Gates of Death and a Resurrection
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY EARLIER this year I was given, by the kindness of some- one who had known him well, two water-colour sketches by Augustus Hare. These drawings are as literal and as detailed as those acquainted with his writings would expect. One, a warm sunlit scene of ochre walls beneath a cerulean sky, shows a stretch of the Via San Gregorio in Rome; the other, a cold, violet-grey scene, is of the macabre Gate of Judgment which gives access to the churchyard of St. Stephen, Coleman Street, and was reproduced as one of the many illus- trations in Hare's two-volume Walks in London, a book which was first published in 1878, but which, like its companion volumes on Rome, Paris, Venice and Florence, remains invalu- able to-day. I had, in consequence of this gift, intended to revisit St. Stephen's to look again at the Gate of Judgment, which I remembered to have survived the air-raid that totally destroyed This church in 1940. Accordingly, with Hare's book in my pocket, I set off thither one evening a few weeks back.
In Hare's day the Gate of Judgment—a somewhat clumsy, hooded but imposing late seventeenth-century stone gateway surmounted by three stone skulls and some elaborate, contorted iron spikes—was crowned by an old double lantern. The frieze of the Last Judgment from which the gate takes its name was still the original wooden relief, which for some reason was after- wards replaced by a reproduction in stone. London lore, on no convincing authority, associates this gate in Coleman Street and the similar gate in Seething Lane, near Tower Hill, with the Great Plague of Charles II's reign, although it seems more probable that these entrances to tomb-land were not connected with any particular epidemic and were merely decorated, in a functional and allusive manner, with emblems of mortality; certainly the Gate of Death in Seething Lane bears a date five months prior to the demise of Oliver Cromwell. This gate gives on to the City churchyard which Charles Dickens loved best- " a small, small 'churchyard, with a ferocious, strong spiked iron gate, like a jail "—and is bedecked with no less than five huge stone skulls impaled on iron spikes. Dickens, who had re- christened the church of Saint Olave, Hart Street, to which this graveyard is attached, the church of "St. Ghastly Grim," describes in one of the essays in The -Uncommercial Traveller the " attraction of repulsion ' which he found in contemplating these skulls at all times of the day, and how he set out one • evening in a thunderstorm to see them by lightning. " I re- paired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes." After examining again the Gate in Coleman Street, which I had reached by a circuitous route through Wood Street, where the great plane tree still stands at the corner with Cheapside, and past St. Mary Aldermanbury, where I found a lean black kitten capering about amongst the thick bracken of the roofless nave and where the wall monuments, vaguely protected by tarred paper some years ago, have now burst their bonds and peep down at one through gaps and gashes in their coverings, I decided to go on and look (though not by lightning) at the Gate in Seething Lane, and at the sad ruins of Saint OlaNie's, the fifteenth-cen,tury church in which Samuel Pepys worshipped. To my amazement the church was no longer a ruin, but a new, apparently completed Gothic building as white as a ghost. Thinking the twilight probably deceptive, I went down there the next morning to look again : and surely enough, behind the Gate of Death, stood a resurrected City church. - By lovers of London the reconstruction of Saint Olave, Hart Street, may be thought a highly encouraging sign. On inquiry I learned that this was one of two City churches given priority by the Diocesan Reorganisation Committee; owing to the vigour of the rector, and the support of certain City Companies tradi- tionally connected with this church, the rebuilding has gone ahead with a speed and determination for which the only equivalent in present-day London may be found in the rebuild- ing of Pump Court and the destroyed Wren arcade in the Inner Temple. The church is not yet completed and still needs to raise a considerable sum of money by public appeal—just as do the churches of Saint Michael Paternoster Royal, Saint Dunstan' in the East (which has so far only been able to repair its tower), St. Vedast Forster, and many others. The scene inside the church at the moment is.one with which all visitors to Normandy have become in the last five years familiar, but which Londoners have long waited to see—a scene of busy, reconstructive activity, new stones being cut, old stones replaced, workmen on scaffold- ing up near the roof, haphazard ropes dangling. In the church- yard, wall monuments are being laid out on the ground and fitted together like the pieces of a stone jig-saw puzzle, while in the crypt is the kind of hospital for effigies that one has con- stantly seen attached to reconstructed churches at Vaux-de-Vire or Caen. The battered alabaster figure of the Florentine merchant Pietro Cappone, which dates from 1582, is lying on its back on an improvised stretcher of planks awaiting restoration to its plinth in the north transept, while the beau- tiful bust, attributed to Bushnell, of Elizabeth Pepys, is already smiling down, through a forest of scaffolding, from the place which her husband himself chose for it high up on the north side of the chancel.
Saint Olave's was the third church known to have stood on its site near Tower Hill. Dedicated to the Norwegian saint, Olaf, above whose tomb thg Gothic cathedral of Trondheim was built, the church that was destroyed in 1941 had been raised in 1450. It had survived both the Great Fire and restoration by Sir Arthur Blomfield, who removed the old enclosed pews and introduced what Augustus Hare justly terms " the. usual folly of shiny tiles." The work now in progress has unearthed the outer wall, window and original doorway of the crypt of an earlier, thirteenth-century church, and this it has been sensibly decided to keep exposed. By careful salvage work a great deal of the original stonework has been saved, and a number of the windows are being re- built with the old masonry. The Victorian glass, on the other hand, has happily disappeared, and, since in the course of time the new church will be surrounded by tall new office buildings, it has been deemed wisest to keep the new window glass as clear and plain as possible. In ground plan and in almost every detail the new church, the foundation stone of which was laid by the King of Norway a couple of years ago, closely follows the original, while one new feature, a South porch leading from the church into the churchyard, has been erected at the expense of, and as a war memorial for, representatives of the wine trade in the parish.
Apart from the monuments which were taken to safety and those which have survived as broken and burned as the Eliza- bethan effigies from Old Saint Pauls still to be seen in the present Cathedral's crypt, one very beautiful ornament of Saint Olave's has survived. This is the vestry which, entered by a fifteenth-century door, dates from the reign of Charles II, and Contains some simple, dark panelling and a very fine plaster ceiling showing the figure of an angel flanked by four heads of cherubim. In this vestry you get again that particular indefinable atmosphere which made so many of the lost churches of the City so strange and pleasant to visit before the war—the dark panelling, the elaborate plaster work, the slightly musty smell of hassocks and prayer-books, a richness of baroque work which made some of these churches resemble the dark, exciting interiors of the churches of the port of Antwerp. This atmosphere, alas, is one that no war damage compensation, nor public appeals nor City Com- panies' generosity can re-create, for it was the result of genera- tions of embellishments and of centuries of use. But mean- while may we not be grateful that at least one of London's ruined churches is being given a new lease of life, and being so affectionately and accurately rebuilt ?
The above is the fifth of a series of articles in which Mr. Pope- Hennessy, a former Literary Editor of the " Spectator " re-explores post-war London.
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