Patrick Comerford
In a blog posting yesterday, I was discussing five churches within five minutes’ walk of Marylebone station that have five different stories and traditions. As I looked at the story of Saint Cyprian’s Church on Glentworth Street, I realised not only that its founding priest, Father Charles Gutch, had been a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for more than half a century, but the controversies involving his Anglo-Catholic style echo many of the experience of another Sidney Sussex fellow, his contemporary the Revd Thomas Pelham Dale (1821-1892), who was jailed for his high church practices.
The Revd Charles Gutch (1822-1896) was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex from 1844 until he died in 1896 and was the Perpetual Curate or priest-in-charge of Saint Cyprian’s Church, Marylebone, for three decades, from 1866 until his death.
Charles Gutch was born in Seagrave, Leicestershire, on 12 January 1822. He was the fourth son of the Revd Robert Gutch the Revd Robert Gutch (1777-1851), the Rector of Seagrave and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge; his mother, Mary Ann James, was a daughter of the Revd John James and Elizabeth Hodgson; the couple were married at Saint Giles’s, Marylebone, on 18 June 1810.
Charles Gutch went to school at Christ’s Hospital School, Sussex, and King’s College School, London. He matriculated in 1840 and was admitted a sizar at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, on 23 March 1840. He moved to Sidney Sussex College on 29 January 1842, where he became Prizeman in Classics and Divinity that year. He graduated BA in 1844 and as the 19th Wrangler.
The Wranglers are those students at Cambridge who gain first-class degrees in mathematics. The Cambridge undergraduate mathematics course, or Mathematical Tripos, is famously difficult. The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge, a position that has been described as ‘the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain.’
Gutch was immediately elected a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College in 1844, and he later proceeded MA (1847) and BD (1854). He remained a senior fellow of Sidney Sussex for more than 50 years, until he died in 1896.
His contemporaries at Sidney Sussex included the Revd Thomas Pelham Dale (1821-1892), who was nine months older. Dale was admitted as a ‘pensioner’ on 30 June 1841 and matriculated in Michaelmas term. He graduated BA in 1845 and was the 25th Wrangler, and he too was immediately elected a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College in 1845.
As for Gutch, a year after graduating he was ordained deacon by Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, in 1845 and priest in 1847. He served two successive curacies in Leicestershire, in Kilworth (1845-1847) and Saint Margaret’s, Leicester (1848-1851).
Edward Bouveries Pusey asked Gutch to take charge of Saint Saviour’s, Leeds, in 1849. Pusey was Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a leading figure of the Oxford Movement. Saint Saviour’s was built in 1842-1845 to designs by the Irish-born architect John Macduff Derick (1815-1849), and Pusey had funded the church.
Gutch refused the offer of the living although he remained at Saint Saviour’s until 1854, when he moved to Norton Saint Philip, near Bath, Somerset (1854-1857), and then to All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, London (1859-1864), where the Revd William Upton Richards (1811-1873) was the vicar.
Gutch was anxious to minister in a church of his own in London where he could pursue his own expression of Anglo-Catholicism. At the time, many large London parishes were being divided to create more workable parochial conditions. He approached the Revd IL Davies, the Rector of Christ Church, Cosway Street, about building a church in that part Marylebone that bordered the neighbouring parishes of Saint Marylebone and Saint Paul’s, Rossmore Road.
Davies reacted favourably to a plan that would relieve him of his responsibility for 3,000 people, about a tenth of his whole parish. He suggested that portions of Saint Paul’s and St Marylebone parishes should be handed over to Gutch too. But neither the Rector of St Marylebone nor the Vicar of Saint Paul’s approved of Gutch’s churchmanship, and that part of the plan foundered.
Many of the parishioners of Christ Church were living comfortably. But the north-east part of the parish was described as ‘a neglected and heathen part of London’. The 3,000 inhabitants of the proposed new district were mostly poor, and had no church and no school. A mission church was needed, but land was scarce and the wealthy landowner was unwilling to help.
Eventually, two houses backing each other and joined by a coal shed in what are now Glentworth Street and Baker Street were rented for use as a temporary chapel. Once the leases were signed, the conversion was entrusted to George Edmund Street (1824-1881), the architect of the Law Courts on the Strand and Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, a churchwarden of All Saints’, Margaret Street, and a personal friend of Gutch.
Gutch faced further difficulties when he proposed dedicating his mission church to Saint Cyprian of Carthage. He explained he was especially struck by Saint Cyprian’s ‘tender loving care for his people, the considerateness with which he treated them, explaining to them why he did this or that, leading them on, not driving them.’
A few weeks before the mission church was due to be opened, the Bishop of London, Archibald Campbell Tait, said that in line with ruling he and his predecessors had made, the district should be named after one of the apostles. Gutch pointed out that Tait had recently dedicated a number of churches in his diocese with the names of saints other than apostles, and he won the day.
The Eucharist was celebrated in Saint Cyprian’s for the first time on Maundy Thursday, 29 March 1866. During the following week, a sisterhood moved in next door to the church. When Queen Victoria formally approved the mission district, Saint Cyprian’s became a distinct parochial charge administered by Gutch with two assistant priests.
Gutch’s curates included the Revd John Witherston Rickards (1844-1921), who later became an SPG (USPG) missionary priest in South Africa, where he founded Saint Cyprian’s Parish at New Rush, Kimberley, on the Diamond Fields in 1871.
Saint Cyprian’s Mission flourished and expanded over the next 30 years. But the mission church was small and could seat only 180 people. It was often overcrowded and extra services were held to accommodate the numbers.
Meanwhile, the landlord, Lord Portman, persistently refused to make available a site for building a larger permanent church. Portman disliked for the churchmanship of Gutch. One of the trustees of Saint Cyprian’s described Portman’s attitude as ‘weak, frivolous, vexatious and unreal.’
Gutch never married. He died at 39 Upper Park Place, Dorset Square, London, at the age of 74 on 1 October 1896. When he died, he had not yet realised his vision of a permanent church.
The Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, appointed the Revd George Forbes, Vicar of Saint Paul’s, Truro, as his successor. Negotiations were opened with the Portman Estate for a site, and Lord Portman finally agreed to sell a site for £1,000 in 1901. But among the rigorous conditions he imposed, he insisted the new church should be built and ready for consecration by 1 June 1904.
Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960) was the architect of the new church, and it was the first new church completed to his designs. The Bishop of Kensington blessed the Corner Stone, which was laid by Lady Wilfreda Biddulph on 7 July 1902.
Almost a year before Portman’s terms were due to expire, Saint Cyprian’s was dedicated to the memory of Charles Gutch by the new Bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, on 30 June 1903. At the service, the bishop wore a magnificent cope of Russian cloth of gold and a richly jewelled mitre.
By then, the altars were fully furnished but when the church was consecrated in 1904 the interior was sparsely decorated, and the task of completing the interior was to be left to succeeding generations.
Comper designed Saint Cyprian’s in a Perpendicular Gothic style. The church is built of red brick with stone dressings and has a nave with clerestory and two aisles. There is no tower, but a small bellcote on Chagford Street. Comper modelled the church on the ‘wool churches’ of East Anglia. It includes large Perpendicular windows but the stained glass, also designed by Comper, is confined to the east end. The nave is modelled on the parish church in Attleborough, Norfolk.
Saint Cyprian’s reflects Comper’s emphasis on the Eucharist and the influence of the Oxford Movement. He wanted his church to resemble ‘a lantern, and the altar is the flame within it’. The unadorned whitened walls in the nave emphasise the contrasting richness of painted and gilded furnishings in the sanctuary.
The sanctuary fittings include a delicate carved and painted rood screen and parclose screens around an ‘English Altar’ surrounded on three sides by hangings and a painted dossal, riddel posts with angels and a painted and gilded reredos.
The central screen below the rood was completed in stages up to 1938. The gilded square tester over the high altar was completed in 1948 and shows Christ holding an open book with a Greek inscription: ‘I am the Light of the World’.
The left-hand screen leads to what was originally called the All Souls’ Chapel, later re-dedicated as the Chapel of the Holy Name. The right-hand screen separates the liturgical south aisle from the Lady Chapel.
Parclose were added and the stone font, vaulted narthex and gallery above in 1930. The decoration of the screens progressed in stages and the tester above the high altar was installed in 1948. The west doors followed in 1952.
Saint Cyprian’s is seen by many as one of London’s most beautiful church interiors. The poet Sir John Betjeman once described Saint Cyprian’s as ‘Comper’s superb church … a Norfolk dream of gold and light within.’ The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner also praised Comper’s work at Saint Cyprian’s: ‘If there must be medieval imitation in the twentieth century, it is here unquestionably done with joy and care.’
• The Parish Mass in Saint Cyprian’s Church on Sundays is at 10:30 am, and Choral Evensong is sung on the second Sunday of each month at 6 pm. Canon Clare Dowding is the Priest in Charge.
