St Thomas the Martyr, East Clandon

The last church apart from my own I will probably visit for some time, St Thomas's East Clandon is an unassuming village church not far away from Guildford. I managed to slip in at the back of a midweek service just before my incarceration with a cough in the middle of March. Appealing though St Thomas's is, you wouldn't describe it as remarkable ecclesiastically, even though there is a very dramatic Gothic Revival tomb in the side chapel, and the chancel seems to have been revamped in the 1920s. Instead the galvanising influence in taking East Clandon up the candle seems to have been AL Poole, incumbent for a mere six years between 1949 and 1954. During his time the calvary against the east wall was brought in as a memorial to the war dead. Fr Poole appears in the memorial list of the Guild of All Souls so you can see where he was coming from. Since then a rather fine statue of the BVM, the tabernacle in the side chapel, and a dramatic window depicting Becket awaiting his fate have all appeared. The current incumbent is a sound fellow so this is all safe for the time being!