some unpleasantness,’ he said, ‘and felt we should be one united family.’ Accordingly, he merged the two separate celebrations into a single service and also changed the position of some of the church’s furniture – ‘rational- ising it a bit’. Now he was able to fulfil peacefully and with conviction the task he considered the most important: that of celebrating the daily Eucha-

72 rist and leading his congregation in prayer. In this work, the celebration of Holy Cross’s centenary in 1988 in the presence of Graham Leonard, Bish- op of London, was a highlight.

‘An area of challenge?’ Richardson was soon to discover how risky condi- tions in the environs of his church could be, for in 1982 members of the English Collective of Prostitutes, part of the King’s Cross Women’s Cen- tre, invaded and occupied the church in protest against the dangers of their profession. Richardson wasn’t surprised. All around him prostitution was rife: in dark alleys, passages or in the corridors or rooms of blocks of flats, and traffic was almost at a standstill because of kerb-crawling. The pres- ence of pimps, drug dealers and other dubious characters further endangered the area. The police were constantly on the alert. Residents were in uproar.

What to do? Reflecting on the episode, Richardson said: ‘Being a priest, therefore seen as an example of , I had to steer a middle course between leniency and understanding of the women – much as I felt their motives were subversive – and adopting a firm stand against lawlessness which is what the law-abiding residents in the area expected of me.’

Meanwhile, the media from all over the world descended upon Fr Trevor and his church. He remembers: ‘One day, reviving myself in The Boot, across the way, I suddenly found myself being interrogated by a Daily Mail reporter. I was constantly being molested and one evening received an anonymous telephone call threatening me that the church would be set alight if the women were not ejected.’

Solving the highjack was difficult, but in the end Bishop Westwood, acting as a negotiator, promised to help steer the women’s demands in the right direction on condition that they leave the building. After twelve days they did, ‘leaving the place looking like a tip’, Richardson remembered sourly. Six months later the police began clearing the streets of prostitutes and their concomitant retinue. A kind of moral cleansing was taking place.

By now Richardson had formulated his own philosophy about King’s Cross. It was this: ‘Because of its mainline railway stations and the lack of social stability, the place is vulnerable to whatever social disorder de- scends upon it. In this way, prostitution was soon replaced by

73 homelessness. Brothels became bed and breakfast places.’ Ministering in such an area called for an even greater than usual involvement with the needs of the local people. Richardson talked of ‘community ministry’ when explaining his various roles. He was a member, vice-chairman, then chairman of the King’s Cross and Brunswick Community Association, held similar positions in the ‘Alone in London Service’, belonged to the London Diocesan Board of Social Responsibility and became increasingly aware of the plight of the younger and older homeless and the injustices that such groups, and refugees, had to endure. He said, ‘At one time I was associated with 24 of such organisations.’ He was also Area Dean of South Camden.

What was upsetting Richardson most was the lack of people’s will to live, usually brought about by illness, loneliness and a resultant loss of dignity. He began asking himself: ‘While I can understand a reluctance on the part of such people to come inside my church, surely there must be other ways in which love, rest and comfort can be provided.’ His answer came from two directions – one in the shape of the Church of England’s report, ‘Faith in the City’ which appeared in the middle of the 1980s, challenging churches to care in new ways for the vulnerable, and the other through dis- cussions with his parishioner Ian Byatt, a senior civil servant, brimming with enthusiasm. ‘Why not open the crypt?’ both thought. Their brains clicked. They set to work.

Richardson invited Julian Hopwood, a worker with the Association for the Pastoral Care of the Mentally Ill, another of Richardson’s involvements, to investigate the idea. ‘In fact, I poached him from there’, Richardson re- members with a laugh. Hopwood soon reported favourably. Meanwhile Richardson and Byatt went looking for money in the City. They found some. Needed now, at the end of 1989, would be a big meeting at which representatives of all church and social groups in the area would be asked for their support in opening the crypt to the homeless as ‘an action by the community for the community.’ It worked! On 12th March 1991, the Holy Cross Centre opened its doors. Looking back, Richardson remembered, ‘Julian and I had exactly the same vision, including our views for a proper trust with competent trustees and a considerable input on the part of volun- teers.’

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By now, Father Trevor could not have been happier, realising that his new- ly-opened centre for the homeless was showing the outside world what a church in a deprived area such as King’s Cross could accomplish. But his ministry was soon to make more waves, this time so violently as to bring his ministry at Holy Cross to an end. The issue now – in the early 1990s – was the reopening within the Church of England of the debate on the ordi- nation of women. Richardson remembered it as ‘the way my life collapsed around me.’

But he is the first to admit that when in the mid 1970s the ‘women’s ques- tion’ was raised – he was still a journalist then – he was not against women becoming priests in principle. He was listening to his inner feelings of equality for men and women and social justice. ‘It was a question of prin- ciple’, he said. But as an Anglo-Catholic priest in the early 1990s he had another vision. Explaining himself, ‘Some have always labelled me as a traditionalist, but in fact I also have radical blood in me. But this radical- ism is rooted in 200 years of Catholic tradition and the issue now raised serious questions about the priesthood, the nature of the church and the na- ture of authority. These were matters of principle too.’

From November 1992 onwards, the date of the General Synod’s vote in favour of women, Richardson realised he would have to decide one way or the other. He described his thoughts: ‘For many, the various provisions that were made by the Church of England – flying bishops, being one – constituted sufficient safeguards to remain within it. But I wasn’t in the business of safeguards. I had come to regard Anglo-Catholicism as a means by which the rift created by the Reformation could be healed, by which the Church of England could be brought back into communion with the church from which it had broken.’ By 1994 he had made up his mind.

How to tell his congregation? Fr Trevor remembered: ‘I was not going to do this on my own, go away just like that, abandon my flock which I had led over the past 13 years. No, I was going to continue leading them.’ So a series of meetings began in which Fr Trevor and members of his congrega- tion discussed their views on the issue at hand. Obviously, the word ‘betrayal’ arose in these discussions: Anglo-Catholics feeling betrayed by the Church of England’s vote. Equally those in the Church of England ap- plying this word to members changing to Rome.

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The outcome in the words of Fr Trevor: ‘A significant number of my pa- rishioners decided to join me in my move to the Roman Catholic church: both churchwardens, the treasurer, the secretary and most of the PCC.’ Had all been influenced, not to say persuaded, by Fr Trevor? He himself doesn’t think so, considering that all had minds of their own, all were dis- turbed about what was happening and all felt that compromises were unsatisfactory. ‘After all’, he said, ‘the tradition of Holy Cross was a Ro- man tradition, using Roman Catholic services, praying for the Pope and for unity with him.’

At this point Richardson suggested to Cardinal , head of Brit- ain’s Catholics, to turn the move by some of his congregation from the Anglican church to the Roman one into an experiment in ecumenism. His idea was that once he, Richardson, had been received in the Roman Catho- lic church and had been ordained, he would take on the role of a guest priest in Holy Cross, there to guide a Roman Catholic congregation. As such he would remain involved with the homeless centre and with the people of the area and would open the church to Catholics in the area.

Both Cardinal Hume and Victor Guazzelli, his bishop for East London, liked the idea. So did David Hope, the Anglican Bishop of London, but Brian Masters, Bishop of Edmonton, was reluctant. How could this ar- rangement work in an Anglican building where a newly to be appointed Anglican priest – Fr Brendan Clover as it turned out – would be minister- ing to Anglicans? About seven churches in the London area undertook similar endeavours.

But in early 1995, many months before Fr Trevor was ordained, the exper- iment was set in motion. Roman Catholic priests from outside were called in to conduct services in Holy Cross. These soon attracted larger congrega- tions than did those for the remaining Anglicans. Meanwhile, Fr Trevor progressed from being a Catholic layman to becoming a deacon and by the end of that year to a Roman Catholic priest. All that time, he continued to live in the vicarage. ‘A unique situation’, he admitted.

Now the experiment received a further blow because the question arose as to whether Richardson, now a Roman Catholic priest, would be permitted to celebrate Mass in the very church in which he used to celebrate as an Anglo-Catholic. Bishop Masters refused to grant this liberty. Why? Rich-

76 ardson tried answering: ‘I am sure the sight of me as the former vicar cele- brating Roman Catholic Mass was something some people could not stomach. So there we were: a Roman Catholic priest from outside had to be brought in to say Mass which I had been prevented from celebrating by an Anglican bishop.

In the spring of 1996, Fr Trevor was granted permission to celebrate Mass once. It was on a Saturday evening. His first and last in Holy Cross. After that he departed for a new life in Norfolk. The experiment continued for another six to nine months, the Roman Catholic congregation arranging for priests to come in. But eventually even this was terminated. The Roman Catholic church in the person of Bishop Guazzelli declared at the time, ‘Christian charity between the two churches has broken down to such an extent that a Christian community cannot flourish in such circumstances.’ In this, Richardson is a deeply disappointed man. Admittedly, he doesn’t know of any other experiment that has succeeded and with regret in his voice said, ‘Most important to me was that the Gospel should be pro- claimed and lived in King’s Cross and that the love of Jesus Christ should be brought to those most in need. I felt that this could be done more effec- tively by responding in a new ecumenical way. This was my dream, shared by people like Cardinal Hume and Bishop Hope. Alas, others thinking dif- ferently destroyed it. Clearly, shades of the Reformation lingered.’

After leaving King’s Cross, Fr Richardson was welcomed in the diocese of East Anglia where he was appointed parish priest in the market town of Swaffham. He is also chaplain of the University of East Anglia and be- came chairman of the Diocesan Commission for Social Concern… ‘still keeping my hand in, as it were.’

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The Rev. T. Richardson

A personal reflection by David Sturgeon

I have known the Reverend Trevor Richardson for many years. I think I first met him in the early 1970s through a mutual friend when Trevor’s time was occupied by music more than religion. We kept in touch on and off over the years, but when he became vicar of Holy Cross we soon found that we had a mutual concern. I am a psychiatrist working at University College Hospital and in a London teaching hospital with all the accompa- nying social problems and deprivation, and Trevor was trying to provide a service for people living in King’s Cross. The area has a high proportion of people with mental health problems living in it, since many people with these problems tend to drift into inner city areas as they are becoming un- well. The area contains many people with severe mental health problems and these are often related to problems with alcohol.

Trevor became increasingly aware that very little was available for these people in terms of companionship, support and places in which to meet people and essentially have normal human contact. He very much wanted to find a place where people with these problems could come together and receive some kind of support and help, but understandably had many res- ervations of what he might be taking on. We met several times to discuss what might and might not be provided at such a centre and the benefits and potential pitfalls of setting up such a service. It always seemed to me that Trevor’s enthusiasm – and, indeed, Julian Hopwood’s enthusiasm once he had been appointed as Director of the Holy Cross Centre – would be abso- lutely instrumental in making the place a success.

He asked me to visit several times and offer suggestions about how people could be encouraged to attend the centre and how the centre could keep boundaries around what it could and could not provide. It is very pleasing to see that the centre is now a well organised resource and can provide var- ious kinds of expertise and help, all of which is greatly appreciated in improving the quality of life of the people who come to the centre. Alt- hough Trevor is no longer at Holy Cross, the centre remains and continues to flourish and is a very welcome community resource in an area which is known to have a very high proportion of people in need.

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The Rev. T. Richardson

A personal reflection by Archie Speles

Apart from the daily round of pastoral work, Trevor did some outstanding work – three things, I think. He was also a scrupulous liturgist who be- lieved that all parish life and work should be centred on the Liturgy. More than that, he believed that it should be beautifully done. In Trevor’s time there was a lot of worship at Holy Cross, even when there were only less than a handful present (remember the 8 o’clock on Sunday morning!). In this he was upholding an Anglican tradition started by Newman which as- serts the Catholic component of Anglicanism. Of course, the Oxford Movement priests could find Catholicism in the Book of Common Prayer and were able to see it liturgically.

Trevor’s Catholic scrupulousness enabled Holy Cross to become, or at least continue as, an Anglo-Catholic Shrine. The church would be full for Holy Cross Day and the priests who attended from all over London were impressed by the quality of the worship, and of course contributed to it.

Secondly, Trevor’s most incisive and (I hope) lasting contribution was the creation of the Holy Cross Centre. It must be stressed that Holy Cross Centre could not have existed without him. This won him few friends among the regular worshippers who felt ‘their’ church had been taken over. Even now, I believe, there is resentment from the old stagers. Do you remember that when he invited us to pray for the parish he asked that we should pray for an ‘increase in numbers and holiness’? I believe that Holy Cross Church is a response to that prayer and it was he who set the whole process going, with surprising skill and speed.

His third ‘achievement’ was his leaving. On accepting that the Church of England had placed itself outside the ‘One Holy Centre and Apostolic Church’ () he had no option but to go. It was very difficult for him to come to terms with his position. Trevor held back out of loyalty to the C of E and in gratitude for it. Nevertheless he did decide to go, and so it became a Parish matter. The PCC resolved together to move, and were later accepted, on the same day as Trevor, at St Aloysius. Trevor saw

79 this as an ecumenical opportunity, and tried to create a ‘united church in Holy Cross.’

This is how we ended up with Holy Cross Church being the venue for both Anglican and Roman Catholic Masses. Other churches copied the idea (St Matthew’s Bethnal Green and St Stephen’s South Kensington, for two) and for a while the experiment stumbled on, alas now finished.

My own view of the episode is that it should reflect very well on Trevor. He tried to leave his parish larger and spiritually richer and he left the model for others to follow. That all three parish churches have reverted back to ‘pure’ (!) Anglicanism is hardly his fault.

Fr Jenner was Priest-in-Charge during the interregnum prior to Fr Trevor’s appointment. This was before the final phase when he was so handicapped and may well have given Holy Cross parish an inkling of what Fr J. had been like in his heyday.

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The Holy Cross Project by Mark Hyder with a personal note from the Rev. Kenneth Leech

The Holy Cross Centre Trust was started in 1988 by members of Holy Cross Church, partly in response to the ‘Faith in the City’ initiative which urged churches, particularly in inner city areas, to engage with people in their communities who were living in poverty. The King’s Cross area with its three mainline railway termini has very high levels of poverty, drug abuse and prostitution. Added to this is the loneliness and isolation of those living in Bed and Breakfast accommodation, many of them in Holy Cross Parish. The idea behind the Centre was to create a space for people to come and socialise in an informal atmosphere. Also the Centre would provide food and clothing.

In August 1990 the Trust appointed a Director, Julian Hopwood, to set the wheels in motion and on Christmas Eve 1990 the Centre opened its doors for the first time as a ‘one off’ event to see what type of response it could expect. Altogether around forty people arrived for lunch, which was pre- pared by Julian and a handful of volunteers from the local community. Later the following year, on Tuesday March 12th 1991, the first official session opened, and thus the Centre was born. The idea behind the way the Centre runs is that there should be less emphasis on professional staff and more volunteers. To begin with, in the first year, there were three paid staff members and about forty volunteers covering three weekday sessions. As the number of sessions has grown, more staff have been employed to cover them, but the emphasis on volunteers remains central to the running of the Centre.

Volunteers basically run the sessions by cooking the meal, making sure that there are enough cups of tea and coffee etc., and most of all, befriend- ing – i.e. talking to the people who visit the Centre, perhaps playing games with them, or simply sharing a meal with them. Many of our people, par- ticularly those who come to the Mental Health Club on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, appreciate the informal, non-institutional atmos- phere at Holy Cross, as nobody attempts to ‘work with them’, rather alongside them, and there are very few rules except the Centre’s main guideline, which reads: ‘Holy Cross Centre tries to be a place where peo-

82 ple feel welcomed regardless of their colour, age, beliefs, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability. Please be respectful to others here so that we can all feel safe to be ourselves.’

This notice is displayed prominently in the Crypt to remind people of our ethos and to reassure Centre users from minority groups that behaviour which departs from these guidelines would not be tolerated, and so Holy Cross is a safe place for people to come and relax in.

The link between the Holy Cross Centre and the church above it is a fairly strong one. Trustees, volunteers and Centre users worship together regular- ly at Sunday Mass and at other times in the week. Many of the people who use the Centre come to the main feast day Celebrations at the Church. The Crypt itself was extensively refurbished in 1997/98 and is now a very spa- cious and well equipped Centre. The Holy Cross Centre now operates seven sessions: Monday afternoon open access; Tuesday evening open ac- cess; Wednesday evening Mental Health Club; Thursday afternoon/evening Italian Club; Friday afternoon Refugee Club; Friday evening Mental Health Club and Sunday afternoon Mental Health Club. On Saturdays and on Sunday mornings and evenings the Crypt is managed by the church and various groups use it at these times.

At present, in 1998, there are five members of staff: three are full-time, two are part-time. Also there are two sessional workers who cover for members of staff at certain sessions. Volunteers number around forty-five at the time of writing and there are quarterly recruitments to which we generally get a very good response. I have worked at the Centre as a regu- lar volunteer for over six years and enjoy the work tremendously. It seems to me that our project encapsulates the idea of our encounter with Jesus day by day in the marginalised, the poor and the outcast. The formation of the Holy Cross Crypt was a major turning point in the relationship of the church to the increasingly troubled neighbourhood. In recent years the area surrounding the church has attracted many homeless and disturbed people as well as prostitutes, drug users and dealers. The work of the Crypt builds upon and develops the work done by other Anglican churches in London and elsewhere. For the parish I believe that its emergence has been a major factor in reversing the inwardness and ghetto mentality which has afflicted Anglo-Catholicism for so long.

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The Rev. B. Clover by himself

‘This church is poorer than our love will let it look’, it says by the church door, and it is a constant fascination that a church in one of the poorest parishes in England could have brought so much richness to so many and to the life of the Church of England. A preacher, Fr Alan Parkinson, re- marked at the beginning of a Holy Cross Day sermon in 1997, ‘I always knew about this church. If you knew anything at all about the Catholic movement in the Church of England you knew about this church. And one day I came and found it exactly as I had been told. Statues of the patron saints and St Pancras, Patron Saint of the Deanery. I knew I had arrived.’ The sense of ‘having arrived’ is part of what confronts one when entering this extraordinary church, for here thought, emotion, theology and liturgy collide in a meaning too rich for words. In Holy Cross, Cromer Street there can be no doubting the reality of God.

It was Mother Teresa of Calcutta who remarked that her encounter with Christ in the Eucharist was the same as her encounter with Christ in the poor, and the reality of that statement is part of the authenticity of Holy Cross, Cromer Street. The adoration and love of Christ in the Blessed Sac- rament is the source from which all else flows, the adoration and love of Christ in the poor and the marginalised and the dispossessed is the logical extension of the Eucharistic theology. A Roman Catholic who works as a volunteer in the crypt describes that work as Eucharistic when she says that ‘when I add the cream to the soup the meal becomes the sacra- ment’. And that sacrament is bigger than any ecclesiastical prescriptions! For the sacrament is the love of the Lord.

I came to be Priest-in-Charge of Holy Cross, Cromer Street almost by de- fault. In the wake of the ordination of women and the heart-searching that provoked for many of us, Fr Trevor Richardson was received into full communion in the Catholic Church in 1995 along with some of the con- gregation. Bishop Brian Masters asked me to provide continuing pastoral and liturgical care of those who had chosen to remain in the Church of England. The offering of Mass, almost daily, continued. For a while we hosted a Roman Catholic weekly celebration of the Sunday Vigil Mass at

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5pm on Saturday evenings and eventually a ‘Chaplain’ was appointed for that experiment in the person of Fr Barry Carpenter, the Cardinal’s Chap- lain to the Homeless. Sadly that arrangement has ceased, but that may be some indication of the fact that the Mass is too important to become a stumbling block. How can we gather around Christ in the Eucharist when the Eucharist is an expression of our division? How can we encounter Christ in the poor and not share his life in the Eucharist?

The grass roots care for others is a foundation stone upon which new things are being built. We should note that from its beginnings the Holy Cross Centre Trust has drawn on volunteers from across the Christian spectrum and from several local churches. This practical working together has produced enormous benefits, not least in the recent ecumenical gather- ings and occasions of prayer together, and in the setting up of a parish over-60s lunch club which attracts more and more locals. No one pretends that there are not difficulties and problems, but in the context of the love of the poor and the mutual care of each other they are of diminished signifi- cance. And if the food we share in the crypt is in some sense the sacrament then we are into inter-communion anyway!

With the advent of urban regeneration expressed locally in King’s Cross Estates Action and the King’s Cross Single Regeneration Board, Holy Cross has been substantially reordered. The crypt has been upgraded so that the quality of the environment now expresses the quality of the service we provide.

The Bishop of London came on 23 July 1997 to bless the Phase 1 works. Phase 2, courtesy of a £100,000 grant from the King’s Cross Single Re- generation Board, is now complete. The church has been rewired with new lighting and the paved area outside the church has been improved with a wheelchair ramp. The church is now floodlit as it serves as the gateway to the Cromer Street estate. All around us, King’s Cross becomes a better place to live. But what is this ‘regeneration’? I have an instinct that it has become a matter of making buildings look better. From that we have bene- fited enormously. But I also have an instinct that the Church needs to reclaim that work – after all it was we who coined it.

Regeneration is to do with people. What is it?

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 inviting people in  meeting them at a point of need  building them up  sending them out

This is precisely what we aim to achieve both ‘upstairs and downstairs’ at Holy Cross, and this philosophy illustrates perfectly why Christ in the Sac- rament is the same as Christ in those in need. For we invite people in order that Christ may satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart and the need we all have to be loved and accepted. When we have responded to the invitation to ‘come and see’, things start to happen to us as Jesus does indeed meet us at the point of our need and chooses to build us up with love. And when we have allowed Jesus to do that for and with us, we are then able to go out in order to bring others in. It is really that simple. And like grace itself it is free, the free and generous love of a God who is wor- thy of all worship and praise. Proper ‘regeneration’, like the sacrament which bears the name, begins and ends before God.

At this point in time in Holy Cross Church we cannot but be aware that there are ripples of love and support moving backwards and forwards from the church into the parish as we seek to identify the needs of those around us, and find ways to satisfy those needs. This is authentic Christianity, the outward expression of a spiritual reality. The Catholic movement in the Church of England should no longer be judged on the correctness of cere- monial or the niceties of worship, but on this authentic engagement with human need. For only Christ can satisfy that need, and our encounter with Christ in the Eucharist is the same as our encounter with Christ in the poor. We cannot any longer rest content with the holy huddle mentality, nor can we think that just because we have beautiful services people will come to them (have they ever?). We must find ways imaginatively to relate to the communities of which we are part, identify the needs and do all we can to see that they are met. And that process is nothing less than the establish- ment of the kingdom of God in our streets.

[Fr Brendan Clover left St Pancras in January 1999 to become a Canon of Bristol Cathedral.]

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The Present and the Future

Michael Farrer

Every history has to have an end, whether it is placed in some chosen point in the past or in the immediate present. The latter position often throws up the challenge to discuss the future, which is not always very easy to do. We can make predictions for the future which can go totally wrong, we can express wishes and hopes which remain unfulfilled. At least the past has the comfort of always being there. It happened and nothing can alter it however much our perceptions of it may vary.

Since the 1950s all sorts of sweeping changes have affected both the Church and the country as a whole. To look at the effects on the district of King’s Cross and the parish of Holy Cross we have seen vast physical and social differences. Whole areas of the old district have been pulled down and new blocks of flats have been built, even though a large amount of the immediate environs of the south side of Euston Road, namely Argyle Square with the northern end of Judd Street and other streets around them, are outwardly very much as they were in the early nineteenth century. Tremendous changes in population have happened in that there is, amongst other things, a great drop in numbers. The population of inner London has declined considerably since the last century and quite a high proportion of people there now are not the natural constituency upon which the Church of England could call. Immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan are Mos- lems, those from India are Hindus, Greeks have their own Greek Orthodox church, the Irish are largely Roman Catholics, West Indians tend to favour Pentecostalist churches and the native English population are affected by the considerable secularisation of our age.

This means that the congregations expected at Holy Cross are nothing like those of earlier days. This can be reflected in one comparison. Fr Robert Dolling, one of the greatest, most saintly Anglo-Catholic priests of the end of the 19th century, wrote a rather depressed letter from his parish at St Saviour’s, Poplar, to a friend and bemoaned the fact that he had organised a service for men at eight o’clock on a Sunday evening and only 40 had turned up. A tremendous number of modern day priests would be pleased if half that number turned up for Mass on Sunday morning! The seculari-

90 sation of British society has now reached such a point that at Christmas 1998 there was no church service on any television channel on Christmas Eve night or the whole of Christmas Day, apart from a brief programme of carols. There has been strong protest by church leaders, so do we now see a nadir from which matters will rise and improve, or is there worse to come? Victorian clergy used to complain that large numbers of people of the very poorest type had no knowledge at all of the basics of the Christian faith. Nowadays it is realised that huge numbers of people of all classes of society have no basic education in these matters and are completely devoid of any knowledge or understanding of it all.

Both the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England have attempt- ed to reverse the decline by instigating radical changes in the performance of church services. In the Roman church the use of Latin was dropped and replaced by very much simpler services in a modern form of English which has the unfortunate result in a use of rather second-rate literary forms and language. The Church of England has followed suit, though with a slightly better, but not much better, use of English and with a con- tinued use of elegant Elizabethan English being maintained in a large number of places. Both Communions have also carried out a number of radical ceremonial changes, the most obvious being the change to having a small altar away from the east wall where the priest now celebrates Mass facing the people rather than with his back to them. Arguments still flow about these radical changes. Those of the more extreme supporters of this movement have imagined that this would attract more people, particularly the young who might be enraptured by a ‘sing-along’ type of music, ac- companied by guitars. It is interesting to note that, since the introduction of this style in the 1960s and ’70s, congregations in both communions have continued to decline at an even faster rate than before, though this is far less marked in the Roman Church than it is in the Church of England, to the extent that their total numbers of active members in the country at large look like overtaking those of the Established Church.

Both of Holy Cross’s original neighbours, St Jude’s, Gray’s Inn Road and St Peter’s, Regent Square have been demolished: St Jude’s in the 1930s, as it was considered to be one church too many in a small area, and St Peter’s after being bombed in the Second World War. This is all part of the pattern which has happened across London and all across the country. It is some- times said that the Victorians built too many churches and the recent years

91 of retrenchment have swept many of them away, as well as forcing the closure of hundreds of country churches of medieval origin or their being gathered up into parishes consisting of five or six or more villages under one priest. The considerable drop in the numbers of men seeking ordina- tion also contributes to a marked decline in the effective forces of the church. Whereas Holy Cross had, in the earliest part of the century, a vicar and three curates, it was recently served by one priest, who was also the vicar of St Pancras where, being a major London church, there had previ- ously been a more considerable staff than at Holy Cross.

Possibly the greatest recent shock was the departure of Fr Trevor Richard- son, the last autonomous vicar of Holy Cross, when he resigned his Orders in the Church of England to be reordained in the Roman Catholic Church, under whose authority he now serves a parish at Downham Market in Nor- folk. His action was, of course, all part of the greatest and most shattering crash to happen in the Church of England’s history, namely the decision of the General Synod to allow the Ordination women as priests.

It would not be the place here to go into any great polemic about the rights or wrongs of this decision, except to note that a tremendous number of people, both within as well as outside the church, have not really a com- plete realisation of the depth and seriousness of the position of those of more conservative Catholic or Evangelical beliefs. It not just, as so many who ought to know better surmise, that they just do not like major change and will eventually get used to the idea of women priests, or that they are all misogynists who are anti-women by nature. It is interesting to note that in the lead-up to the Synod decision in 1992 there were two contending bodies in the controversy. One was the Movement for the Ordination of Women, known as MOW, and another, Women Against the Ordination of Women, known as WAOW. The former had a membership consisting of both men and women, but was completely swamped in size by the latter organisation whose membership consisted of women only! The fact is that those of a Catholic stance who oppose the ordination of ‘priestesses’ be- lieve that the Church of England cannot any longer claim to be part of the original Catholic Church as the Synod cannot have the authority to take this step, and that such women cannot inherit any validity as priests since their supposed ordination is quite outside any authority or intention of the whole Church. This stands, as well as the belief that Our Lord never did ordain women, neither did His Apostles, and therefore that the Church can

92 never reverse His arrangements. The present pope has not the authority to carry this out, so there can surely be no authority in a local synod. It is ra- ther like a district council declaring itself a republic!

This great split naturally affects Holy Cross very strongly as its Anglo- Catholic traditions place it firmly in the camp of those who object to wom- en priests. We have been fortunate in three successive Bishops of London, Dr Graham Leonard, Dr David Hope and Dr Richard Chartres, our present bishop, who would none of them ordain women. As well as that, until his recent sudden and sad death, Bishop Brian Masters, the late Area Bishop of Edmonton and a great friend of Holy Cross, was of a very definite Catholic tradition and another who would never ordain a woman. There is now a strange anomaly in the Church of England. The Catholic objection has been met by the invention of the idea of two ‘Integrities’ where those who object to this break with Catholic tradition are to be served, in spiritu- al and sacramental needs, by Provincial Episcopal Visitors, known colloquially as ‘Flying Bishops’, who include, as the providers of such ministry for London and Southwark, the Bishop of .

The whole of this upheaval has meant a lot of chaos and doubt about what should really happen. Some have left the Church of England for good, most for the Church of Rome, as did Fr Richardson and some of the con- gregation of Holy Cross, others who could not in conscience submit to the Papal claims of complete authority have tried to set up small bodies of ‘Continuing Anglicans’ under the authority of various bishops in America who had been forced to set up such bodies when the Episcopal Church of the United States took a similar step in 1976. The smallness and fragmen- tation of these bodies has resulted largely from the fact that no bishop in England, either active or retired, has had the courage to leave the Church of England to lead them. The body ‘’ was set up in 1992, after the decisive vote in the Synod, to gather together those who objected and has proved flourishing and successful. It was obvious that no drastic division could happen overnight. ‘Forward in Faith’ has recently made a declaration about seeking a separate ‘Third Province’, but they may have to come down to worshipping in private houses and rented premises as the Continuers have had to do. We just do not know! As Holy Cross is such a parish, what will happen? We just do not know!

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The immediate effect of this disaster on Holy Cross was the resignation of Fr Richardson and his departure, with a small group of Holy Cross people, for the Church of Rome, the only priest of Holy Cross since its first priest, Fr Stanley, to take this step. This led to an unusual experiment. It was de- cided to share the church with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster and a Roman Catholic congregation came in to use the church for their services at certain times, leaving the rest of the time for the existing Anglican congregation to make their usual arrangements. Sim- ilar arrangements were made in some other parishes in the dioceses, one of these being St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, another church designed by the same architect, Peacock, another case where an Anglican priest had re- signed and joined the Roman church.

This experiment came to an end after only a short time, largely on the rec- ommendation of the Roman Catholics. Although it had been felt that some of their flock would welcome the idea because their nearest church of St Aloysius in Somers Town was too distant (the Euston Road as usual being thought of as an almost unbridgeable river dividing the area), it was even- tually thought that the separate communities would be far happier retaining their own premises. Rumours had abounded about the Romans having taken over Holy Cross which had to be firmly denied by Fr Bren- dan Clover when he took over as Vicar of St Pancras and priest-in-charge of Holy Cross. The similar experiments in the other London parishes also ended. A lot of Anglicans expressed the opinion that those who had left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church should make a def- inite break and not imagine that they could hang on in their familiar buildings, engendering an unhealthy love of ‘bricks and mortar’ over and above the true sacrifices of conscience.

The situation in recent years has put a tremendous strain on a very fine and able priest. Fr Clover had to combine work in the fairly moderate Anglican tradition of St Pancras with the more extreme Anglo-Catholic tradition of Holy Cross, maintaining a full programme of daily and Sunday services at both churches, at certain times single-handed. His great intellectual abili- ties could well have been swamped and lost to the Church by such an imposition. In January 1999, Holy Cross was faced with the news of his imminent departure on being appointed a Canon of Bristol Cathedral, where his great gifts of academic potential and musical ability can be more fully recognised. This is not the first time that a priest of Holy Cross has

94 received such promotion and recognition in the Church of England, as Fr Wheatley subsequently became and more re- cently, Bishop of Edmonton, but the sense of great loss in the parish and in St Pancras must be tempered by great joy for him and his family that a pe- riod of almost impossible hard work should end in this way and that a happy and fulfilled future can lie ahead for them.

Fr Clover carried out a brilliant task in stabilising the situation after the departure of Fr Richardson and the unsettling period of the ‘Roman’ ex- periment. Two important factors are in place which should secure the immediate future. One is that the present Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, is a fine upholder of traditional standards in the worship and wit- ness of the Church of England and is, from all accounts, reluctant to see the tragic closure of churches when it can be avoided. The other is the Crypt Centre. There need to be many such centres in inner London and its presence is so valuable to the mission of the Church towards the lonely, the poverty-stricken and the dispossessed that nothing should be allowed to diminish this effort. The Crypt Centre stands very fully in the tradition of those Victorian Anglo-Catholic pioneers who went into ‘darkest Lon- don’ to bring the love and light of Christ into the lives of those who were without hope. This tradition did not just lay on beautiful ritualistic services in churches adorned with colour and the smell of incense, it taught its priests and people to go down to the most miserable and most sad to hold out arms warm with welcome and hands strong with loving support to try to heal broken minds and broken lives. That is the least we can do to fol- low in Christ’s own example. The dual function of Holy Cross as it now stands is of the great social outreach and comfort engendered by the Crypt downstairs representing, as it were, our work on earth, with the church up- stairs leading us into the worship of God in heaven.

People from the crypt do go up into the church and experience the True Presence of Christ in his Holy Sacrament and that numinous, prayerful at- mosphere which it has, like so many churches of a Catholic tradition. The one element will feed another and the point of the existence of Holy Cross will, we hope, become more and more obvious to a doubting generation over whom Christ will, one day, reign.

The significance of the old tradition is very apt. A church building has be- come likened to a great ship turned upside down, hence the term ‘nave’ or

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‘navis’ for its main part. It is like a great Ark, the Ark of our Salvation, as it has been called. The position of the Crypt Centre can then be seen as the engine-room in the bowels of the ship, driving the vessel on. And the fuel? The fuel is the Holy Spirit of God!

He comes the broken heart to bind, The bleeding soul to cure, And with the treasure of His grace To enrich the humble poor.

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Pondering the Past and Facing the Future

Fr Paul Lewis

I arrived in the parish as deacon on December 21st 1964. The parish was very different from what it is today. There were four on the staff, Fr Sturt, myself and two sisters from St Saviour’s Priory, Haggerston. There were four services on Sunday: 8.00 Low Mass, 9.25 a conducted sung Mass, 11.00 Solemn Mass, and Evensong and Benediction. Most of the congre- gation were from the parish or nearby. There were hardly any immigrants living in the parish. The courtyards of the flats in Midhope Street and Tankerton Street were filled with washing. They reminded me of the slums of Naples.

I did not realise it at the time, but I was blessed to have begun my ministry under Fr Sturt. He was a devout, gracious and faithful priest, if somewhat eccentric. On the first day after I arrived, I reached the church first. We had just been told by our Principal, Cheslyn Jones at Chichester, to make sure that all the lights in the church were switched on so that those going to work would see that we were working as well. A few minutes later Fr Sturt arrived and turned off nearly all the lights. He used to say his office by the light of a candle and one of the people who attended the daily Mass used to bring a torch so that she could follow the Mass in her Missal. There was a similar policy over heating in the vicarage. In the week before Holy Week I had a mild attack of ’flu and was concerned that I would not have recovered in time for Holy Week. I came down for lunch and put the gas fire on. When Fr Sturt came in he turned off the gas fire. He said that after a certain date which I cannot recall heating could not be put on. I went out of the room and put on an overcoat. No comment was made. On my first Sunday after the 11.00 Solemn Mass, I rushed into the Sacristy to take off my cotta, so that I could get to the back of the church to meet the congregation. I was told that the way to greet the people was to wear one’s cotta and to have the on one’s head. We came to a compromise. I wore the cotta but carried the biretta.

I was told that I could not entertain any friends in my attic room. I was al- lowed to when I said this was totally unacceptable. I always remember Timothy Ware – who later became the first Englishman to be a bishop in

98 the Greek Orthodox Church – being received very icily by Fr Sturt. The wearing of a cassock was compulsory within the parish and I was not al- lowed to go into any pub interior in the parish. I entered The Boot for the first time in June 1999. If I had gone as a curate at Our Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, I would have found the regime even stricter. The curates were not allowed to have front door keys and had to be back in the clergy house on their days out by 10.00pm.

Fr Sturt was painstaking in my training. Every Saturday morning an hour was spent teaching me to say Mass. I am eternally grateful for this. I was only allowed to preach once a month. Here Fr Sturt showed how thought- ful he was. To preach too much at the beginning of one’s ministry has a debilitating effect on the quality of one’s preaching in the future. Most churches have visiting preachers in . We had visiting celebrants so that Fr Sturt could be free to sing in the choir! An eccentric priest, Fr Spokes, used to come when Fr Sturt went on holiday. If there were lilies in the church, which he hated, he used to arrive at the altar with a handker- chief over his face. He hated wearing the church’s Gothic vestments and used to throw them on the Sacristy floor when he had finished saying Mass. My father had senile dementia at the time and my poor mother was at her wits’ end. It was Fr Spokes who suggested Twyford Abbey, a house run by the Alexian Brothers. That is where my father, who was a Roman Catholic, died. Little did I know at the time that years later I would be go- ing there several times to give Fr Sturt Holy Communion after saying Mass at St Magnus the Martyr.

One Sunday after Corpus Christi, there was a carpet of flowers. I spent the afternoon watching Fr Sturt put more than a hundred candles on the altar. When he had finished, he said to me, ‘Now you know how to build up an altar.’ On this day, the monstrance which could not be touched by human hand was used. The jewels of Fr Sturt’s mother were encrusted in it. I had put white gloves on to handle it. I hated wearing them and used to throw them on the floor in my youthful impetuosity. Five days before I sailed to Barbados to become a tutor at Codrington College, in 1968, I was invited by Fr Sturt to assist at the Holy Cross festival. He said to me, ‘I know that you hate wearing them, I hope that you do not mind using the gloves.’ Of course I did not, nor did I throw them on to the floor on this occasion.

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On All Souls Day, Fr Sturt celebrated the three Masses consecutively. Af- ter the third Mass, we went to the Church porch where he threw down a piece of purple cloth and performed the Absolutions of the Dead. At breakfast I asked what this meant. I was told that Holy Church is very lov- ing on this day and even prays for those who died outside the church, but that this has to be done outside the church.

At Chichester Theological College, we were taught that the Mass, the Di- vine Office and Meditation were the bedrock of the priesthood. This was reiterated and confirmed for me by what Fr Sturt did in turn. Certain things in life are not taught but caught. When I left Holy Cross, I thought in my youthful pride that what I had learned was all negative. The longer I have been a priest, the more I have realised that what I experienced in that year has had a formative and positive influence. Every time during the recent interregnum that I have taken that long walk from the Sacristy to the altar, I have felt the presence of Fr Sturt. As soon as I arrive at the altar, the presence evaporates. Having pondered the past, I must face the future. The prodigal son has returned. A senior priest in the deanery told me that my first priority was to increase the giving of money. It would be uncouth to relate exactly how I responded. At the age of 62 years, I do not see myself as a fundraiser. I intend to use the gifts that God has given me and to pre- pare for my death. In 1965 the church was open most of the time. Then a Quaker used to come each day to pray. She came because there was a strong sense of the numinous and the walls were steeped in prayer. As I recite the Divine Office, meditate and say Mass each day, I hope that the numinosity which is present will seep like oil into my inner being. If we can install CCTV, then the church can be opened up for more to experi- ence a place where ‘the intersection of time by timelessness’ is constant and where prayer is made valid.

The sacred space above and the crypt below together proclaim the mystery of the Incarnation. Together they can put into practice the advice that Mother Teresa gave to her sisters in Calcutta: Handle the dying in the gut- ters with the same reverence as you handle the Blessed Sacrament.

The crypt put into practice the message of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, which has always terrified me. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.’ We are called to recognise Jesus not only in the breaking of the bread but also in the faces of our fellow

100 men and women regardless of colour, race or creed. The work in the crypt reminds us all that Jesus was not an exclusive person but an inclusive per- son. Taking our cure from what is done in the crypt, we need to welcome all who enter sacred space.

On May 1st of this year, I went to the Shrine of the Black Virgin of Mont- serrat just outside Barcelona. There I prayed that she would watch over and protect Bishop Peter in his new ministry and that if it was God’s will I should become priest-in-charge of Holy Cross. On September 11th, I shall be going on the Edmonton area pilgrimage to Walsingham. There I shall ask Our Lady of Walsingham to watch over and protect me in my ministry at Holy Cross.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: (by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, and the Estate of T.S. Eliot)

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The Church in the Back Streets

The Rev. Kenneth Leech

The history of Holy Cross, St Pancras, is part of, and inseparable from, the history of the ‘Anglo-Catholic movement’, and specifically of the second phase of that movement which led to a major growth of the inner city min- istry. Let me at this point say that I dislike the term ‘Anglo-Catholic’ which has many problematic aspects, and so, realising that many readers are familiar with the term, I shall now switch to the less confusing term ‘Anglican Catholic’. Unlike the former term, with its similarities to terms suggesting a merger or fusion (Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, etc.), the term ‘Anglican Catholic’ makes clear that what is being described is a particular formation within Catholic Christianity, a formation within that cluster of churches called Anglican. I shall use it to refer to those streams within Anglicanism which have particularly empha- sised its Catholic identity, ethos, spirituality and doctrine.

However, Anglican Catholic history is full of myths and half-truths which need some critical examination, while it is often forgotten that Anglican Catholicism was a complex movement and contained a number of distinct streams. I want therefore to dispose of three myths, and locate two streams which are important for understanding the past, present, and future of the movement out of which Holy Cross parish came.

The first is the myth that the Oxford Movement was radical from the start and that we can speak in unambiguous terms of the ‘social implications’ of that movement. John Griffin’s book on the Oxford Movement claims that it was ‘radical in its politics and its “sociology”’. I really don’t think the evidence bears this out. Most Anglican Catholics remained socially con- ventional and were no threat to the status quo. But there is one exception. In its resistance to state control of the Church, the Oxford Movement did sow the seeds of what could have become a strong movement for disestab- lishment. But it never happened.

A second myth is that most Anglican Catholic priests were left wing, or at least vigorous social activists. Now there is certainly some evidence, for example, that clergy trained at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, in

102 the 1920s were believed to be socialists, and a letter appeared in the Mir- field Gazette of 1927 expressing alarm that people were assuming that all Mirfield-trained clergy were ‘reds’. The writer almost certainly had in mind Father John Groser, the East End priest, then a Poplar curate. But priests of this kind were never typical either in Groser’s time or earlier in that of , still less today. Groser himself described the kind of paternalism and authoritarianism in many ritualist churches. As late as 1939, he pointed out, a notice board outside St George’s in the East pro- claimed. ‘No dogs or women without hats allowed in’. Some radicalism!

The third myth is that most Anglican Catholic parishes were in slum areas and that the ‘ritualist slum priest’, of whom Lowder and Wainwright at London Docks and Dolling in Portsmouth became archetypal, were typi- cal. Lowder, according to his biographer, Lida Ellsworth, was ‘the ritualist slum priest par excellence.’ Certainly there was a tradition of ministry in poor inner urban districts, and both the East End parishes and Holy Cross itself were part of this. But the idea, popularised by such writers as Roger Lloyd in his The Church of England in the 20th Century, that ‘the Anglo- Catholic curate normally went to a slum parish’ is nonsense. Most Angli- can Catholic churches were not in slum or poor areas, nor was Anglo- Catholicism primarily a poor people’s or a working-class movement. A study of 56 Anglican Catholic churches in London in 1900 showed that 39 were in comfortable or wealthy areas, 12 in moderate to poor ones, and on- ly 5 in very poor districts. Even here they were often supported by fashionable people from elsewhere.

These myths are particularly relevant to districts such as East London and King’s Cross and St Pancras. Trevor Richardson once told me that he saw Holy Cross as ‘the last of the East End parishes’, and certainly its ethos does resemble the neighbourhood Catholic shrines of Hoxton, Haggerston and Stepney more than the more eclectic central London parishes which are often fashionable and at times ‘dainty’. But to look at Holy Cross in the light of these three myths noted above is to see both their falsehood as generalised claims and the elements of truth in them. All three figure in some way at Holy Cross: it did nourish and foster a certain radicalism and a critical posture towards establishment Anglicanism, a certain spirit of re- sistance, even a counter-culture, and some of its priests were certainly radical in their politics. One remembers Father Jack Jenner with his strong pacifist and anti-nuclear convictions. Holy Cross was a good example of

103 what the late Canon Stanley Evans, writing in 1962, called ‘the church in the back streets.’

But when we look at Anglican Catholicism we see that there were at least two streams within it. One stream was a papalist one. Many of the priests at Holy Cross stood firmly within this stream, not least Fr Sturt who was a key figure in the Society for Promoting Catholic Unity, a group which worked tirelessly for corporate reunion with Rome. Anglican Papalists took the position that England formed two provinces of the Western Church which had been cut off from their main source of life by historical events for which they were not responsible. Unfortunately, most Papalists attached themselves uncritically to Rome at one of its most decayed peri- ods. Today, many Anglican Papalists look to the more reactionary elements within the Roman Communion, taking little account, and often knowing nothing, of the immense ferment which has taken place there, of the progressive forces which exist not only in South and North America, but also in other parts of Europe. So Anglican Catholics cling to the more backward-looking elements within Rome, and those clergy who have left the Church of England for the Roman priesthood are usually, though not always, among the more conservative elements within that church.

The second stream, overlapping at certain points with the first, was more open, adventurous and flexible. It was the stream associated with and the ‘sacramental socialists’ who grew in numbers and influence after the 1870s, the stream which included bishops such as Michael Ram- sey and , and – yes, it should be stressed – Barbara Harris and Desmond Tutu, the two best-known black bishops in the world, both coming out of a very traditional Anglican Catholic background.

Today Anglican Catholics are more divided, fragmented and confused than they have been for a long time. The issue of the ordination of women is not the cause of this state but it has opened up a whole Pandora’s box of unresolved issues. My sense is that Anglican Catholicism is an aging movement as well as a largely clerical one. While many young Christians have gained from and value the stress on the sacramental life, they have not absorbed the theological basis.

Anglican clergy have not been good at communicating with lay people or discussing with them what it is that matters in the faith. Hence many de-

104 bates which lay people find incomprehensible or irrelevant, apart from a group of – mainly male – clericalised lay people for whom religion has be- come a kind of hobby. The issue of the ordination of women is a classic instance. I have ministered in a number of parishes whose clergy have ei- ther died, retired or defected over this issue. Once they have left, it has become perfectly clear that the lay people, while they did not wish to upset the clergy of whom they were fond, did not share their position, and in a number of cases called a woman to celebrate or be their parish priest.

The tragedy of Anglican Catholicism, I believe, lies in its inability to ma- ture and develop. At the moment when Holy Cross was founded, the movement was buoyant and on a wave of triumphalism and energy: today it is a classic case of a tradition in decay. There are a number of aspects of this. One is the fact that the movement has become dangerously negative.

While I do believe strongly in the importance of resistance and opposition, it is impossible to build a movement purely on opposition, as many politi- cal factions have found – it was George Orwell who once called Anglican Catholicism the religious equivalent of Trotskyism. Yet many Anglican Catholic publications are full of negativity of the most bitter and unpleas- ant kind. Again, the movement has become more precious and effete. The kitsch aspect goes back a long way. The fetish of correctness, the delight in fuss, the neurotic clinging to ceremonial trivia – these are well known signs of pathology, of serious spiritual illness.

Again, much of the movement has ceased to think. While the work of Charles Gore helped to shape the progressive Catholicism of the future Roman church, and Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936) anticipated much in the , it is diffi- cult to think of serious thinkers today who belong to this tradition except in the most critical and marginal way.

And the movement is deeply affected by sexual confusion and dishonesty. To cite an example which is current at present, the growth of Anglican Ca- tholicism and the growth of a male homosexual subculture in Britain occurred at the same time. The closet and the Sacristy were historically co- incident. And for a long time, many Anglican Catholic parishes provided a way in which gay people were able to be themselves in an oblique way. It was a kind of therapeutic community in an age of secrecy. However, since

105 the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the spread of greater hon- esty about sexual identity, the Anglican Catholic movement, which had once been a place of safety, has become a zone of untruth and denial. So it is all too common to find Anglican Catholic priests and spokespersons in the forefront of hostility to homosexuality while following a closet homo- sexual lifestyle themselves. The contradictions of the closet have become endemic within the movement in a way which is really very serious, not least in the Edmonton area.

Yet in all these areas there are signs of hope, and I would not be surprised if the coming decades saw a new mutant within Anglican Catholicism which was more positive, unfussy, thoughtful, and more healthy in its handling of matters of sex and gender. I could be wrong. I am not sure if Anglican Catholicism can survive as a discrete phenomenon within world Christianity or be a positive force within it. Certainly the features I identi- fied above are serious obstacles to its future. Anglican Catholicism manifests itself today as an example of a tradition which seems to have fossilised. But traditions can be renewed and reinvigorated. I am not at all sure whether this particular tradition is open to such a process. Time will tell.

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APPENDIX: The Rev. A.H. Patten

A personal memoir by Michael Farrer

It would seem unusual to devote a section of a book about a parish to a cu- rate who served there for only a little over a year, but the importance of Alfred Hope Patten is unusual with regard to what he achieved after leav- ing Holy Cross and because his great work in restoring the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham had its germination in his time at Holy Cross. That great work has had a notable and growing effect on the whole Church of England and has a growing and effective influence still.

The only thing approaching a biography of Fr Patten is contained in the book Walsingham Way by Fr Colin Stephenson, his successor as Adminis- trator of the Shrine at Walsingham. From this account we learn about his early life and his establishment of the Shrine. I am writing this as a per- sonal memoir because I was one of the first boys of the Sanctuary School which was founded at Walsingham in 1944 and there I learnt from him the Catholic Faith, for which I must be eternally grateful and which has given me the knowledge and enthusiasm for the great, inspiring history of the Anglo-Catholic Movement, to contribute to this history of so notable an Anglo-Catholic Parish.

It is recorded by Fr Stephenson that Alfred Hope Patten was born on No- vember 17th 1885, on the Feast of St Hugh of Lincoln, whom he always adopted as his Patron Saint. His parents did not approve of the hardships he experienced in the one year he was at boarding school and insisted thereafter on his private education at home. They lived for most of his boyhood and young manhood in Brighton where he was able to become absorbed in the great flourishing Anglo-Catholic churches there, like St Bartholomew’s, St Paul’s, St Michael’s (where he served at the Altar) and the Annunciation. Still supported by his parents and with no gainful em- ployment well into his twenties, he eventually decided he had a vocation to the priesthood and sought to enter a theological college. The problem was that he had never passed any form of examination and the facing of that ordeal produced in him an unusually strong form of ‘exam nerves’ to the extent of a virtual nervous and physical breakdown. Eventually, however, he was able to qualify for Lichfield Theological College which was, unu-

108 sually for that period, willing to take on men who were not university graduates. His ‘exam phobia’ presented itself in an extreme form of physi- cal illness when it came to taking his General Ordination Exam. However, the , for which he was destined, was at that time pos- sessed of an unusually tolerant Bishop in Arthur Foley Winnington- Ingram, who had an equally tolerant Examining Chaplain in Archdeacon Phillimore. Archdeacon Phillimore took the unusual step of interviewing Hope Patten at his bedside, asking him a few perfunctory questions as to his theological knowledge, and, realising that he had here a candidate of true vocation and potential, recommended him to the Bishop for ordina- tion.

He was ordained Deacon at St Paul’s Cathedral on December 21st 1913 and went to Holy Cross as Curate. He joined there Fr F.E. Baverstock, the Vicar, and two other curates, Fr F.E. Bailey and Fr L.T. Barrett. It is a co- incidence, not so unusual in the Anglo-Catholic world, that I met Fr Bailey and had quite a long conversation with him in the 1950s when he was Vic- ar of All Hallows, Gospel Oak, but did not realise his connection with Fr Patten. I wish I had, it might have added even greater interest to the con- versation. Also, my researches for this book have just uncovered that Fr Barrett went on later to be Vicar of Lamorbey in where one of his cu- rates was a current friend of mine, Fr Ivan Clutterbuck. Fr Clutterbuck tells me that Fr Lawrence Barrett was one of three brothers who became priests of the Catholic persuasion and caused a tremendous amount of fam- ily shame by becoming married. That was a thing which his colleague Hope Patten would have disapproved of very much indeed! The ideals of priestly celibacy were held very strongly by a number of Anglo-Catholics at that period and they tended to regard their married brethren in the Cath- olic wing of the church as renegades. I am glad that this attitude is less marked nowadays.

He lived, with the others, in the Clergy House, which was then at 62 Cart- wright Gardens where a somewhat spartan regime prevailed, typical of most Anglo-Catholic clergy houses at the time. He was always very aware of the paranormal and had a strong feeling that the house was haunted, to the extent that one of his colleagues remembered having to accompany him upstairs to his room in a state of terror because of what he perceived there.

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There are only a few references to him in the Parish Magazines of the time. There is no reference to him being ordained as a Priest in December 1914, nor of his subsequent moving, as stated by Fr Stephenson, into his own flat in the Parish, fleeing the terrifying, haunted Clergy House. The Parish Magazine of January 1915 carries a note by Fr Baverstock in his Vicar’s Letter that he resigned, to their great sorrow, in January 1915 on doctor’s orders because his health was not deemed strong enough to en- dure such a tough Parish. Fr Baverstock does note that he certainly looked fit and strong enough to him. He notes as well how his preaching would be missed. That great quality of his had become very much developed when I knew him at Walsingham. Simple and direct, his sermons held one’s atten- tion as he poured out his strong and uncompromising faith in all that the Church had always taught, with a fervour and gripping inspiration so lack- ing in so many Anglican clergy who have an ability to ramble on about nothing very much at all. He seems to have been asked back to Holy Cross to preach after he had left for St Alban’s, Teddington.

The important thing for future history that happened at Holy Cross was that one morning at breakfast Fr Baverstock showed Fr Patten a statue of Our Lady which he, as an official of the League of Our Lady, was to send to his old colleague Fr Reeves, who was then Vicar of Walsingham. Fr Reeves had been Vicar of St Michael’s Bingfield Street in Islington where Fr Baverstock had been his Curate. After Fr Patten had moved from Ted- dington to Buxted in Sussex and then to Carshalton in , there came the time when Fr Reeves wanted to move from Walsingham. The stipend for the living was very low, only £200 a year, poor even for those days. Many possible applicants had turned the job down because of this, and Fr Reeves felt that he could not leave without finding a successor for the Pa- tron to present in his place.

He asked his old colleague, Fr Baverstock, by then Vicar of St Clement’s Notting Dale, if he could recommend anybody. Fr Baverstock, realising that his former curate was now of sufficient experience to take charge of his own Parish, recommended Hope Patten who, after a considerable peri- od of cogitation, accepted the offer. So he became Vicar of Great and Little Walsingham with Houghton St Giles in 1921, where he was to stay until his death in 1958 and where he was to light a candle of devotion in England to Mary and her Divine Son which will never, ever, we pray, be put out.

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The Parish of Walsingham had first experienced the tide of the Catholic Movement in the 1880s when Fr George Ratcliffe Woodward, the notable musician and writer of Christmas Carols, like ‘Ding Dong, Merrily on High’ and others, and former Curate of St Barnabas Pimlico, had been ap- pointed. There was a more moderate Catholic tradition established, as was deemed suitable for a country church at that time, than Hope Patten as- pired to and to which he was used at Holy Cross and his other Curacies. Consequently he started immediately to move the place a considerable number of notches up in the ‘High’ or even ‘Extreme’ scale. His devotion to Our Lady, Mary the Mother of Christ had the obvious outlet in restoring the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, one of the greatest and most im- portant Shrines in Medieval Europe, so cruelly destroyed by Henry VIII at the Reformation of the 16th century.

On 6th July 1922 he arranged, with great ceremony and the ringing of church bells the restoration of a copy of the throned and crowned medieval image of Our Lady of Walsingham to a side chapel in the Parish Church of Little Walsingham. Many people, myself included, were able to take part in a moving re-enactment of this event on 6th July 1997 to give witness and thanks for the tremendous developments since. He seemed to have made an instant impression on the religious life and nature of Walsingham. Tall and good-looking with a great charm and indomitable nature, he rap- idly turned the place into a tremendous bastion of Catholic spirituality and devotion, inspiring both the villagers themselves and visitors from all over England who came there, thrilled by this new exciting move forward in the great Catholic Movement which was sweeping the Church of England. Opposition came from the to this seemingly ‘Popish’ Shrine in an Anglican Parish Church, so, in 1931, Fr Patten acquired a site elsewhere in the village to build a separate building devoted to the Shrine in perpetuity. This became extended further in 1938 and became the Shrine Church we see today.

In 1944 he was able to take up the offer of Quainton Hall School, a private Preparatory School in Harrow, to house at Walsingham a small branch of the School set up as a boarding school for boys whose parents wanted them out of London because of the German bombing. This was a school of a very definite Anglo-Catholic inspiration, its headmaster being a priest, Fr Montague Eyden, who had been a Curate at St Mary’s, Somers Town. His deputy headmaster at Walsingham, Alfred Batts, who had run the ‘Evacua-

111 tion Branch’ at its previous location at Long Marston, in Hertfordshire, was a former organist and choirmaster at Somers Town and was a distin- guished expert on plain chant and medieval music, and so the school was able to become the Choir School for the Shrine, providing the rendering of plain chant for the services there.

Unfortunately, one of Hope Patten’s shortcomings was the he had no expe- rience of running a school, or even much of being taught in one. He thought he could have the place run in accordance with his own rather im- practical dreams and would not let professional and experienced headmasters have their own way. Accordingly, Alfred Batts left after only one year, three other successors came and went and the school was subse- quently closed in 1956 as a financial failure. However, to this and to Fr Patten’s inspiration I owe my lifelong adherence to that Catholic Faith which is the true heritage of the Church of England and which has led me to contribute to the musical tradition of our church by being for a while a at Southwark Cathedral and later a Gentleman of the at Hampton Court, as well as singing for long periods at such An- glo-Catholic churches as St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square and St Alban’s, Holborn.

Fr Patten was an awe-inspiring figure to us as boys. He taught us our Di- vinity lessons and there, and from the pulpit and in the Catechism in the Parish Church we attended, he put over that uncompromising faith of his, fluently and naturally. For him, there was no doubt. The Catholic Faith was absolute and the fact of Christ being the Incarnate Son of God meant that this and this alone was the fullest revelation of God to Man. No other watered-down or aberrant religion could stand against it. He had warmth, however, which some people, who only saw the rather grand figure he could appear, did not realise.

On one occasion, when we were playing games of ‘Germans and English’ with make-believe pieces of sticks as guns amongst some ruined cottages, he suddenly appeared in a doorway in cassock and cloak and wide black hat, with his piece of stick, gunning us all down. Even this great figure could become a little boy and play soldiers! One might as well record a story by Fr Stephenson in his book that when A.H.P. (as he is often re- ferred to now) was a Curate in Carshalton he visited a lady parishioner, went straight into the living room, swept her cat in his arms and said, ‘Oh,

112 you adorable person!’ Any cat lover has my vote, and a lot of other peo- ple’s.

He died, suddenly in 1958, just as he had finished conducting Benediction for a party of Bishops who had been attending the that year. This was a very dramatic seal on all his endeavours and a great augury of what was to come. He had had considerable battles to fight in establishing the Shrine as a significant entity in the Church of England. He came of a generation who had seen Protestant-minded Bishops harry and harass the nascent Catholic Movement unmercifully. So often preference was given to men who seemed to hold very shaky and heretical views at the expense of those like him and all his Anglo-Catholic colleagues who held real beliefs in the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the status of God’s Catholic Church as taught by the Apostles, and were put- ting them into practice in their worship and in their lives, who were harassed and put down by their Bishops. Now the tide had turned and An- glican Bishops were coming on pilgrimage to Walsingham and kneeling before the Shrine of Our Lady there.

His successor, Fr Colin Stephenson was able to take up the burden and run with it into a new age. He made a point of putting out that Walsingham was a shrine of the Incarnation and that not just the most extreme of An- glo-Catholics should kneel there. At a time when, in the last fifty years, we have seen the devastating collapse of so much that the Church had achieved, when we are seeing churches closed, congregations dwindling, Religious Orders decimated, faith disappearing, ‘Men’s hearts failing them for fear’, Walsingham has never ceased to grow more and more in its ap- peal. Thousands flock there now where once it was only hundreds. Holy Mary still abides there, showing her Divine Son to the people for whom He died and whom He redeemed. The fact of His Incarnation is shown there and taught there still to tell this modern age that, despite what the faithless millions may say, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Walsingham has an amazing atmosphere of prayer and other-worldliness. Even when I was first there as a boy in 1944, when the Shrine and its gar- den were only a few years old, it seemed as if it had always been there. It is that sense that Fr Patten wanted to create, and he did it. That Archdea- con who recommended that the exam-shy young man should be ordained a

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Priest nevertheless, and that Bishop who decided to act, set on to the Church of England one of the most remarkable Priests it has ever been blessed with, who set up, by his faith and courage, one of the most striking and now universally revered institutions it has ever had.

The seed that brought about this massive tree was planted at Holy Cross, Cromer Street in 1913. Holy Cross priests and people have supported and visited Walsingham all along the years and I hope they do so with a sense of thanksgiving to God for their one-time Curate who brought it about.

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