FALLING DOWN
By EDWARD HODGKIN
THE best-known consequence of the disaster to the cross- channel ferry the 'White Ship,' in which William Atheling and his companions were drowned, was that the young man's father, Henry I, never smiled again. An indirect result of the same shipwreck was the foundation of the priory, church and hospital of Saint Bartholomew in Smithfield. Before the king stopped smiling his court had the reputation for a good deal of gaiety, and among the courtiers was a certain Rahere, a man apparently of humble origin and agreeable manners, who was prepared to make himself useful by helping to arrange for the royal entertainments. When the court sobered down and piety came into fashion, Rahere, presumably from motives of self-interest, adapted himself to the changed circum- stances: he went on a pilgrimage to Rome. Unfortunately for him, as for so many of his contemporaries, this journey ended in an attack of malaria, which in his case nearly proved fatal. Rahere went to recuperate on Isola Tiberina, an island formerly sacred to Aesculapius, on which the Emperor Otto III had dedicated a church to Saint Bartholomew. It was while be was on this island that the saint appeared to Rahere in a vision and instructed him, on returning to England, to show his gratitude for his recovery by building a church in the suburbs of London, at Smithfield. The church was duly built, and dedicated as was natural to Saint Bartholomew. To it was later added a hospital, whose Chapel after the Reformation became the church of the adjacent parish. Both church and hospital have survived the centuries. Today a benevolent State has finally taken the hospital under its wing, but the church is appealing to the generosity of the public for the £20,000 necessary to save it from falling down. '
As the oldest church structure -in the capital Saint Bartholomew- the-Great, as it has long been called (to distinguish it from its neigh- bour in the hospital, Saint Bartholomew-the-Less), deserves the support of Londoners. It has not always had their support ; indeed the ups and downs of its career are a fairly accurate indication of the public's changing attitude towards religious life and church antiquities. What is now left is only a fraction—mainly the choir and truncated transepts—of the original church. The rest of the priory buildings have disappeared. Ever since the Reformation, when the community of Augustinian canons which had occupied the priory was broken up, the waves of secular London have lapped round the church, destroying parts of it, submerging other parts for longer or shorter periods, but never making a final conquest of the whole fabric.
Thus the nave was pulled down by Sir Richard Rich, Henry VIII's Chancellor, who bought the land after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the cloister, a piece of north side of which is still standing, became a blacksmith's forge and a stable. The sacristy became a store-room for hops, the chapter-house a timber-yard, the south transept a burial-ground, the crypt a beer cellar, while the lady chapel, after serving Rich for a time as a private house, became successively a tenement, a printing works and a fringe factory. It was mostly thanks to the energy of two or three rectors in the nineteenth century that what was left of these buildings was re- covered and the whole church tidied up and restored (the restora- tion, incidentally, being carried out with unusual tact). Today it is possible here, as nowhere else in London, to enjoy the simple dignity of the Norman proportions, more or less unencumbered by later accretions.
With luck Saint Bartholomew's will get the £2o,000 for which it is asking. Although hidden from sight to the passer-by it is well-known to .visitors ; historical associations attract those who are not primarily interested in architecture. Hogarth, for example, was baptised here and his self-portrait hangs in the vestry ; Benjamin Franklin learned his trade as a printer in the lady chapel, and the descriptions of Bartholomew Fair in jonson and Defoe have made the neighbourhood familiar to many who have never themselves visited it. In every sense the church is a national monument, though, so peculiar is the way in which we organise these things‘ the responsi-
bility for its upkeep is still vested wholly in the parish ; and the parish consists today of seventy souls, many of them old-age pen- sioners.
The plight of Saint Bartholomew's raises several problems of more than local interest. The £zo,000 which is being asked for is required, not for any elaborate work of reconstruction, but simply for upkeep— to prevent the church from finally collapsing into the marsh on which, by some feat of Norman engineering, its pillars have, almost literally, floated for eight hundred years. Like many other City churches, Saint Bartholomew's was damaged, but not destroyed, by enemy action, and the immediate repairs have been made good with the money claimed from the War Damage Commission. What now must be done is maintenance work which was necessarily neglected during the war ; this 'includes such things as repairing the stoned work and roof, strengthening the tower, replacing old pipes and so on. All this is unspectacular, and those who contribute to the appeal will have little to see for their money when it is all spent, though it will probably be some satisfaction to them to know that, if they had failed to contribute, it would only have been a question of years before there was nothing left for anyone to see but a ruin.
They order this matter better in France. There it is possible for a church to become an ancient monument before the owls have driven out the human congregation ; which means that the State can become responsible for the fabric without interfering with what goes on inside. In England each parish shifts for itself, and whether the church stands or falls depends on the ingenuity of the vicar, the publicity value of the building and the wealth of the parishioners. When one or more of these conditions is lacking, all that can be done is to put a touching advertisement in the newspapers and hope for a miracle. That, combined with an endless succession of whist- drives and jumble-sales, is the accepted way of doing things. If the Rector of Saint Bartholomew's decided that the emergency called for desperate measures and, taking a leaf out of his predecessors' book, let out the lady-chapel as a printing works and stored timber in the transept, his zeal to restore the church's finances might be com- mended, but his methods would not. If, like Rahere, he got td work himself with trowel and mortar, he would find himself in trouble with the trade unions, the Ministries of Labour, Works, Town and Country Planning, Health and Supply, and probably also with the Chancellor of the Diocese. In the reign of Henry I a man who wished to erect a church to the glory of God set to work with his own labour and the labour of his friends : in the reign of George VI he has to rely on cheque-books.
But today cheque-books are increasingly unreliable sources of comfort. The Church of England sees its income dwindling just when the calls on its purse are increasing. And at any rate the Church, even if it had any money to spare for the upkeep of buildings (which it has not), would be obliged to approach the problem from a pastoral and not a purely architectural point of view. It is bound to be more concerned with the new areas of population which have no churches than with the old areas which have too many. There are, moreover, many monstrosities of pink Victorian brick which are as badly in need of repair as St. Bartholo-4 mew's, and which serve much more populated parishes. What is to be done with them ? Rebuilding is as expensive as repairing, but if they are neither rebuilt nor repaired they will come down just as surely on the heads of their congregation as will Saint Bartholomew's., The hint of a new approach to the problem—limited in scope and intention—is contained in the plan for the City churches proposed last week by the London Diocesan Reorganisation Committee. The destruction caused by bombs has provided the excuse for a re- organisation of parishes which will reduce those in the City of London from 46 to 15 (incidentally, slightly increasing the area of Saint Bartholomew's, which remains a parish church). The sale of the abandoned church, sites will provide funds which could be used to restore some of those that are to be preserved. But this is no final solution, even for the City. The appeal for funds will have to go on indefinitely, while ecclesiastical architecture, good, bad and indifferent, from. Rahere to Butterfield, crumbles for lack of maintenance.
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