Anglo-Catholic Sources no.2: Churchgoing Guides

If you were away from home and looking for an amenable place to worship in the far-off days before being able to look it up in Dr Google’s archive, it helped to have a handy booklet to slip into your valet’s pocket which detailed what you could expect to find when opening the door of a particular church. From the 1870s the main pressure group of the Anglican Catholic movement, the English Church Union, produced a string of Tourist’s Church Guides which laid out just that information. The earliest, published in 1874, describes a landscape in which frequent celebration of communion is still relatively rare and the aim is to find a church where a visitor can be sure of a eucharist to attend early on a Sunday morning (and, thus, fasting). It lists churches where altar lights can be found, where sittings are free (rather than rented) and the building is kept open, where vestments are worn (not very many of those), where the Eastward Position is adopted, and even whether the chant used in the Offices is Anglican or Gregorian. Of course the editors were dependent for their data on returns from incumbents and secretaries, and so the Guide almost certainly omits churches, but it probably includes most of the ones where these ritual elements were definitely in place.

As time went on and the Catholic movement both advanced and attracted official opprobrium and repression, it became less wise and less practical to include all this information – helpful though it is to investigators like me as such things are rarely mentioned in local church histories – and the markers of a ‘sound’ church resolved into four, the much-besought ‘Full Catholic Privileges’: namely, a Sung Eucharist every Sunday, a daily mass, perpetual reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and set times for confession. There were more and more such ‘four-star churches’ as time went on; and from the 1933 edition onwards the criteria for inclusion became stricter as, the Guide editors stated, by that date ‘there are now few districts in England where an early celebration of the Holy Communion on Sundays is not to be found’.

The last official ECU Tourist’s Guide was printed in 1951, right at what has traditionally been taken as the peak of Catholic influence in the Church of England. However, it’s becoming clearer that the standard markers of that influence, as shown by the number of four-star churches, were continuing to be adopted long after that point. So it was good that Fr Peter Blagdon-Gamlen took it upon himself to carry on the work of the Guides by producing his own Church Traveller’s Directory in pretty much the same format with the ECU’s support. Blagdon-Gamlen had a ‘colourful’ ministry that took him from Evesham to Yorkshire to Derby, then Bedfordshire, and finally to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. At Derby he once called for a trade union for the ordained that would ensure pensions for clergy widows, but most of his causes were less progressive. To say that he flirted with the far Right would be charitable but inaccurate: no flirtation was involved. In 1962 he permitted a parish magazine article he’d written denouncing white women having black babies to be reprinted in the British National Party’s magazine Combat, fulsomely supported Enoch Powell while describing Martin Luther King after his death as ‘a neo-Communist agitator’, and in the 1970s put the National Front’s newsletter on his church newsstand because of their sound approach to the Common Market. ‘A character’, we might say if we were being kind, though those who encountered him (he only died in 2004) recall a beneficent soul with a wide if odd range of knowledge if you steered clear of politics.

There were two editions of the Directory, issued in 1966 and 1973: the later one is digitised here but the 1966 edition isn’t even in the Bodleian which is a great shame. The second clearly reveals that the peak of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England came rather later than we have guessed, by-and-large, at least if those landmarks of Full Catholic Privileges are the criteria, and (as we knew) that non-metropolitan Surrey wasn’t at the ritualist cutting edge.

Thus in that earliest, 1874, edition of the Tourist’s Church Guide, there is only one vestment-using church in Surrey outside the London area, Reigate parish church; two years later it’s been joined by an oddity, St Matthew’s Hatchford, a small private chapel established by Lord Ellesmere. Hatchford doesn’t appear again and Reigate is soon outstripped by its daughter churches, St Luke’s and St Mark’s – the latter a four-star church in 1948. Even though by 1933 the atmosphere in the new Diocese of Guildford (and the longer-standing one of Southwark) was far less hazardous for liturgical development, there were still only nine four-star churches then; but, as the table below shows, advance was quite rapid in the decades afterwards, washing up some names which seem surprising to anyone who knows the diocese well today.

You may also note the eight churches which left the list between the last two columns. This was, in every case, because they gave up a daily mass, while retaining the other three markers. This may not necessarily have indicated a positive alteration in churchmanship, as a daily eucharist was a demanding thing to sustain and many impeccably Catholic churches (such as Hascombe and Weston Green) never got that far; but it does perhaps suggest that a high-water mark had been passed by the early 1970s.