YMCA History Bourchier and Starmer

A totally preposterous parson . . .

A new study of Evelyn Waugh and the first vicar of St Jude's

A Totally Preposterous Parson: Evelyn Waugh and Basil Bourchier

Basil Bourchier was once one of the most famous clergymen in the Church of England, held in the highest esteem by the many hundreds who flocked from all parts of London to hear him preach, and the many more who followed his doings and opinions in the press.

In 1907 he was appointed the first vicar of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an experimental community in which the social classes would live together in attractive housing and semi-rural surroundings.  The parish inevitably attracted Bohemian and radically minded residents keen to campaign for and debate the issues of the day such as women’s suffrage, animal rights and spiritualism.  Bourchier played a leading part in these discussions and took them to a wider audience through his journalism, books and radio broadcasts.

At the beginning of the First World War he accompanied a women’s medical unit to Belgium where he was arrested and sentenced to death as a spy.  The last minute intervention of a German officer who had visited the Garden Suburb as part of a pre-war town-planning delegation brought about his reprieve.  

Bourchier would probably be forgotten today if it were not for a few lines in Evelyn Waugh’s A Little Learning in which he is ridiculed as “a totally preposterous parson”.  Waugh had been a regular worshipper at Bourchier’s church from shortly after it opened in 1910 and was confirmed there in 1916.  His father, Arthur, was a leading member of the congregation and its various committees, and became a friend and publisher of Bourchier.

By the time of A Little Learning (1964) Waugh had been a Roman Catholic for over thirty years and had long since come to think of the Church of England as an essentially ‘bogus’ institution. Bourchier himself had died in 1934 at the age of 53.

Biographers of Waugh invariably repeat the 1964 portrait as if it were an accurate account of Waugh’s youthful opinion of his vicar.  Alan Walker (the current vicar of Hampstead Garden Suburb) reconsiders Waugh’s statements in the light of the church’s records and suggests the author actually had a much warmer and more positive opinion of Bourchier – and indeed of the Church of England.  He corrects several errors and misunderstandings about Bourchier and his ministry, and goes on to look at the clergyman’s later career and final downfall.

Reviewed by Stephen James in the Suburb News Autumn 2016 No 128 page 7
http://www.hgs.org.uk/suburbnews/sn128/index.html

                                                                                             

Message in a bottle

A whisky bottle containing notes and other items left by the builders to mark the completion of the spire on 24 April 1913.  The bottle was discovered in the summer of 2017 during repair work.

Evelyn Waugh and Basil Bourchier

'A Totally Preposterous Parson'
Evelyn Waugh and the First Vicar of St Jude's
An illustrated talk by the Vicar
Fellowship House
Tuesday 16 June at 2.30

St Jude's and the Great War: the first few months

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On the evening of Tuesday 16th December 1913 the St Jude’s Young Men’s group held a debate in the parish club room at 13 North Square on the motion Germany contemplates war.  The Minister of the Free Church, the Reverend J. H. Rushbrooke, seconded the opposition, while the Vicar of St Jude’s, the Reverend Basil Bourchier, argued that the peace-loving women of Germany would never countenance war.   The vote was taken and the Chairman, Mr Alex Richards, of 5 Hurst Close, Churchwarden of St Jude’s, announced the overwhelming defeat of the motion: Germany does not contemplate war.

The St Jude’s Parish Paper of 7th August 1914 carried the one-word headline: WAR!  and continued, The direct challenge offered by Germany to Britain has been taken up and the declaration of war by this country has put an end to a tension which had become unbearable.

The previous June (1913) Bourchier had been appointed Chaplain to the 4^th (City of London) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, with the rank of Captain.  On the evening of Monday 17th August he was present at a meeting in the Club House, Willifield Green, held to bid farewell to a member of his congregation, Mabel St. Clair–Stobart, and her husband John Greenhalgh, of 7 Turner’s Wood, who were departing for the Belgian Front.  In the previous few days Mrs Stobart (as she liked to be known) had gathered an all-women team of twelve nurses, six doctors, and ten orderlies and an X-ray operator.  Mr Litchfield, one of the Co-Partners, handed over a cheque for £200, raised from residents of the Suburb and from a special collection of £36 collected at St Jude’s, in support of her work.  And then the vicar announced he was going with her.

Mabel St. Clair–Stobart was an extraordinary woman.  She was a feminist and suffragist who believed that wartime service would prove women’s worth and secure them the vote.  Already in 1907 she had founded the Women's Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps to serve between field and base hospitals.  When the British Red Cross refused the Corps's services in the First Balkan War in 1912 she went anyway, and with her all-woman unit set up a hospital in Thrace for the Bulgarian Red Cross.  It was only eighteen months previously, in January 1913, that she had been in the Club House for a meeting welcoming them back to the Suburb.

The Greenhalghs and Bourchier arrived in Brussels on the 19^th August, and set about transforming some rooms in the University into a first class hospital for the Allied wounded.  The following day they found themselves watching the German army making a triumphant entry into the city.  Their task now was to head off the rest of their team on its way from Ostend.  When informed that no safe conducts out of the city were being issued, Mrs Stobart decided to take her plea to the German commander now installed in the Hotel de Ville.  The officer who received her was married to an English woman, and after a few days the Suburb Three were given passes to the Dutch border. 

They passed through fifty miles of German-held territory but were then arrested at Hasselt on 26th August on the grounds that their permits, though correctly stamped, were not correctly signed.   It was suggested that the Vicar of St Jude’s was only disguised as a minister of religion, and that Mrs Stobart’s Kodak proved she was a spy. 

After being conveyed by train in a coal wagon to a neighbouring town, where they were held overnight in a verminous cell, they were sent to Aachen for trial.  They needed to be protected from a violent mob calling for the deaths of the accursed English as they were marched to imprisonment below ground in the town’s fortress. The Vicar’s cell was the size of a coffin, had no window and just a small plank-bed.  Mrs Stobart, who understood German, kept from him and her husband, the promise of a Devil-Major that they were to be shot at dawn.

But then a miracle occurred.  In his separate interrogation John Greenhalgh mentioned that he lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb.  The judge immediately showed interest, replied I was in England in June, and know Oxford and Hampstead Garden Suburb.   Do you know Mr Litchfield?  Why, yes, said Greenhalgh, he was my colleague in the housing scheme.  The attitude of the Germans changed, they were released on parole to a hotel where they invited the supervising officers to dine with them, and after a few days were back on their way to the border.

The Suburb Three arrived back on the Suburb on Monday 7 September.  The crowd gathering to welcome them and hear their reports the following week proved too big for the Institute Hall, and the meeting had to be moved to the Free Church, which was crowded to the doors.

Meanwhile at St Jude’s a Relief Committee had been formed which, it was immediately agreed, would cooperate with the General Committee for the Suburb, by raising a voluntary rate from the parish.  Prayers were offered for the Minister of the Free Church who had found himself in Germany when war was declared, still toiling, he said, on behalf of friendly relations between two nearly related nations, and [believing] that the Christian Faith was strong enough to overcome the suspicions and jealousies that make for war.

On 22 September the indefatigable Mrs Stobart set off again for the war zone to organize a hospital in Antwerp for the National Service League.  When the city surrendered, only two weeks later, she ensured all her wounded patients were safely evacuated before setting off on foot with her remaining workers.  As they were walking along a deserted highway, with the sound of shells screaming overhead, Mrs Stobart suddenly saw tearing towards me, at breakneck pace, three London motor buses – a dream-like touch of incongruity.  But I ran out into the road and, risking being run down, spread out my arms to stop them.  The buses conveyed them to the safety of the allied lines.

Meanwhile young men from the congregation were seeing their first action.

Captain G. K. Butt, son of Major George Butt of 4 Meadway, a former Churchwarden, serving with the 1st Lincolnshire Regiment, wrote to the Vicar: While I am writing shelling is going on, but not doing much damage as long as we stay under cover.  One feels like a rabbit – we leave our holes as soon as all is quiet.  Then whizz comes a shell, followed by a whole lot more, and away we scuttle into our holes again.  We are on a sandy hill, and it looks just like a rabbit-warren.

The mother of Lieutenant Russell Wilkinson, of 25 Coleridge Walk, serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps attached to the Second Middlesex Regiment, appealed for a box of comforts – mufflers, shirts, belts, mittens – for distribution among his sixteen stretcher bearers and the wounded.  He received two.

At home, Lieutenant Leslie Gamage, of East End Road, and the Reverend W. H. Baine, of 4 North Square, a teacher at Haberdashers’ School and assistant priest at St Jude’s, were instructing the thirty-two boys of the St Jude’s Sharpshooters League in drill and shooting.  Rifles and ammunition had been donated, and a firing range created in the Vicarage garden.  By Saturday 5 December the embryo soldiers were ready to hold their first public parade and receive badges to go with their uniforms of navy blue with brass buttons (five for each boy at 2d each). 

The hour was three o’clock, and the Central Square was all animation.  Hark! The tramp of the military is heard – left, right, left, right . . . Who approach?  Have the Huns arrived? Or is it Kitchener’s Army?  Quite plainly it is some particularly distinguished body of MEN (capital M please!).  Yes it is  - the St Jude-on-the-Hill Sharpshooters . . .

The end of the year found Mrs Stobart back on the continent at the Women’s Imperial Service Hospital at Chateau Tourlaville, near Cherbourg.  Third time lucky, she wrote.

A version of this article appeared in the Suburb News Summer 2014 (page 4).

Christian Vegetarianism

The first vicar, Basil Bourchier, was noted for his concern for animals - expressed for example in the memorial to the war horses in church. He also advocated 'Christian Vegetarianism' as this recent post on the archive of that name shows. You can read the post and enlarge the article here (where you will also find a link back to our own site).

Walter Starmer

This afternoon we welcomed the Kirkby family from Guildford on their first visit to St Jude's. Norman Kirkby, seen here with Kathy and their daughter Abigael, is the great nephew of Walter Starmer the painter of the murals in the church. The family have a considerable collection of works by Starmer including several of St Jude's that we had never seen before.

Photo by Richard Wakefield

They were also able to tell us many biographical details which were new to us, not least that the man we always call Walter Starmer was known to the family as 'Percy'. We were only aware of one photograph of the artist until today; now we can share several:

Starmer as the war artist who met the first vicar, Basil Bourchier, in France.

A young Starmer at work in St Jude's.

One of Starmer's later commissions at St Jude's was the west window in memory of Bourchier. Here is a coloured sketch of the window (note the word 'Inscription' for the presumably as yet undecided text). We have an uncoloured version with the text in the vestry.

The west end as it was for only a few months before the window was installed.

Starmer at work on the full size design for the window.

Starmer and Bourchier with the Bishop of Willesden and the Mayor of Westminster at St Anne's, Soho (where Bourchier was Rector after he left St Jude's in 1929). This window by Starmer was destroyed in the Second World war.

Three photographs showing Starmer at work on the restoration of the murals at the Chandos Mausoleum at St Lawrence Whitchurch (Little Stanmore).

And as President of the Watford Art Society.

All Starmer photographs courtesy of the Kirkby family.

Link to W P Starmer inventory

The High Altar Stone

The principal altar of a church, by tradition, contains a stone or 'slab' at its centre. In fact, the stone is the altar, the rest making up the altar-table, and it is the most sacred location in the church, being the place of "sacrifice and thanksgiving".

The 'slab' in the high altar of St Jude's has a fascinating history which was told at length in the St Jude's Gazette of December 1948 by the Reverend Sydenham Lindsay (and is reproduced below). In summary, it consists of two stones: the larger one was originally part of the altar steps of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Montreal, and the smaller one is from St Anne's Chapel in Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) the capital of French Acadia built (as a Roman Catholic chapel) in 1708 and, following the town's cession to the English in 1710, the site of the first Church of England service in Canada. The two stones are separated by an ancient piece of Egyptian cedar from the 19th Dynasty (over 1300 years before Christ).

The stone was used for the first time at St Jude's at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1911.

The slab is normally concealed beneath the altar cloths, only being exposed once a year from the 'stripping of the altar' on Maundy Thursday through Good Friday until the preparation for the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. If you would like to see it please ask the Vicar after the Good Friday Liturgy.

From the St Jude's Gazette of December 1948

The ALTAR-SLAB, which forms an embellishment of the High Altar in this Church of S. Jude-on-the-Hill, was the gift of " J.M.B." (John Munroe Black, who died on 17th November 1947, age 77), a Canadian friend of the Rev. B. G. Bourchier, MA. It was fashioned in September, 1911, and was blessed by the Right Rev. J. C. Farthing. D.D., Lord Bishop of Montreal, in the Church of S. James the Apostle, Montreal, on the Festival of S. Luke the Evangelist, 1911. On the following day (Oct. 19) the Rev. Sydenham B. Lindsay, B.A., another Canadian friend of the Rev. Mr. Bourchier and of S. Jude's, celebrated his First Communion upon it in the Church of S. John the Evangelist by courtesy of the Rector. It was in this church that Mr. Bourchier preached his first sermon on the Continent of America (Quinquagesima Sunday, 1909).

In connection with the blessing of the Slab, the following facts are worthy of being recorded:

The ceremony occurred on the 201st anniversary not only of the first Saint's Day observed by the Church of England on Canadian soil, but of the first Communion celebrated in Canada according to the Anglican Use; it occurred during the Coronation and Durbar Year of Their Gracious Majesties, King George V. and Queen Mary, and during the Jubilee Year of the Church of S. John the Evangelist, Montreal: it closely followed the public admission (Oct. 11) of Mr. Bourchier to the benefice of S. Jude-on-the-Hill; it took place in a church in which both Mr. Bourchier and his father have preached, and at an Altar on which the Bishop of London celebrated a Low Communion during his visit to Montreal in September, 1907. The Slab was carried to and from this Altar, respectively, by the Rev. Canon Ellegood, M.A. (the oldest priest of the Church of England in Canada, and the senior military chaplain of the British Empire), and by the Rev. Sydenham B. Lindsay, B.A. (the youngest priest in Canada; his ordination having just taken place). The act of blessing was witnessed by the rectors of the Churches of S. John the Evangelist, S. James the Apostle, and the Advent—in which edifices Mr. Bourchier preached during his visit to Montreal in 1909—and by the Ven. Archdeacon Norton, D.D., Rector of Montreal, in whose Cathedral Mr Bourchier witnessed the presentation of a Pastoral Staff to the Bishop of Montreal on Easter Even 1909.

The slab left Canada for England on October 27, 1911 (the Vigil of the Festival of Simon and Jude), and reached St Jude’s Vicarage on November 6 (the Festival of S. Leonard, patron saint of prisoners and captives, and a contemporary of St Augustine of Canterbury). On December 21, 1911 (the Festival of St Thomas) it was used by the Bishop of London at a Celebration in the Chapel of Fulham Palace. On Christmas Eve, 1911, it was placed in the High Altar of S. Jude's, and dedicated by the Right Rev. W. W. Perrin, Bishop of Willesden (formerly Bishop of Columbia, Canada). It was used for the first time (at St Jude’s) as a throne for the Divine Presence at a Solemn Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Day, 1911, the Rev. Mr Bourchier being celebrant.

The slab consists of two stones, the smaller, or darker in colour, forming the centre-piece of the larger, or lighter. The latter is of French origin, having been quarried in Caen about the middle of the nineteenth century. When the Anglican Cathedral of Christ Church at Montreal, Canada, was opened in the autumn of 1859, it formed a portion of one of the two steps at the Communion rail – a relationship which continued undisturbed for half a century, during which time the step was pressed by the knees of thousands of communicants from all parts of the world. In 1907 (the year in which the Bishop of London first visited Canada) a new pavement of coloured marble and jasper was laid throughout the chancel and choir of this pretty Gothic edifice, and the discarded steps and tiles passed into the possession of Mr Robert Reid, the contractor to whom had been entrusted the task of laying the new pavement. Through the courtesy of this gentleman, a section of the upper step was obtained, and out of this section the larger of the stones forming the Altar-Slab was fashioned. From its former lowly position at the foot of the Altar in the English Cathedral at Montreal it has, therefore, been exalted to the place of “sacrifice and thanksgiving” on the altar of the Church of S. Jude-0n-the-Hill – a meet reward, surely, for years of faithful and humble service in the worship of Almighty God.

In thus recording the history of the larger of the two stones forming the Slab, it may perhaps be fitting to add: The Rev. Edmund Wood, M.A., who was primarily responsible for the visit of the Rev. Mr. Bourchier to Montreal in 1909, began his work as a clergyman of the Canadian Church in the Cathedral from which the stone was taken. In 1860 (the year in which H.R.H. the Prince of Wales—afterwards King Edward VII.— visited Canada) he was deacon-in-charge of its Chapel-of-ease, then situated some nine or ten blocks away from the Cathedral. During his occupancy of this position it was his custom once a month to lead his communicants in solemn procession through the streets of Montreal from the Chapel to the Cathedral in order that he and they might receive from the hands of the Cathedral priests the most comfortable Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. In 1861 he founded and became rector of the Church of S. John the Evangelist. His translation from the Church Militant to the Church Expectant occurred on Sunday, September 26. 1909, the call to higher service reaching him suddenly and unexpectedly at the hour of the early Eucharist. Thus passed to his eternal rest this faithful and devoted priest of Holy Church, this holy and humble man of heart, this pioneer leader of the " Catholic Movement" in Canada, this " father " of surpliced choirs in the Canadian Church.

It is an interesting fact that the Altar-Slab was dedicated by the Bishop of Willesden on the 35th anniversary of the ordination of " Father " Wood's successor in the rectorate of S. John's Church.

The smaller stone was taken from the foundation of St. Anne's Chapel at Annapolis Royal, Canada—the Place of the Nativity of the Church of England in Canada, and the site of the oldest European settlement to the north of the Gulf of Mexico on the North American continent, the town having been founded by the Sieur de Monts, under the name of Port Royal, in 1604, as the capital of the French Province of Acadia. This Chapel was built within the walls of Fort Anne in 1708 by Subercase, who succeeded de Brouillan as Governor. For two years it was used as a Roman Catholic place of worship by the French garrison and the Acadian colonists. On October 9, 1710 (the year in which the top-stone of S. Paul's Cathedral, London, England, was laid), it fell into the hands of the victorious English, who held within its walls a service of thanksgiving for the success, against Subercase, of the arms of H.M. Queen Anne, through Colonel Nicholson. This was the first service held in Canada according to the rites of the Church of England. It took place soon after the French garrison had withdrawn from the Fort with all the honours of war. The Rev. John Harrison, Chaplain to Commodore Martin, of H.M.S. " Dragon," officiated, and the Rev. Samuel Hesker preached. In 1787 Annapolis Royal became a part of the first colonial bishopric of the Church of England -founded in that year under the name of "Nova Scotia." Until that year it had belonged to the jurisdiction of the Bishops of London. The smaller stone, therefore, was derived not only from the site of the oldest European settlement in North America and from the Chapel in which the Anglican liturgy was read for the first time in Canada, but from the most ancient colonial diocese of the Anglican Communion. To the Commissioners in charge of Fort Anne, as well as to the Rev. Harry How, B.A., B.D., Rector of S. Luke's Church at Annapolis Royal, and to Mr. A. S. Maynard, a member of S. John's Church, Montreal, the donor of the Altar-Slab is indebted for this historic stone. It was, in very truth, derived from the Bethlehem of the Church in Canada, even as the larger stone was derived from the land which witnessed the consecration of the first Archbishop of Canterbury, whose See, since its creation in 597, has held the same relative position with respect to English dioceses that the See of Nova Scotia has held since 1787 with respect to all the dioceses of the Anglican Communion in the British Dominions beyond the Seas, namely: first in point of establishment and antiquity.

Deposited between the stones is a small piece of cedar. This was derived from Egypt, the historic land which, in the days subsequent to the visit of the Magi to the Infant Christ, afforded an asylum to the Holy Babe, and His Blessed Mother, and protected Him from Herodian wrath and jealousy. This cedar dates from the XlXth Dynasty (1462-1288 B.C.) and is thought to be older than the Decalogue.

Annapolis Royal has had a most romantic history. It was there that the first field of wheat ever sown by the hand of a white man in all Canada was sown by L’Escarbot, a Parisian lawyer who accompanied Samuel de Champlain and Sieur de Monts to New France in the early days of the seventeenth century. During the bitter strife which subsequently sprang up between the between the French and English nations, and which continued for a period of 150 years, culminating at length in the cession of of Canada to Great Britain. Port Royal was the most assaulted place on the Continent. It was taken by force five times by the English; it was by them abandoned or restored to the French four times; it was unsuccessfully re-attacked by them three times; it was unsuccessfully attacked by the French and Indians twice; and it was taken, sacked and abandoned twice, once by pirates and once by the United States revolutionary forces. It was there, too, that the heart of de Brouillan was buried (‘near a cross where it was intended to build a chapel”), after his body had been consigned to the waters of the Atlantic in September 1705.

"No other spot in all this western world

So oft hath seen the battle-flag unfurled;

So often been the battling cannon’s targe;

So oft the scene of head-long battle charge;

So often heard the Indian war-hoop dread;

Or been by spoiler's ruthless hand bested;

So often borne in war's alternate chance

The flag of England and the flag of France."

By the achievement of Colonel Nicholson in 1710, Port Royal finally ceased to be a French possession Subercase surrendered after a short bombardment, and on October 10 the starving and ragged garrison of only 200 men marched out to be sent home to France. Before the sun had set on that memorable day – memorable alike to alike to England and to England’s ancient and Holy Catholic Church – the French flag had been lowered for the last time from Fort Anne, and Port Royal had become an English fortress.

Co-incident with the cession of Acadia to the British in 1713, the name of Port Royal was changed to Annapolis Royal in honour of Queen Anne, and the town became the seat of Government, a dignity which it retained until 1750. In that year the headquarters of the Government were transferred to the newly-founded City of Halifax, whither the holy silver vessels (royal gifts to the church) were removed for safe-keeping by order of General Lawrence.