St Paul's Church for Seamen, Dock Street (1847-1990)

see also Episcopal Floating Chapel, St Paul's Whitechapel CE Primary School, St Paul Dock Street Curates, Parish Registers

EARLY YEARS

When the London Docks were constructed in the early 19th century, the lane known as Saltpetre Bank (marking the area's 18th century links with glassmaking) became Dock Street - a sign of the ever-changing nature of the area. It was after visiting her aunt and uncle in this street that the maidservant Elizabeth Canning disappeared on New Year's Day 1753, later claiming to have been held captive for a month in a hayloft, but the verdicts against the accused were overturned and she was convicted of perjury, imprisoned for a month and transported for seven years.

The foundation stone for a church to replace the Episcopal Floating Chapel, the Brazen, was laid on 11 May 1846 by Albert, the Prince Consort. The Illustrated London News [first left] shows him lowering the stone by turning a small handle on a block and tackle. The cost of £9,000 - including £1,250 for the Dock Street site - was met by public subscription, and it was consecrated in 1847. As part of the process, the architect Henry Roberts and several residents of Wellclose Square had issued a householders' certificate of inadequacy of existing churches in the parish of St Mary Matfelon, in which the new church was situated: its patrons, Brasenose College Oxford, gave formal consent, as did the evangelical Rector of Whitechapel from 1837-60, the Rev W.W. Champneys, whos was one of the prime movers, and built three other churches in the area, largely maintained by the Church Pastoral Aid Society. (In fact, as explained below, St Paul's it did not become a parish church until 1864.) The original trustees were Lord Henry Cholmondeley, the Hon. Francis Maude, John Labouchere, Frederick Madan (one of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House) and Charles James Bevan. New trustees were regularly appointed: one of the last, in 1959, was David Sheppard (later Bishop of Liverpool), when he was the Warden of the Mayflower Centre in Canning Town.

The architect was Henry Roberts FSA, Fellow of the Institute of British Architects (1803–76), who was born in Philadelphia but came to work in Britain, in the office of Fowler and Smirke before setting up his own practice in 1830. He had liberal and Evangelical connections, explored below. In 1832 he won the competition to design the Fishmongers' Company Hall by the new London Bridge, and the result, in Greek Revival style showing Smirke's influence, was much admired. His practice (with George Gilbert Scott as a pupil) flourished, with houses for the aristocracy in a range of styles - Jacobean, Tudor Gothic and Italianate. His essays in Gothic Revival churches, however, of which St Paul's was an example, did not meet with the approval of the Ecclesiologists. Reviewing the designs in 1846, they judged it extremely poor - a vulgar attempt at First Pointed....the whole is stale and inspid. It was in Early English style, of stock brick, with stone dressings, and a tower and spire at the north-west which was surmounted, not by the customary cross, but by a weather-vane in the form of a ship (now mounted on the south wall of St Paul's School). The interior was plain, with no chancel and a west-end gallery (the organ was in the first stage of the tower.)

Roberts also designed the vicarage at no.11 next door [left]. with stucco bands and architraves to the ground floor sash windows (it was listed Grade II in 1973). Messrs William Cubitt were contracted to build both the church and the vicarage, which is now tenanted by business students and was visited a few years ago by the Rector and Tony Williamson (who grew up in the house) and his family. Tony died in 2019 – see this obituary.

Henry Roberts was a pioneer of social housing, and honorary architect of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes (originally the Labourers' Friend Society, of 1830, re-established in 1844 with the Prince Consort as President - see its fourth annual report here). He published an influential essay The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes (1850) and four further books; see Professor James Stevens Curl The Life and Work of Henry Roberts, 1803-1876: The Evangelical Conscience and the Campaign for Model Housing and Healthy Nations (1983), and his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (2000). See here for the later story of workers' housing in the parish.

The district, previously quite up-market with its music halls and theatres, and gracious residences around Wellclose Square, was in decline. As the merchants moved out, the houses became tenements and warehouses, the open spaces and gardens filled up with hovels, cafés and doss houses, and vice was rampant. An account of 1857 speaks of

Disasters at sea were frequent, and disease, alcoholism, penury and unemployment were all around. Mothers went out to work, for a few pence a day, leaving babies in charge of children, so that up to sixty children each day were absent from school. Aoording to the official register for 1870, 85 infants died from being left in the streets. Children were chronically underfed, and the dirty and vicious streets formed their home, school and playground. Houses were overcrowded, insanitary and infested, and clothing in rags and tatters. Maternity hung like a nightmare over houses too poor and untrained to cope with it.

In 1858 the Prince Consort gave a set of communion plate. [Since June 1990 this has been on loan to the Treasury of St Paul's Cathedral, on the direction of the Bishop.]

St Paul's ministers ('perpetual curates': as yet there was no parish created) were also chaplains of the Asylum and Sailors' Home. The first was the remarkable Charles Besley Gribble (1847-58) - see here for more details of his life before and after St Paul's, and his family. While at St Paul's he co-operated with the London City Mission, a non-denominational agency founded by David Nasmith in 1835 of which other Anglican clergy were suspicious. Lower Life in London, by George Perkins (1854) describes the lives of individuals in the Well Street area. On one occasion Gribble cared for two kidnapped sailors from the Friendly Islands. He left the parish to become Embassy Chaplain in Constantinople, where he was involved in complex negotiations with the Turkish authorities; he died in 1878.

Robert Hall Baynes (1858-62) - left in a mezzotint of c1858 by Robert Bowyer Parkes at the National Gallery, which lists him as vicar, writer, criminal - is remembered as a collector of religious poetry, a writer of hymns and religious verse, and editor of various publications (see Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology) – though more so in the USA, where two of his hymns [right] still appear in hymnals, than in this country. Son of a Baptist pastor in Wellington, Somerset, he studied at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was sentenced to four months' imprisonment for obtaining food and lodgings by false pretences (and served other prison sentences in Bristol for theft and assault); nevertheless, he was ordained in 1855 and after curacies at Christ Church Blackheath and St John Hoxton came to St Paul's. During his time in the parish, he opposed the style of worship at St George-in-the-East, but when Joseph Rowe was convicted of 'brawling' in 1860 Baynes denied in court the claim that he had encouraged him to shout out the responses over the choir - and wrote to The Times to make his position clear. He reported 13,541 ship visits in 1861, with 415 meetings held; by the following year, he had three city missioners and two scripture readers under his direction. See here for his comments about religious services held in theatres. On 2 January 1860 a letter to The Times included these words: I was told, not long ago, by the captain of a merchant ship, that he had been to nearly all the large ports in the world, but had never witnessed such open and abandoned profligacy as exists within half a mile from my church in Dock Street.

He left for Holy Trinity Maidstone, and then was Vicar of St Michael Coventry (becoming a canon of Worcester [Coventry's diocese at that time] on the death of Mr Haddan in 1873 - no doubt in 'consolation' for the Madagascar furore - see below) until 1879. In that year he gave a paper to the Monthly Church Conference of the diocese of London 'Is the pulpit of the national church as real a power as it ought to be, and if not, why not?' After a year as Rector of Toppesfield (where W.P. Jay of Christ Church Watney Street later served, from 1889-94) his final post (by exchange of livings) was at Holy Trinity Folkestone; he died in 1895, apparently after falling into the fire at his Oxford lodgings.

In 1870 he had been appointed Bishop-designate of Madagascar, but he resigned the following year. Anglican missionaries, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), had gone there in 1864, working initially along the east coast around Toamasina, but others had preceded them - hence the conflict. The intriguing story is told more fully here.

Hymn collections edited by Baynes - some including his own texts - were Hymns for the Public Worship of the Church (1858, while at St Paul's); Lyra Anglicana (1862 - also while at St Paul's, and dedicated to the Duchess of Marlborough who had taken a kindly interest in its mission work); The Canterbury Hymnal (1863); and Hymns for Home Mission Services in the Church of England (1879, to be used alongside Hymns Ancient & Modern). Collections of religious verse included English Lyrics (1865, dedicated to the Bishop of Oxford in grateful memory of many kindnesses); The Illustrated Book of Sacred Poems (1867, dedicated to the Archbishop of York); Autumn Memories and other Verses (1869 - his own poems, produced at Coventry and including some illustrations of the church there, and dedicated to the Countess of Aylesford); and Home Songs for Quiet Hours (1874 - dedicated to the East End philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts). He produced a communicant's manual typical of many others of the time in 1869 (later editions added some eucharistic hymns), and for a time he edited (or 'conducted') the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine & Family Treasury. The final illustration above, for All Saints, is typical of the engravings in these works.

DAN GREATOREX YEARS

The most famous Victorian incumbent, who served for 35 years from 1862-97, was Dan Greatorex. He became Vicar when a parish district was created in 1864 - the machinations behind this, linked to the rise of ritualism at St George's and its mission church, are explained here. Greatorex was a man of pronounced evangelical principles and boundless energy. He founded an astonishing array of schools, nurseries and other institutions, and his story is told in more detail here. His architect brother Reuben, who designed St Paul's School and Church House, Wellclose Square, is a part of this story.  Although work with seamen continued, conducted by lay missioners and various societies, the focus was shifting to more general parochial ministry, including 'rehabilitating victims of vice'. In 1873 Greatorex accepted the status of honorary chaplain to the Home and Asylum at £50 a year (raised in 1874 to £100), and when he retired in 1896 he was granted an annuity of £50. But lawyers advised that there was no need to appoint or pay his successor as a chaplain - an informal arrangement and ad hoc honorarium would suffice!

There were two royal visits during this time. The Prince and Princess of Wales came to open the Day Schools on 30 June 1870. On 23 June 1874 the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh came to open the Infant Nursery ('for the children of seamen and others') and Mission Room. There was a Déjeuner (with tickets for those who contributed five guineas to the steward's list), a Presentation of Purses by young people in the Grand Marquee, and a four-day Grand Flower and Rose Show and Exhibition of British and Foreign Birds. See the poster [left] about the Committee for the Systematical Decoration of the Intended Route! In addition to the National Anthem, the choir sang the Russian National Hymn and God bless our Sailor Prince, despite the 'serious doubts about the propriety of the words' expressed by the Bishop of Rochester, who led the proceedings in place of the Bishop of London. [A more recent royal visit was made by Princess Margaret in 1956.]

See here for Victorian curates of St Paul's, and here for baptism and wedding statistics throughout the period.

Nautical memorials
Two Arctic explorers are commemorated in the church.

Tiles set In the north aisle wall mark Rear Admiral Sir William Edward Parry, who had read the lessons for four years and died in 1855.

The west window depicts scenes on the Sea of Galilee - Christ teaching from a boat, Christ rebuking the wind and waves, the miraculous draught of fishes and Christ walking on the water - in memory of Captain Sir John Franklin who, with the crews of Erebus and Terror, perished on an expeditionary voyage.

In memory of Captain Sir John Franklin RN, KCH one of the founders of this church who died on board HMS Erebus in lat 69°, 37 42” N, long lat 98° 41” W erected 1872 Dan Greatorex, Vicar He rebuked the winds and the waves saying 'He that hath ears let him hear' 'Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men' 'Thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt'

Franklin led the Royal Navy's 1854 expedition to locate the North-West Passage across Canada, to enable ships to sail to the Far East by an alternative route avoiding the problems of rounding Africa. His vessels were equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and several years' supplies of newly-invented tinned food (though some of his sailors suffered from lead poisoning from the sealing process). When they disappeared, his wife pressed for a major search to be launched. Their remains were eventually found by Dr John Rae, tipped off by Inuit contacts. Rae, from Orkney, had been surveying and charting the area on foot for some years, using traditional skills learnt from the Inuits. As the naming of Rae's Straight (the 'missing link' of the Passage) suggests, he should really be credited with the discovery of the Passage, but Franklin's memorial in Westminster Abbey attributes it to him. This is probably because, offensively at the time, but correctly according to recent research, Rae reported that Frankin's expedition had resorted in extremis to cannibalism. Orcadians are pressing for proper recognition of Rae's achievement. The story of the two men was well-told in an episode of Ray Mears' BBC series, and the accompanying book, Northern Wilderness (Hodder & Stoughton 2009).

Many other memorials, and model ships, followed, including the Peril of the Hecla, forced against an iceberg in 1825, and the wreck of the Gossamer off Prawle Point near Dartmouth, where Captain Thompson and others drowned en route to Australia, having attended the church on the previous Sunday.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

By 1900 St. Paul's church was in a poor state of repair and the walls were badly stained by damp. Photographs show the interior unchanged: the pulpit and large reading-desk dominated and the altar was small and insignificant. A £1,600 restoration was undertaken, during which the galleries were removed, a raised chancel formed in the eastern bay of the nave, the east wall was painted with Gothic arches to match the old reredos, the reading desk was removed, and the pulpit either replaced or radically altered. The organ, an 1848 2-manual instrument of 14 stops by Gray and Davison of 370 Euston Road (costing £278, with one of the earliest 'piperack' cases), renovated by them in 1865 (which is probably when the pipes were decorated), was rebuilt in 1901 as a 3-manual instrument by Hele & Co of Plymouth [right]. When the church closed, it was transferred and rebuilt by Peter Collins for St Philip Earl's Court, Kensington.

Another memorial to those who perished at sea, on board the barque Brier Holme off the coast of Tasmania in 1904, was erected; the story is fully told here.

Greatorex' successor as Vicar was Edward Griffith Parry (1897-1918). He was from a 'Liverpool Welsh' clerical family and, like his brothers, sttended Liverpool Institute. His older brother John, after Corpus Christi College Cambridge, was a curate at St Chrysostom Liverpool, then in Rotherham, and came to London as Vicar of St Stephen Canonbury, then of St Leonard Bromley [by Bow - in the East End] and chaplain to the Stepney Union (writing The Parish Visiting Book in 1895) then became Vicar and Rural Dean of Hammersmith and chaplain to the West London Hospital before retiring to Ilfracombe in 1906. Edward and his younger brother Joshua Powell Parry (who served his first curacy at St Paul's) both went to Jesus College Cambridge. Like John, Edward also served his title in Liverpool, at St Columba's, and a second curacy in Bromley [the south-east London one] before coming here. He married, and a daughter was born at St Paul's in 1899. Charles Booth archive contains an interview with him [B222 pp90-107].

In 1906 he was one of three councillors for Tower Ward (on the City fringes), and in the 1913 London Councy Council elections for the Whitechapel ward (with 5,117 voters) stood unsuccessfully as a Municipal Reform candidate, together with Adolph Ludski; they polled 1008 and 916 votes respectively, but the Progressive candidates Henry Herman Gordon and William Cowlishaw Johnson held onto the seats with 1746 and 1792 votes each. He was a member of the London School Board, representing the Berner Street group of schools; in 1901 his published attendance figures were poor, and the minutes noted that he hopes to attend meetings more frequently. He was also a 'coöptative' [co-opted] governor of the Aldgate Freedom and Lordship Foundation (charities for the needy in the parish of St Botolph Aldgate and the City of London respectively, and jointly run under a scheme of 1897, with a clerk on an annual salary of £50).

The London Standard of 11 January 1912 reported that he laments the tendency to yield to the demand for services that are fleeting, if not flippant; for sermons that excite for the moment; for professional singing by a choir; and for services that must be illustrated by lantern views or kinematograph displays [right: and see here for a Methodist neighbour who some years later embraced the latest technology]. This prompted a further press article a few days later:

The same year there was a published appeal to churchpeople for the Crèche by one of his West End supporters, describing the daily life of a poor mother in the parish:

See here for other curates in Parry's time; there were no more until the 1950s.

Another long incumbency followed: Charles Davey Weekes (1918-48). Ordained in 1898 after ordination training at Ely Theological College, he was the youngest of three brothers who studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. William Haye Weekes, after a curacy in Exeter diocese, went to Bloemfontein, as bishop's chaplain, then variously Rector of Mafeking, and Beaconsfield, and Archdeacon first of Kimberley, then of Bloemfontein. George Arthur Weekes became the Librarian of Sidney Sussex, then Master from 1918-45 (and Vice-Chancellor of the University 1926-28). Charles served his title in Broadwindsor (Salisbury diocese) before going to South Africa as his brother's curate at Beaconsfield for six years, returning to curacies in Bodmin and then at Christ Church, Isle of Dogs, from 1910-18. At St Paul's he had no curates, though when St Mark Whitechapel closed in 1926 (and demolished in 1937) and its parish was added to St Paul's, he was inducted to the new united benefice (by William Willcox, Bishop of Willesden) and worked with E.J. Crosby, its last priest-in-charge, for two years until 1928. He retired to Sunbury-on-Thames and died some years later.

Frederick Walter Crooks was Vicar of the combined parish of St Paul with St Mark from 1948-52. Like many others who served here, he had trained at Trinity College Dublin, and began his ministry in Ireland in 1941, as Dean's Vicar of St Canice Cathedral and curate of Kilkenny, before wartime service as a RNVR chaplain from 1943-46. After two years at High Wycombe, in charge of St Andrew's, he came to St Paul's for four years - see his comments here on inheriting a former Admiral as curate! - before going to Guildford diocese, serving successively as incumbent of Cobham (taking in Ockford and Hatchford in 1954), Haslemere and Epsom, with two stints as a rural dean (of Godalming from 1967 and Epsom from 1969), becoming an honorary canon from 1969-74 when he became Vicar of Shalfleet on the Isle of Wight in Portsmouth diocese, combined the following year with the village of Thorley. He retired in 1980 to Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight, holding permission to officiate for the following three years, and died in 2003, aged 85.

FATHER JOE, 'ADMIRAL WOODS', THE 'BACCY PARSON' & OTHERS

St Paul's had long had a Protestant and low church tradition (despite a number of curates of what was once called 'advanced churchmanship'), but this changed dramatically with the coming of its most famous Vicar, Joseph Williamson (1952-62), universally known as Father Joe and invariably garbed in cassock and biretta. The church acquired (by faculty) an aumbry in 1955, and Stations of the Cross in 1958. This deceptively frail figure with a bellowing voice was proud of being a Poplar lad, and believed this gave him 'street cred', and an understanding of people's lives, in the East End, though it also gave him a chip on the shoulder when it came to dealing with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His major project – in which he was staunchly supported by his wife Audrey and two parish workers, Nora Neal and Daphne Jones – was based on Church House, Wellclose Square where prostitutes and 'girls in moral danger' were rescued and rehabilitated. A fuller account of his life and ministry can be found here, and of Nora Neal and Daphne Jones here. The history of Church House [right in his time, and in its current sorry state] can be found here, together with hopes for its future restoration.

After the death of Admiral Woods (Chaplain of the Red Ensign Club, and honorary curate of the parish) in 1954, Fr Joe became also Chaplain of the Sailors' Home and Red Ensign Club. See here for the stipendiary curates who served with him.

The last Vicar of St Paul with St Mark was Hugh Sainsbury Cuthbertson (1963-68): see here for an extended account of the 'Baccy Parson' and his Christian Socialist connections.

These advertisements [left] from a 1967 church booklet show the continuing German and Jewish presence in the area. Freimuller's shop backed onto Wilton's, which from 1891-1956 had been under the aegis of the Methodist Church.

FINAL DAYS

In 1971 St Paul's parish was joined to St George-in-the-East – Dan Greatorex no doubt turned in his grave, given his hostility a century earlier! - but the church remained open for worship until 1990. From 1971-79 the curate-in-charge was the enigmatic Joseph Thomas Davies, known as 'Father Aquinas'. He was from the parish of St Barnabas Bethnal Green, where he was 'Brother Aquinas' or more simply 'Joe', but according to Lana Rowe, a friend from Bethnal Green days (who met him when he called at her parents' provisions shop soliciting harvest gifts, and discovered that she played the guitar and sang, so got her involved in church) no-one was sure of his origins - he invited visitors from Cambridge and Eton (getting choristers and trumpeters to play for services) and claimed to have shares in a racehorse. [Those who knew him in the Suffolk parishes where he was to serve later said he maintained close ties with his 'relatives', the Sykes family of Sledmore House, near Beverley in Yorkshire.]

He worked at Bethnal Green hospital, where he fitted artifical limbs; an April Fool prank involved a fake operation for a head transplant (of which photos survive). He bought an old London taxi, in which Lana attempted to teach him to drive (he probably never took a test), and later he drove young people around in an (untaxed) minibus. He organised many church social events and dinners, not always turning up himself, though he was certainly present for an event marking the return of Bishop Trevor Huddleston from South Africa - who ordained him (with little or no training) to serve at St Paul's.

The same pattern continued there: elaborate services [left are Christmas, Easter and Harvest (x2) during his time] - one year there was also a full-size crib in the vicarage garden, and a donkey accompanying the carol singers around local pubs and St Katharine's Docks, including the Thistle [now Tower Guoman] Hotel - see also an Epiphany procession arriving there.

St Katharine's Docks had been recently redeveloped, and the Queen visited during her Silver Jubilee in 1977 [right] and opened the Coronarium, a circular open-air rotunda using eight Doric columns salvaged from the docks and used for a time as an 'all faiths chapel' - far right is Fr Aquinas celebrating a eucharist there. It incorporated a large perspex 'crystal crown', recycled from the original design of the monolith for the film 2001 which was rejected in favour of a black basalt slab; in 2000 it was relocated onto the wall of the Thistle Hotel. The Coronarium is now covered over and is a Starbucks: here is a 2013 newsletter describing a gathering there led by the Master of the Royal Foundation to mark St Katharine's Day.

Fr Aquinas restored Beating the Bounds [left]. He is remembered with affection by some for his enthusiasm, and care for the needy, he broke all the rules: finances were dodgy, he let wayfarers (as he called them) sleep in various parts of the church - one, when he was at St Barnabas, had slept up a ladder behind the altar mural and startled congregations with his snoring. The archdeacon was regularly called in by the exasperated churchwardens. Right is a slightly bemused Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1974-80 on a visit to the parish.

He left in 1979 to become Rector of Roos and Garton in Holderness with Tunstall and other parishes in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where, among other things, in 1985 he was embroiled in controveries about the future of the recently-built village school in relation to local housing developments. In 1989 he became Rector of Pentlow, Foxearth, Liston and Borley near Sudbury in Suffolk (but in the diocese of Chelmsford - now part of the North Hickford Team), where he continued a vigorous ministry - his 'bells and smells' were not appreciated by all, but others warmed to his pastoral style. He organised many social functions at Foxearth Rectory and in the village hall; had groups of ordinands from Westcott House in Cambridge to stay, for parish experience; welcomed a coachload of East Enders to visit; and kept a horse, Jupiter, in a stable at the Rectory, riding daily around the village (for which he needed no licence or driving test). Having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, regretting that he had not done so sooner, he died in office of cancer in 1995, aged 63, and his funeral was back at Bethnal Green, at his request. The paschal candlestick at Foxearth is his memorial there. The following year, a close friend Paul Secretan, Mission to Seamen's chaplain in South Shields, took his own life, distressed at the break-up of his marriage and the death of his mother and of his old friend. [Our thanks to Lana and Ashley Rowe, friends from Bethnal Green days, and to Corinne and Philip Cox, respectively former head of Foxearth primary school and churchwarden, for some of this information.]

Curates and members of St George's (with Julian Scharf as priest-in-charge of the united parish) then led worship, among them Olive Wagstaff, a licensed Parish Worker who has vast experience of the area from the 1950s onwards. She worked at St Dunstan Stepney, was one of the lay community members at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in St John Groser's time, and did pioneering work with the elderly. Until recently she was our sacristan at St George's. From 1984-86 Daniel (Philip) Pearce was a non-stipendiary curate of the parish who helped to build up the congregation at St Paul's, and prepare it for final closure. Reflecting recently on the experience, he writes I moved in with Hugh and Juliet Shelbourne, living at Church House, Wellclose Square ... we started with a Sunday congregation of about seven and gradually people began to drift in, till we got up to about 40 on a good Sunday. At that time there were various schemes for closure of one or more local churches - see here for full details - and the upshot was a decision to close St Paul's. Daniel continues ....so we agreed to march, as a body, from worship at Dock Street to the main eucharist at St George's. The merger was not always easy. We had a pretty free and easy way of worship: ask a rhetorical question in a sermon and you were pretty sure to get one or more answers from the pews ... St George's was more traditional. One Sunday when I introduced a spot of unexpected drama into my sermon, one of the old members told me 'I have enough drama in my living room and kitchen without having it thrown at me in church!' It was all the same an exciting and wonderful time of my life and ministry.

In 1989 the St Katharine's Dock area of the parish (south of East Smithfield) was transferred to St Peter London Dock. Various schemes for the church building were considered - including a restaurant, and continued use by other Christian denominations who had been meeting there since it closed for Anglican worship; unfortunately, there was little consultation with the parish. Above is the final procession the other way - from St George's to St Paul's (now with Gillean Craig as Rector) for a final service. It was on the market for a year, with a £1.5m price tag.

The East London Advertiser on 14 September 1990 dubbed it 'the church no-one wants' [right], and the agent commented 'we will push it more aggresively when the property market picks up'. It was used in 1991 for the filming of the first series of the first ever TV show about computer and video games, Gamesmaster, presented by sporting stars of the day, including John Fashanu, Eric Bristow, Jimmy White, Pat Cash, Gary Wilson and Emlyn Hughes. In the event, it was successfully converted into a private nursery in 2002; the parish has had no contact since.

See here for baptism and wedding statistics throughout the life of the parish.

Dock Street and Ensign Street then and now

Both streets saw many changes in the 19th century as they became main thoroughfares to the Docks. All the modern buildings are of indifferent quality and little interest. Right is the west side of Dock Street from Goad's 1887 insurance map.

On the east side of Dock Street, south of the church, an 1873 warehouse (part of the cartage depot for Millwall Docks) has gone. At no.15 a double-fronted house of the 1860s remains; until recently it was The Galleries, a consultancy providing art for industry, and in the adjacent modern block recording studio facilities [left, and the original building at night].

On the corner of the west side, at 66-67 Royal Mint Street [left], is a former tobacco warehouse of 1891, by Edwin B. Crockett, described in the current Pevsner as 'forceful' - there are tall iron columns inside. In 1850, one Cohen, a reformed Jew and general dealer, had traded from this address. His wife Jane was witness in the Old Bailey trial of Edward Coughlin, who was transported for seven years for stealing a watch from a Fleet Street trader and seeking to sell on the pawn ticket. In 1866 Catherine Cohen (their daughter?), general outfitter of the same address, was declared bankrupt. The building is now converted to flats. Beyond the building site are modern flats [right]; nos. 12-14, built as offices in the Italianate style [far right].

In 2005 Purple Property Holdings sought planning permission for three new blocks [visualisation far left]  on the site of nos.10-20 [here is the archaeology report: the next two images show the 2008 demolition of the rice mill that stood there]; it remains a building site. Flank Street ran between Dock Street and John Fisher Streets; right is a procession gathering there in 1987.

No.20 had been a warehouse of 1883 (with windows dressed in blue bricks) for Wallis & Drysdale, a firm with an interesting history. John and Thomas Wallis, and Hector Drummond Drysdale, had traded as mustard and chicory manufacturers, spice merchants, farmers and millers, from 131 Upper Thames Street, with the Wallis family also running a flour, chicory and mustard mill at Burton Latimer [left], and farms in Kettering and Rowell (all in Northamptonshire) from the 1860s. John Wallis retired in 1875, and in 1878 the partnership between Wallises Thomas, James Aspin and Arthur Thomas and Hector Drysdale was dissolved. James Aspin Wallis remained the manager of the Burton Latimer mill, living at Isebank, the adjacent house, until the 1920s: he chaired the parish council and was a prominent Baptist. In 1932, this became the site where Weetabix was first commercially produced in this country (invented in Australia as 'Weetbix' and also promoted in the USA, where it had historic links with Seventh Day Adventism and millenarianism). Meanwhile, the London mustard operation had shifted export production (for Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to Guernsey in the Channel Islands, to avoid duty on goods manufactured in bond; they were then shipped to London for onward transmission.

At no.22 (opposite the church) is is the former Sir Sidney Smith pub (named after an admiral who served in the French revolutionary wars), which was rebuilt in the 1930s by A.E. Sewell, and re-named the Pepper Pot in 1998 [left, with old sign still in place and again after the name change]. Right, in 1971, is the former pub Hearts of Oak at no.36 and the southern end of the street in the 1980s.

Left is nos.38-44 in 1971. No.40 was a nine-storey building with a cast iron frame, built by French prisoners-of-war during the Napoleonic Wars (though some date it to 1834) which was a sugar refinery until 1874 - Hodgeson & Son in 1837, John Hodgeson in 1845, and Harrison & Wilson in 1857. As the Goad map above shows, it later became the Monastery Bonded Tea Warehouse - a company formed in 1889, now dissolved. In 1973 it was listed Grade II (forming a group with no.15 opposite) though was severely damaged by fire; the left part was demolished in 1980 [image right] and modern office buildings now fill the site.

The southern end of Ensign Street - left in 1956 - has been largely rebuilt. Right is Liberty House and beyond it Onedin Point at nos.20-22. Far right are doorways of no.18, the former Mercantile Marine Office, now flats.

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