PASSING THE THATCHER TEST

The death of Margaret Thatcher on 8 April has dominated the consciousness of Britain for the last two weeks. The comprehensive assessment of her achievements and legacy I leave to our eminent historians and politicians. Like thousands of others, last Wednesday I was a mere face in the crowd on Fleet Street as her coffin was borne solemnly to St Paul’s with its military escort and the band playing. We clapped in respectful appreciation, clear that we were witnessing an historic occasion, the departure of a remarkable person, a great leader, in many respects a revolutionary. The magnificent funeral at St Pauls seemed to me to be an entirely appropriate way to say farewell to our Iron Lady.

Margaret Thatcher honoured at St Paul's

Her career was of course controversial and while I am a great admirer some perfectly sensible people think otherwise. Please forget the malcontents who disgraced themselves in Glasgow, Easington and South Yorkshire by celebrating her demise: they belong to a reactionary and immobile tradition, given disproportionate air-time by the sad BBC whose own moral compass has long gone awry. The great majority of British people of all parties acknowledged her historic political dominance.

Margaret Thatcher always appreciated the power of ideas. She was driven by the Puritan Methodist values of Frugality, the Work Ethic and Self-Help; she was convinced to espouse Sound Money and Limits to State Influence; she approved of Nationalism and the Rule of Law. These were some of her principles. She left public life 23 years ago and we might do worse than measure our present and future policies on the pressing issues of the day by the extent they would pass the Thatcher Test.

Let us look at Europe, the Economy, Education and Welfare Benefits. Every day that passes our relationship with Europe deteriorates. We recoil with horror at the ludicrous and brutal squeeze imposed on the admittedly feckless Southern European countries within the disastrous Eurozone. Britain is not a Eurozone member but Brussels and the German-dominated Northern bloc keep up a chorus of hostility to British tax practices, British Banks, the City and British criticism of Euro-extravagance. As I have long maintained, Britain and Europe are incompatible bed-fellows. Charles de Gaulle had “a certain idea” of France and when he vetoed UK accession to the EEC in 1963 he set out his “certain idea” of Britain – and he knew us better than we knew ourselves: After describing the close-knit, like-minded continental consensus in the Six, he compared it with Britain

England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.
In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals.

Mrs Thatcher warned against closer unity in her Bruges speech. She would not have tolerated the current drift and would have had many a swipe at the Europhile Foreign Office. We do not live, think, do business or govern ourselves like other Europeans. Let Cameron negotiate a new relationship if he can and hold a referendum. Let there be no fudge. If the outcome is not satisfactory Britain should set herself free from European entanglements.

The management of the economy is a very thorny current issue. A policy of austerity has been pursued since 2008, coupled with the rescue of two major banks and the provision of liquidity to City markets by the Bank of England. George Osborne has been criticised for not changing course after the agonisingly long wait for recovery. We can be sure that the “Lady who was not for turning” would urge no change this time round either. She would have been concerned that endless QE was inflationary and, while she may not have approved their rescue in the first place, she would warmly advocate the distribution of shares in RBS and HBOS on easy terms to the hard-pressed British taxpayer.

A tearful George Osborne at the Funeral

Education has become an increasingly central issue. The Education Secretary Michael Gove is an energetic reformer proposing changes in the curriculum, raising exam standards, building new schools more quickly and promoting the study of factual history. Most recently he has suggested that the annual terms should be lengthened and the school day made longer to enable Britain to compete globally. In all this he has been opposed by the militant teachers’ unions, an entrenched vested interest, the enemies of change, protectors of teachers’ privileges and indifferent to the fate of their pupils.

Michael Gove grasps the Nettles

Mrs Thatcher herself was an unremarkable Secretary for Education but she would have warmed to the articulate Gove’s programme, the emphasis on hard work and the rescue of wasted young national talent. She would have battled against obstructive unions, especially when long-term national issues were at stake.

Finally we come to Welfare Benefits. A good start has been made in rationalising the benefit system largely driven by Iain Duncan Smith, heir to and ally of Frank Field. It is an insult and affront to the working population to see large amounts of state payments supporting parasitical life-styles. Labour often denies or ignores the existence of a growing under-class of welfare “scroungers” but it does exist and the recent extreme case of father of 17 children and murderer Mick Philpott proves the point. Reduction in the Welfare budget is unlikely and maybe undesirable but it needs to be tightly managed and controlled.

Mrs Thatcher deplored a Dependency Culture: she wanted to help those in real need, the aged and the disabled and to help get the unemployed back in work. Work raises the morale and self-respect of the individual. This was a principle of Thatcherism. Her influence will live on and Passing the Thatcher Test may become a template for the future.

SMD
21.04.2013
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

MARGARET THATCHER; AN APPRECIATION

The finest Prime Minister of Britain since the War and perhaps the finest peacetime Prime Minister in our history has just died.

Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Roberts in 1925, the younger of two daughters of Alderman Albert Roberts, who ran two small grocer’s shops in the historic town of Grantham in Lincolnshire. Alderman Roberts was a pillar of the community, serving as Mayor in 1945-6 and becoming a Methodist lay preacher. He imbued into her his old-fashioned (laissez-faire) Liberal ideals and the virtues of self-help.

Margaret shone at her local school, Grantham Girls’, and won a place reading Chemistry at the then all-woman Somerville College, Oxford. She latterly specialised in X-ray crystallography graduating in 1947. She had been president of the University Conservative Association and was an admirer of the writings of economic liberal Friedrich Hayek. She worked as an industrial chemist and stood unsuccessfully in the Tory cause in the 1950 and 1951 elections. In 1951 she met and married Denis Thatcher (his second marriage) and they had two children in the 1950s, Mark and Carol. Margaret moved to the Anglican Church. Denis had become a wealthy businessman selling his paint company and being appointed a director of Castrol and then Burmah Oil. Margaret decided to read for the Bar and qualified as a barrister, specialising in taxation, in 1953. Denis was to prove an irreplaceable supporter throughout her career.

A young Margaret Thatcher

Mrs Thatcher finally entered Parliament as member for Finchley in 1959. She joined the Conservative front bench in 1961 under MacMillan as a junior minister and held a succession of shadow ministerial posts in opposition from 1964 to 1970. She was not a particularly prominent figure but she joined Edward Heath’s cabinet as Secretary of Education from 1970 until the Tories lost office in 1974. She came to public notice when she ended free school milk for primary children being dubbed by Labour “Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk-Snatcher!”

But Thatcher was about to experience a political conversion. The Conservatives were totally disillusioned with Heath whose economic policies had utterly failed. Thatcher had heard a speech on monetarism from Enoch Powell, the brilliant maverick Tory intellectual and former Treasury minister. She began to see there was another way than the Keynesian demand management consensus and she expressed her views accordingly. Heath had to stand for re-election as Tory party leader in 1975 and Thatcher stood against him, more prominent Tories declining to do so. To general surprise, Thatcher first defeated Heath and then Whitelaw in a second ballot and became Leader of the Opposition facing Wilson and then Callaghan. In opposition Thatcher found inspiration in discussions with deep-thinking cabinet colleague Sir Keith Joseph and with Ralph Harris’ Institute of Economic Affairs; she also absorbed the proposals of the free-market apostle US’s Milton Friedman.

Enoch Powell

                

Sir Keith joseph

                                       

When Callaghan lost a vote of confidence in Parliament in 1979 and the subsequent election, the Conservatives were thus well prepared intellectually for office. Mrs Thatcher was the first woman Prime Minister in British history and her 11 continuous years in this position made her the longest-serving Premier of the 20^th century.

Margaret Thatcher enters Downing Street with Denis 4 May 1979

The Thatcher era went off with a bang. The Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe’s first act was to abolish exchange controls – a strong signal that regulation was to be reduced – and floating sterling held up perfectly well. A savage squeeze of the money supply, intending to tame inflation, followed. Interest rates rose, vulnerable companies failed and unemployment rose sharply. There was party pressure for a policy U-turn but Mrs Thatcher’s response to the 1980 Tory party conference was uncompromising “You turn if you like. The Lady’s not for turning” Her government went through a tough spell but by 1982 the UK economy was performing much better, though unemployment stayed at 3million.

Then in April 1982 Argentina seized the Falklands, not expecting much British resistance. It reckoned without Mrs Thatcher. Despite hostility from Spain, Italy and Belgium, silence from Germany and duplicity from France, the inevitable innate enmity of the United Nations and pussy-footing from Haig’s US State department, Mrs Thatcher decided to fight and sent a naval task force. She had earned the friendship of US President Ronald Reagan and he and his Defence Secretary Casper Weinberger gave vital material and intelligence assistance. After a hard campaign, and much to the credit of the UK forces, the Argentines surrendered in June 1982 and the islands were liberated. This was a defining moment for Mrs Thatcher. She was hailed as cool under pressure and the patriotic “Falklands factor” helped her easily to win the 1983 election against shambolic, loony-leftist Labour leader Michael Foot.

Mrs Thatcher re-elected in June 1983

Mrs Thatcher inherited a group of senior Tories many of whom were by no means in tune with her aspirations and policies. They came to be called “The Wets” and after many a reshuffle, they all fell away. Prominent among them were Ian Gilmour, Norman St. John-Stevas, Francis Pym, Jim Prior and the combative Michael Heseltine, all intelligent and capable men but not keepers of the Thatcherite flame.

“Thatcherism” in the words of Nigel Lawson meant “Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values' (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism”

Her programme was very ambitious but Thatcher was a conviction politician who did not brook much obstruction. Her ethos revolved round work and she lectured a glowering Edinburgh General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988 with her Sermon on the Mound quoting St Paul “If a man will not work, he shall not eat”. She was not heartless, as her enemies claimed but she deplored welfare dependency. She viewed poverty as a misfortune, which government should do what it could to alleviate, not as a badge of honour deserving special rights or privileges. She did not believe government should bail-out failing enterprises and watched several such go to the wall. When people in the North complained, she briskly dismissed them as “Moaning Minnies”.

She saw that Britain had suffered grievously from irresponsible trades union power. The laws on the closed shop and secondary picketing were strengthened and financial penalties for breaches of the law increased. She prepared carefully for a clash with the miners which duly came with a bitter 12 month strike in 1984. The strike failed, the NUM was effectively destroyed and the union movement weakened. Britain’s strike record hugely improved thereafter. It was the most significant event of Mrs Thatcher’s second ministry.

                

W£illie Whitelaw

Norman Tebbitt

                

Mrs Thatcher liked to work in a small team of close colleagues. She leant heavily on patrician Willie Whitelaw, a former Home Secretary, a man of sound judgement and able to dispense moderating advice to her. He chaired many cabinet committees and exercised his charm to keep recalcitrant backbenchers on tune. Ill health forced his resignation in 1988, a major blow to her government. “Everyone needs a Willie” she quipped.

More committed and a Thatcher loyalist to the very end was Norman Tebbitt, of working class origin and epitomising “Essex Man”. Tebbitt held various portfolios including Secretary for Employment. After town centre riots in 1981, Tebbitt mused:

I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking 'til he found it. 

 This very reasonable remark was twisted by the media to mean that Tebbitt had told the unemployed to get “on yer bike” but he had not. However the Thatcherite value of Self-Help was invoked. Tebbitt was a tough political street-fighter, close to Mrs Thatcher, and a good man to have on your side. He reduced his workload to look after his wife, permanently disabled by the IRA Brighton bomb.

Mrs Thatcher faced physical dangers too. An Irish terrorist bomb nearly killed her (5 others died) at her Brighton hotel in 1984. Her close aide and Colditz escaper Airey Neave was murdered by the INLA in 1979 and her loyal and talented PPS Ian Gow was killed by an Irish terrorist car bomb in 1990. She did not deviate from her firm but conciliatory policy on Ulster, winning national support.

Above all, Mrs Thatcher was a liberator. To give many working people a first step on the property ladder she had a highly popular policy of selling council houses. Many key public corporations were successfully privatised: water, British Telecom, gas, BP, the airports. The arcane City system of jobbers and brokers was swept away by “Big Bang” in 1986. The nonsense of Labour’s 83% (98% on “unearned” income) marginal tax rate was drastically reduced to a top rate of 40% by Thatcher’s most capable Chancellor, Nigel Lawson. After 35 years of feeble economic performance, Mrs Thatcher ushered in a period of sustained UK prosperity.

The marked improvement in living standards for those in work earned Mrs Thatcher a 3^rd election victory in 1987, only losing 21 seats and retaining a comfortable majority. Enoch Powell once said that “All political lives end in failure” and Mrs Thatcher’s was entering its final phase.

Europe became a central concern. She had long been a doughty opponent of Brussels’ interference and extravagance: its fat-cat bureaucrats offended every fibre in her body and she regularly worked over Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand at EU gatherings. But the UK was often isolated and the Tory party was split between the euro-sceptic and euro-enthusiast factions. In a prescient speech in Bruges in 1988 she argued against federalism and centralisation in Europe: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. She was a voice crying in the wilderness and Brussels charged on to its disastrous Eurozone project.

She made mistakes; her reform of local government finance via the Community Charge (aka “poll-tax) galvanised the opposition and riots ensued. Many Scots, highly dependent on state spending and welfare, long hated her and deserted the Tories for the absurd nationalist fantasies of the SNP.  Her implacable self-belief alienated first Nigel Lawson and then fatally Geoffrey Howe. Her leadership was challenged by Michael Heseltine in 1990 and she did not achieve the required margin of victory in the first ballot .Tearfully she resigned; it was time for her to go. She accepted a life peerage and Denis was created a hereditary baronet.

But what a legacy she left! Her economic reforms changed the landscape of British politics and no attempt was made to reverse them. The Thatcher prosperity continued throughout the Major and Blair eras. Blair said “We are all Thatcherites now”. Her influence remains in the US and Europe fears her still.

Sadly beset by Alzheimer’s, she died at the age of 87. It has been ordained that she will be accorded a funeral at St Paul’s with full military honours. It is hugely deserved and I hope some latter-day Tiepolo paints The Apotheosis of Blessed Margaret, trailing blue clouds of glory and escorted by smiling cherubs. We can be sure that she will brook no delay at the Pearly Gates and if necessary firmly put St Peter’s hat straight.

      Lady Thatcher

PS The painting (a Rubens pastiche by Ben Moore) now exists!

Blessed Margaret in Glory

SMD

8.04.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

SOMETHING FISHY

Compared to many other countries, Britain does not have truly extensive fauna of mammals, insects, reptiles or birds but the waters surrounding her are rich in the most delicious fish and sea creatures. The other animal kingdoms can be a pest, just think of moles, midges, snakes and crows while fish are generally inoffensive, with the possible exception of sharks and piranhas, not much seen in British waters.

I was brought up in the leading Scottish fishing port of Aberdeen although since the advent of North Sea Oil that honour has now passed to Peterhead. The fish market abounded with the riches of the North Sea and the North Atlantic - mainly whitefish like cod, lemon sole and haddock, but also magnificent halibut and the once ubiquitous herring. We ate fish constantly – my dear Mother fried lemon sole to delicate perfection and toothsome halibut steaks were a special treat.

The Old Aberdeen Fish market

My own tastes were and remain more plebeian. I adore fish and chips, that staple of British life, and will usually prefer haddock over cod. The haddock is so tasty and versatile, a prince among fish, crisply fried through to its scrumptious white flesh (tartar sauce a must) but also used for milky Arbroath smokies, startling omelette Arnold Bennett and that wonderful Scots fish soup Cullen Skink.

Haddock, a Prince of Fish

Herring have been sadly over-fished and are much less eaten fresh in oatmeal than once they were: but in their smoked form as kippers they hugely enhance any breakfast, just the thing to send strong aromas round the house and to set you up for the manifold challenges of the day!

A tasty grilled Kipper

Freshwater fish are another glory of Britain. I used to angle for trout, rather incompetently, and I sometimes caught a fat brown trout - a delightful feast fresh baked in butter in the oven. Even better were the occasional sea trout, venturing up river, whose delicate  pink flesh slid  off your fork and maddened the taste-buds. The King of all river fish must be the noble salmon, sleek and powerful, whose flesh poached or grilled is a gastronomic wonder and slices of smoked salmon lend distinction to any gathering

An Atlantic Salmon leaping - one of Nature's great sights

You may think I am somewhat undiscerning in my love of fish and it is true that there are few fish I positively disparage. I cannot share the enthusiasm of some English regions for soggy plaice and hake and I am not a fan of that bony East End speciality jellied eels (sorry, Tubby Isaac). – although Hamburg’s eel-soup is rather fine.

  Progressing down the food chain from eels takes us to “seafood” the crustaceans and hidden delicacies for which Britain is justly renowned. You may be sitting in a mega-expensive Parisian restaurant but the chances are the fabulous lobster thermidor you are wolfing down came from a modest Scots lobster-pot.

A Lobster awaiting the shell-crackers

 All round the long coast of Britain seafood flourishes, juicy mussels galore, scallops (seared scallops a great favourite of my lovely wife, an ambrosial mouthful), crabs famously from Cromer, wonderful Cornish langoustines, prawns (and Dover sole and turbot) made famous by master-chef Rick Stein at Padstow.

There are dozens of other British fish I have not mentioned but I make no apology for blowing the trumpet for the delights of cold Northern waters. In contrast the Mediterranean is less abundant and hard-won fish are often amazingly expensive. Although there are delectable fish in the Med they tend to have a multitude of bones, deterring many diners. In Greece I happily consume quantities of squid (kalamares) and octopus. Oddly octopus has to be tenderised by smacking it hard on a rock and then washed down, being left to hang out in the sun on a washing line, usually attracting plenty of wasps – but certainly delicious grilled in lemon and oil.

In my local taverna in Samos my staple is the Greek version of sole and chips (confusingly sole is glossa –tongue).with a hearty green salad and a half-litre of the local cold draught wine. Pretty good, but my thoughts often stray to the likes of Harry Ramsden whose fish and chips were legendary or to a little boat house on Ulva off the coast of Mull where natural oysters were dispensed, the stuff of dreams.

Classic British Fish and Chips

Scots Oysters to die for

SMD

5.04.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

THE CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES (10): Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street

[This is the final of 10 articles briefly describing the 39 functioning historic Anglican churches in the City of London]

This is my final piece on the City Churches. I have written 10 articles each covering 4 churches, and since there are 39 recognised City churches I stretched the rules to make it 40 by including the extra-diocesan Temple Church, strictly a “Peculiar” belonging to two Inns of Court, but definitely within the City. I will therefore describe St Martin Ludgate Hill, St Bride’s Fleet Street, St Dunstan-in-the-West and The Temple Church.

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To get access to the West front of St Paul’s Cathedral you have to climb up gentle Ludgate Hill past, in medieval times, Lud Gate and in the 19th and 20^th centuries an intrusive railway viaduct, thankfully recently removed.

St Martin Ludgate Hill

   

There has been a church dedicated to St Martin here since 1174, later rebuilt in 1437.  It was consumed in the Great Fire of 1666. The lead spire and fine portico of St Martin was designed and placed by Wren and his assistant Robert Hooke to complement the dome of his great cathedral.

The interior is tall and cruciform with a baptismal font inscribed with a Greek palindrome. Many of the furnishings come from other, now demolished, churches. There are more paintings than usual with two trompe d’oeil saintly images looking like stone statues being particularly striking.

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Walking West down Ludgate Hill takes you into Fleet Street, once home of almost all the national press and the haunt of journalists and proprietors. Their bibulous and sulphurous lifestyle hardly stretched to church-going but they adopted St Bride’s Fleet Street as their very own, a place to repent of their many sins.

The Steeple at St Bride's Fleet Street

The church site is very ancient; supposedly a church was founded by the Celtic missionary St Bridget in Saxon times. The church we now see was built after the Great Fire by Wren in 1684 although he built the famous tower later in 1703. The steeple is remarkable and a landmark: it seems to be true that tiered wedding-cakes copy its design.

The church was gutted in 1940 in the Blitz and renovated to a new design by Godfrey Allen with collegiate seating, lavish cream and gold decoration and many memorials to editors, journalists and press barons.

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A little further up Fleet Street takes you to idiosyncratic St Dunstan-in-the-West. Its fine tower and lantern dominate Fleet Street and are built in the Gothic manner. The church also salvaged from its predecessor a splendid 17^th century clock, with wooden figures of giants striking bells within a wooden temple.

St Dunstan-in-the-West

The inside is a compound of late Georgian and Victorian Gothic as the church we now see replaced one which survived the Fire but was pulled down in its decrepitude in 1829.  The architects were John Shaw, father and son, whose interior is a delightful Octagon. This Guild church is charged with fostering good relations with churches outside Anglicanism and this is most evident with the spectacular iconostasis of the Romanian Orthodox Church occupying one of the eight bays.

The Romanian Orthodox iconostasis

 The church is dedicated to St Dunstan, a very popular saint in medieval England, though later surpassed by St Thomas Becket. It has many 16^th and 17^th century memorials retained from the earlier church and there is a strong connection with the Hoare banking family whose head office stands opposite. Famous benefactors like Lords Northcliffe, Camrose and Rothermere are also commemorated.

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My final church is the historic Temple Church within the precincts of the Middle and Inner Temples, the august Inns of Court where now barristers have their legal chambers.

The Temple Church off Fleet Street

This magnificent church was consecrated in 1185 by the English members of the Knights Templar. The Templars were an Order of soldier-monks founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land at that time controlled by the European Crusaders. There were two other such Orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights of St John. The Templars attracted the sponsorship of revered St Bernard of Clairvaux and the admiration of the kings of France and of Henry III, devout King of England.

The original church was entirely round, in careful imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem built on the spot where Christ was said to be buried  and the site of the Resurrection. When King Henry III expressed a wish to be buried in the church it was especially extended with the building in the 1230s of the Chancel, when the King and Queen bequeathed their bodies to the church.

Effigies of Knights in the Round Church

The Round Church was built in the Norman style with seats against the walls with sturdy carved Norman porticos and capitals. The leading Templars were buried here notably the immensely powerful William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, the original Earl Marshal. His effigy and those of other unidentified Knights lie in the middle of the Round Church.  The Chancel is built in the Early English Gothic style and is a Hall Church with its two aisles the same height as the Nave.

With the loss of the Holy Land to the Saracens in the late 13^th century the Templars lost their rationale. Their wealth attracted the cupidity of Philip the Fair of France and later Edward II of England: the Order was suppressed in 1307 with trumped up charges of heresy. Many Knights were burnt at the stake. Their property, including the Temple Church was passed over to the Hospitallers, who rented it to two colleges of lawyers who evolved into the Inner and Middle Temples. At the Dissolution Henry VIII seized the church but a 1607 agreement with James I gave the church in perpetuity to the two Inns of Court.

The Chancel of the Temple Church

Since then the church was the centre of theological controversy between Puritans and moderate Anglicans. but it has mainly become a processional church for the legal profession and grandly claimed to be “The Mother Church of the Common Law” Gutted by the Blitz, the church has been sympathetically restored.

The Temple Church features in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown which sold over 80m copies spinning a yarn about the Jesus bloodline, after his “marriage” to Mary Magdalene, being perpetuated via the Templar Priory of Sion and opposed by Opus Dei in the form of a fanatical albino priest! Pure hokum of course, but great box-office for the Temple Church and Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh: Da Vinci Code fans can trivialise and diminish all such places.

A Capital at the Temple Church

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The City Churches suffered two catastrophes – the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz in 1940-41. An immense effort was made to rebuild them and later generations owe a debt of gratitude for this effort.

I hope my 10-part series has stimulated some readers to take an interest in and even visit these 40 excellent churches.

SMD

3.04.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

THE CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES (9): Upper Thames Street and the River

[This is the ninth of 10 articles briefly describing the 39 functioning historic Anglican churches in the City of London]

Upper Thames Street is a modern road by-passing the City centre attracting heavy, noisy traffic. It cuts through historic parts of the City near the River Thames and leaves some excellent City churches rather isolated. Here I describe St Michael Paternoster Royal,   St James Garlickhythe, St Andrew by the Wardrobe and St Benet Pauls Wharf

St Michael Paternoster Royal

St Michael Paternoster Royal (the name is a confused corruption of rosary sellers and wine merchants) has been the site of a church since the 13^th century. It has connections with Richard Whittington (1364-1423), four times Lord Mayor of London, who founded a nearby college and was buried here. As legendary Dick Whittington and his fabulous Cat, hero of many a pantomime, a poor man from Gloucestershire,  young Dick was supposed to have turned back to London on hearing Bow Bells and then making his fortune.

Rebuilt after the Fire by Wren in 1694, the tower and spire are its most remarkable features – in Betjeman’s words “a round colonnaded temple with round urns on it, a middle stage with curling corbels, more urns and a round turret supporting a vane”

The Baroque interior gives little pleasure as it is half-partitioned into offices for the Anglican Mission to Seamen.

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A little further west takes us to St James Garlickhythe, named after a medieval river wharf nearby where garlic was landed from France. Being dedicated to St James, it was a stop on the great pilgrimage route to his shrine at Santiago de Compostella. The medieval church was destroyed in the Fire and the new church was designed by Wren in 1684. Its most striking feature, as in nearby St Michael Paternoster Royal, is its very fine Tower built rather later by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1717. Before the embankments were built in Victorian times, the Thames was much wider and the river ambiance of this area would have been much more pronounced.

St James Garlickhythe

The church has strong links with 11 Livery Companies like the Vintners, Glassmakers and the Joiners and the replica clock at the west door, with the figure of St James above it is a gift from one such Company. The interior of the church is high and airy and the clear glass brought in so much light it was known as “Wren’s Lantern”. There is a fine pulpit, intricate woodwork and a well-wrought sword rest within this spacious and beautifully restored church.

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Walking down 19^th century Queen Victoria Street takes you to St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, in earlier times an area of densely packed shops; nearby stood a royal depository, known as the Wardrobe. All was destroyed by the Great Fire and Wren rebuilt in 1691.The Blitz flattened the surrounding area and St Andrew has a prominent elevated position, as you climb a steepish flight of steps to enter.

St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe

Yet the fine position is rather wasted. The neighbouring St Nicholas Cole Abbey had in the 1890s a congregation of precisely one person and I always feel St Andrew is similarly deserted. The restored Baroque interior is pleasant enough but the area is unpromising. Nearby stands the swish new head office of the Salvation Army and a neighbouring building hosts the Church of Scientology advertising the effusions of C Ron Hubbard. It is not Anglican country: St Andrew in kindly desperation plays host every Sunday to the St Gregorios congregation of the Indian Orthodox Church.

 St Andrew epitomises the dilemma of the Church of England: what to do with its incomparable legacy of historic buildings, for ages maintained heroically with no demands on the taxpayer. Can it last?

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My final church is also something of a curiosity. St Benet Pauls Wharf is a remarkable survivor, untouched by the Blitz and pure Wren externally and inside from 1685. It is brick built with attractive garlands carved over the windows and has a Dutch look. The church has for over 500 years been associated with the College of Arms, the nearby centre for Heraldry, once a very important activity. The great architect Inigo Jones was buried here .in 1652.

The church is the preserve of Welsh-speaking Episcopalians, which must be a very select band indeed.

I visited the church interior in the 1970s but do not remember it well. I have tried to visit several times since, most recently 2 weeks ago, but it is always locked. It suffered arson and vandalism in the 1970s and its opening hours are very limited.

I set out below a contemporary photo of the interior, which looks rather fine.

St Benet Pauls Wharf

                      

St Benet Pauls Wharf Interior

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SMD

1.04.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013