An Anglo-Catholic Funeral

Still saints their watch are keeping.....

When we celebrated the centenary of the St Pancras Housing Association in the area north of Euston Station, not long ago, there was a very good exhibition at the church where it all began - St Mary’s in Eversholt Street.

The curate there, Basil Jellicoe, not without the support of many others, got together after the First World War and actually DID something about the truly intolerable living conditions of people compelled to live in the slums . In the richest city on earth, and a few yards from where passengers were getting on and off trains, heading to the grouse moors and big businesses of northern England, Londoners were crammed into squalid little houses, watching their children go hungry, or die of rickets. Somers Town was part of the Monopoly board owned by the aristocratic family of the name (Baron Somers of Evesham, and his various relations including the Hervey-Bathursts who reside at Eastnor Castle, the contemporary historian Anna Somers-Cocks - the Zuleika Dobson of my generation at Oxford, - and many others.

This was the very patch of city-ground where the 11-year old Charles Dickens used to set out each day from Bayham Street to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse in the Strand.

I remember Laura Collins, a teacher friend of mine, telling me that her grandmother had grown up in a family there where over a dozen people lived in one room in Aldenham Street. No lavatories. No proper washing facilities. Nowhere to cook. Filth. Rats. And then along came this driven young man, Father Jellicoe, who had volunteered to work at the church - he wasn’t the vicar, he was something called the Magdalen missioner. And he and his friends actually changed things. They persuaded their posh friends to give money. They demolished the slums. They built fine tenement buildings in the square mile between Euston and St Pancras. Gilbert Bayes designed ceramic ornaments to adorn these living spaces - ships, saints, angels appeared on window-ledges, even on the tall poles which held up the washing-lines in the courtyards of these handsome buildings.

Basil Jellicoe and his friends and followers - mention must be made of Irene Barclay, the first woman chartered surveyor -

were inspired by their belief that God himself came to earth as a poor carpenter, sent to preach the Good News to the Poor. The radical message of the Gospel was not just that the rich are obliged to help the poor. Rather, they were to learn the way of Dispossession. It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich person to enter Heaven. Jellicoe would have responded eagerly to Mother Theresa’s idea that if we ever get to Heaven, we will look around and see, not a crowd of senior churchmen, but the street-poor of Kalkuta.

The poor of Somers Town were not seen by Jellicoe as people to patronise or spoon-feed. No. The people of Somers Town were teaching HIM how to live. He in turn, with his rich, Oxford-educated friends, came to learn from them how to live, following Jesus the poor man of Nazareth. The Housing Association they founded spawned hundreds of examples across Great Britain and the world.

In the exhibition put on to commemorate the setting-up of the Housing Association, there was footage of the Bishop of Oxford, Kirk, coming to celebrate Mass and give Benediction to the people of Somers Town. It showed dozens - more accurately, hundreds of people crowding into the courtyards of one tenement , where an altar had been erected, as the Bishop lifted up the Blessed Sacrament to bless the people. You would think, looking at this footage, that Catholic Christianity had triumphed in England, and that the country could never sink back into the indifferentism of the past.

Yet, as I’ve written about before, Somers Town is not the same place any more, and although St Mary’s, its church and its school, keep the faith alive, with all the vigour and all the faith which Jellicoe and his friends displayed 100 years ago, the numbers are small who actually attend the church. Many of those faithful, religious people who now live in Somers Town are followers of the Prophet - Peace Be Upon Him. I yearn for them to become Anglo-Catholics, but honesty persuades me to say, there seems very little sign of it yet. Rather, Father Paschal, the current priest at St Mary’s, his church-wardens and his congregation, soldier on without the huge crowds of people who had sung O Salutaris Hostia, as they flocked to watch Bishop Kirk raise the Monstrance over their heads in 1925.

But sometimes, something happens