First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  23 Charlemont House, Dublin, c. 1773, by Lord Charlemont and Sir William Chambers

  24 “Wispers”, Midhurst, Sussex, 1875, by Norman Shaw

  25 House in North Oxford, 1870, by Clapton C. Rolfe

  Even greater was Shaw’s influence on the small house. Here is a pleasant enough artisan dwelling [25] by Clapton C. Rolfe in North Oxford, 1870. It is in the polychrome style of Butterfield. Compare it with Norman Shaw’s Hostelry [26] for that first garden suburb he laid out at Bedford Park, London (1878), and we are out of the Victorian era into a manner of building we have seen in our own lifetime.

  26 Hostelry, Bedford Park, London, 1878, by Norman Shaw

  Norman Shaw’s influence on domestic architecture was enormous. He and Morris might equally be described as founders of the Arts and Crafts movement. Shaw’s houses had Morris papers. Shaw believed in using local styles and local builders and whenever he found old craftsmen he employed them. His followers, such as C. F. A. Voysey, M. H. Baillie Scott and Edgar Wood, built houses of a strongly individual but yet hand-wrought and local-looking style. They tried to make cottages for the middle classes in the old cottage style and designed their own fabrics and furniture. Indeed Voysey continued his architecture down to the very toast racks and spoons, as Burges had done before him. Edgar Wood’s cottage at Rochdale [27] is a Yorkshire example. It may be arty-crafty, but it is serviceable and does no violence to the landscape. H. L. North of Bangor was a Welsh Edgar Wood.

  27 Cottage at Rochdale, 1893, by Edgar Wood

  What Shaw was to small houses, George Gilbert Scott, Junior, Sir Gilbert Scott’s eldest son and the father of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was to new churches. In 1877 he built St. Agnes, Kennington [28]. It caused great controversy as it was built of brick in the Perpendicular style then thought “debased.” The nave arcades had no capitals to their columns, there was a screen across the chancel arch and provision was made for side chapels. The glass was by Kempe. St. Agnes was destroyed by the Nazis, as was Scott’s All Hallows, Southwark. But St. Mark’s Milverton, Leamington, and St. Augustine’s, Hull, survive as work of this great architect’s Neo-Perpendicular manner. He was as much at home with the Renaissance style.

  28 St. Agnes, Kennington, 1877, by George Gilbert Scott, junior

  Two years earlier F. C. Deshon had designed this Mission Church [29] in a style that was then thought “debased” because it had no pointed arches and was unashamedly structural.

  29 Mission Church, 1875, by F. C. Deshon

  30 Church of the Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, 1877, by G. F. Bodley

  G. F. Bodley, a pupil of the older Scott and a close friend of the younger Scott, designed Holy Angels Church, Hoar Cross, in 1877 [30]. He built many churches in his attenuated Perpendicular style, of which the best examples are St. Michael’s, Camden Town, London; St. Augustine’s, Pendlebury, Manchester; St. Martin’s, Scarborough; St. German’s, Roath; and Holy Trinity, Kensington.

  31 Church of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, 1888, by J. D. Sedding

  Another high-churchman and friend of this group was J. D. Sedding, whose church [31] of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, London (1888), has a Gothic counterpart in his famous church of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street. Scott, Bodley and Sedding go with plainsong, the English Hymnal, Percy Dearmer and the later phases of the Catholic Revival. Their buildings are set in slums, where the Church of England did such great work throughout the last half of the century, and in spacious seaside suburbs, whose wealthy and well-intentioned congregations subscribed to the slum missions.

  32 Design for a Church by Edgar Wood

  The Nonconformists were now tiring of their Classical chapels (see pp. 90–119) and taking to what was known as “late Gothic freely treated.” Here is an example by Edgar Wood, who was born a Methodist [32].

  Temple Moore, another of the older Scott’s pupils, survived until 1920, and he built in a severe and simple late Gothic style, among the finest examples of which are St. Wilfrid’s, Harrogate (1909) [33], and one of his latest works, Pusey House, Oxford. Sir Charles Nicholson and Harold Gibbons are architects in the Temple Moore tradition. With these men must be included Micklethwaite and Somers Clark and their pupil Harold S. Rogers. The Roman Catholic architect of this date was J. F. Bentley whose Cathedral at Westminster [34] in the Basilican style (designed 1895) and church of the Holy Rood at Watford in late Gothic are a testimony to the versatility of his great genius.

  33 St. Wilfrid’s, Harrogate, 1909, by Temple Moore

  34 Westminster Cathedral, designed 1895, by J. F. Bentley

  SOME CURIOUS REVIVALS. In Secular life there was now a restlessness among architects to find a manner of building which, in style at any rate, did not savour of either Gothic or classic. Influenced by Norman Shaw, Thomas G. Jackson, a fine writer on architecture, revived the Jacobean style for his prize-winning design for the Examination Schools, Oxford [35], in 1876. He did so much else in this manner that it came to be known as Anglo-Jackson. The manufacturer of Holloway’s Female Pills, wishing to educate women as well as make them well, sent W. H. Crossland, a pupil of Sir Gilbert Scott, to the French châteaux. As a result Crossland produced the amazing Holloway College for Women (1886) at Egham [36] in Portland stone and red brick, vaster and more elaborate than Chambord and set among pines and rhododendrons of Surrey. That fine draughtsman and architect Beresford Pite won the Soane Medallion in 1882 with his design for “A West End Club House” [37] in what might be called a Wagnerian romantic style. He designed the West End to go with it.

  35 Examination Schools, Oxford, 1876, by Thomas G. Jackson

  36 Royal Holloway College, Englefield Green, Surrey, finished 1886, by W. H. Crossland

  At the other end of the scale C. R. Mackintosh went in search of extreme simplicity and built in a Beardsleyesque Scottish Baronial style. This design of a house by him [38] is early-twentieth-century. With George Walton he was known by the followers of Norman Shaw as a member of the “Spook School” and he is really an Art Nouveau architect, a romantic, not a down-to-earth man like Voysey, Scott, Edgar Wood and Holden, whose Market Hall [39] of 1901 is a foretaste of the underground stations and the new University of London building, for which he is now known.

  *

  VICTORIAN SURVIVAL. The great church architect Sir Ninian Comper was a pupil of Bodley. His early work is mostly late Gothic, more gorgeously treated in colour of glass, hangings and painted woodwork than was that of his master. St. Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, Baker Street, London, 1900 [40], is an example of his earlier style. He builds his churches as “a lantern for the altar” and intends them to bring the visitor, as he enters them, to his knees. He obtains his effects by plan, colour and above all a sure sense of proportion. St. Philip’s, Cosham [41] is a 1937 building shewing his development and what might have been the development, had they survived, of the great Victorian church-builders. The altar is brought out into the middle of the church so that a congregation may join in worship from three sides. It is still the central flame of the lantern, under its golden baldachino. Classic and Gothic are welded together in the church itself. It is the end of the battle of Gothic and Classic, “inclusion by unity” as Comper calls it. The late A. Randall Wells, the late F. C. Eden and the late Martin Travers, who was a pupil of Comper, and T. Lawrence Dale, Frederick Etchells, F.R.I.B.A., and R. Blacking are among the stalwarts of this tradition of good craftsmanship.

  37 Design for “A West End Club House”, by Beresford Pite, 1882

  38 The Hill House, Helensburgh, 1906, by C. R. Mackintosh

  39 Design for a Market Hall, 1901, by C. H. Holden

  40 St. Cyprian’s, Baker Street, 1900, by Sir Ninian Comper

  41 St. Philip’s, Cosham, 1937, by Sir Ninian Comper

  13

  THREE CHURCHES

  BLISLAND, CORNWALL

  CHURCH CRAWLING is the richest of pleasures, it leads you to the remotest and quietest country, it introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass w
hich is always truer than what you read in books. It was through looking at churches that I came to believe in the reason why churches were built and why, despite neglect and contempt, innovation and business bishops, they still survive and continue to grow and prosper, especially in our industrial towns.

  Of all the country churches of the West I have seen I think the Church of St. Protus and St. Hyacinth, Blisland, in Cornwall, is the most beautiful. I was a boy when I first saw it, thirty or more years ago. I shall never forget that first visit—bicycling to the inland and unvisited parts of Cornwall from my home by the sea. The trees at home were few and thin, sliced and leaning away from the fierce Atlantic gales, the walls of the high Cornish hedges were made of slate stuffed in between with fern and stone crop and the pulpy green triangles of mesembreanthemum, sea vegetation of a windy sea coast country. On a morning after a storm, blown yellow spume from Atlantic rollers would be trembling in the wind on inland fields. Then, as huge hill followed huge hill and I sweated as I pushed my bicycle up and heart-in-mouth went swirling down into the next valley, the hedges became higher, the lanes ran down ravines, the plants seemed lusher, the thin Cornish elms seemed bigger and the slate houses and slate hedges gave place to granite ones. I was on the edge of Bodmin Moor, that sweet brown home of Celtic saints, that haunted, thrilling land so full of ghosts of ancient peoples whose hut circles, beehive dwellings and burial mounds jut out above the ling and heather. Great wooded valleys, white below the trees with wood anemones or blue with bluebells, form a border fence on this, the western side of Bodmin Moor.

  Perched on the hill above the woods stands Blisland village. It has not one ugly building in it and, which is unusual in Cornwall, the houses are round a green. Between the lichen-crested trunks of elm and ash that grow on the green, you can see everywhere the beautiful moorland granite. It is used for windows, for chimney stacks, for walls. One old house has gable ends carved in it. They are sixteenth or seventeenth century and curl round like swiss rolls. The church is down a steep slope of graveyard, past slate headstones and it looks over the tree tops of a deep and elmy valley and away to the west where, like a silver shield, the Atlantic shines. An opening in the churchyard circle shows a fuchsia hedge and the Vicarage front door beyond. The tower is square and weathered and made of enormous blocks of this moorland granite, each block as big as a chest of drawers. When I first saw it, the tower was stuffed with moss and with plants which had Vested here and there between the great stones. But lately it has been most vilely repointed in hard straight lines with cement. The church itself which seems to lean this way and that, throws out chapels and aisles in all directions. It hangs on the hillside, spotted with lichens which have even softened the slates of its roof. Granite forms the tracery of its windows, there is a granite holy-water stoup in the porch.

  The whitewashed porch, the flapping notices, the door! That first thrill of turning the handle of the door of a church never seen before, or a church dearly loved and visited again and again like Blisland—who but the confirmed church crawler knows it?

  Sir Ninian Comper, that great church architect, says that a church should bring you to your knees when first you enter it. Such a church is Blisland. For there before me as I open the door is the blue-grey granite arcade, that hardest of stones to carve. One column slopes outwards as though it was going to tumble down the hill and a carved wooden beam is fixed between it and the south wall to stop it falling. The floor is of blue slate and pale stone. Old carved benches of dark oak and a few chairs are the seating. The walls are white, the sun streams in through a clear west window and there—glory of glories!—right across the whole eastern end of the church is a richly-painted screen and rood loft. It is of wood. The panels at its base are red and green. Wooden columns, highly coloured and twisted like barley sugar, burst into gilded tracery and fountain out to hold a panelled loft. There are steps to reach this loft, in the wall. Our Lord and His Mother and St. John who form the rood are over the centre of the screen. I look up and there is the old Cornish roof, shaped like the inside of an upturned ship, all its ribs richly carved, the carving shown up by white plaster panels. Old roofs, beautifully restored, are to be seen throughout the church. They stretch away beyond the cross irregularly and down the aisles. I venture in a little further, there through this rich screen I mark the blazing gold of the altars and the medieval-style glass, some of the earliest work of Mr. Comper. In the nave is a pulpit shaped like a wineglass, in the Georgian style and encrusted with cherubs and fruit carved in wood.

  The screen, the glory of the church, the golden altars, the stained glass and the pulpit are comparatively new, designed by F. C. Eden in 1897, who died a few years ago. He must have visualised this Cornish church as it was in medieval times. He did not do all the medieval things he might have done. He did not paint the walls with pictures of angels, saints and devils, he left the western windows clear that people might see their books; he put in a Georgian pulpit. He centred everything on the altar to which the screen is, as it were, a golden, red and green veil to the holiest mystery behind it.

  What do dates and style matter in Blisland church? There is Norman work in it and there is fifteenth- and sixteenth-century work and there is sensitive and beautiful modern work. But chiefly it is a living church whose beauty makes you gasp, whose silent peace brings you to your knees, even if you kneel on the hard stone and slate of the floor, worn smooth by generations of worshippers.

  The valley below the church was hot and warm when first I saw this granite cool interior. Valerian sprouted on the Vicarage wall. A fig tree traced its leaves against a western window. Grasshoppers and birds chirruped. St. Protus and St. Hyacinth, patron saints of Blisland church, pray for me! Often in a bus or train I call to mind your lovely church, the stillness of that Cornish valley and the first really beautiful work of man which my boyhood vividly remembers.

  MILDENHALL, WILTS

  Ah let me enter, once again, the pew

  Where the child nodded as the sermon grew;

  Scene of soft slumbers! I remember now

  The chiding finger; and the frowning brow

  Of stern reprovers, when the ardent June

  Flung through the glowing aisles the drowsy noon;

  Till closed the learn’d harangue, with solemn look

  Arose the chaunter of the sacred book—

  The parish clerk (death-silenced) far-famed then

  And justly, for his long and loud—Amen!

  Rich was his tone, and his exulting eye

  Glanced to the ready choir, enthroned on high,

  Nor glanced in vain; the simple hearted throng

  Lifted their voices, and dissolved in song;

  Till in one tide, deep rolling, full and free

  Rung through the echoing pile, old England’s psalmody.1

  In all England there are probably hardly more than a hundred churches which have survived the tampering of the last ninety years. We talk of our churches as “old” but they are mainly Victorian—at any rate in their furniture. The West galleries were cut down. The old choir was dismissed and went disgruntled off to chapel or to form a village band or to appear self-consciously and surpliced in the chancel. That chancel was blocked by an organ or harmonium, its width was cluttered up with choirstalls, the pulpit was removed, the plaster taken off the walls, the ceiling stripped, the high pews chopped down, the clear windows filled with coloured glass, the old floor paved with red and shiny tiles. All the texture and atmosphere of the past were replaced by a sticky and glossy hardness which was wrongly, if piously, thought to be medieval.

  Of all the churches which remain almost untouched by the Victorians, the loveliest I know is Mildenhall, near Marlborough. It stands in the Kennet water meadows, a simple four-square affair: three-storeyed tower, nave, aisles either side and a chancel. But as you approach it there are signs of the past—clear glass panes, patched and flaking outside walls looking like an old water colour. And then the inside! You walk into the ch
urch of a Jane Austen novel, into a forest of magnificent oak joinery, an ocean of box pews stretching shoulder high all over the church. Each is carved with decorations in a Strawberry Hill Gothick manner. The doors and sides of the pews take a graceful curve either side of the font and another curve above them is made by the elegant west gallery. Norman pillars just raise their sculptured heads above the woodwork of the aisles. Two huge pulpits stand, one each side of the chancel arch. The old stone floors remain, the long cream-washed walls, the stone arch mouldings, picked out subtly white to form a pale contrast. The chancel, as it should be, is richest of all—panelled, with elaborate-carved pews for the squarson and his family, a carved canopy hanging over the Commandment board behind the altar, delicately carved communion rails in the Chippendale style. Even the red leather kneelers at these rails and the scarlet service books are the same date—1816. For there it is, written in gold letters on shields that look down from the corbels of the nave roof:—