Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman

The book is ritualistic, but several excellent men have composed and written for it, like Sir Frederick Ouseley and Sir Henry Baker, and Bishops and Deans. The surpliced choir precede the clergy and march out of the new vestry built on the north-east corner of the church. Some of the older men, feeling a little ridiculous in surplices, look wistfully towards the west end where the gallery used to be and where they sang as youths to serpent, fiddle and bass recorder in the old-fashioned choir, before the pipe organ was introduced up there in the chancel. The altar has been raised on a series of steps, the shining new tiles becoming more elaborate and brilliant the nearer they approach the altar. The altar frontal has been embroidered by ladies in the parish, a pattern of lilies on a red background. There is still an alms dish on the altar, and behind it a cross has been set in stone on the east wall. In ten years’ time brass vases of flowers, a cross and candlesticks will be on a ‘gradine’ or shelf above the altar. The east window is new, tracery and all. The glass is green and red, shewing the Ascension – the Crucifixion is a little ritualistic – and has been done by a London firm. And a smart London architect designed all these choir stalls in oak and these pews of pitch-pine in the nave and aisles. At his orders the new chancel roof was constructed, the plaster was taken off the walls of the church, and the stone floors were taken up and transformed into a shining stretch of red and black tiles. He also had that pale pink and yellow glass put in all the unstained windows so that a religious light was cast. The brass gas brackets arc by Skidmore of Coventry. Some antiquarian remains are carefully preserved. A Norman capital from the old aisle which was pulled down, a pillar piscina, a half of a cusped arch which might have been – no one knows quite what it might have been, but it is obviously ancient. Unfortunately it was not possible to remove the pagan classical memorials of the last century owing to trouble about faculties and fear of offending the descendants of the families commemorated. The church is as good as new, and all the medieval style of the middle-pointed period – the best period because it is in the middle and not ‘crude’ like Norman and Early English, or ‘debased’ like Perpendicular and Tudor. Nearly everyone can see the altar. The Jacobean pulpit has survived, lowered and re-erected on a stone base. Marble pulpits are rather expensive, and Jacobean is not wholly unfashionable so far as woodwork is concerned. The prevailing colours of the church are brown and green, with faint tinges of pink and yellow.

      Not everyone approved of these ‘alterations’ in which the old churches of England were almost entirely rebuilt. I quote from Alfred Rimmer’s Pleasant Spots Around Oxford (c. 1865), on the taking down of the body of Woodstock’s classical church.

      ‘Well, during the month of July I saw this church at Woodstock, but unhappily, left making sketches of it till a future visit. An ominous begging-box, with a lock, stood out in the street asking for funds for the “restoration”. One would have thought it almost a burlesque, for it wanted no restoration at all, and would have lasted for ever so many centuries; but the box was put up by those “who said in their hearts, Let us make havoc of it altogether”. Within a few weeks of the time this interesting monument was perfect, no one beam was left; and now, as I write, it is a “heap of stones”. Through the debris I could just distinguish a fine old Norman doorway that had survived ever so many scenes notable in history, but it was nearly covered up with ruins; and supposing it does escape the general melee, and has the luck to be inserted in a new church, with open benches and modern adornments, it will have lost every claim to interest and be scraped down by unloving hands to appear like a new doorway. Happily, though rather late in the day, an end is approaching to these vandalisms.’

      The Church in Georgian Times

      See now the outside of our church about eighty years before, in, let us say, 1805, when the two-folio volumes on the county were produced by a learned antiquarian, with aquatint engravings of the churches, careful copper-plates of fonts and supposedly Roman pieces of stone, and laborious copyings of entries in parish rolls. How different from the polished, furbished fane we have just left is this humble, almost cottage-like place of worship. Oak posts and rails enclose the churchyard in which a horse, maybe the Reverend Dr Syntax’s mare Grizzel, is grazing. The stones are humble and few, and lean this way and that on the south side. They are painted black and grey and the lettering on some is picked out in gold. Two altar tombs, one with a sculptured urn above it, are enclosed in sturdy iron rails such as one sees above the basements of Georgian terrace houses. Beyond the church below a thunderous sky we see the elm and oak landscape of an England comparatively unenclosed. Thatched cottages and stone-tiled farms are collected round the church, and beyond them on the boundaries of the parish the land is still open and park-like, while an unfenced road winds on with its freight of huge bonnetted wagons. Later in the 19th century this land was parcelled into distant farms with significant names like ‘Egypt’, ‘California’, ‘Starveall’, which stud the ordnance maps. Windmills mark the hill-tops and water-mills the stream. Our church to which this agricultural world would come, save those who in spite of Test Acts and suspicion of treachery meet in their Dissenting conventicles, is a patched, uneven-looking place.

      Sympathetic descriptive accounts of unrestored churches are rarely found in late Georgian or early Victorian prose or verse. Most of the writers on churches are antiquarians who see nothing but ancient stones, or whose zeal for ‘restoration’ colours their writing. Thus for instance Mr John Noake describes White Ladies’ Aston in Worcestershire in 1851 (The Rambler in Worcestershire, London, Longman and Co., 1851). ‘The church is Norman, with a wooden broach spire; the windows, with two or three square-headed exceptions, are Norman, including that at the east end, which is somewhat rare. The west end is disgraced by the insertion of small square windows and wooden frames, which, containing a great quantity of broken glass, and a stove-pipe issuing therefrom impart to the sacred building the idea of a low-class lodging house.’ And writing at about the same time, though not publishing until 1888, the entertaining Church-Goer of Bristol thus describes the Somerset church of Brean:

      ‘On the other side of the way stood the church – little and old, and unpicturesquely freshened up with whitewash and yellow ochre; the former on the walls and the latter on the worn stone mullions of the small Gothic windows. The stunted slate-topped tower was white-limed, too – all but a little slate slab on the western side, which bore the inscription:

      JOHN GHENKIN

      Churchwarden

      1729

      Anything owing less to taste and trouble than the little structure you would not imagine. Though rude, however, and old, and kept together as it was by repeated whitewashings, which mercifully filled up flaws and cracks, it was not disproportioned or unmemorable in aspect, and might with a trifling outlay be made to look as though someone cared for it.’

      Such a church with tracery ochred on the outside may be seen in the background of Millais’ painting The Blind Girl. It is, I believe, Winchelsea before restoration. Many writers, beside Rimmer, regret the restoration of old churches by London architects in the last century. The despised Reverend J. L. Petit, writing in 1841 in those two volumes called Remarks on Church Architecture, illustrated with curious anastatic sketches, was upbraided by critics for writing too much by aesthetic and not enough by antiquarian standards.

      He naturally devoted a whole chapter to regretting restoration. But neither he nor many poets who preceded him bothered to describe the outside appearance of unrestored village churches, and seldom did they relate the buildings to their settings. ‘Venerable’, ‘ivy-mantled’, ‘picturesque’ are considered precise enough words for the old village church of Georgian times, with ‘neat’, ‘elegant’ or ‘decent’ for any recent additions. It is left for the Reverend George Crabbe, that accurate and beautiful observer, to recall the texture of weathered stone in The Borough, Letter II (1810):

      But ’ere you enter, yon bold tower survey

      Tall and entire, and venerably grey,

      For time has soften’d what was harsh when new,

      And now the stains are all of sober hue;

      and to admonish the painters:

      And would’st thou, artist! with thy tints and brush

      Form shades like these? Pretender, where thy brush?

      In three short hours