Among the Archives

For the last several months I’ve become something of a weekly fixture at the History Centre in Woking, working through first wodges of service registers and more recently copies of Crockford’s to investigate the clergy who have served churches in the diocese at the Catholic end of the spectrum. I can’t find any indication that I’ve mentioned it here before, so I admit now how crushingly dull a lot of this has been. At the History Centre you can order up to ten documents from the stacks in advance, though you can request more once you’re there. Oh dear, I thought before I started, how restricting that will be, but I discovered that working through ten old service registers over the course of three hours or so was quite sufficient to exhaust and render me almost incapable of speech. I rarely saw a church in the middle of a transition from one way of doing things to another, though here and there you could tell when a new incumbent had brought a sudden change of direction. I found books where clergy doggedly recorded every time they said Morning or Evening Prayer, even when alone, and ones where they listed the times of services but not what they were. I found churches which helpfully recorded numbers at every service, but this was rare: most of the time, until priests became defensive about how many people were turning up (or weren’t), only totals of communicants were noted down. I discovered the odd rude remark scrawled in a margin by a frustrated incumbent. I recoiled from the aroma of mould and marvelled at teacup rings or mice nibblings.

Going through the lists of clergy uncovers a couple of very late exchanges of livings, some interesting connections between churches, and several clergy passing through the big mission parish of St Mary’s Portsea. Few of them go on from serving a Catholic parish in Surrey to anything more high-profile, but given the career structure of the Church of England this is no great surprise and you could probably say the same of any sample of incumbents. It’s very clear how the turn into the twentieth century leads to the increasing dominance of theological colleges in the training of curates: go back before WWI and it’s rarer and rarer for a priest to have been to one, and before 1900 it’s extremely uncommon. But I did find that Fr Lushington, who caused such ructions at Thorpe, had been trained at Sarum College in the 1870s; and, even more strikingly, Vincent Musgrave of Hascombe had attended Wells College as far back as 1853. That would have made him exceedingly unusual: there were only about 15 students at Wells then and none of the other colleges would have had many more in an age when there were far, far more clergy about. Gems, my beloveds, gems.