Kingston’s other church
The two churches in Kingston are both Victorian Gothic, but that is their only similarity: the one is majestic and famous nationwide, but the other is virtually unknown. Colin Trueman investigates an all-but-forgotten gem.
Published in October ’17
The tiny hilltop village of Kingston, in Purbeck, is remarkable for having two churches. The later of the two is the more famous, having acquired the nickname of ‘the cathedral of Purbeck’ because of its enormous proportions and lavish decorations – John Betjeman, a great admirer of the church, described how it ‘gleams with Purbeck marble’. It is hardly surprising that it took six years to build and cost the 3rd Earl of Eldon, the owner of the estate on which he had the church built, £70,000 in 1880 – the equivalent of at least £8 million today.
An 1884 drawing of Repton’s church as seen from Kingston village, before the south apse was added
But the other church, dedicated like its successor to St James, is usually neglected, not to say ignored. However, it has a history, too, if not quite such a flamboyant one. It is at the eastern end of the village, on the site of an earlier church which had been there since the 12th century, supposedly the twin of the remote chapel at St Aldhelm’s Head, a couple of miles further south. Kingston was in the parish of Corfe Castle, but the parish church was a mile and a half away, including a journey down, and more significantly up, the long and steep Kingston Hill – too much for the older (and not so old) inhabitants of the village. Hence the need for a ‘chapel of ease’ in Kingston, which was served by the Rector of St Edward’s, Corfe Castle, or his assistant.
A 1922 photograph of the church, complete with south apse
But after seven centuries of use, the old church had fallen into disrepair. The books of the Acts of the Peculiar of Corfe Castle record complaints about the state of the church from as far back as 1581: ‘the Chaunsell door doth lye in decay and in want of reparaition’. In 1630 it was still ‘in decay’, as was ‘the seiling over the Commyon table’ and ‘the West end of the Chappel’. By the early 1830s the building must have been in a sorry state, for it was then that the 1st Earl of Eldon, who had acquired the Encombe estate (which included much of Kingston village) in 1806, decided that it was up to him to ensure that ‘his’ village had a church worthy of his rank: he was now, after all, Lord Chancellor, the most important of the Great Officers of State, always appointed personally by the monarch (albeit advised by the Prime Minister), the monarch in this case being King George III. The Earl chose to have a completely new church rather than to restore the old one, and the man he entrusted with this task was George Stanley Repton, the son of the eminent architect and landscape gardener, Humphry Repton, nowadays regarded as the successor to Capability Brown.
The wall under the west window re-uses a Saxon arch from the original building
It was an interesting choice for the Earl to make, because Repton had eloped with his oldest daughter, Elizabeth, in 1817 and had been married by special licence at St George’s, Hanover Square, without the Earl’s blessing or even his knowledge. This caused immense displeasure to the Earl and his wife, so much so that (as the diarist Joseph Farington reported) ‘they sent Her Court dress to Her in a parcel, witht. note or message.’ It was not until 1820, after the difficult birth of the couple’s first child, that the Eldons and the Reptons were reconciled. Perhaps the Eldons had guilty consciences about their own elopement nearly half a century before: John Scott, as he was then, had carried off Bessie, the daughter of the Newcastle banker, Aubone Surtees, with the help of an old friend and a ladder, across the border into Scotland to marry her at Blackshiels, near Edinburgh.
The church has a stunning view of Corfe Castle, with Poole Harbour and Bournemouth beyond
At any rate, the reconciliation was as thorough as it could be. Evidently all was forgiven and forgotten, because the Earl made use of Repton’s services as an architect on and off for the rest of his life. His first tasks were to make improvements to Kingston (as the estate village) and to the grounds of Encombe itself. As the Earl grew older and his wife’s health grew worse, he became ever more aware of their mortality (they were both over 80) and his thoughts turned to a permanent resting-place for the two of them. The nearest church to his beloved Encombe was the chapel at Kingston, so, having secured a burial place by arrangement with the ecclesiastical authorities and all too aware of the decayed state of the old building, he commissioned his son-in-law to build a new church on the site of the old one.
This tablet in the church’s tower records the fact that it was ‘erected at the sole expence of John Scott, First Earl of Eldon’
Repton followed the ground plan of the old church and used most of the old building material. This is most obvious, not to say disconcerting, at the western end, where there is a small arch built into the wall under the large west window – it is the only semi-circular feature in an entirely Gothic-style building, dating from the original 12th-century church. Horace Twiss, in his Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, describes that original church as ‘a rude, ill-constructed building, the walls of which, though thick and clumsy, were by no means impervious to damp’.
Repton’s drawings of it show that in his re-build, he maintained the position of the walls but also that he made many significant changes. He increased the height of the tower and added a pinnacle (an obelisk-finial) at each corner of it; he raised the pitch of the roof; he removed all the buttresses which had been added over the years to stop it from collapsing; he changed all the windows to the Gothic style; and he added a transept to the south wall. In truth, it was indeed a new church, as his father-in-law had desired, much more elegant than the old one, with the slimmer lines associated with Gothic architecture. Pevsner, in The Buildings of England: Dorset, calls it ‘a simple, though not a small church’; inevitably, he devotes far more space to its more imposing successor in the village.
The building was entrusted to John Tulloch, a Wimborne builder and architect who subsequently worked on churches in Blandford and Lytchett Minster, and the new church opened for divine service on 26 May 1833. Lady Eldon, who had died in 1831, had already been interred in a specially constructed family vault in the churchyard, and when her husband died in 1838, he was placed by her side. The Earl, honourable to the last, had paid for everything out of his own pocket.
For the next forty years the church continued to function as it had for the previous seven centuries, as the focal point of the village. But in 1874 the 3rd Earl commissioned George Edmund Street, one of the leading architects of the day, to design a new church for Kingston – a surprising decision, given that the existing church was so young. The ostensible reasons for this were that he wanted to commemorate his grandfather in fine style and that he wanted to create employment for local workers during a period of recession. An alternative theory (based on a family legend for which there is not a shred of evidence) is that the Earl was caught in bed with the vicar’s wife, who was naked apart (the story goes) from one of the Countess’s hats. Relations between squire and vicar would inevitably have been somewhat strained, hence the need for what was, in effect, a private chapel for the Earl’s family.
The house as it now is, sheltered if not indeed actually surrounded by trees
The new church continued to be just that for forty years, from its opening in 1880 until 1921. In that year the Earl conveyed it and its churchyard to the Church Commissioners, who officially substituted it for the old one the next year. Thereupon the old church, now officially redundant, became the village hall; with its loss of status came concomitant indignities, such as being used for village parties and theatrical rehearsals. It was used as a venue for pop musicians to practise (including future rock star John Wetton, then a Bournemouth schoolboy, later a member of King Crimson and Asia), as a film set (being almost burnt down by a German film crew in the 1960s) and latterly as target practice for hooligan stone-throwers.
Fortunately, another Bournemouth schoolboy, Barry Chapman, had fallen in love with the place on his cycle rides as a teenager, and when the church was put up for sale by the Church Commissioners in the 1970s, he, by now a practising architect, was able to buy what was then a decrepit wreck. He converted it into a home for himself and his family, where they lived for more than thirty years – and preserved a remarkable church for the rest of us.
