A Name to Note

Under current circumstances I can't get very far with the Anglo-Catholic history project, because it's a bit difficult getting into churches and in fact going anywhere that's too far to walk to. All I can do is scout out the website of some churches and associated information. 

I've already mentioned here the church of St Peter, Hascombe, a dizzy Tractarian jewelbox designed by Henry Woodyer. The Catholic tradition at Hascombe didn't halt in the 19th century, as there are photos of incumbents wearing birettas in the 1930s (as my predecessor at Swanvale Halt did at the same time). But I'm becoming more interested, too, in the role of the man responsible for the rebuilding of the ruinous former church, Vincent Musgrave. Fr Musgrave came from a clerical family: his father Charles was Vicar of Halifax and Archdeacon of Craven. He himself had had a first incumbency at Mattersey in Nottinghamshire, and spent the rest of his ministry at Hascombe. He wasn't in the position to found daughter churches as his slightly earlier contemporary John Brownlow Chandler at Witley did - more about him another time - and instead concentrated on schools. He was part of the committees that set up Cranleigh School and St Catherine's School in Bramley, both of which ended up having something of a Catholic tradition: I will have to see the splendid chapel at Cranleigh, and Bramley I had the chance to visit a few years ago; Musgrave gave an amazing reredos, designed by Kempe and carved in Oberammergau, to the chapel at St Catherine's in memory of his wife in 1903. The role of schools in the Surrey church landscape is something to which I will have to give more thought.

In a little book describing the rebuilding of St Peter's, Fr Musgrave makes a statement that probably tells us why he became a Tractarian: early in the 19th century, he believed, 'through the Abuses of the Episcopate, and the worldliness of the Clergy, religious feeling had sunk to a low ebb', inplying he was part of the generation to restore it. I wonder whether he included his uncle, Archbishop of York Thomas Musgrave, among the Abusive Bishops.