Beasley’s Yard

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Nonconformists

When I was looking for background material for the post on Jackson & Walford, booksellers of St. Paul’s Churchyard, for my other blog, I found the Autobiography of William Walford which led me to Beasley’s Yard in Uxbridge.

The Autobiography was edited by John Stoughton and published in 1851 by Jackson & Walford. It takes the form of letters written by Walford senior to his friend Stoughton with the intent of having the letters collectively form a memoir of the reverend’s life. As I already said in the blog post on the booksellers, father William was not very good at details such as names or dates, so it is a bit of a haphazard process to distill his life story from the book, but what I am most interested in for the purpose of this post, is his connection to Beasley’s Yard.

The reverend says in one of his letters that he moved from Hackney to Uxbridge “about the time of the publication of this work”. “This work” is his new translation of the Book of Psalms as – in his view at least – the so-called ‘Authorized Version’ was badly translated and could be improved upon. Walford’s edition of the psalms was published in 1837 by Jackson & Walford, so the move to Uxbridge probably took place in 1837 or 1838. Walford senior had already been acquainted with the Congregational community in Uxbridge for quite some time before his move as he “was in the habit of going almost every week to Uxbridge to officiate in a congregation, the minister of which, a relation of my wife, was advanced in years, and lived but a short time after my visits to assist him were first made”.

portrait of William Walford from his Autobiography

After the death of the old minister, Walford continued to travel to Uxbridge, until an illness prevented him from doing so. In the years that he suffered from ill-health, the congregation was first served by a friend of Walford and later by a former pupil, but when the latter left for Birmingham, Walford’s health had improved enough for him to take up his duties again. He moved to Uxbridge “as the congregation was not large, [he] thought the discharge of the duties which it involved would not be oppressive”. His house stood “on Uxbridge Common, moderately elevated, and commands, on the eastern front, the hills of Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead, with several others; and on the west, the vicinity of Windsor, sufficiently near to see the Royal Standard, which waves with the breeze, when the Court is at the Castle”. Uxbridge Town was less than half a mile away from his house and as London could be reached in two hours, the reverend was quite pleased with his new abode.

These days, Uxbridge can be reached in less than half the time it took Walford, so one day I went by Underground to have a look at what was left of the meeting house where he had officiated. The building is situated just off the High Street in Beasley’s Yard, named after Thomas Ebenezer Beasley, the minister of the church from 1790 to 1824.⁽¹⁾ Walford does not mention the name of the minister whose duties he took over, but it could well have been Beasley. The Old Meeting Congregational Church is said to have been founded in the 1660s, but meetings were held in the homes of members until 1716 when their first meeting house was erected.

The 1716 building from The History of the Ancient Town and Borough of Uxbridge by G. Redford and T.H. Riches (1818)

Portrait of Thomas Ebenezer Beasley (Source: British Museum)

To the right of the tower, next to the windows on the present-day building, a few tiles forming the year 1883 can be seen and a plaque on the tower itself gives both the original year of 1716 and the year of the extension and rebuilding of 1883. The west wall was rebuilt, the three remaining 18th-century walls were raised to support a new roof, and a small square tower and vestry were added for a total sum of nearly £1,300.⁽²⁾ The windows are fitted with stained glass in a simple style, befitting the Congregational tenets.

The congregation was never very large and in 1962 it merged with the Providence Congregational Church to form the Uxbridge United Church and in 1972, the Congregational and Methodist churches amalgamated into Christ Church and the building in Beasley’s Yard was no longer needed as a church, but is now used for community purposes and has been renamed Watts Hall, in honour of Isaac Watts, the hymn writer.
When I visited the yard, there was no one around to ask if there was any possibility of looking inside, so the pictures from the outside will have to do, but you can see some inside pictures here.

William Walford’s Autobiography can be read online here.
A 1960 photograph of the yard can be found here.

(1) http://www.eddiethecomputer.co.uk/history/galli.htm.
(2) A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 4 (1971).

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Watts Chapel

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Postman's Park

Although this blog is about London Details, this photographic post makes an excursion to Compton, near Guildford, in Surrey where the Watts Mortuary Chapel can be found. The chapel is also known as the Watts Cemetery Chapel and can be found close to Watts Gallery. The first part of the name, Watts, may give you clue why I am including a Surrey chapel in this blog as George Frederic Watts, painter and sculptor, was the brain behind the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice in Postman’s Park. Although Watts already conceived the idea of such a memorial in 1887, it took so long to materialise that only four plaques had been installed in the memorial wall in the park before Watts’ death in 1904. His widow, Mary Seton Fraser Tytler, continued the project, as she was to do with the chapel in Compton.

Mary Watts was the artistic force behind the chapel, but her husband paid for it and presented it to the village of Compton. Lots of villagers were involved in shaping and decorating the chapel with Mary Watts teaching them how to make the terracotta tiles as well as guiding them in decorating the interior in the Arts & Crafts style mixed with Celtic influences. And it is true what Richard Jefferies, former curator of Watts Gallery, says, that nothing prepares you for the shock of seeing the interior, even after having been astounded by the outside (for link see bottom of post). Both George Frederic and Mary are buried in the cemetery behind the chapel. The chapel is now a Grade I listed building and the cemetery itself is Grade II.⁽¹⁾ Unfortunately the inside is rather dark and no match for my small camera, but I hope I can give you at least a faint impression of what there is to see in this amazing building.

Links
Lots has been written about the chapel, but you may like to start with these:
London Historians visited Watts Gallery and you can read their posts on the visit here. You can watch the short introduction to the chapel by Watts Gallery here, or the slightly longer explanation, Mary Watts & The Watts Chapel by Richard Jefferies here. Or simply go to the Watts Gallery website for more information.

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(1) Historic England, Listed building 1029541; and Historic England, Register of Parks and Gardens.

St. Mary’s clock tower

Tags

parc

The area of the Elephant and Castle Roundabout is probably the last place in London you would go to for a relaxing walk, but perhaps you should reconsider. A little to the south of the shopping centre on the A3, on the opposite side of the road, a small green space can be found called St. Mary’s Churchyard. And yes, it did once belong to a real church, St. Mary’s, Newington Butts, but the church is no longer there as it has been moved to Kennington Park Road (website here).

The history of the church officially starts in the fourteenth century when it is mentioned in a medieval document, but it may be a lot older as there is a church mentioned in the Doomsday Book that may or may not refer to the site of St. Mary’s. The lands around it had belonged to the Manor of Walworth, but the area changed its name to Newington, possibly because of the new houses, or ‘New Town’ that had sprung up on the edge of Walworth. According to John Noorthouck, it “is thought to receive the addition of Butts from the exercise of shooting at butts formerly practised here, and in other parts of the kingdom, to train the young men to archery”, although he does concede that it perhaps derived from the Butts family of Norfolk who had an estate in the area.⁽¹⁾

Horwood 1799 map

According to John Stow, in 1715 the church showed “a sudden rupture in the wall, which put the Congregation, then assembled, into such a general consternation that they all ran out, and many in making their escape, were bruised and trodden under foot, and received great hurt”.⁽²⁾ An investigation was launched and the structure was found “so much decayed in the pillars, walls and beams, and in the roof and foundation” that it was deemed unsafe and not worth the money repairing. The main part of the church was demolished in 1720, leaving just the clock tower standing. A new church, incorporating the old clock tower, was speedily built and opened in March 1721 and enlarged in 1793.

The church in 1866 (Source: Old and New London, vol. 6)

The Newington Butts Road became busier and busier and as the church stood so close to the road, it was considered a public danger. In 1876, the church was demolished and a new one built in Kennington Park Road. The old churchyard became a public garden and a year later, on the site of the old church, a new clock tower was erected which is described by Edward Walford:

This tower is fourteen feet square at the base, and carried up in five stages with buttresses to a height of about a hundred feet. The clock-face is placed at the height of seventy feet. In the lower part of the building the material is Portland stone, the remainder being of Bath stone, and the front to Newington Butts, as well as the two sides, is enriched with carvings in florid Gothic. There is a doorway in the centre of the front, with windows in the upper part. On the left side of the doorway is the following inscription: This tower was built at the expense of Robert Faulconer, Esq., Anno Domini 1877, on the site of the old parish church of St. Mary’s, Newington.⁽³⁾

1893 Ordnance Survey map showing the position of the clock tower

ILN, 6 April 1878

A newspaper report elaborated on Walford’s last remark. According to the Illustrated London News, the new tower had “at the sides of the doorway two handsome panels, filled with polished red granite, on which is the following inscription in engraved and gilded letters: – ‘This clock tower, erected A.D. 1877 by R.S. Faulconer, Esq. formerly a churchwarden of the parish of St. Mary, Newington, probably marks the site of the Saxon church mentioned in the Doomsday Book in connection with Walworth, as it certainly does that of several churches which have been built in succession upon it. The last church upon this site was erected in 1793, and was removed under the authority of an Act of Parliament in 1876, in which year on May 1, the new mother church of St. Mary, Newington, in the Kennington Park-road, was consecrated'”. Now, compare this text with the text on the plaques lying in the plant border near the fence to mark the spot where the tower stood and you will see that the newspaper journalist was not a hundred per cent word perfect, but near enough to make me think we are talking about the same panels. Did they remove them from the clock tower in 1971 when it was demolished after having been a local landmark for almost a hundred years? Or are the ones you see in the churchyard new copies? Granite is a hardy material that can easily survive the century and a half since the tower was first erected and a bit of new gilding will do wonders. Whether original or copy, it is nice to know that a small park on a busy road has a solid connection with the past. The churchyard itself was re-landscaped in 2007 and the restored 1876 railings form a sturdy barrier between a very pleasant green retreat and the hustle and bustle of the Elephant and Castle junction.

(1) J. Noorthouck, A New History of London, including Westminster and Southwark, 1773, p. 691.
(2) J. Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, Borough of Southwark, and Parts Adjacent, ed. R. Seymour, 1735, volume 2, p. 810.
(3) E. Walford, Old and New London, 1878, volume 6, p. 264.

You can read more on the history of the churchyard on the London Gardens Online website here.

Green oasis 2 – St. Dunstan’s

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horticulture

When looking for a quiet spot to eat my lunch one Saturday morning in November, I decided on St. Dunstan’s in the East. The whole half hour I was there, I was the only soul wandering around. During the week, and especially during lunch hour, it is a different matter, but that day, St. Dunstan’s proved to be one of those unexpected islands in the middle of London where time seems to have stood still. Not true of course, busy Lower Thames Street is close by and hoards of tourists mill around the Tower just a few minutes away from this green oasis on St. Dunstan’s Hill.

The church was originally built in about 1100 with a new south aisle added in 1391. The church was severely damaged in the Great Fire of London, but rather than being rebuilt, as many of the City churches were, St. Dunstan’s was repaired. A steeple, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was added thirty years later. In 1817 it was decided to rebuild the church from scratch as the weight of the roof had thrust the walls out and the building was becoming unstable. The new design, retaining Wren’s tower, was by William Tite and David Laing, the architect to the Board of Customs. The church was severely damaged in the Blitz with just the north and south walls remaining, but Wren’s tower and steeple miraculously survived. The church was not rebuilt, but left to stand as it was. The ruin is now a Grade I listed building.⁽¹⁾

The City of London Corporation decided to turn the ruins of the church into a public garden. It opened in 1971 (you can see the year on the rainwater head) and we can now all enjoy its tranquil green space, but not all the planting is from the 70s. The fig tree against one of the walls (bottom picture) has its own plaque, describing it as the tree planted in 1937 to commemorate the coronation of George VI, so it must have survived the Blitz and everything else history and the elements decided to throw at it.

Rather than telling you lots more about the history of the building – and there is lots more – I leave you with some of my pictures. After all, this post is about a green space, not about the building.

Looking for a another green space to get away from the hustle and bustle of London? Have a look here.

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Most of the information in this post was derived from the Wikipedia article on the church, see here. If you want to see more pictures, have a look at The Secret Garden Atlas here.

(1) English Heritage ID 199522 (see here).

The Weeping Monument of Edward Cooke

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Cromwell, Ireland, medicine, St. Bartholomew-the-Great

Many tourists have walked past the grand porch of St. Bartholomew-the-Great on the corner of West Smithfield and Little Britain, perhaps on their way to the Victorian pile of Smithfield market, but very few tourists take the trouble to go through the arch, along the path and into the church. What now appears to be a separate porch used to be the west front of the actual church. The church itself was part of the monastery of the Augustinian Canons and much larger than it is today, but in 1539, the nave was destroyed as the result of Henry VIII’s Dissolution. The rest of the church was allowed to remain as a parish church and what is now the path from the porch to the church door used to be – roughly – the south aisle of the nave.

Once inside, the hustle and bustle of the street is no longer to be heard and one can pretend to be back in 1652 when the stone monument for Edward Cooke was erected. It is attributed to Thomas Burman (1617/18–1674)⁽¹⁾ and known as the ‘weeping statue’, because the moisture in the atmosphere used to be soaked up by the soft marble and miraculously released again as ‘tears’ from time to time. Alas, the Victorians installed a radiator under the monument which put a stop to the moisture releasing properties of the stone, so no more miracle.
Under the effigy is a tablet with the text:

Hic inhvmatvm svccvbat, qvantvm terrestre: viri
Vere venerandi, Edwardi Cooke Philosophi
Apprime docti nec non Medici spectatissimi
Qvi tertio Idvs Avgvsti Anno Dom. 1652.
Annoq[ue] ætatis 39, certa resvrgendi spe
(vtinecesse) natvræ concessit.

Or in English: Here lies interred all that is mortal of a truly reverend man, Edward Cooke, an exceedingly learned Philosopher as well as a very notable man of medicine, who, on the third of the ides [the 11th] of August A.D. 1652, and in the 39th year of his age, yielded perforce to nature in the sure hope of a resurrection.⁽²⁾
A second text on the plaque refers to the weeping nature of the stone:

Vnsluce yo^r briny floods, what can yee keepe
Yo^r eyes from teares, & see the marble weepe
Burst out for shame: or if yee find noe vent
For teares, yet stay, and see the stones relent.

Edward Cooke

Despite the fact that Edward died relatively young at 39 years of age, he had amassed a reasonable amount of property. He had lands in Lincolnshire which were given to him by his father-in-law Timothy Wade at the time of his marriage.⁽³⁾ The combined coats of arms of the Cooke and Wade families can be seen under the tablet referring to the statue’s moisture properties. Edward owned a property in Lime Street, presumably that was were he lived, and he had property in Friday Street which was rented out.
He also had shares in ‘bills of Ireland’, a scheme put forward by the Cromwellian Parliament to anglicize Ireland in order to control the stubborn Irish who did not want to accept English rule. Every person who contributed to the scheme was to receive land, estates or manors according to their contribution, or ‘adventure’ as it was also called. The subscription began in 1642, but it took till 1653 for the lands to be given out, so Edward Cooke never reaped the rewards himself. He had inherited his shares from his father, also Edward, an apothecary who died in 1644, and from his brother John, who died later that same year.⁽⁴⁾ Edward Cooke senior also invested in the Massachusetts Company and even sent his other son Robert, whom he had trained to be an apothecary, across the Atlantic. Edward senior had invested 100 pounds for which Robert was given the right to 800 acres of land in the new colony.⁽⁵⁾

Edward was baptised on 14 November 1613 at St. Dionis Backchurch, and became, as the monument in St. Barts already states, a medical man, consistently described as ‘Doctor of Physick’ in the parish registers. J. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922) lists him as entering Sidney College, Cambridge at the age of 17 on 22 Oct. 1630. He received his M.A. in 1638 and his M.D. in 1644. In between his M.A. and his M.D., he went abroad – not unusual for well-to-do Englishmen – to broaden his experience and to study at other European universities. We find Edward at Leyden registering himself on the 1st of June, 1639 and at Padua in October 1641.⁽⁶⁾

Edward died the 11th of August 1652 and was buried at St. Barts on the 14th; he left a wife and two children. He had married Mary Wade on 9 December 1645 at St. Helen Bishopsgate and four sons were born during the marriage, but two died young.⁽⁷⁾ Edward left most of his wealth to his wife and on her death to his sons, first to Edward and if he should die before his wife, to Robert.

(1) http://www.churchmonumentssociety.org and A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851 (http://217.204.55.158/henrymoore/index.php)
(2) ‘Monuments, memorials and heraldry’, The records of St. Bartholomew’s priory [and] St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield: volume 2 (1921), pp. 449-487.
(3) PROB 11/224/348.
(4) John Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1870) and John Pentland Mahaffey, Irish State Papers 1641 to 1659, vol. 4 (1903).
(5) Letters of 1638 and 1649 from Edward Cooke to John Wintrop in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863, p. 381-384.
(6) Album studiosorum Academiae Lugduno Batavae MDLXXV-MDCCCLXXV, compiled by W.N. Du Rieu, 1875 and www.rcpe.ac.uk/library/read/people/english-students/
(7) Baptism and burial register of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate: baptised 23 Oct. 1646 Edward (buried 21 Nov. 1646); baptised 16 Nov. 1647 Edward; baptised 19 Feb. 1650 Timothy (buried 12 Aug. 1650); also mentioned in the will is a son Robert, but I have not found a record of his baptism.