Clerical Cavalcade

When I wandered into St Mark’s Farnborough South a little while ago, I wasn’t expecting the Anglo-Catholic adventure playground I discovered there. As I begin compiling lists of clergy I discover that those who’ve served St Mark’s are also more remarkable than you might expect for this unreported, uncelebrated suburban parish.

During my visit, the good folk of St Mark’s alleged that the church ‘had never been forgiven’ for going Anglo-Catholic at some point, but I’m not yet sure when that point was. Looking at the clergy I know about so far, L.G. Tugwell (1904-11) served curacies at St Saviour’s Battersea and Holy Trinity Guildford before becoming Anglican Chaplain at Frieburg, all appointments you might expect of a High Churchman. Basil Philips (1911-23) studied at Keble College and Wells Theological College and had done his curacy at Dorking before coming to Farnborough, and was briefly succeeded by the celebrated Bernard Keymer (1923-5). Now Keymer had been curate at the moderately Anglo-Catholic St Mary’s Portsea where future Archbishop Cosmo Lang was vicar (mind you, there were a dozen curates in the parish at that stage), before becoming Vicar of Eastleigh and then a military chaplain. His war service was heroic as he won the MC for rescuing soldiers trapped in barbed wire, and after the Armistice was appointed the first chaplain of the RAF college at Cranwell. Presumably it was St Mark’s connections with first the RFC and then RAF that led to him moving there.

Frs Tugwell, Philips and Keymer all have the stamp of moderate High Church clergy, but I think it was their successors who took St Mark’s to the top of the candle. The next vicar after Mr Keymer was – take a deep breath – the Revd the Viscount Mountmorres. William Geoffrey Bouchard de Montmorency came from Irish aristocracy, and succeeded to his title unexpectedly in 1880 at the age of eight, after his father, the 5^th Viscount and a magistrate, was assassinated in the midst of the Irish Land Wars. Unlike the rest of the family William went to England for his education, firstly at the Anglo-Catholic Radley School and then Balliol. After graduating he travelled and became an expert in ‘tropical economics’, the tropics in question being mainly in central Africa. In 1904 Montmorency took part in an expedition to the Congo with the journalist Maurice Dorman and both wrote up their experiences, his Lordship in The Congo Independent State: a report on a journey of enquiry, and Mr Dorman in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State. The Viscount reported quite favourably of some at least of the people he met (the Bonjo and Dongo tribes, for instance, were ‘a splendid, intelligent, and fearless race’), but his journalist companion dedicated his book to the ruling Belgian authorities and devoted it to refuting reports of the Belgians’ ill-treatment of the natives – it is ‘distressing to read, showing a complete lack of sympathy with the Africans’, says the British Museum, to which Montmorency sold his collection of African artefacts in 1911. He’d also dabbled in politics, sitting as a Moderate Party (that is, Conservative) member of the London County Council for Tower Hamlets from 1894 to 1898, and finally in 1911 could be found lecturing in an Edinburgh cinema to accompany a film about the lives of the late Edward VII and George V: ‘he possesses the gift of vivid description’, reported The Scotsman, ‘and his running commentary on every depicted item … is not only happily phrased, but always interesting and instructive’. By then the Viscount had probably already decided to follow a clerical life: he went to Cuddesdon college and was ordained in 1913, serving his title at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, an advanced Catholic parish, before moving to Swinton in Lancashire as Rector in 1917 (he was also a Royal Navy Reserve chaplain). 1925 was the year he relocated to Farnborough, and remained for ten years, before leaving for St Paul’s, Wokingham, but he was only able to enjoy those grander surroundings for a year until he died. Despite two marriages Montmorency only had a single daughter, so on his death the titles passed to his cousin Arthur, the incumbent of St Modoc’s, Doune, in Scotland, who thus became the second ordained Viscount Mountmorres in a row. There’s an interesting character.

For William Montmorency’s last two years at St Mark’s, his curate was Cecil – or Charles, sometimes – de Lyons-Pike. Under normal Anglo-Catholic circumstances I would suspect him of having invented the double-barrelled name, but his father Charles, a Shropshire-born solicitor who practised in Bloomsbury, also used it so Cecil/Charles is not to blame. He began his professional life as a schoolmaster, eventually (after being rejected for military service) becoming head of Holland House School in Hove. One pupil at the time was the future author Patrick Hamilton who ‘remembered de Lyons-Pike as being a young, bespectacled man who was extremely High Church. On one occasion he shocked the school assembly by saying to a boy “You’re the one who called Walker’s cousin a damned bloody fool”. After he had doled out a thrashing, he commented “You didn’t expect me to repeat that, did you?”’ In 1922 de Lyons-Pike moved the school to Burgess Hill, renaming it St Peter’s Court, and left in 1927 apparently after deciding to be ordained. He attended the theological college at Ely and was deaconed in 1928. St Mark’s was his first appointment, where he moved smoothly from curate to vicar in 1935 after Fr Montmorency moved on. Fr de Lyons-Pike stayed until 1952 and I will tell you what happened to him next in a minute.

His successor was Francis Wheeler. Mr Wheeler was yet again a non-standard figure having been ordained in Accra in 1926, an outpost of the Anglican Church where anything other than Anglo-Catholics were thin on the ground. He was principal of St Augustine’s College at Kumasi, and served three English curacies at St Michael’s Shoreditch, Christ Church Woburn Square, and St Michael’s Paddington, before becoming priest in charge of Holy Trinity, Marlow, Vicar of East & West Hanney, and finally incumbent of Wheatley in 1944. Somewhat over 30 years before, Mr Wheeler’s predecessor there had been burned in effigy in his own garden after trying to introduce a Sung Eucharist to the parish church, so, for a priest who believed schoolchildren should be ‘taught to sing the Mass, starting with the Kyries and the Sanctus’, it might be wondered whether this Oxfordshire village was really the right place. According to the history of the Church in Wheatley (written in 2006, coincidentally, by John Prest who was my tutor at Balliol), Fr Wheeler certainly doesn’t seem to have been that happy. Having already written a book entitled Modernity (1929), which concluded that Modernity was generally to be regretted, his Primer of Pastoral Theology (1948) finds reason to denounce lipstick, the cinema, and jazz (‘negroid in origin’), and assumes that the modern clergyman’s work will largely be confined to a small and dwindling group of committed people: ‘the flock is far less biddable, far less disposed to listen obediently … The influence of the pulpit has waned until it has become practically negligible … You may stand at the door of the fold and call persuasively “The Bible says …”, “The Church teaches …”, but there will be little or no response from the majority. They have never been in the fold, they feel no need of its security, and as for the shepherd, he is superfluous’.

Mr Wheeler lists his pastoral, theological and devotional works in his entry in Crockford’s; he doesn’t mention his novels. These were a string of thrillers set before, during, and after the War with European conflict as the backdrop; the exception was the fourth, the supernatural chiller Unholy Alliance (1951), which included a depiction of a Black Mass so lurid the Vicar of Wheatley had to deny he’d actually been to one.

By 1952 Francis Wheeler had stuck it out in uncongenial Wheatley for eight years and decided on a move. He went to St Mark’s, and remained there for thirteen uneventful and, one hopes, less frustrating years. The good folk of the Oxfordshire parish found that their new priest was none other than Fr C.R. de Lyons-Pike, swapping livings with Mr Wheeler in what must have been one of the last arrangements of its kind. Perhaps Wheatley had become more accepting of Anglo-Catholics, or time had rubbed off some of Fr de Lyons-Pike’s sharp edges in the decades since Patrick Hamilton encountered him at Holland House School, but his six years there seemed rather happier than his predecessor’s time. At least, John Prest says, a widower when he arrived, he ‘lost no time in marrying his housekeeper’s daughter’.

Fr de Lyons-Pike is (I think) the figure on the left of this picture, and I suspect that’s Fr Montmorency in the middle – not sure of the chap on the right. That’s enough clergy!