St Patrick feels like a guilty secret. Built in 1940 - where did they find the labour force? - this looks like the misbegotten love child of a bomb shelter and a water tower, is as ugly as that sounds and I loved it. Unsurprisingly LNK I think that's probably for the best as an internal view would almost certainly disappoint.
I feel oddly guilty about being somewhat indifferent to Barking Abbey, I'm sure it should have stirred me more. Approached from the north all that remains are rather uninteresting foundations but as you wander SE to St Margaret you find the gatehouse, or curfew tower, which is more interesting than the remains.
Beside the tower is St Margaret, open, which is not overly exciting but does hold quite a lot of interest inside particularly in its monuments.
Barking in the Middle Ages was famous for its ABBEY. This was founded c. 666 by St Erkenwald for Benedictine nuns and remained powerful to the date of the Dissolution. The church was pulled down in 1541. The site was excavated in 1910 and much of the medieval evidence can now clearly be read inscribed in stone lines in the grass. The buildings lay just N of the parish church. The abbey church faced the parish churchyard. It was of C12 date, just under 300 ft long and had a chancel with apse, chancel aisles with smaller apses, crossing tower, transepts with one chapel each, nave of ten bays with aisles, and two W towers projecting slightly beyond the aisles. In the early C13 a Saint’s Chapel and Lady Chapel were added at the E end. To the N of the nave lay the cloister with the monastic buildings arranged in the usual way: Chapter House off the E walk, Dormitory off the W walk and projecting N beyond the Cloister; Rere-Dorter, that is lavatories beyond to the W and separated by a passage, Refectory along the N walk. N of the chancel beyond the Chapter House was the Infirmary with its separate chapel. Of all the monastic buildings only one remains upright: the E Gate or FIRE BELL GATE, a gate-tower with upper chapel, containing a badly worn, but originally excellent mid C12 (?) ROOD with three figures. The figures are in relief and the whole is built up of oblong blocks like the more famous contemporary reliefs at Chichester.
ST MARGARET. A church of proper town-size, not small as the nearby churches of East Ham and Dagenham. Nave and aisles, outer N aisle, chancel and chancel chapels, W tower. The chancel is of the early C13 - see its lancet windows (E window early C16). The octagonal piers of the N arcade of the same period. At that time the church must have had crossing and transepts, see the much wider opening of the present E bay of the arcades. Earlier still than the C13 appears the E chapel of the outer N aisle and especially the arcade of two bays to the N chancel chapel. This has circular pier and semi-circular responds, all with scalloped capitals. The ashlar masony also is Norman. The Royal Commission suggest re-use after the Dissolution. In the C15 the W parts of the N arcade were reconstructed, then the W parts of the S arcade built, the W tower (with taller stair turret) added and then the E parts of the arcades renewed (arches with two hollow chamfers). The tower is of Reigate ashlar, while the rest of the church is of rag. C15 also the chancel chapels. The date of the outer N aisle seems to be early C16. The nave roof is original, that of the chancel has a prettily stuccoed vault of 1772. All this makes a confusing picture, to the mind as much as the eye. - FONT. Bowl on baluster stem, with ornate scrolly ornament, just going gristly, i.e. c. 1635. - PULPIT. C18, with staircase railing of finely twisted balusters. - ORGAN CASE. C18, by Byfield. - SCULPTURES. Fragment C. 12 in. high, of Saxon cross shaft with close thin interlace ornament. Perhaps C10. — MONUMENTS. Brasses of Priest c. 1480, of Thomas Broke d. 1493 and wife, and of John Tedcastell and wife d. 1596 ; in chancel. - Brass of Richard Malet d. 1485, demi-figure of Priest, in N aisle. - Incised slab to Martin, first Vicar of Barking, d. 1328, large demi-figure, an important work of its type. - Sir Charles Montague d. 1625. A beautiful and unusual design with small seated figure in tent, musketeers l. and r. outside the tent, and many more tents in the distance. Sir Charles seems to muse on the next day’s destinies, and there is a great deal of suspense in the eve-of-battle atmosphere. - Francis Fuller d. 1636, with frontal bust in oval niche. - John Bennett d. 1706, a spectacular monument with a frontal demi-figure in elegant attitude between two columns carrying an open segmental pediment. To the l. and r. ships in relief. - Sir Orlando Humfreys d. 1737, standing wall monument with detached Corinthian columns carrying a far projecting broken segmental pediment. Between them the bust of Sir Orlando; outside the columns cherubs. Original iron railings. - John Bamber d. 1753, bust against obelisk attributed by Mrs Esdaile to Roubiliac. Original iron railings. - Sir Crisp Gascoyne d. 1761, Lord Mayor of London, elegant with weeping putto against a grey obelisk.
ST PATRICK, Blake Avenue. 1940 by A. E. Wiseman. An odd attempt at modern church architecture, with a circular E tower housing the apse and ending in bell-openings of somewhat streamlined design.
BARKING. It stands for the tranquil Age of Saxon England and for our troubled Age of Power, for it has the great ruins of the Old Abbey and the biggest Power House in the land. Thrilling it. must have been to see it in its days of fame when the Conqueror would come to seek the hospitality of the Saxon abbess while he built his town house, the Tower of London. Here the Saxon earls would come to swear him fealty. Every Toc H man must know that his church, All Hallows-by-the-Tower, is actually All Hallows, Barking, for it belonged to the abbey here at which the Conqueror stayed and of which we may see the ruins to this day.
It is a spacious place to walk in, and two 15th century towers look down on us as we wander in the footsteps of those who knew the abbey in its days of splendour - the gateway tower and the tower of St Margaret’s Church. We walk within the space of these great walls, in and out of the passages and corridors, for the site is beautifully kept and we can trace the foundations of the vanished structure, which was first Saxon, then Norman, and refashioned in medieval times. Stones have been let into the green turf to show us how the abbey stood, but much of the ancient walls remain a few feet high. A part of the nun’s church wall runs by the churchyard still. In this vanished church, 340 feet long, two queens have worshipped (the queens of Henry the First and of King Stephen).
The medieval gateway into this field of peace is a two-storeyed structure called the Curfew or Fire Bell Tower. It has a round arch built after the Normans, and above the archway is a chapel with a sculpture of the Crucifixion, showing the Madonna and St John at the foot of the Cross, John’s head leaning in sorrow towards the Master. It is the work of a 12th century artist, probably a Norman. Here also is preserved a ring which is believed to have been worn by an abbess of Barking Abbey.
The great church which stands by the ruined abbey has grown from age to age. Its oldest stone was part of a Saxon cross, carved with interlacing scrolls; it is preserved as perhaps the one link we have here with the settlement founded by St Erkenwald, the first bishop to preach in St Paul’s. There is also here a fragment of a black marble gravestone which came from the abbey with the name of a Norman bishop on it, Maurice. The chancel is the work of our first English builders but has in it a richly carved pillar piscina of the Normans, and in one of its chapels is a round Norman pier with scalloped capitals carved by one of the abbey’s Norman craftsmen.
The arcades in the nave are 13th and 15th century, the font is 16th, and has a 17th century cover painted with flowers, birds, and butterflies. One of the tower arch piers has a most beautiful recess with medieval tracery and ornamental vaulting; it is a gem, and has a tiny niche in it for some mysterious purpose. The roofs come from the same medieval period, and on some of the beams above the nave are ancient paintings; we noticed a woman riding a panther.
One precious possession the church has recovered from the ruins of the abbey, the gravestone of the first vicar here. He died in 1328, and his memorial is one of those engraved stones which were the forerunners of brasses. It shows him deeply cut in the stone with his curly hair, his embroidered collar and cuffs, and his name and office in bold letters.
Of the four brasses here three are 15th century and one 16th; two show priests in their robes, one shows Thomas Broke and his wife with a son and daughter, and a hundred years later is John Tedcastell with his wife, four sons, and five babes in swaddling clothes.
On the chancel wall sits in armour, in a tent guarded by sentries, with a page holding a horse close by, Sir Charles Montagu, whose brother sentenced Sir Walter Raleigh. Among a group of 17th and 18th century busts is Francis Fuller of 1636 with three bright shields, John Bennett in front of the prow and stern of a warship, Orlando Humfreys with four cherubs, John Bamber of 1753, and Sir Crisp Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of 1753. One of the windows has a quay scene in bright colours, and another shows St Erkenwald holding a model of the abbey.
One of the attractive modern possessions of this old place is an array of carved and painted figures on the top of the south chapel screen, the Fishermen’s Memorial. It is an interesting company with St Nicholas and the three children he saved from death, James and John with their fishermen’s nets, Ethelburga (first abbess here), and two famous historic figures whose names must live as long as history. One is Elizabeth Fry, who is here because she lived close by and lies in the little Quaker burial ground not far away; the other is the immortal Captain Cook.
It was a few days before Christmas in 1762 that Elizabeth Batts stood in front of the altar of this church to be married to James Cook, who was then paying a flying visit home from his charting of American waters. They had six children, of whom three died as babies, the other three boys growing up to love the sea. Elizabeth said goodbye to her husband in 1776 and four years later news came to her of his death, which had happened 20 months before. She was to survive him for 56 years, years of great sorrow for her, for she outlived all her children and was alone in the world for 40 years. There have been few lonelier lives than that of the bride who stood in this place to marry a sailor who found a continent.
One or two odd things of great interest Barking has in its church. There is a Bible of Armada year on an 18th century table, a helmet hanging on the wall, a stone from the old abbey, scooped out and called the Nun’s Bath, and an oyster shell with the date 1510 scratched on it, thought to be the date of one of the extensions of the church.
Barking is fortunate in having one of its finest old houses in the care of the National Trust, which has placed it at the disposal of the town for its museum. It is the 16th century Eastbury House, one of the architectural masterpieces of its day, a handsome structure with its gables and chimneys and turrets, and original garden walls with the old niches for beehives. There is a great painted chamber with wall-paintings of Elizabethan ships, one in full sail and one at anchor, and another old painting of an avenue of trees standing out from an elaborate painted background of panels and corinthian columns. The room above this gallery, which is 70 feet long, has a magnificent queenpost roof which is in a perfect state of preservation.
The museum so nobly housed has a fascinating collection. There is a Roman coffin of stone which is 17 centuries old, and a series of charming watercolours of old houses and views reveal the Barking of last century. Mr Frank Brangwyn has given prints of his Stations of the Cross, and the National Art Collections Fund has enriched the museum with a panel of 16th century Flemish glass. An English woodcarving of the 17th century shows the Sacrifice of Isaac, and (constant delight of Barking’s children) there is a Georgian Doll’s House which has been completely refurnished in the style of 1865. The ingenuity of a young artist who was too poor to pay for living models is shown in a group of coloured figures which he moulded and arranged for his painting After Waterloo. He was Charles Gogin, who died in 1931. Here, too, is one of the finest collections of armour in this country. Contrasted with examples of exquisite workmanship from the 15th century, we have a model of an Elizabethan soldier trailing his pike. There is an excellent series showing the development of Gothic armour, and also of the development of spurs. Among the spurs is an English spur from Bosworth Field; its wearer evidently caught his heel in the bole of a tree and the spur brought him down. Another famous battlefield has yielded something to this amazing collection - Agincourt, from which has come a sword made at Dreux, with gold ornament and a coat-of-arms on its hilt.
The museum has been the scene of some valuable loan exhibitions, the most attractive having been one illustrating Elizabethan England and another the Art of the Theatre. Eastbury House has indeed come again into its own, a treasure house of great dignity, worthy of the
fine town of Barking.
Such is Barking old, with all its wonder of the past; what of Barking new, with all its wonder of the present? It has come to stand for great things in the life of the greatest city in the world, for it has one of our greatest power houses for electricity, and on the other side of Barking Creek is the main outfall of North London’s drainage, 28 acres of brick-walled reservoirs and tanks, looking like some great work of the Roman Empire, built by the engineer who laid out the Thames Embankment. In these great tanks takes place the chemical purification of all this drainage, the water being pumped into the Thames and the rest shipped on vessels which are taken out to sea, where it is thrown overboard. The concrete supporting the floor of the reservoir is 20 feet thick and the reservoir can contain over forty million gallons at one time.
The Barking Power House, standing among the wastes of the river estuary, gaunt emblem of the energy driving the wheels of the 20th century, has the two biggest transformers in the world and the two biggest turbo-generators in England. These works are one of the causes of the great growth of Barking’s population, which has risen from 14,000 a hundred years ago to about 80,000. Side by side on the Longbridge Road are two open spaces the town has provided for all these people, a 76-acre park and a swimming pool 165 feet long, holding over half-a-million gallons of water.
The Saint of the Miserables
THE name of Elizabeth Fry (who lived here and lies here) endures for ever with Florence Nightingale’s; she is the saint of the prisons.
Her clarion call for mercy and justice to the miserable people in the prisons of -her day rang through England and through Europe. Prisons were then sinks of suffering and iniquity, in which plague came as a great deliverance from anguish. Men and women, innocent and guilty, were herded like cattle in filthy dens; even girls and little children perished of disease in these noisome places.
Into this world of misery and shame Elizabeth Fry came as an angel from Heaven. She was an eldest child in the old Quaker family of John Gurney, the banker of Norwich, and she had been moved as a girl by the preaching of the Gospel. She married Joseph Fry when she was only twenty, and the fact that he did not share her great-heartedness made her all the more determined to give herself to some great cause.
She began preaching, and it is recorded that her beautiful voice melted the hardest men. Even as a child she had visited a prison with her father, and when she was 33 she happened to hear of the state of things at Newgate, where about 300 women and children were crowded into two wards and two cells. They had nothing to do. They had neither nightclothes nor bedclothes. They ate and slept, cooked and washed, in the same foul space. Even the Governor of Newgate was afraid to trust himself alone in this place, but Elizabeth Fry went into it, and her presence had a miraculous effect on these unhappy people.
She roused Parliament and persuaded it to appoint a committee to go into all this. She found work for prisoners set free. She exposed the exploiters and oppressors of these prisoners, and she went into prisons all over the land improving their conditions. She made it possible for public men to think of reforms such as had never occurred to Parliament or to public men; it was her trumpet that woke up the nation to one of the greatest horrors existing within it. Sydney Smith, who laughed too much, declared that the sight of Elizabeth Fry among these people moved him to tears - they clung to the hem of her garment, he said, and worshipped her as the only being who had ever loved, taught, or noticed them, or spoken to them of God.
She carried her work to the Continent, and its influence spread through Europe. She met rulers and princes; it was nothing to her whether she was entertaining the King of Prussia or having tea with a cobbler. She gave her life to miserable people anywhere, and it made no difference to her when her husband became bankrupt and found himself in poverty. She carried on, and she went about doing good until she died at 65 and was laid in this little burial ground of the Friends.
It is a spacious place to walk in, and two 15th century towers look down on us as we wander in the footsteps of those who knew the abbey in its days of splendour - the gateway tower and the tower of St Margaret’s Church. We walk within the space of these great walls, in and out of the passages and corridors, for the site is beautifully kept and we can trace the foundations of the vanished structure, which was first Saxon, then Norman, and refashioned in medieval times. Stones have been let into the green turf to show us how the abbey stood, but much of the ancient walls remain a few feet high. A part of the nun’s church wall runs by the churchyard still. In this vanished church, 340 feet long, two queens have worshipped (the queens of Henry the First and of King Stephen).
The medieval gateway into this field of peace is a two-storeyed structure called the Curfew or Fire Bell Tower. It has a round arch built after the Normans, and above the archway is a chapel with a sculpture of the Crucifixion, showing the Madonna and St John at the foot of the Cross, John’s head leaning in sorrow towards the Master. It is the work of a 12th century artist, probably a Norman. Here also is preserved a ring which is believed to have been worn by an abbess of Barking Abbey.
The great church which stands by the ruined abbey has grown from age to age. Its oldest stone was part of a Saxon cross, carved with interlacing scrolls; it is preserved as perhaps the one link we have here with the settlement founded by St Erkenwald, the first bishop to preach in St Paul’s. There is also here a fragment of a black marble gravestone which came from the abbey with the name of a Norman bishop on it, Maurice. The chancel is the work of our first English builders but has in it a richly carved pillar piscina of the Normans, and in one of its chapels is a round Norman pier with scalloped capitals carved by one of the abbey’s Norman craftsmen.
The arcades in the nave are 13th and 15th century, the font is 16th, and has a 17th century cover painted with flowers, birds, and butterflies. One of the tower arch piers has a most beautiful recess with medieval tracery and ornamental vaulting; it is a gem, and has a tiny niche in it for some mysterious purpose. The roofs come from the same medieval period, and on some of the beams above the nave are ancient paintings; we noticed a woman riding a panther.
One precious possession the church has recovered from the ruins of the abbey, the gravestone of the first vicar here. He died in 1328, and his memorial is one of those engraved stones which were the forerunners of brasses. It shows him deeply cut in the stone with his curly hair, his embroidered collar and cuffs, and his name and office in bold letters.
Of the four brasses here three are 15th century and one 16th; two show priests in their robes, one shows Thomas Broke and his wife with a son and daughter, and a hundred years later is John Tedcastell with his wife, four sons, and five babes in swaddling clothes.
On the chancel wall sits in armour, in a tent guarded by sentries, with a page holding a horse close by, Sir Charles Montagu, whose brother sentenced Sir Walter Raleigh. Among a group of 17th and 18th century busts is Francis Fuller of 1636 with three bright shields, John Bennett in front of the prow and stern of a warship, Orlando Humfreys with four cherubs, John Bamber of 1753, and Sir Crisp Gascoigne, Lord Mayor of 1753. One of the windows has a quay scene in bright colours, and another shows St Erkenwald holding a model of the abbey.
One of the attractive modern possessions of this old place is an array of carved and painted figures on the top of the south chapel screen, the Fishermen’s Memorial. It is an interesting company with St Nicholas and the three children he saved from death, James and John with their fishermen’s nets, Ethelburga (first abbess here), and two famous historic figures whose names must live as long as history. One is Elizabeth Fry, who is here because she lived close by and lies in the little Quaker burial ground not far away; the other is the immortal Captain Cook.
It was a few days before Christmas in 1762 that Elizabeth Batts stood in front of the altar of this church to be married to James Cook, who was then paying a flying visit home from his charting of American waters. They had six children, of whom three died as babies, the other three boys growing up to love the sea. Elizabeth said goodbye to her husband in 1776 and four years later news came to her of his death, which had happened 20 months before. She was to survive him for 56 years, years of great sorrow for her, for she outlived all her children and was alone in the world for 40 years. There have been few lonelier lives than that of the bride who stood in this place to marry a sailor who found a continent.
One or two odd things of great interest Barking has in its church. There is a Bible of Armada year on an 18th century table, a helmet hanging on the wall, a stone from the old abbey, scooped out and called the Nun’s Bath, and an oyster shell with the date 1510 scratched on it, thought to be the date of one of the extensions of the church.
Barking is fortunate in having one of its finest old houses in the care of the National Trust, which has placed it at the disposal of the town for its museum. It is the 16th century Eastbury House, one of the architectural masterpieces of its day, a handsome structure with its gables and chimneys and turrets, and original garden walls with the old niches for beehives. There is a great painted chamber with wall-paintings of Elizabethan ships, one in full sail and one at anchor, and another old painting of an avenue of trees standing out from an elaborate painted background of panels and corinthian columns. The room above this gallery, which is 70 feet long, has a magnificent queenpost roof which is in a perfect state of preservation.
The museum so nobly housed has a fascinating collection. There is a Roman coffin of stone which is 17 centuries old, and a series of charming watercolours of old houses and views reveal the Barking of last century. Mr Frank Brangwyn has given prints of his Stations of the Cross, and the National Art Collections Fund has enriched the museum with a panel of 16th century Flemish glass. An English woodcarving of the 17th century shows the Sacrifice of Isaac, and (constant delight of Barking’s children) there is a Georgian Doll’s House which has been completely refurnished in the style of 1865. The ingenuity of a young artist who was too poor to pay for living models is shown in a group of coloured figures which he moulded and arranged for his painting After Waterloo. He was Charles Gogin, who died in 1931. Here, too, is one of the finest collections of armour in this country. Contrasted with examples of exquisite workmanship from the 15th century, we have a model of an Elizabethan soldier trailing his pike. There is an excellent series showing the development of Gothic armour, and also of the development of spurs. Among the spurs is an English spur from Bosworth Field; its wearer evidently caught his heel in the bole of a tree and the spur brought him down. Another famous battlefield has yielded something to this amazing collection - Agincourt, from which has come a sword made at Dreux, with gold ornament and a coat-of-arms on its hilt.
The museum has been the scene of some valuable loan exhibitions, the most attractive having been one illustrating Elizabethan England and another the Art of the Theatre. Eastbury House has indeed come again into its own, a treasure house of great dignity, worthy of the
fine town of Barking.
Such is Barking old, with all its wonder of the past; what of Barking new, with all its wonder of the present? It has come to stand for great things in the life of the greatest city in the world, for it has one of our greatest power houses for electricity, and on the other side of Barking Creek is the main outfall of North London’s drainage, 28 acres of brick-walled reservoirs and tanks, looking like some great work of the Roman Empire, built by the engineer who laid out the Thames Embankment. In these great tanks takes place the chemical purification of all this drainage, the water being pumped into the Thames and the rest shipped on vessels which are taken out to sea, where it is thrown overboard. The concrete supporting the floor of the reservoir is 20 feet thick and the reservoir can contain over forty million gallons at one time.
The Barking Power House, standing among the wastes of the river estuary, gaunt emblem of the energy driving the wheels of the 20th century, has the two biggest transformers in the world and the two biggest turbo-generators in England. These works are one of the causes of the great growth of Barking’s population, which has risen from 14,000 a hundred years ago to about 80,000. Side by side on the Longbridge Road are two open spaces the town has provided for all these people, a 76-acre park and a swimming pool 165 feet long, holding over half-a-million gallons of water.
The Saint of the Miserables
THE name of Elizabeth Fry (who lived here and lies here) endures for ever with Florence Nightingale’s; she is the saint of the prisons.
Her clarion call for mercy and justice to the miserable people in the prisons of -her day rang through England and through Europe. Prisons were then sinks of suffering and iniquity, in which plague came as a great deliverance from anguish. Men and women, innocent and guilty, were herded like cattle in filthy dens; even girls and little children perished of disease in these noisome places.
Into this world of misery and shame Elizabeth Fry came as an angel from Heaven. She was an eldest child in the old Quaker family of John Gurney, the banker of Norwich, and she had been moved as a girl by the preaching of the Gospel. She married Joseph Fry when she was only twenty, and the fact that he did not share her great-heartedness made her all the more determined to give herself to some great cause.
She began preaching, and it is recorded that her beautiful voice melted the hardest men. Even as a child she had visited a prison with her father, and when she was 33 she happened to hear of the state of things at Newgate, where about 300 women and children were crowded into two wards and two cells. They had nothing to do. They had neither nightclothes nor bedclothes. They ate and slept, cooked and washed, in the same foul space. Even the Governor of Newgate was afraid to trust himself alone in this place, but Elizabeth Fry went into it, and her presence had a miraculous effect on these unhappy people.
She roused Parliament and persuaded it to appoint a committee to go into all this. She found work for prisoners set free. She exposed the exploiters and oppressors of these prisoners, and she went into prisons all over the land improving their conditions. She made it possible for public men to think of reforms such as had never occurred to Parliament or to public men; it was her trumpet that woke up the nation to one of the greatest horrors existing within it. Sydney Smith, who laughed too much, declared that the sight of Elizabeth Fry among these people moved him to tears - they clung to the hem of her garment, he said, and worshipped her as the only being who had ever loved, taught, or noticed them, or spoken to them of God.
She carried her work to the Continent, and its influence spread through Europe. She met rulers and princes; it was nothing to her whether she was entertaining the King of Prussia or having tea with a cobbler. She gave her life to miserable people anywhere, and it made no difference to her when her husband became bankrupt and found himself in poverty. She carried on, and she went about doing good until she died at 65 and was laid in this little burial ground of the Friends.
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