St Barnabas, locked no keyholder, Victorian three gabled church nothing to write home about but I've seen worse
St Mary Magdalene, lnk although I've subsequently read on their website that the key is available from the Nature Reserve office, looks fascinating - a revisit is needed. The 9½ acre graveyard is managed as a nature reserve which I applaud as a welcome introduction of green lungs in to the urban area.
Having said that the graveyard contains 60 CWGC headstones (actually I think there are more since I found one that is not mentioned on the CWGC site – SO Osbourne 1943) of which I found 11, the rest are lost in the wilderness and 3 of those are now illegible. This, it seems to me, is a crying shame and that respect to the fallen can, and should, be accommodated within the strictures of a nature reserve.
ST BARNABAS, Browning Road, Little Ilford. 1900-9 by Bucknell & Comper. Red brick. Fine quiet three-gable front with Perp windows. Interior wide with wide aisles, cool and competent. No chancel arch. Large Perp windows, four-lights even in the aisles.
ST MARY MAGDALENE, High Street South. It is surprising to find a prosperous medieval village church between an East-end suburb, a by-pass road, and the vast hump of the Northern Outfall Sewer. The W tower of the early C16, low, of big reddish rubble. The rest of the church essentially Norman, with masonry of large coursed rubble. Norman windows, deeply splayed inside, preserved on both sides. Nave wide and aisleless, lower and narrower chancel, and yet lower and narrower apse. The apse has two pilaster buttresses outside and a corresponding pilaster inside on the SE. Its plain moulding is identical with that of the W arch of the apse. It indicates that the apse was intended to be vaulted. In 1931 however a Norman ceiling was discovered above the apse. The chancel has inside as an enrichment intersecting arches with zigzag decoration, well preserved on the N side, hardly recognizable on the S. The W doorway of the Norman church is preserved. It leads now into the W tower. It is of three orders of columns with scalloped capitals. The S side of the chancel has a three-light brick window, probably of the C17. The nave windows are from the restoration of 1844-5. In the N chancel wall the remains of an opening of the early C16 towards an anchorite’s cell, in the S side of the apse a PISCINA of the C13. Double opening with trefoiled heads under pointed arch. - FONT. Bowl of 1639 on late C17 or early C18 baluster stem. - PAINTING. In the apse remains of early C13 wallpainting, imitating ashlar facing with red joints. In the arch to the apse small flowers and foliage frieze with head of Christ in the apex. - PLATE. Cup of 1563; Cover of 1573; Cup and Cover 1623. - MONUMENTS. Brasses to Hester Neve d. 1610 and Elizabeth Heigham d. 1622. - Standing wall monument to Edward Nevill Earl of Westmorland, early C17, surrounded by the original iron Two large kneeling figures facing each other, and kneeling children below. Alabaster, good quality. - William Heigham d. 1620 and wife, good alabaster monument with two standing cherubs; no effigies. - Giles Breame d. 1621, kneeling figures also facing each other, smaller than the Nevill tomb. - Higham Beamish d. 1723, plain against obelisk, signed by Nathaniel Hedges. - In the Churchyard William Stukeley, the antiquarian, is buried (d. 1765).
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| St Barnabas |
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| St Mary Magdalene |
Across the river from here is a fine view of Kent, partly blocked by the six-mile embankment of a great sewer. Monstrous slag heaps such as are too often allowed to ruin our countryside make a grim background to the huge Beckton gasworks. One of our most industrial towns, it has little for the traveller to see, but its 70 or 80 miles of streets are fine and well kept, and planted with thousands of trees. There are 200 acres of open spaces, a Central Park of 25 acres, and Plashet Park a little smaller; it was the ground round Plashet House, the home of Elizabeth Fry when Plashet was a secluded hamlet. No trace of her home is left, but in our own time there has been discovered the rate-book of the house. The site itself is delightful with ornamental gardens. Near the Central Park is the memorial to the men of the Great War, whose names are on bronze tablets; there are 1669 of them. The Town Hall in the middle of the town (built of red brick with terracotta facings) has a fine clock tower, and inside are more memorials; one to four heroic men who gave their lives in trying to save one of their mates who worked for the council; another tablet is to 100 men who fell in the South African War, and with their names are Kipljng’s words, Lest We Forget. The technical college and grammar school is an impressive building, and there is a grammar school for girls, also nobly housed.
One of the most interesting old buildings in the town is Green Street House, at which Henry the Eighth stayed with Anne Boleyn. In those days the house was new, though the gables and cornices we see ‘are 17th century. There is panelling of 1600 in the passages and in three of the rooms, and from the same time is the fine staircase with high wooden vases on its heavy balusters. There are 17th century doors and doorways, and two Queen Anne fireplaces.
Those who would read of these things may do so in a fine Carnegie Library, which has in its entrance hall a bust of the noblest woman on East Ham’s roll of fame, Elizabeth Fry. She lived at Plashet House, of which only the grounds remain. Last century the Methodists raised a chapel to her memory in Plashet Grove, and St Stephen’s church was built in her honour about the same time. The church is rich in modern woodwork.
The mother church of the town is Norman, and is of remarkable interest, having Roman bricks, Norman timbers, and medieval painting. The windows of the bell-chamber tell us the tower is only 400 years old, but it has a rare 14th century bell inscribed with the name of Gabriel, and shelters a fine Norman doorway with three pairs of shafts crowned by cushion capitals.
The Roman bricks in the walls must have come from a Roman settlement near the site, and Roman relics have been found in the churchyard - perhaps the biggest churchyard in England still in use. The bricks were used by the Normans, whose handiwork is in four windows and an archway. On the outside chancel wall is the stone frame of a 13th century doorway, and the medieval iron window fastenings of a hermit’s cell. The doorway by which we come in has one scalloped capital carved by the Normans, and the porch has Tudor timbers in the roof. The nave has two Norman windows set in its thick walls, and one side has oak panelling carved with 17th century strapwork. The walls of the Norman chancel have a band of 13th century painting, and also 13th century are the red flowers on the walls of the Norman apse and on its deep window splays. It is above all this colour that we find the Norman timbers, a very unusual possession, found in only about a dozen churches in the country. They are heavy Norman beams, remaining as solid examples of carpentry in the original roof.
Along the chancel walls are remains of a lovely interlacing arcade of round arches with zigzag. Four arches are complete, but the others have been cut into for tombs, and for a Tudor doorway to the roodstairs. The apse has a 13th century bracket with a finely carved head which, with a Norman capital, has been fashioned into a pair of stone basins at which the priest would wash his hands.
The font has a quaint bowl given by Sir Richard Heigham in 1639, and in the chancel is a brass portrait of Sir Richard’s wife, his family crest on a helmet hanging above. A wall-stone with a gilt cherub is to Sir Richard’s daughter, and there is a brass of Hester Neve in Stuart dress. High on the chancel wall is a brightly painted monument with shields, pilasters, and obelisks giving it an air of dignity; in its arched recesses Charles Breame and his wife have been kneeling for over 300 years.
In a corner of the apse is the pretentious monument of a man who claimed to be an earl. It has its original iron railings, and eleven shields-of-arms. Above is an elaborate armorial achievement guarded by standing figures of Prudence and Hope, and below is an enriched recess with a carved helmet of red and black plumes set in front of a prayer desk. Here kneel Edmund Nevill and his wife Jane, a determined-looking woman with a red face and a coronet. In front of the tomb kneel their three sons and four daughters. The long inscription has in it a touch of defiance, proclaiming that Edmund Nevill, descended from kings and princes, was truly the 7th Earl of Westmorland. Actually his ancestor was Ralph Nevill, whose loyalty to Henry the Fourth has been vividly made use of by Shakespeare, but the 6th Earl was attainted for his attempt to release Mary Queen of Scots, and not even James the First would restore his title, so that the claim here is a bogus one.
In the churchyard is a stone set up in the days of the Commonwealth, but the most famous man buried here lies in an unmarked grave. He is Dr William Stukeley, the famous antiquary.
In the days when East Ham was a humble village William Stukeley paid a visit to his friend the vicar, Stukeley being then an old man who knew that his great labours were soon to end. As they wandered about the churchyard, gazing over the Thames marshes toward Shooter’s Hill, the old man turned to his friend and said: “When I die may I have a grave under this green turf, and will you see that no stone or other memorial is raised above me?” Stukeley was the leading antiquarian of his day, and realised only too well how vain are pompous sepulchres. Born in 1687 at Holbeach in Lincolnshire, he went from the grammar school there to Cambridge, became a doctor, and practised; but his heart was in the ancient story of our land, and he helped to found the Society of Antiquaries, becoming its secretary.
Many and long were the journeys he made with his friends, and curious were his notes. He wrote 20 books which, with all the errors that will creep into books, have helped our antiquarians ever since. His friends called him the Arch Druid, for Stonehenge had cast its spell about him, and he had devoted months to exploring it. His theories are wrong, but even now people tell us, as he did, that the Druids sacrificed at this great temple. It is his error that persists. Stonehenge and Avebury are both far older than the Druids, if Druids ever did exist. But these errors are nothing, for they can be corrected. What is remembered of Stukeley is his unweary zeal and his intense love of the Past. In 1765 they brought him here by the Essex highway and over Bow Bridge, and laid him to rest in East Ham churchyard, levelling the grass so that none can point to the spot, and he lies unknown as he wished to lie.
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