History since 1879
The following article appeared in the January 2004 edition of Ecclesiology
Today. It provides a brief history of the Society since 1879. For those
who prefer reading this sort of thing on paper, you can download a version
in Word or a pdf version (Adobe
Acrobat).
‘The non-professional study of ecclesiology’:
125 years of the Ecclesiological Society
Trevor Cooper
Purpose
Did they intend merely to visit, in an agreeable but unintellectual
way, a certain number of churches? – challenged Alexander Beresford
Hope. He was speaking to members of
the new St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society – our Society, under its
original name – during his inaugural address on Tuesday, 1 April 1879.
He hoped members would not limit
themselves in this way, and went on to encourage them to maintain and
develop the ‘science of Ecclesiology’, which was the study of worship in
‘all its material developments’.
The language may be dated, but the point he made is robust, and has
stood the test of time. Since its foundation 125 years ago, the Society
has continued to study all the physical
appurtenances of worship, such as church buildings, furnishings, artistic
embellishments, liturgy and music.
It is worth emphasising that from the beginning the Society has been
devoted to learning and debate, rather than attempting to lay down the
law. This is in contrast with the original
Ecclesiological Society, which had been founded forty years previously,
in 1839 (beginning life as the Cambridge Camden Society). This earlier
Society had been a
highly-effective pressure group for the Gothic style, together with
a rigid set of ‘laws of church arrangement’. These views had been transmitted
with verve, sarcasm and cast-iron
certainty through its famous Journal, The Ecclesiologist.
But the original Society failed to recruit, the membership aged, and
with the close of The Ecclesiologist in 1868 (the last issue claiming,
with some truth, that ‘we have the
satisfaction of retiring from the field victors’), the original Society
seems quietly to have faded away, though it was said to have been represented
at the funeral of Sir George
Gilbert Scott as late as 1878.
Foundation
A prospectus for the new St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society (the present
one) announced it to be a ‘successor’ of the Ecclesiological Society, by
then ‘dissolved’. Canon Gregory,
one of the Vice-Presidents, recalled how the new Society had begun
‘as the result of a conversations he had had with a few gentlemen . . .
who remarked to him that a want would
be supplied if the young men of London could visit the churches of
the metropolis, under efficient guidance, on their Saturday half-holidays’.
The object of the new Society, headlined on its first set of Transactions,
was ‘the non-professional study of Ecclesiology’. This less than inspiring
strapline was quietly dropped in
succeeding years.
The first president was the dean of St Paul’s, who held the presidency
for 21 years. It was because the Society met at the Cathedral that it was
called ‘The St Paul’s
Ecclesiological Society’, no doubt to help make clear that it was newly
founded.
The two surviving prime movers of the original 1839 Ecclesiological
Society, Beresford Hope and Benjamin Webb, both became members of the new
Society. As we have seen,
Beresford Hope gave the inaugural address, and both he and Webb were
vice-presidents. (It was a peculiarity of the Society at this time that
more than ten percent of its
membership were vice-presidents.) Very few other members of the original
Society joined the new one: many would by then have been elderly.
The new Society began with a bang, with nearly 250 members, including
some of the leading architects, liturgists and church historians of the
day – men like G. H. Birch, R. H.
Carpenter, Alfred Heales, J. Wickham Legg, T. Gambier Parry,
J. D. Sedding, J. P. Seddon, Sparrow Simpson, and J. C. Wall.
Activities
In its first years, the Society visited churches old and new, held lectures,
and published learned articles. It has, of course, done much the same ever
since, the most significant
innovation since 1879 being the launch of the Society’s website, though
this had to await the invention of the internet, and was not introduced
for 120 years, in 1998.
For the first sixty years, until 1938, the Society published a continuous
Journal, Transactions of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society.
Many of the articles in this series broke new
ground, and are of very high quality. This was followed by a more intermittent
series, the Transactions of the Ecclesiological Society (by then
the Society had changed its name),
until about 1957.
Other publications followed, including a useful series of short monographs,
and a lively newsletter. The Society now produces a periodical three times
a year Ecclesiology Today
(gentle reader, you have this in your hand), and occasional monographs.
The tradition of visiting churches has, of course, continued, together
with that of organising lectures, including the well-established annual
Dykes Bower memorial lecture, begun in
1998, and the Annual Conference, first held in 1996.
Crises
It has not, of course, been entirely a smooth ride. Somewhat embarrassingly,
there were financial rumblings just one year after the foundation of the
Society, when it was realised
that income from subscriptions would not equal expenditure, probably
because the life membership fee was set so low. After continued expressions
of concern by the Treasurer,
and largely unsuccessful appeals for donations, subscriptions were
raised in 1884.
Money became a major problem during 1922, largely, it seems, due to
excessive expenditure on a previous section of the Transactions.
This left the Society technically insolvent.
The immediate response to was to expel about one quarter of the membership
for arrears of subscriptions; for the next few years the Transactions were
rather thin.
One major decision which seems to have caused some angst was the question
of the admission of women. This was first raised at the AGM in 1907. It
was recorded that ‘an
animated discussion followed, from which it appeared that members were
by no means in accord on the subject’, and it was put aside for further
consideration. This incendiary
subject was left alone for six years, until at the AGM in 1913 ‘some
discussion ensued’, but ‘no definite decision’ was reached. Finally the
Council took a grip on the situation, and
at the AGM the following year made a recommendation to admit ladies,
six months before war broke out. There was a long discussion, before it
was finally agreed that ‘there is
nothing in the constitution of the Society to limit the membership
to men’, and the great matter was settled. By the following year, eight
ladies had joined.
Throughout much of the early years of the twentieth century there seem
to have been worries about membership, which hovered between 250 and 300,
and then began a steady
though slow decline after the clear-out of members in 1922. In 1936,
with membership having dropped below two hundred the Society created a
subcommittee to review its future.
One recommendation – contested by some members at the AGM the following
year – was to change the name to the Ecclesiological Society (dropping
the prefix St Paul’s) and
this was finally agreed at an Extraordinary General Meeting attended
by just 23 members later that year.
Despite this attempt to reposition the Society, numbers did not rise
substantially, and by the 1960s they had dropped to something around one
hundred members. At this time
there was an active programme of visits, but little in the way of publications.
A relaunch of the Society by Stephen Humphrey, the energetic Secretary
at the time, supported by a
number of Council members, finally led to the desired growth, Since
then, membership has been on a general upward trend, and now stands at
more than 850 members.
Until about thirty years ago the Society was firmly based in London
and the surrounding area. Almost all visits started from London. Today,
although still weighted towards southern
England by a factor of about two to one, the Society’s reach is national,
and visits to churches take place all over the country.
Continuity
Thus the Society has been in continuous, though not entirely untroubled,
existence since 1879. The Council hopes that, after 125 years, the Society
still meets the needs of those
who find churches and their use a fascinating subject for recreation
and study, and who enjoy, from time to time, meeting others of a similar
turn of mind, making it ‘the Society for
those who love churches’.
I would be delighted to hear from anyone who has, or knows of, a copy
of the Prospectus of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society (probably dated
1878 or 1879), or of the
recommendations made by the sub-committee on the future of the Society
in 1936, or, indeed, of any of the more ephemeral material relating to
the history of the Society up
to (say) the 1980s, including the rules of the Society at the various
stages in its life.
References
My primary source is the Transactions of the St Paul’s
Ecclesiological Society, as follows: Vol I, title page, iii, vii, viii,
lx and passim; Vol VI, xix; Vol VII, xxiii, xxvii and xxxiv; Vol IX,
viii, xvi (in addition to which, my copy of Vol IX part
1 contains a handwritten note detailing the excessive costs of part 5 of
Vol VIII); Vol X, cv, cxiv, cxviii, cxix . In addition, see
James White, The Cambridge Movement, Cambridge
(1962), 223-4; Geoff Brandwood, ‘Fond of Church Architecture’, page 53
and passim in C. Webster and J. Elliott, ‘A
Church as it should be’: the Cambridge Camden Society
and its Influence, Stamford (2000); Gavin Stamp (ed.), George Gilbert
Scott’s Personal and Professional
Recollections, Stamford (1995), 382. I am grateful
to Geoff Brandwood for comparing the names of the original members of the
St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society with those who
had belonged to the by then defunct Ecclesiological Society.