My break this week helpfully coincided with some local churches reopening to visitors (some of whom might have been looking to commemorate Prince Philip) and they're an interesting collection. Apart from a low-key Lady Chapel with a blue frontal on the altar, St Nicholas's Thames Ditton seems to have avoided any contact with the Catholic movement at all, but the East Molesey churches have certainly been affected by it - even if they've moved on now. The first sign of interest at St Paul's comes before you even go in, as there's a holy water stoup beside the door. That's empty, but the Sacrament is still reserved inside and there are Stations of the Cross which look post-World War Two to me. I couldn't tell when the carpeted dais was installed, but the Catholic fixtures are now relics of a past the church has left behind: the tambourine resting on the unremarkable nave altar is symbolic ...
No lack of detail along the road at St Mary's, though, where I was told very definitely that the reordering of the nave took place in 2015 and the chancel a couple of years later. Here, the nave has been cleared and carpeted, fitted with metal-framed chairs, and the 1929 chancel screen left in place to provide a backdrop for the band (it's the sort of church where that's the centre of attention). Behind the screen, the old chancel is kept as a beautiful space though I'm not sure what they do with it. They have a range of sumptuous altar frontals and a nice Art Nouveau cross of a type I've seen elsewhere, but I can't quite work out where to place the church as a whole. There are Eucharistic motifs and the Instruments of the Passion carved into the wooden reredos, and three sedilia next to the altar now very strikingly bisected by a prie-dieu repositioned and repurposed as a sound system desk, but I can't see any sign that the chancel screen had a rood or a cross on it, or that there was ever an aumbry anywhere.
The story is a bit unclear at Chobham too, where St Andrew's is a heavily restored medieval church with the Sacrament reserved in a Lady Chapel with a jarring modern altar frontal (the aumbry door embroidery looks very like what we saw at Shere). It has a stone dais leading into the nave, but no sign of a nave altar, nor do there seem to have been choir stalls which your standard Victorian restoration would normally have put in. The panelling round the altar is dated both 1937 and 1950 and the pews look more modern than you would usually expect (the latest memorial date they bear is 1977 but they must have been installed long before that). On the north side of the church opposite the Lady Chapel is another chapel whose altar must once have had curtains on three sides but it's a bit of a junkyard now. At least that cabinet blocks the view of the altar frontal. I can't really work out what's happened with this church.
Finally to St James's Weybridge, a JL Pearson-designed church which I know well and which furnishes far too many clues to a varied past to describe here, a past that includes the illegal requiem mass conducted by Rector Edward Rose in 1866, an incumbent in the 1930s who had been curate at All Saints' Margaret Street, and a gentle downward slide in churchpersonship during the 1970s and 80s abruptly ended by an upward heave in the mid-1990s. The current incumbent is a devotee of St Pio and you will now find an icon of the Padre in St James's, as well as one of the church's patron saint on the grandiose High Altar; you can also see from these photos that while the church was open for people to pay their respects to the Duke of Edinburgh, the altar frontal has not been changed to purple as the Diocese of Guildford rather shockingly advised us, and it is the Blessed Sacrament in its monstrance which has central place. You can also see in these images the bizarre triptych in the All Souls Chapel (a WW1 memorial, as these things so often are) which bears an image of Sir Galahad, presumably as an epitome of Christian knighthood; and St James's 'Trisagion' altar and accompanying furniture, consecrated by Rowan Williams, no less, in 2007 and helping to make this a rather unique church within the Catholic tradition.
With regard to Chobham my guess is that any Victorian choir stalls went during the 1937 reordering. It is actually quite a short chancel, so this would make sense. The remaining curtains in the north chapel and some evidence of them in the south, suggest that the reordering was on Parson's Handbook lines, as was common in the east of the county. They certainly seem to specialise in hideous frontals here: I found another gem online.
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, John, I will have to find out more about the sequence of events at Chobham. Incidentally I've recently bought 'Twenty Priests for Twenty Years' from the Anglo-Catholic History Society; is that write-up of Arthur Duncan-Jones yours?
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed. It was a shame they had to misspell his name on the contents page!
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