Patrick Comerford
I was in London last week for the annual ‘Founder’s Day’ or Bray Day, organised jointly by SPCK (Society for the Promoting Christian Knowledge) and USPG (United Society Propagation of the Gospel), both founded by Thomas Bray.
Bray Day is celebrated each year on 15 February. This year’s celebrations took place in Saint Alban’s Church, Holborn, and the preacher was the former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries (Baron Harries of Pentregarth). His sermon on ‘Poetry’ drew on many of the ideas in his 2022 Lent book Hearing God in Poetry: Fifty Poems for Lent and Easter, published by SPCK.
Saint Alban’s Church is dedicated to Saint Alban, the first English saint martyr. It is a well-known but well-hidden church between the City of London and the West End, and serves a part of London known for the jewellery business in the Hatton Garden area and for law firms. It is a beautiful Victorian church, rebuilt after World War II, and with a striking mural on the east wall by Hans Feibusch.
The site for the church was donated by William Henry Leigh (1824-1905), 2nd Baron Leigh. For Charles Dickens, this was the site of ‘A Thieves’ Kitchen’ or Fagin’s Den in Oliver Twist. The church was designed by William Butterfield in 1859 and was built in 1861-1862 with funds from the financier and banker John Hubbard (1805-1899), 1st Baron Addington, described over the entrance merely as ‘a Merchant of London.’
Saint Alban’s is one of Butterfield’s finest mature works, and remains a powerful composition. As with All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, Saint Alban’s shows Butterfield’s skill in to working with a difficult, almost impossible site. It is a Gothic-style church, built in red and yellow stock bricks with stone dressings, tiled roofs and with seven bays, and tall, narrow, geometric traceried windows.
It is a tall, wide, aisled church with short transepts abutting the west tower with a saddleback roof. The restrictions of the site forced a blank east wall. The entrance is through the south transept which forms a small chapel.
The Revd Alexander Heriot Mackonochie (1825-1887) was appointed the first perpetual curate or Vicar of Saint Alban’s in 1862. As an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford (1844-1848), Mackonochie heard Pusey preach and got to know many of the leading figures in the Oxford Movement.
After curacies in Westbury, Wiltshire, and Wantage, Berkshire, Mackonochie become a curate at Saint George’s-in-the-East, London, in 1858. There he worked with Charles Fuge Lowder (1820-1880) as a mission priest in the slum areas of London Docks. At this time, Saint George’s-in-the-East was a focus for anti-Ritualist rioting, when services were disrupted and stones were thrown at the mission’s priests.
Mackonochie was appointed to Saint Alban’s in 1862. In a letter to Hubbard, the patron of Saint Alban’s, he outlined his theological stand, including his agreement with George Anthony Denison’s ideas Catholic ideas about the Eucharist.
The church was surrounded by the Holborn slums and new Victorian tenement blocks. Mackonochie worked for the construction of many model dwellings in the parish, including Tyndall Buildings, Evelyn Buildings and Saint Alban’s Buildings. Many of the residents of these buildings included soap boilers, tailors, clothes makers, labourers and mechanics.
Mackonochie’s pastoral approach was typical of the ministry of the 19th century Anglo-Catholic ‘slum priests.’ With his two curates, the Revd Arthur Henry Stanton and the Revd Edward Francis Russell, and the support of lay members of the parish, he founded schools, soup kitchens, a working men’s club, mothers’ meetings, clothing funds and more.
At Saint Alban’s, Mackonochie introduced a daily Eucharist, Gregorian chant and ritual details such as lit candles on the altar and cleansing the eucharistic vessels at the altar. This was the first Anglican church to hold the three-hour devotion on Good Friday (1864) and one of the first to celebrate a Harvest Festival. The use of Incense began at Epiphany 1866. Mackonochie also heard confessions.
From 1867, Mackonochie was also chaplain of the sisterhood of Saint Saviour and the sisters and sisters of the Clewer Community of Saint John Baptist worked in the parish.
Mackonochie became known as ‘the martyr of Saint Alban’s’ and was regularly the target of protests by evangelical or Low Church activists protesting against his ‘ritualism’. But throughout Mackonochie’s later persecution, Saint Alban’s remained a thriving Anglo-Catholic parish.
John Martin was supported by the Church Association when he brought a prosecution against Mackonochie in 1867 under the Church Discipline Act 1840. The charges referred to the priest elevating the host above his head, using a mixed chalice and altar lights, censing things and persons, and kneeling during the prayer of consecration.
The Court of Arches decided against Mackonochie on two counts and in his favour on the other three, with no decision as to the payment of costs. Mackonochie agreed to comply, but the anti-ritualists appealed to the Privy Council, which found against him on the remaining three charges and ordered him to pay all costs.
Even after the prosecution, the Church Association continued to pursue Mackonochie, saying he had re-introduced the prohibited ritual, and on 25 November 1870 he was suspended from office for three months.
He had become a hate-figure for the Low Church, he was banned from preaching in the Diocese of Ripon, and the Irish-born Dean of Ripon, Hugh M’Neile (1796-1879), refused to speak at the Liverpool Church Congress because Mackonochie would also speak. When Thomas Macaulay was speaking in the House of Commons on the Maynooth Endowment Bill, he described M’Neile as ‘the most powerful representative of uncompromising Protestant opinion in the country.’ Even Queen Victoria was appalled by M’Neile’s bigotry, expressing her dismay at his anti-Catholic fervour.
A second lawsuit was brought against Mackonochie in March 1874, repeating the old charges and adding new ones, including processions with a crucifix, the use of the Agnus Dei, and facing east during the consecration. Mackonochie stood firm in the face of the prosecutions, but on 12 June 1875 was found against on most of the charges and suspended for six weeks.
John Martin appealed to the Dean of Arches in 1878, claiming Mackonochie had not obeyed the 1875 judgment. Mackonochie was brought before a new court created by the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874, and he was suspended for three years.
A fresh round of prosecutions was under way in 1882 when, at the deathbed request of Archbishop Archibald Campbell Tait, Mackonochie resigned from Saint Alban’s to move to Saint Peter’s, London Docks, the church founded by CF Lowder in 1866. By then, the mob violence that Mackonochie had faced mob violence during his time with Lowder in the 1850s and 1860s. This had abated by the 1880s, but had the prosecutions continued.
Despite the vibrancy of Saint Peter’s, Mackonochie was unhappy. He had moved from Saint Alban’s out of a sense of duty, but missed his old parish. His self-confidence was waning and by July 1883 he faced yet another suspension. Knowing that suspension would be disastrous for the parish, Mackonochie resigned from Saint Peter’s in December 1883, only a year after resigning from Saint Alban’s.
Instead of moving to another parish, Mackonochie moved into the Clergy House at Saint Alban’s, where he worked as an assistant priest. He died on 15 December 1887, aged 62. He was described by a contemporary as bringing ‘light into the dark places, and beauty and orderliness and peace before weary eyes and harassed minds, and sweet and ennobling music to ears accustomed to discordant curses, and screams of anger, and cries of pain.’
Mackonochie’s curate, the Revd Arthur Henry Stanton (1839-1913), remained a curate at Saint Alban’s (1862-1913), an indefatigable champion of the poor, a staunch champion of rituals, and an exuberant preacher.
A chapel added to the church in 1891 was designed by Charles Henry Money Mileham (1837-1917), with stained glass by Charles Eamer Kempe (1898). It also has two of the original Stations of the Cross by Ninian Comper.
The church hosted the first complete performance in England of Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur in 1938, and played by the composer.
The church was burned out during the London Blitz in 1941, although the 1891 chapel survived. The church and the attached clergy house have been Grade II* listed buildings since 1951.
The main church was restored by Sir George Gilbert Scott’s grandson, Adrian Gilbert Scott (1882-1963), in 1959-1961, with a new organ by John Compton. Scott’s simple but dignified scheme incorporated several features of the old building, but replaced Butterfield’s elaborate decoration. The tower opens into the nave through a great arch by Butterfield. The arcade was rebuilt with stone at the lower levels and rendered above.
The east wall of Saint Alban’s is covered by a mural, ‘The Trinity in Glory’ (1966) by the German-Jewish painter and sculptor Hans Feibusch (1898-1998), who also painted the Stations of the Cross. Feibusch arrived in England in 1933 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. After World War II, he became known for his church murals and he was baptised and joined the Church of England in 1963. He worshipped at Saint Alban’s, where the east wall mural is his largest.
‘The Trinity in Glory’ is a celebration of liberation, depicting Christ’s manifesto in the words of Isaiah that has fuelled and continues to fuel the ministry of this church. The mural measures 8.8 metres by 15.2 metres (29 ft by 50 ft) and depicts more than 50 principal figures. Feibusch completed the work with the assistance of Phyllis Bray in only three months. Among those 50 principal figures, Father Mackonochie is shown wearing green vestments, together with other clergy who have served Saint Alban's, including the Vicar at the time of the painting, Father Peter Priest.
Feibusch also painted the 14 Stations of the Cross, which were marouflaged to the north and south walls of the church in 1969-1970, and he is the artist of the sculpture ‘Jesus being Raised from the Dead’ (1985) at the entrance to the church.
In the last years of his life, Feibusch returned to the Judaism of his youth and he was buried with Jewish rites at Golders Green Jewish Cemetery in 1998.
The Mackonochie chapel survived the bombing during World War II, and it has stained glass 1885 and 1898 by CE Kempe (1885 and 1898) and two of the original Stations of the Cross by Sir Ninian Comper (1912).
Saint Alban’s hosted the foundation of Affirming Catholicism, representing a liberal strand of Anglo-Catholicism, in 1990. But the church is now a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parish under the Alternative Episcopal Oversight of Bishop Jonathan Baker of Fulham.
Father Christopher Smith has been the Vicar of Saint Alban’s since 2011. He is the tenth vicar and succeeded Father Howard Levett who retired in 2010. The Revd Duncan Hegan is the curate; he is originally from Bangor, Co Down, and was ordained last year.
• Saint Alban’s Church emphasises the sacramental life of the Church, and is open every day. On Sundays, Family Mass is at 9:30 and Solemn Mass at 11 am. Coffee is served between the two masses. Mass is celebrated in the Mackonochie Chapel, Monday to Friday at 12:30.
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