Patrick Comerford
I have been in London three times over the last five or six weeks for a variety of reasons, with each visit was an opportunity to see churches, synagogues and other buildings and places of historical and architectural interest.
One sunny afternoon, I visited for the first time Saint George’s, Hanover Square, the parish church of Mayfair and a few steps south of Hanover Square, near Oxford Circus.
The church describes itself as an oasis of calm in the bustling West End and has a reputation for dignified, traditional worship, music with its professional choir, and for its preaching. George Frederick Handel, who lived nearby at 25 Brook Street, was a regular worshipper and Saint George’s is home to the London Handel Festival each year.
Saint George’s Church was built in 1721-1724 to designs by the architect and surveyor John James (1673-1746), as part of a project to build the Queen Anne Churches, 50 new churches around London. John James replaced James Gibbs in 1716 as one of the two surveyors to the Commissioners for the Building of Fifty New Churches – Nicholas Hawksmoor was the other commissioner.
Saint George’s is the only church James designed for the commissioners, but he also collaborated with Hawksmoor on the design of two other churches, Saint John Horsleydown in Southwark and Saint Luke Old Street.
James re-cased the mediaeval tower at Saint Alfege’s Church, Greenwich, and added a steeple in 1730, while the rest of the church was entirely rebuilt by Hawksmoor for the commissioners in 1712-1714. James also re-clad the mediaeval tower of Sait Margaret's, Westminster (1735-1737).
The site for the Saint George’s was donated by General William Steuart (1643-1726), who laid the first stone in 1721.
Steuart grew up in Ireland, and was MP for Co Waterford in 1703-1715. He was closely related to the Villiers-Stuart family of Dromana House of Villierstown, near Cappoquin, Co Waterford.
A civil parish of Saint George Hanover Square and an ecclesiastical parish were created in 1724 from part of the parish of Saint Martin in the Fields.
The portico of Saint George’s Church is supported by six Corinthian columns, projects across the pavement and is flanked by obelisks. There is a short tower behind the portico, rising from the roof above the west end of the nave, with a coupled column, a Wren-inspired belfry and a cupola.
The interior is divided into nave and aisles by piers, square up to the height of the galleries, then rising to the ceiling in the form of Corinthian columns. The nave has a barrel vault, and the aisles have transverse barrel vaults.
The reredos is from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons and frames a Last Supper, painted for the church by William Kent in 1724. The windows include early 16th century Flemish glass originally from Antwerp. The screens and stalls are by Sir Reginald Blokfield.
The Revd Andrew Trebeck was the first Rector of Saint George’s (1725-1759). When Saint George’s opened, it had no churchyard, and burials took place first at Mount Street and then in Bayswater in 1765 until 1854. The burials at Saint George’s included Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), a pioneer of Gothic fiction, and the Revd Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), the author of Tristram Shandy.
The rectors of Saint George’s in the 18th and 19th centuries often held the parish while holding other senior church offices:
• Charles Moss (1759-1774) was Bishop of St David’s (1766-1774), and later Bishop of Bath and Wells;
• Henry Reginald Courtenay (1774-1803) was Bishop of Bristol (1794-1797) and then Bishop and Archdeacon of Exeter (1797-1803);
• Robert Hodgson (1803-1844) was Archdeacon of St Alban’s (1814-1816), Dean of Chester (1816-1820) and Dean of Carlisle (1820-1844).
Two 20th century rectors, Norman Thicknesse and Stephen Phillimore, were Archdeacons of Middlesex.
Bishop Henry Courtenay (1741-1803) is recalled in the street name of Bishop Court in Newcastle West, Co Limerick. The town first came into the hands of the Courtenay family in 1591 when the castle and lands were granted to Sir William Courtenay (1553-1630) of Powderham Castle, Devon.
The bishop’s eldest son, William Courtenay (1777-1859), was the MP for Exeter (1812-1826) and when he resigned he became clerk-assistant to the House of Lords, with the then-princely annual salary of £4,000. In addition, his large estates in Ireland gave him £90,000 a year. He was known as a generous landlord and a conscientious and liberal-minded politician, supporting Catholic Emancipation and opposing the death penalty.
With his position in the House of Lords, Courtenay was well-placed to advance claims that a shamed and exiled cousin, also named William Courtenay, was the rightful 9th Earl of Devon, although it was long believed that the title had been extinct since 1556. The claim to the title was allowed on flimsy grounds by the House of Lords in 1831.
The disgraced cousin never returned to take his seat in the Lords, but when he died in Paris in 1835 the bishop’s son William Courtenay succeeded as 10th Earl of Devon. The Courtenays became the largest landlords in Co Limerick, owning up to 85,000 acres in the south-west of the county.
Because of its fashionable location, Saint George’s Church became a favoured venue for many society weddings, and it is the church referred to in the song ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ sung by Alfred P Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady (1956), based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913).
Famous people who were married in the church include Lady Hamilton (1791), later Nelson’s mistress; the poet Shelley; the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli; the writer George Eliot; Theodore Roosevelt (1886), later the 26th president of the US; and the playwright and Nobel laureate John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
Other weddings there included: Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the second Hellfire Club and later Chancellor of the Exchequer; James Stopford (1731-1810), later 2nd Earl of Courtown, in 1762, when he was the MP for Taghmon, Co Wexford, in the Irish House of Commons.
Dr Henry Slaughter (1756-1823), of Phillimore Place, Kensington, a direct descendant of the Comberford family of Comberford Hall, Staffordshire, married Frances Manbury, Lady Montague, widow of Mark Browne (1745-1774), 9th Viscount Montague, in Saint George’s Church on 21 May 1800.
The Cork-born poet and author Mary Teresa (Comerford) Boddington (1776-1840) was a daughter of the Cork wine merchant Patrick Comerford. She left Cork for London in 1803 and she married Thomas Boddington (1774-1862), a wealthy West Indian merchant of Upper Brooke Street, London, and Marylebone, in Saint George’s Church, Hanover Square, on 16 April 1805. The Boddingtons are often referred to in Thomas Moore’s Diary.
Saint George’s Church has also been associated with baptisms and weddings in another branch of the Comerford family, including two sons of Colonel James William Comerford (1829-1917): Robert Homfray James Comerford (1861-1939), who was baptised there in 1861; and his brother, Dr Beaumont Harry Comerford (1887-1947), who was baptised there in 1887.
Sir Arthur Blokfield restored Saint George’s in 1894, and Saint George’s was refurbished in 2010.
The Revd Roderick Leece has been the Rector of Saint George’s since 2005. He studied music at Wadham College, Oxford, and trained for the priesthood at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield. The other priests at Saint George’s include the Revd Dr Alan McCormack, who has been Dean of Goodenough College since 2015. He was Dean of Residence and Chaplain, Trinity College Dublin, in 1997-2007.
The parish is part of the Deanery of Westminster Saint Margaret in the Diocese of London.
The Sunday services are: 8:30 am, said Holy Communion (BCP), 11 am, Sung Eucharist. Daily Prayer: 12:10 pm. Weekday Holy Communion: Wednesday, 5:45 pm; Thursday and Saints’ Days, 1:10 pm.
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