Bournemouth Religion

Talking about Church history, as we are, it's not unnatural that I should have a particular interest in that of my home town of Bournemouth. This was piqued a few years ago by discovering that the first Vicar of Bournemouth, Alexander Mordern Bennett, was an ardent Tractarian who formed a slightly more moderate counterpart to the famous Fr Wagner along the coast in Brighton, a similarly wealthy clergyman who built churches and schools and set up a convent (for which innovations he ended up being burned in effigy by the more Evangelical local Anglicans). Bennett is a highly interesting character, having been ordained several years before John Keble preached the Assize Sermon that sparked off the Oxford Movement, so he must have been captivated by its ideals at an older age.

I recently came across Bright's Guide to Bournemouth, dating from 1896, which very helpfully gives a list of all the churches and their services. How far had the Catholic Revival gone in the town by that stage? Of course, a mere list of services doesn't tell you how the services were conducted; whether any of the clergy were burning incense, wearing vestments, using the Roman Canon or doing other such naughty things. But you get some clues as to, arguably, more important and long-lasting changes. Bear in mind that a couple of decades earlier a weekly Communion service would have been a rarity, but by century's end it was relatively common.

Evening communion services are a sure sign of an Evangelical church; at a Catholic Anglican church congregants would have been instructed only to receive communion fasting. Sure enough, the church deliberately founded in rebellion at the predominately Tractarian flavour of Bournemouth Anglicanism, Holy Trinity, has evening communion services, along with St Paul in Littledown. Most churches now have communion every week, but at St John's Surrey Road the only chance worshippers have to take communion is 8am on a Sunday morning: almost all the other churches provide more opportunities, even the Evangelical ones (St Luke's in Winton only has a communion service at 8am every third Sunday, but then it's just a little mission church; it's somewhat unfair to judge the smaller Chapels of Ease (CE) by these data, too). 

I had previously thought that weekday celebrations of communion were a better indication of 'advanced' churchmanship than celebrations on holy and saints' days, because a common move for a Victorian churchman keen to shuffle his church along was to introduce communion on the holy days authorised by the Prayer Book, as this was hard for Protestant parishioners to object to (that was what happened at Lamford and Swanvale Halt). This table suggests otherwise, however, because weekday celebration is slightly more widespread in 1890s Bournemouth than observance of the holy days; even Holy Trinity has a Thursday communion service ('for invalids'), and there's a stronger correlation between churches that have red-letter-day services and those who have multiple celebrations of the eucharist every Sunday. 

Even though many of the Bournemouth churches were set up by Revd Bennett, they don't all show the same advanced churchmanship of the original parish church, St Peter's in the town centre, from which they were founded. However it might be unfair to judge them by these figures as you might expect the big town-centre churches to be better resourced and staffed. St Swithun's in Gervis Place, for instance, doesn't look especially advanced, though it's a chapel-of-ease to St Peter's. 

The most advanced churches are at the bottom of the table. St Peter's, the original church, and St Michael's, are fairly in the forefront of High Church practice at this time with multiple celebrations of the Eucharist every Sunday and services on some weekdays as well as red-letter-days. St Stephen's, built as a memorial to Revd Bennett and from the start somewhat more Catholic than its parent church, has a daily communion, one of fewer than 500 churches across the country at this time (and probably now). St Aldhelm's Branksome, split off from the slightly more conservative All Saints in that part of the town, doesn't have a daily celebration but the eucharist is the main service every Sunday (and I see that the church still has a splendid rood screen and six candles on the altar). Finally, the most advanced church in the town is St Clement's Springbourne, with a daily mass and the communion as the centrepiece of Sunday worship, the goals (at least interim goals) of many Anglo-Catholic clergy. The church then was being cared for by Fr Towle, who appears in the photograph below. Sound fellow.