Patrick Comerford
In recent weeks, I have been visiting a number of churches in Bedford, including Saint Paul’s Church, the main church in the centre, Saint Peter’s Church on Saint Peter’s Street in the De Parys area, Saint Cuthbert’s Church, in the middle of a traffic island between Castle Road and Mill Street, and the former Church of the Holy Trinity, now part of Bedford Sixth Form College.
The former Church of the Holy Trinity is on the north side of Bromham Road, on the corner with The Crescent. The former church is now in the grounds of Bedford Sixth Form College, where it is used as kitchens and dining room. But for more than 130 years, from 1841 until 1974, Holy Trinity was an active Church of England church serving an interesting part of north-west Bedford.
By the 1830s, the expansion of Bedford towards the north-west was putting pressure on church accommodation in the town. A committee for building a new church as a chapel of ease for Saint Paul’s was formed in 1837. The Duke of Bedford contributed £50 and Lord Carteret, the patron of the parish, promised an endowment of £2,000.
The site was offered by Francis Green and the Norwich-based architect John Brown (1805-1876) was commissioned to design the new church. John Brown had been the Norfolk County Surveyor since 1835. He designed many churches, including Saint Michael’s in Stamford, Lincolnshire (1835), as well as the workhouse in Swainthorpe, Norfolk (1836).
The foundation stone of Holy Trinity Church was laid on 18 June 1839 and the completed church and burial ground were consecrated on 29 June 1841 by Joseph Allen, Bishop of Ely.
The church had galleries on cast iron columns and pews in the nave, seating 1,400 people. There was a stipulation that at least 500 sittings were to be free. It was also intended that only burials should be permitted and no baptisms or marriages should be conducted there, although both later took place at a later stage.
The interior of the church was redecorated and improved in 1859 by James Horsford, and a clock was placed in the tower in 1860. That year, a separate parish of Holy Trinity was formed from Saint Paul’s.
The chancel was added in 1865 by Francis Cranmer Penrose (1817-1903), who designed a new chancel with transepts and modified the galleries and seating to provide additional accommodation.
Penrose was educated at Winchester and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was an archaeologist and astronomer as well as an architect. He was the Surveyor of Saint Paul’s Cathedral from 1852 and President of the RIBA (1894-1896). Penrose designed church and domestic buildings, and restored many mediaeval churches. His work in Bedford included the addition of the aisles to Saint Cuthbert’s Church.
The tower of Holy Trinity Church was restored in 1929, when the pinnacles were removed, and again in 1958 when the facings and buttresses were repaired in brick.
An engraving of the church ca 1862 shows that, before these changes took place, the north elevation consisted of the steeply pitched gable end of the nave flanked by the lower gables of the aisles, with tall pinnacles in between each gable, and crosses on the apexes of the gables. These, along with the tall pinnacles on the corners of the tower and on either side of the south elevation, gave the church an added elegance that was lost with their removal.
The church was declared redundant in 1974 and was used for a short time by the Polish Roman Catholic Congregation. When the Polish parish moved to Saint Cuthbert’s, Holy Trinity was acquired in 1979 by the Harpur Trust as an annexe to the Bedford High School for Girls and opened in 1980.
The conversion involved the removal of the nave arcades, altar, pews, galleries and all other interior fittings. The ground floor is now used as a kitchen and dining room, and an inserted first floor contains classrooms.
A sports hall was built to the north of the church in 2003-2004. It is attached to the north-east corner of the church, where a door has been inserted at first-floor level to provide access to the new building. A modern single-storey, flat-roofed extension was added to the north-west corner of the church.
The interior no longer resembles a church interior, having lost its nave arcades, altar and all other fittings. The ground floor has been converted into a kitchen and dining room, while the inserted top floor forms a corridor flanked by classrooms with overboarded ceilings. The double-chamfered chancel arch has been mostly obscured by this remodelling.
The only visible remnants of the interior decoration are heavy, moulded ribs running east-west across the roof, terminating in corbels, and large roundels containing a quatrefoil and bosses in various forms. The door of the east transept opens into a porch with a timber screen pierced with stained glass panels. This leads to the open well, stone cantilevered staircase which has slender cast-iron balusters extending in pairs below the treads.
The former Church of the Holy Trinity has been de-listed because its conversion has resulted in the complete loss of its original configuration of nave, aisles, chancel and altar, along with its internal fabric, fittings, and furniture. It no longer resembles a church, and its architectural integrity has been further compromised by extensions to the chancel, with the loss of historic fabric.
The main building of Bedford High School for Girls is now Bedford Sixth Form College. This building, dating from 1878-1892, was designed by the architect Basil Champneys (1842-1935), whose notable buildings include John Rylands Library in Manchester, Somerville College Library, Oxford, Newnham College, Cambridge, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Mansfield College, Oxford and the Rhodes Building at Oriel College, Oxford. His father, William Weldon Champneys (1807-1875), was the Dean of Lichfield (1868-1875).
On the opposite corner of Bromham Road and the Crescent, a commemorative plaque on the gable end of the house at No 9 Bromham Road and facing the church is a blue plaque erected in 2019: ‘Fanny Elizabeth Eagles (1836-1907) ‘Sister Fanny’ Church of England Deaconess Community worker and founder of St Etheldreda’s Children’s Home here (1881-1984)’.
Fanny Elizabeth Eagles was the founder of an early group of deaconesses in the Church of England and founded an orphanage in Bedford.
She was born in Bedford in 1836, the daughter of a solicitor, and grew up as a member of Saint Paul’s Church. At an early age, she wanted to become a nun. But the Rector of Saint Paul’s, the Revd John Donne, encouraged her instead to become a deaconess. She worked on a fever ward before spending two years with the nursing sisters in the Community of Saint Peter in Brompton Square, London.
Canon Michael Ferrebee Sadler, a Tractarian, became the Rector of Saint Paul’s in 1864, and Fanny Eagles was made a deaconess in 1869. She dressed like a nun and formed the Sisters of Saint Etheldreda, who were associated with Saint Paul’s parish from 1869. The sisters became six in number and their emphasis was on education, including Sunday schools and night schools.
The sisters worked through an outbreak of smallpox in Bedford In 1870 and 1871. T he gift of a house enabled them to move to No 9 Bromham Road in 1881. The house became an orphanage, Saint Etheldreda’s Home, a chapel was built next door and a nearby house was bought.
Fanny Eagles died in 1907, but the home continued until 1984, and the plaque at 9 Bromham Road facing the former church is a tribute to her life and work.
