Patrick Comerford
The Stony Stratford Playreaders have been reading TS Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party this week. I suggested this play for many reasons, including its associations with Mary Trevelyan from Stony Stratford, who inspired Julia, one of the play’s characters, its place in the poetry of TS Eliot and discussions of his Anglo-Catholic spirituality, and because of my own long-running interest in the poetry and writings of TS Eliot.
When I was in London recently, I visited Change Alley, which had associations with four generations of one branch of the Comerford, sought out the sites of the earliest coffee shops in London, and that same afternoon I also returned to visit Saint Mary Woolnoth Church, a landmark church near Bank underground station at the heart of the City of London, on the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street.
Members of the Comerford family who are associated with Saint Mary Woolnoth Church include: James Comerford (1764-1833), who was buried at Saint Mary Woolnoth in 1833; and his grandson James William Comerford (1829-1917), who was baptised in Saint Mary Woolnoth on 19 January 1830.
The church is interesting as one of the Queen Anne Churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, but also for its associations with many interesting people, including the founder of Lloyds Edward Lloyd, the abolitionist and hymnwriter John Newton and his friend William Wilberforce, and, of course, the poet TS Eliot.
The church stands on a site has been used for worship for perhaps 2,000 years. Traces of Roman and pagan religious buildings were found under the foundations of the church, along with the remains of an Anglo-Saxon wooden structure.
The full and unusual dedication of the church is to Saint Mary of the Nativity. The name ‘Woolnoth’ may refer to a benefactor, possibly Wulnoth de Walebrok, a Saxon noble who lived in the area earlier in the 12th century. Alternatively, the name may be connected with the wool trade – this was so with the nearby church of Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw.
The present church is at least the third church on the site. The Norman church survived until the mid-15th century, when it was rebuilt. The new building was consecrated in 1438, but additional work appears to have taken place towards the end of the century, and a spire was added in 1485.
The advowson was given by the founder or his heirs to the Priory of Saint Helen, Bishopsgate. After the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII gave it to Sir Martin Bowes of Lombard Street, a goldsmith and Lord Mayor of London in 1545-1546. The advowson passed from Bowes to the Goldsmiths’ Company, and the patronage subsequently passed through various hands.
The church was badly damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but was partially rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1670-1675. Sir Robert Vyner, Lord Mayor of London in 1674, made a major contribution to the costs, and Vyner had his own entrance to the east end of the church, a privilege inherited by the Post Office which later stood on the site of his mansion in Lombard Street.
The style of the church was described as ‘modern Gothick’ in 1708. But Saint Mary Woolnoth was only partially-repaired by Wren. The building became unsafe and in 1711 it was decided to build a new church under the Fifty New Churches Act. By 1712, the church was so dilapidated that the parishioners were afraid to worship there, and repairs were carried out.
Edward Lloyd, the founder of Lloyd’s of London, was a member of the vestry at the time. He founded Lloyd’s coffee house, which later developed into Lloyd’s Corporation. TS Eliot would work for Lloyd’s two centuries later.
Work on rebuilding the church began in 1716, when excavations uncovered remains thought to be Roman, and there is evidence of major Roman buildings in the immediate vicinity. The new church opened for worship on Easter Day 1727. It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, assisted by John James. It is one of Hawksmoor’s most distinctive and original designs and his only church in the City of London.
Hawksmoor designed an unusually imposing façade in the English baroque style. It is dominated by two flat-topped turrets supported by Corinthian columns. The west side of the façade, facing Lombard Street, has distinctive recesses bearing an inset forward-curving pediment resting on skewed columns.
Hawksmoor’s treatment of the north elevation has been described by as ‘a piece of sheer architectural eloquence hard to match’. The absence of windows on this wall insulates the interior from the noise of Lombard Street.
Despite its small size, the church is surprisingly spacious inside. The layout is typical of Hawksmoor, forming a ‘cube within a cube,’ or a square enclosed by three rows of four columns that is itself enclosed by a wider square.
In the shallow chancel, an ornate, baroque wooden baldacchino with twisted columns and a canopy ornamented with gilded cherubs, was made by John Meard and carved by Gabriel Appleby. It was modelled on Bernini’s baldacchino in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
The pulpit, with its unusual bulging shape, was made by Thomas Darby and Gervaise Smith and is inlaid with sunbursts by Appleby. The tester echoes the shape of the ceiling. The galleries were made by Meard and carved by Darby and Smith.
The Revd John Newton (1725-1807), the former slave trader who became an abolitionist, and an evangelical hymn writer, was the Rector of Saint Mary’s Woolnoth from 1780 to 1807. His best-known hymn is Amazing Grace, and his parishioners included the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce (1759-1833).
John Newton died in December 1807, shortly after the Abolition Act was passed. He was buried beside his wife in the crypt of Saint Mary Woolnoth. A memorial tablet on the north wall bears an epitaph written by Newton himself.
The church was threatened with demolition on several occasions but was saved each time. Its galleries were removed in 1875-1876by William Butterfield, who thought they were unsafe, a number of significant changes were made to the interior, and the chancel was raised.
Between 1897 and 1900, the City & South London Railway (C&SLR) built Bank Underground station beneath the church. The company had permission to demolish the church, but public outcry forced the company to think again.
The crypt was sold to the railway and the bodies there were moved for reburial at Ilford, including Edward Lloyd and James Comerford. However, John Newton and his wife Mary (Catlett) were reburied in 1893 at Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church, Olney, near Milton Keynes, where he had been a curate and then vicar before moving to London.
The crypt and plinth of the church were used as a booking hall in 1897-1900. The walls and internal columns of the church were then supported on steel girders while the lift shafts and staircase shaft for Bank station were built directly beneath the church floor. At the same time, the bells were rehung with new fittings.
The lower part of the south elevation is now masked by the single-storey former Underground station entrance, with a new vestry, in a style that pays tribute to Hawksmoor.
A second organ, dated 1913, is placed at the east end of the north aisle.
TS Eliot, who worked in the City nearby at Lloyd’s Bank, refers to this church in 1922 in a passage in his poem The Waste Land, Part 1, ‘The Burial of the Dead’:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
In his notes to the poem, Eliot remarks that the ‘dead sound on the final stroke of nine’ was a ‘phenomenon which I have often noticed.’ Spurr interprets this as a symbolic allusion to the traditional hour of execution and Christ’s crucifixion at the ninth hour.
In The Waste Land, Eliot also refers to Saint Magnus Martyr, and celebrates the architecture and spiritual importance of the church, with its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.’
Saint Mary Woolnoth was the parish church of the Lords Mayor of London. The Mansion House stands almost opposite, on the site of Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw. This association helped protect the church from repeated threats of demolition between 1863 and 1926.
Eliot supported the protests in 1926 to save City churches like Saint Mary Woolnoth from demolition. He wrote that the threatened churches gave ‘to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced … the least precious redeems some vulgar street …
‘The loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and unforgotten.’
In Anglo-Catholic in Religion: TS Eliot and Christianity, Professor Barry Spurr examines how Eliots references to Saint Mary Woolnoth in The Waste Land foreshadow his later Anglo-Catholic faith. Eliot was baptised on 29 June 1927 at Holy Trinity Church in Finstock, Oxfordshire, by the Revd William Force Stead. He was confirmed the next day, 30 June 1927, in the private chapel of Bishop Thomas Banks Strong of Oxford.
Saint Mary Woolnoth was the only City church to survive World War II unscathed. The church was designated a Grade I listed building on 4 January 1950, and it became a guild church in 1952.
Until recently Saint Mary Woolnoth was used by the German-speaking Swiss community in London. It now hosts ‘IMPRINT Church London’, which includes Saint Mary Woolnoth, Saint Edmund the King and Saint Clement Eastcheap in the Diocese of London, and is part of the HTB Network of churches. The Revd Wole Agbaje is the priest in charge.
• Saint Mary Woolnoth is open Monday-Friday from 7 am to 3 pm and also has a café, Newton’s Coffee, on the front steps.
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