St Mary's, Thorpe

Our SCP chapter met at Thorpe in the northwest of Surrey on Tuesday, or at least a number of us consonant with covid restrictions did. There is no guesswork needed at all about the tradition at Thorpe, though I’m not quite clear when it started; the advowson was owned by the Lords of the Manor, the Leigh-Bennetts, who must have approved of the actions of the combative priest installed in 1907, Somerville Henry Lushington. However, it wasn’t just Fr Lushington’s High Churchery which provoked a visit from the Kensitites in 1910 but also a set of very grubby personal disagreements which don’t really show the aristocratic vicar and his supporters in that good a light. There were rowdy Protestant demonstrations (‘Ritualism means Ruin!!’) and in 1911 the church was broken into and the altar fittings dumped in the churchyard wrapped in an altarcloth. By 1916 Fr Lushington was dead, and his replacement, Basil Edrupp, while firmly maintaining Thorpe’s Catholic tradition, was apparently a much more emollient character who aroused no opposition at all. In 1930 the Leigh-Bennetts sold the manor house, Thorpe Place right opposite the church, to the Sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage as a new home for the Spelthorne Sanatorium at Bedfont, a hostel for women especially with alcohol problems; there it stayed until 1955. Some of the fixtures in the church come from the convent chapel.

The church as we see it now has undergone waves of refurbishment. There was a 19th-century rebuilding in which the 13th-century arcades were taken down and rebuilt – though it’s uncertain when this happened – and we owe the small building’s spaciousness to Fr Lushington who at the cost of local controversy cleared out the pews. Then there are the fittings brought in from the convent, almost certainly including the altar furniture in the cramped north chapel – now known as the Benedict Chapel – and possibly the canopy over the high altar. That replaced a wooden reredos which, to judge by a photo in the hallway at the church, was probably 1930s or 40s, in a major reordering in the 1980s also including new flooring and a nave altar.

These sedilia are genuinely medieval, as is one of the piscinae. Guess which is the fake.

Thorpe is a lovely church, almost cleared of its medieval atmosphere and yet wonderfully warm and comfortable, and laden with attractive things. I try to avert my eye, however, from the grim crucifixion over the chancel arch, painted by an expert on, of all things, Ethiopian manuscript illustrations, Beatrice Playne. If only it had been based on one of those. You’d never guess it dated to the 1960s.

And what did we discuss? Catholic mission, of course, rather as usual!