Mission by Music

The history of Anglo-Catholicism includes a variety of gloriously loopy initiatives that should not have worked, but which, one must assume by the grace of God, did. A couple of years ago I found out about the Christian bikers' group, the 59 Club; and I've just discovered another, amazed that I'd never come across it before. The website of St Paul's Church, Addlestone, includes some memories of a former choirboy at the daughter church of St Augustine. He refers to the 'terrifying' Fr Desmond Morse-Boycott, who occasionally took services at St Augustine's in the early 1950s, and who ran the St Mary of the Angels Song School in a big house at the top of the Woburn Road in Addlestone. This sounded interesting: Morse-Boycott appears very fleetingly in histories of the Anglo-Catholic movement such as Michael Yelton's Anglican Papalism, but that's all. The Choir School has escaped much attention. So I bought his 1972 retrospective about the School, A Pilgrimage of Song, which arrived very efficiently this morning.

Fr Morse-Boycott began working life as a journalist, and was ordained later, finding his way to St Mary's Somers Town where as curate he worked among some of the worst social conditions in 1910s and 20s central London; one of the other priests there was the much better-known Basil Jellicoe, the Missioner funded by Magdalen College, Oxford, who did so much to affect housing provision and policy in London. Morse-Boycott took groups of Somers Town boys ('who only knew grass as something "to keep off of"') on summer camps at Fr Jellicoe's family home in Chailey, Sussex, where his father was Rector: it was there that Morse-Boycott met his future wife, Marguerite, who'd come to help out at the camp one year and was shocked by the state of the curate's socks. Clearly marriage was the only rational answer. Once they were a couple, the Morse-Boycotts began a boys' club, first in their house, and then in a cellar room owned by St Mary's: the tenor of the work is shown by the fact that the boys got 'clothes, soup of the evening, and a hot wash in the sink'. They began to teach the boys a bit of this and that Church knowledge, and finally music.

The parish was already raising money to send some boys to Woodbridge School in Essex and when these youngsters came home for breaks in Eton collars and uniforms their fellows at the Room Under the Pavement club asked if they could dress the same. An appeal for cast-offs among the clergy's better-off connections (of whom there were many) produced enough clobber to kit the boys out and even more of a school atmosphere developed. The posh uniforms aroused the derision of other children but this lasted only a limited amount of time before they discovered that the boys at St Mary's hadn't lost their ability to fight when they donned starched collars and black jackets. The outfits also had the benefit of being unpawnable, unlike other clothes the boys were given. 

The great All Saints' Margaret Street, of course, had had a Choir School for over seventy years by this stage and its example was there to be copied and, in fact, exceeded. In 1931 a site for a residential School was acquired in Highgate and, of all people, GF Watts's widow Mary provided a foundation stone. A Trust was established and the School opened the following year. 

And yet very shortly after that, Morse-Boycott was out of his parish, ousted from St Mary's by a move to insist that all clergy serving the church were celibate. The Room Under the Pavement was still an important part of the Choir School system as boys used it when on holiday back at home and the Mothers' meeting that was based there at other times was the main source of recruitment of new pupils, but that was removed to other parish purposes. Morse-Boycott hadn't even been drawing a stipend since 1924 and it was a poor reward for his efforts. The School became, as he put it, 'Handmaid to the Church of England', at its disposal for any occasion it might require. 

And so it was: and gradually its reputation advanced to the point where it came to secular attention, too. High points were the bizarre occasions when the St Mary of the Angels boys were asked to replace the voices of the Westminster Abbey choir singing for a Coronation (perhaps the Abbey wanted too much of a fee), and even those of the choir at the Sistine Chapel. Similar institutions in Europe were intrigued. In 1938 the Highgate site was sold to the London County Council raising very welcome funds, and that was when the School moved to Addlestone. While they were away on a singing tour of Devon the house burned down, but miraculously the lease of a neighbouring house came up and the School again relocated, with a sojourn being evacuated to Devon (and being thrown out on New Year's Day 1942 when the landlord refused to extend the lease). The School stayed in Addlestone until 1952 when the death of a benefactor meant a mortgage fell due and the house had to be sold, necessitating a further move to Beaconsfield where it stayed until the end finally arrived in 1972.

As you can see, money was never far from the Morse-Boycotts' minds. The School had some money-spinners such as making palm crosses ...

... but apart from donations (and Marguerite's efforts in the embroidery department) a lot of its income came from singing. There were recordings and tours, and when the boys sang at a Church event, there was never a fee charged, but there was a plate put out. As Fr Morse-Boycott admitted, the education authorities took a dim view of this ('heresy and exploitation') and in fact of the School as a whole. His total lack of any formal teaching experience, or any qualifications to do anything, might not have been a problem in a London slum in the 1920s, but by the 1960s St Mary of the Angels was a relic of another age, as was the man himself. Anglo-Papalist he may have been, but his spirituality had something of the romantic medievalist strain about it: he filled out the register books at St Augustine's, Addlestone, in elaborate Gothic script (for which purpose he brought his own pen), never used any liturgy other than the Book of Common Prayer (and certain additions he devised himself), and while at Addlestone revived for the first time in the Church of England the tradition of the Boy Bishop who supervises his choir colleagues between St Nicholas's Eve and Holy Innocents Day. Investiture took place in the chapel and was a grand occasion: 

(Here you get another view of the blue smocks which were part of the boys' uniforms from the Highgate days). 

The Ministry of Education was not the only authority that disappointed Fr Morse-Boycott: the Church of England was never, on an institutional level, very kind to its self-declared Handmaid, though over the years the School produced dozens of priests (at least one becoming a bishop) and musicians amateur and professional. The Church, he complained, was 'a hard mother'. When the incumbent Boy Bishop reached the end of his tenure, he was ceremonially 'wipped out' by his fellows in what looks in the photo in the book to be not an entirely comfortable experience though universal self-interest probably made it a less than brutal one: 'How to deal with the Establishment', Morse-Boycott captioned it. Mind you, his insistence on his (quite remote) royal ancestry and gracing himself with a coat-of-arms might possibly denote the sort of nut who wasn't necessarily easy to deal with. I suspect that you need a bit of that to get anywhere.