Three More Churches

The wind and rain has howled around the Rectory this afternoon and my mind turns to a group of churches recently seen. Coldharbour, Capel and Newdigate offer their own interesting features but not much in terms of the history of the Catholic movement in the area. Ockley, though, still has the Sacrament reserved and quite a lush sanctuary decorated in pinky marble. The reredos dates to 1873, but the marble work was done in 1917 in memory of a young man killed at the First Battle of Ypres: yet another example of World War One affecting the way churches looked and acted.

Not far away is St Mary Magdalene's, South Holmwood. This is a Victorian church with a longstanding Catholic tradition as witnessed, again, by its fixtures and fittings, although I happened to meet the incumbent who characterised the church now as 'closer to the candlestick than the flame'. The church guide says the 'reredos' was installed in 1887, but what they have in the church now looks a bit later to me. There seem to have been curtains on riddel-posts around the altar at some time to judge by the markings in the floor, and I wonder whether those nice little wooden angels you can see on the predella used to stand on top of them. The Lady Chapel and its aumbry has a more modernist austerity to it, dating as it does only from 1979.

 

Further up the road towards Dorking is North Holmwood, where we find not just reserved sacrament, but Stations of the Cross, three sanctuary lights, a statue of Our Lady, a Corpus Christi banner, and something I've never seen before - a text for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, kept in a small wall-mounted box. The mere presence of any of these things, of course, doesn't mean they are used now, but they must have been once. The sanctuary is remarkably unremarkable compared to Ockley and South Holmwood.

I'm not sure whether Ladies Anne and Mary Legge - daughters of the 3rd Earl of Dartmouth, it seems - who paid for North Holmwood in 1874, intended it as an outpost of Catholic Anglicanism, though one of its architect Rohde Hawkins's other churches, St Michael's Mount Dinham in Exeter, definitely is. However it's South Holmwood that provides us with the first 'ritualism conflict' I know about from Surrey. In 1901 Sir Leopold Heath of Kitlands fell out with Revd Gill the vicar over two silver candlesticks which Sir Leopold insisted should be removed from the altar. On Mr Gill's refusal to comply, Sir Leopold then began a door-to-door petition in the parish and made it an issue in the Vestry election: the vicar was compelled to concede, though three years later Sir Leopold was dead and it didn't take long for the candlesticks to reappear. Mind you, he might just not have liked the person who gave them to the church, Lady Laura Hampton of Oakdale house not far away. She wrote children's books - at least one of which was illustrated by Thomas Noyes Lewis, q.v. And there we had better end!