St Anne's Bagshot

It was some time ago now that I looked over Bagshot church. The present building dates from 1883 - there was a little Georgian chapel previously - and was paid for by Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, whose family had its own door to get in, leading direct from the carriage drive to Bagshot Park; it's no surprise that the church has a lot of royal and noble memorials scattered about. The tradition is moderate Catholic, encouraged by Fr Andreas the incumbent: a few years ago he was given a thurible by the local priest of the Roman observance who'd 'needed help with the hinges of his confessional'. He tutted on noticing that the aumbry hadn't got a candle next to it, disavowing responsibility. Apart from the odd detail of decoration probably the most striking items in the building are the spectacular reredoses; certainly the one in the Lady Chapel was made by the Warham Guild, and I wonder whether the rather nice cope I found in the vestry is Sarum blue. 

I didn't ask Andreas about the prayer bowl I found in front of the altar and its heterogeneous collection of bits. A cursory glance would suggest it's an Easter Garden but it was the wrong time of year. It does contain - taking us back to the Shrine of Blessed John Keble at Church Crookham - the tiniest ever copy of The Christian Year, possibly a relic in its own right.

Which Blue?

At first I thought it was a Common Blue, flitting around the bits of black medick in the path in front of my house; but in fact I think it may be a Short-Tailed Blue. It is very welcome and lovely, whatever it is.

UPDATE: It's a female Common Blue.

Nymans

Given that Nymans in Sussex provided so much interest when I went there last week, I'm puzzled that I've got no recollection of hearing about it before. It was moderately busy though only at certain points, the grounds extensive enough to swallow up most visitors so that I could walk some stretches without seeing anyone at all. Nymans is not a Gothic Garden, because its follies and arrangements are not intended to produce a shuddersome thrill, but it does include ruins which was the draw as far as I was concerned. However those ruins are not what they seem. 

The gardens are formed into an eclectic sequence of landscapes, a rose garden, a walled garden, a sunken garden with an Italianate loggia and a Byzantine wellhead, and avenues of hedge leading to herms and statues. They are varied, and amusing.

At the centre of the gardens sits the house of Nymans. When German-born banker Ludwig Messel bought it in 1890 it was an unremarkable early-19th-century structure which he transformed into a weird mock-Tudor mansion with a colossal tower on one side. In due course Ludwig's son Leonard took over. Leonard's wife Maud really didn't want to move to darkest Surrey from London. She was an artistic soul. This is Maud, pinched from the National Trust guidebook to Nymans. Just look at that dress. Imagine the colours.

Maud refused to move unless the house was rebuilt around her own fantasies as a medieval manor. She got her way, and what we have now is an astonishingly convincing pastiche of a building which has grown over a long time. Maud and Leonard's daughter Anne - eventually Lady Rosse and mother of Lord Snowdon - stayed on at Nymans as 'Garden Director' after it passed to the National Trust in 1953 until her death in 1992: that's her in the amazing portrait below. It's no surprise that the house is packed with miscellaneous bits and pieces that are of all periods and none, just like a proper lived-in manor and a bit like an analogue of the gardens where you will even find a Roman altar-stone if you keep your eyes open.

Ah, the ruins. These were not an intentional part of the composition. In the bitter winter of 1947 the staff got into the habit of defrosting the pipes in the morning with blowtorches, and lo and behold one February dawn a fire broke out burning down one wing. That's the ruin. 

Fear and Its Proponents

Reading a headline along the lines of ‘vaccine-sceptic US Cardinal out of intensive care after covid diagnosis’ it came as no very great surprise to discover that the Cardinal in question is longstanding antagonist of the Bishop of Rome, Raymond Burke of Wisconsin, poster-boy of Roman Catholic conservatives the world over. Cardinal Burke is known for controversial statements on a variety of topics, but it depresses one slightly to find him in exactly the position you would predict on this issue too, even though its relationship with Christian faith is indirect to say the least. In some places online you will see him quoted as spreading the rumour that the covid vaccines contain injectable microchips, but to give even him some credit, this is not the case; his statements opposing compulsory vaccinations (something I sympathise with, on the grounds that the skin marks the inviolable boundary of the state’s mandate over sane people) go back before the pandemic, and in the interview in question he seems to be drawing a parallel between that and forms of governmental techno-monitoring of individuals’ behaviour, rather than connecting them directly.

But the Cardinal’s overall attitude to covid is, as I say, clear and predictable. It’s summarised in a homily he preached on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin last December. This is his argument. The US has treacherously been made economically dependent on Marxist materialism in the form of China; the pandemic is being used to destroy Christian faith and practice; the Church is full of moral and theological laxity and incapable of mounting a defence. All Christians can do is flee to Our Lady who weeps along with them.

I am very sure Our Lady weeps on occasion, and in this baleful picture there are, not surprisingly, some colours that while lurid are not too far off reality. The influence of China is indeed troublesome; the Church certainly hasn’t covered itself with glory during the pandemic, though if the Cardinal thinks the Roman dispensation has been wanting in this respect he should peer this side of the Tiber. But it’s the middle bit of his case which catches the ear:

Then, there is the mysterious Wuhan virus about whose nature and prevention the mass media daily give us conflicting information. What is clear, however, is that it has been used by certain forces, inimical to families and to the freedom of states, to advance their evil agenda. These forces tell us that we are now the subjects of the so-called “Great Reset”, the “New Normal”, which is dictated to us by their manipulation of citizens and nations through ignorance and fear. Now, we are supposed to find in a disease and its prevention the way to understand and direct our lives, rather than in God and in His plan for our salvation. The response of many Bishops and priests, and of many faithful has manifested a woeful lack of sound catechesis. So many in the Church seem to have no understanding of how Christ continues His saving work in times of plague and of other disasters…. At a time when we most need to be close to one another in Christian love, worldly forces would isolate us and have us believe that we are alone and dependent upon secular forces which would make us slaves to their godless and murderous agenda.

Is the virus mysterious? Is information about its nature and prevention conflicting? I mean, my feeling is that, while we may not and will probably never know where it came from, we understand pretty much everything we need to about it. Nobody knows where the Spanish Flu of 1919 originated, or pretty much any other pandemic infection. Like most covid-sceptics talking outside their own echo-chambers the Cardinal never ties any of his argument down to definitive statement: he insinuates, hints and suggests – ‘certain forces’ are to blame, the shadowy elites who are, apparently, not only content with enriching themselves (which is the left-wing reading of the ‘Great Reset’), but also destroying the Christian faith and replacing God as well. I can’t think of anything emanating from the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, the UN, or any other organisation of global influence which could justify such an idea, but what do I know.

Great Reset language, and the reaction to it, interests me. A global crisis which halts so much of human society seems to me almost inevitably to bring into question many of the normal aspects of social organisation: it’s natural that individuals and organisations should have their usual habits shaken up and query whether they actually want to resume them. You see that everywhere, including churches. It strikes me as a natural, obvious, and entirely healthy thing. The use of this language by rich and influential individuals operating on the global stage is surely just a reflection of the same psychological instinct; what they mean by it and how far they are prepared to do anything about it is another matter. From Prince Charles to Karl Schwab they seem to me to be vaguely progressive and well-meaning souls who have no real conception that anything about their own lives or positions might have to be sacrificed to bring about the changes that they say they want, and that is also standard, for the rich and for all of us, most of the time. That's why the change they promote might well enrich and empower such people still more, even if they don't actively plan it that way. 

Cardinal Burke also shares this with the secular covid-sceptics I have come across: that while he blames the elites for controlling the ignorant masses through fear, it is his own discourse which is fear-filled. Its lack of specifics and detail is exactly what energises fear: its story of undefined, dark, evil forces who control our lives, manipulating and terrorising us, out to destroy everything we value and that makes our lives worthwhile. In complete contrast, the mainstream narrative of the pandemic has concentrated on casting light and hope. Here is a new virus; this is serious in this way, and in this way; but look, this is what we can do about it; and thanks to scientific effort, there’s the prospect of putting it behind us, isn’t that good? I have no doubt the Devil makes use of any situation. It is hard to see, however, the use he can make out of lots of people not dying of a disease, and any sort of Christianity that concludes widespread horrible death is a salutary thing needs to look at itself hard.

Village Show

In 2020, of course, there were no community events, and yesterday was the first resumption of that sort of Swanvale Halt normality with the Village Show, a cornucopia of flowers, fruit and cake, and other things besides. The weather thwarted my intention of having some of the stalls outside and thus to show that we were still taking covid semi-seriously, but we cleared the whole interior of the church instead and that provided plenty of space for people to move around without too much proximity. The team managed extraordinarily well, adding to the event some of the things we would normally have at the Spring Fair; I am not sure that will ever return, and I think even the church members who are assuming it will are mainly concerned with getting rid of the boxes of secondhand books which currently stuff the choir vestry. Adam, who usually plans the whole thing along with his wife Jill, managed to suffer a minor stroke a week or so ago while driving at speed along the A3, an event from which he emerged with nothing more serious than bruises and temporary confusion, but it meant more of the work devolved on Jill. The burger stand had to restrict itself to hot dogs only as it was discovered our usual supplier of gas bottles had decided to close on Saturdays. I nearly had one before remembering that I wasn't eating meat: it's not a foodstuff I relish overly but hot dogs or burgers are part of the occasion more than anything else. Ms Formerly Aldgate was basically vegetarian but I once caught her at the Spring Fair with a hot dog decorated with radioactive sauce. 'I think that the actual meat content is probably minimal', she said.

Announcing the prizewinners at the end, I was delighted that 'Best in Show' was won by an amazing Gothic Windsor chair which someone basically knocked up in their shed, as it took me right back to my days working at Wycombe Museum which had many such items in its collection. However, it was when I scanned the list of winners and saw that the Fruit Category had been won by 'Pamela for her melons' that I thought I might have been set up. Suddenly I'd been catapulted into an episode of Benny Hill. But, when life gives you melons ...

Thoughtless

The Western Church reduced the Eucharistic Fast to an hour before reception of communion in the 1960s and I imagine (though I have never looked it up) that this applies to a home communion as much as to an actual celebration of the Sacrament. It is at least seemly to avoid wolfing down food soon before consuming the Body of the Lord. It was, however, a couple of hours before I was due to take communion to Hilary the other day, so it was perfectly in order for me to have lunch. It was only partway through my repast, however, that it suddenly struck me that very garlicky garlic mushrooms was perhaps not the kindest choice. 

Gone Shopping

'It's busy', the manager at the Co-Op told me, 'we have lots of new staff though the empty shelves take less time to fill ... Yes, not enough lorry drivers, problems with suppliers, all that's going on.' Not much is being said publicly about shortages in shops, possibly sensibly given what tends to happen when people think there are. 

Meanwhile I have something to transform my shopping experience, a pair of bike pannier bags. I consulted Dr Abacus over the purchase as I knew he would be the right person to go to and as predicted he came back with advice within ten minutes of my email. I think what I will do in future is pack my shopping into separate bags - probably those hemp fabric bags we all seem to acquire these days but whose provenance is often mysterious - and pop them in the panniers. They make the bicycle somewhat less racy-looking but it was never that racy with the basket on the back anyway.

One of my amendments to my life prompted by climate concern has been not to use the car if there is a viable alternative, and that means cycling to do my main shop if possible. The panniers allow me to carry more and bring other benefits. There have been times when I have teetered about with a heavy bag in the basket and another on my back, balancing on the really quite small area of tyre actually in contact with the ground. Lowering the centre of balance makes the whole journey feel slightly less perilous.

Changing Assumptions

At Fr Thesis’s central London church the grand festival of the Assumption of the BVM yesterday involved a procession around the streets with a statue of the Virgin being carried in a flower-decked litter flanked by Chelsea Pensioners: at Swanvale Halt we are a little lower-key, and the observation was confined to liturgical propers, vestments (my 18^th-century blue set) and reciting the Angelus at the main morning service. Our statue can’t really be moved anywhere as it is rooted to its plinth very firmly. As I pointed out in my sermon to mark the occasion, I think the B.V. of Swanvale Halt looks remarkably like 1920s movie star Lillian Gish, who made her last movie at the age of 94: you can often guess when bits of religious art have been produced by which celebrities they remind you of. The statue arrived in the church at the end of the 1960s from the London convent of an order of sisters based in Surrey, and we suspect that our late sacristan Mary had connections with them; but on the back is a plaque recording that it was donated in memory of a member of the congregation. Miss Lanfield was, in her younger days, a militant suffragette who was known for such exploits as following Asquith to a wedding with a dogwhip concealed in her umbrella intending to give him a thrashing; throwing a tomato at the Director of Public Prosecutions; infiltrating the House of Commons disguised as a man; and smashing windows at the General Post Office. She was imprisoned and force-fed, and was awarded the WSPU’s medal with a variety of bars for it. There can’t be many Virgins in churches with that kind of history behind them: all on the day when women in Afghanistan see twenty years of liberty about to be thrown into the fire.

Tradition Resumed

In March 2020, I went doorknocking - visiting houses which had recently changed hands - for what would turn out to be the last time in seventeen months. Even when theoretically it became possible (and houses have been bought and sold throughout the pandemic) I decided new residents might not welcome an unknown person on their doorstep. Only today have I dared to resumed what is, I'm afraid, my chiefest expression of outreach in the community. I have no reason to believe that ten years of this, even done as diligently as I can, has resulted in a mass of conversions. What it does it to keep me in touch with what is happening in a way I would not be otherwise - inreach, you might call it. Once upon a time I would try and spot the estate agents' boards when they went up and came down, until Dr Abacus pointed out all the data about property sales were on Rightmove and that was where the Government itself gets its information!

I only had five properties to visit today. First, a house in a small close at the top of the hill (Hannah the churchwarden happens to live opposite); that was owned by a young family who'd come from London. Second, a modern terraced house in a yard just off the main street, and adjoining another congregation member's: nobody in. Third, a little Victorian cottage set back from one of the village streets in a row which I didn't know existed even after nearly twelve years here. That was being refurbished, but a neighbour helpfully told me the young woman who's bought it will be moving in from Brighton later in the year. Fourth, a 1930s bungalow: nobody in. Fifth, a new house right on the edge of the village (the last on its road, in fact), where I met a grandmother who moved initially into another house in the village to be closer to her grandchildren just as the lockdown started, but before that was living about five miles away.

She pointed out to me a group of people, children and grown-ups, in the paddock opposite, saying they were setting up a garden. And so it proved: they were part of the community action group which works on the private rental estate in that part of the parish (about 150 houses and flats), planting raised beds in old tyres, making bug hotels and bird feeders. Now there you are, you see, without my somewhat fond evangelistic efforts I would never have found out about that. And I wouldn't have made the transition, which I rather needed to do that morning, from feeling completely useless and superfluous to the life of the world in general to seeing myself as quite blessed. 

Mellow at Enton Mill

Usually I prefer walks to have some specific thing or feature to aim at, but despite the degree of inertia one needs to overcome, it's always worth while to change your surroundings, even if not by very  much, and even if there's nothing very remarkable at the end. The mere variation has good mental effects and therefore physical ones. Today my destination was Enton Mill, an extraordinarily picturesque range of buildings which Pevsner managed to overlook completely - a 17th-century mill Tudorified in the early 1900s and augmented with a cottage or two. You can't get near the pools (well, not legitimately), but you can sit beneath the footpath sign by the side of the lane and eat your lunch if you happen to have one. And that was the focus of my walk today. The photo includes my tea perched on my knee, in honour of Dr Bones who inherited the ability to balance teacups (sometimes adding the saucer) in that position from her clergyman father. It was very unstable and I removed it as soon as the image was achieved.

As I sat munching my lovely sandwich prepared by John at the Swanvale Halt railway station kiosk I could see the brim of my hat bobbing up and down and it struck me how funny I must look, a middle-aged man all alone sat snacking on a bank, and also that I didn't mind this. I had a vague memory of what must be a cartoon I have seen in which a character sits in a park or something, doing the same thing, and of having felt affection for that character, a reaction which must have had something to do with the story, whatever it was. I could see myself as childlike, oddly.

If we are lucky, perhaps we become more childlike as we grow old, but it's a childlikeness which incorporates a sort of awareness children themselves can't have. We are indulgent and forgiving towards children, and if we can glimpse the childlikeness in ourselves we might also be tender towards our silliness. From that it's an easy step to discovering the same tenderness for others too. 

Hortus Conclusus

In his phantasmagoric 1984 art collection Hallelujah Anyway Patrick Woodroffe includes the haunting image of the 'Hortus Conclusus', a ‘melancholy mediaeval prophecy’ depicted as a sprawling and ruinously ancient tree rooted onto a tower of rock, islanded above a cataract in a poisoned and desolate landscape. The real medieval hortus conclusus, in contrast, was the ‘Enclosed Garden’, a walled would-be paradise designed to recreate Eden for the delight of ladies in hennins and escoffions, but Woodroffe’s is – he has a learned and fictional folklorist declare – an apocalyptic vision:

When all things come to an end – as some day they surely must – then shall the very last man shut himself away in the Last Garden on Earth. There he shall hide and care for the last tree and the last flowers, while all around him the world shall be swallowed up. … And one day even the Last Garden shall be swept away and with it the very last man, and the Earth shall have no husbandman, and shall run savage like the Wilderness. And of Man there shall remain no trace, neither memory nor regret.

Sometimes, when it’s all in full leaf and hung with bees and butterflies, my garden feels like the Hortus Conclusus, as though nothing exists outside it but ruin; as though the waves of desolation are lapping at its walls (or chainlink fences overgrown with bindweed and bramble). The water trickles in the pond and the marjoram flowers provide multitudes of bees in umpteen varieties with plenty to keep them going. The burning world is a long way away.

Of course it’s not. As the earth warms some plants will retreat and others will advance, and insects or birds we find familiar in southern England will be ousted in favour of others, new fauna which will cause us different problems. In fifty years, when I am long gone, my garden, if it still exists, will look different, and not because this little bust and the other statuary will be absent. A younger generation will accommodate itself to changes like this, and will mourn the past no more than I am especially affected by the lack of elm trees in the English countryside, which all vanished in my childhood thanks to ophiostoma ulmi. I fear that will not be the worst they have to deal with.

Who Does What?

The little stacks of paper - not as high or as colourful as this - spread over my dining room table, then the chairs, and finally the floor. There had to be a lot of them, as each represented a member of the congregation and the jobs they do, or did before covid put paid to so much of our church life. Some people have a stack that is only one sheet of paper high; others have gathered reams of roles. I am reaching the end of a big project of writing role descriptions for everything that everyone does. To be entirely frank, I probably wouldn't have even begun had not incoming churchwarden Grant expressed some irritation with verger Rick's habit of taking responsibility for things when he has not been explicitly asked to: you could describe this as initiative, but sometimes it goes beyond that and we agreed that what he needed was something that described what he is actually supposed to be doing. However, if the verger is to have a job description, everyone must, so Rick doesn't feel singled out.

In fact the diocese has been nagging at us incumbents to do this for some time, if only because it gives an opportunity to state which roles are subject to DBS clearance (or, as the Safeguarding Department insists on terming it, 'eligible for clearance' as though it was a privilege people looked forward to) and which aren't. It has been a colossal and bewildering exercise of drafting and consultation, and this final stage will involve writing a letter to everyone and getting the things to people (not everyone is online and I think in this case physical bits of paper will concentrate the mind). 

One ambiguity is that I don't really know how many of these beloved souls will actually want to resume their former roles once it becomes possible. For a liturgical, sacramentally-focused church, we now have perilously few people who are available to carry out liturgical functions; and then there's the practical but vital stuff, such as serving the post-service refreshments that enable people to get to know one another, the most basic step in building up the Body of Christ as any kind of community. I am starting to see how the pandemic has cut us down to the roots. I would like this to be like coppicing a tree, an operation that enables it to spring back into life and new growth - but I am far from sure!

Camberley Religion

A clean sweep of the Camberley churches – well, almost – the other day was completed by going home along the B3411 and gaining access to two more, so it was quite a haul. Not that the Camberley district presents us with anything very Anglo-Catholic now, though there are hints of what might once have been. The whole area used to be part of the sprawling parish of Ash which, from the 1500s, included a timbered chapel of St Peter at Frimley; this was rebuilt in the 1820s and became a parish church in its own right in 1866. By that time the military town of Yorktown/Camberley was growing up to the north, graced with its own church of St Michael which was eventually separated from St Peter’s, and both churches produced daughters in the decades afterwards.

Let’s go to St Peter’s, Frimley, first. The VCH describes the tower as ‘debased’ and Pevsner characterises the interior as ‘awful’: but its sheer ‘awfulness’ affords some interest in the form of its galleries and wall-benches, which the Ecclesiologists would have swept away given the chance. The reredos shows that even what must have been a relatively Low church could by 1880 install marble and a carved cross and not feel too many pangs of conscience. But the church benefits from a nice reordering done in 2011: I am not generally fond of this spindly style of altar furniture but at Frimley it looks quite dramatic against the lit east end.

The mother church of Camberley, and daughter in its turn to Frimley, is St Michael’s, Yorktown. I couldn’t actually get in on my visit, and the best I could do was peer through a locked door, but it’s a big, if unremarkable middle-of-the-road church. The building is one of Henry Woodyer’s, and, once completed with a spire forty years after being opened, sits lowering very handsomely over the town. Or it would, if it were not now screened by trees and a gigantic wall bordering the A30 which makes it sadly hard to see from nearby, though the spire pokes up as soon as you draw away. Looking at images of the interior available online I can’t see anything north of Victorian floral-and-choral.

I was much luckier with St Michael’s clutch of offspring churches. The earliest of these that survives is St Paul’s. This began as a flint Brethren chapel built by a Camberley wine merchant called Thomas Boyes; when Boyes sold out to a staunch Anglican called Mr Fowler some time before 1895 the building was passed to the vicar of Camberley, and was replaced in 1903 by the present redbrick and timber fabric designed by WD Caroe (and it looks it). The main part of the building is nothing but a barn, looking even emptier under covid restrictions – ‘the inside never given a thought’, says Pevsner – its walls austerely adorned with the monuments of military gentlemen. But the sanctuary, behind the red-carpeted dais which now bears the altar table, is a genuinely exciting architectural space. The heavy carved furniture reminds me of West Byfleet’s, and behind the red curtain (part of a set of post-WW2 amendments) are two regular holes in the wall either side of the altar – I wonder what they were? The old font is marooned outside, which is a bit of a shame.

St Mary’s is on the west side of the town, and dates to 1937. Here we find more timber, and if the interior looks a bit confused, this is because it’s been rearranged repeatedly. The liturgical east end was originally at what is now the back, which explains why it’s set a step higher than the rest of the floor, and then the building was orientated to one of the long walls. Now the congregation has decided the altar should go at the opposite end to its original location, and are waiting to see whether it’s safe to remove the pillar which is currently right in front of it. There is some nice mid-century glass.

Back north of the main road is St Martin’s. There was a church opened in what is now the hall in 1961, but the current building was consecrated in 1993. Nobody would claim it as a gem, and it’s pretty much an empty space in which churchy things can happen rather than a sacred space in which secular things can happen. But it’s actually rather a pleasure to be able to get into a modern church at all as these are the ones most likely to be shut. Two sofa areas, I was told, have been introduced during the pandemic, though I can’t see the connection as I would have thought sofas would be the last thing you’d want. We had one at Swanvale Halt for a while but it attracted tramps and after I had to clean up vomit behind it before an 8am mass one Sunday I concluded it had to go.

St Andrew’s, Frimley Green, was a stroke of luck: I met the incumbent who was going in to do a short job and my photography and his task took exactly the same amount of time. Frimley parish set up an iron church here in 1889, replaced by the current redbrick one in 1911, ‘looking like it was bought at Liberty’s’ as Pevsner can’t resist remarking, and it continues Camberley’s theme of timbers (with some unfortunate steel cross-ties).

Now, apart from Mr Woodyer’s presence at St Michael’s and the sedilia at St Paul’s, it looked as though the Catholic movement passed the entire district by without a second glance, but at St Andrew’s I spotted a curtained aumbry by the altar. Experience has taught me that aumbries don’t necessarily have anything in them, so I asked whether they reserved the Blessed Sacrament in the church. The answers ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ I was prepared for, but not the one I received, which was ‘We try not to’, a remark whose actual meaning I am still turning over in my mind. Meanwhile the entrance lobby at St Paul’s has a photo of the clergy (and everyone else in the church) taken a few years ago, which shows them wearing an extraordinary costume of black preaching scarves, embroidered as though they were stoles, over cassock-albs, and I don’t know what to make of that, either (the swirly flames in the photos are faces blurred out).

If there was ever a church in the area which had a Catholic identity, it’s the long-vanished St George’s (1893-1967). If so it would repeat the pattern we see elsewhere of a daughter church being able to advance further than its parent. It was designed by Arnold Hoole, who’d got the job of completing the spire of St Michael’s and who had a fondness for ironwork screens, tall altars and candlesticks, and altar crosses that were straining to become tabernacles. We can see this in his design drawings and the only photo I can find of the interior of St George’s; and in his other church, the very Anglo-Catholic St Michael’s Beckenham (bombed out in 1944 and since rebuilt in a very different style). I’d be surprised if Camberley hadn’t once had any church in this tradition.