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since the 1850s but by special dispensation from the Privy
Council no less Father Diamond was interred next to his
church. I doff my metaphorical cap to him on my walk to
work in the morning. Father Diamond’s rectory was
burgled more than 40 times, his cars regularly stolen or
left up on bricks - the gangster Charlie Richardson once
bought him a Ford Escort so he could carry on with his
parish visits. You’d think he’d be impossible to replace but
replaced he was and by men just as diligent and dedicated
to looking after the people of their parish.
Elsewhere parishes struggle to recruit new incumbents and
even a beautiful rural parish nestling against the Ashdown
Forest and a spiffing Georgian rectory (one of just 700
or so of the 50,000 rectories sold off by the Church of
England) just isn’t enough of an incentive it seems.
A month or so ago Earl De La Warr who has in his gift the
living of St Michaels and All Angels Withyam and it’s
chapel-of-ease All Saints Blackham advertised in
The
Spectator
for a new priest. The churches are on the
Buckhurst Estate, which has been the ancestral home of
the Earl’s Sackville family for almost 1000 years and
includes Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Woods. He
got not one bite! The post is still being advertised on the
Church of England website.
It Didn’t Really Take The First Time
Christianity had first arrived on these shores with traders
from ports in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2
nd
century
AD. It wasn’t then much concerned with buildings or
incumbents. According to the New Testament Christians
formed the church wherever they gathered. In Roman
Britain this would typically have been a room set aside for
worship, one of the earliest examples being at Lullingstone
Villa, first built near Watling Street in Kent’s Darenth
Valley just 30 years or so after the Roman’s arrived.
One room was first used as a pagan shrine with paintings
of local water deities but in the 4
th
century the room was
remodeled and redecorated with Christian symbols that
include the characteristic Christian Chi-Rho. But
Christianity didn’t really catch on among the Brits and
though detail from the Dark Ages is scarce it’s thought to
have all but died out after the Romans left only picking .
up again when Saxon Lords of the Manor were converted
by Irish and Roman missionaries in the 6
th
century.
A Tough Parish
Deptford Curate Father Noel Mellish was the first Army
Chaplain to win the Victoria Cross. In March 1916 this
brave parson walked out on to a battlefield of the Ypres
Salient, strafed with German machine gun fire armed only
with his prayer book to bring in dozens of wounded men.
Father Mellish survived that war and the next one living to
a ripe old age. Throughout the 1960s the priest at St Paul’s
was an Australian chap called Father Brown who had
preached in the outback as part of the Bush Brotherhood.
I guess that as time marched on they needed tougher and
tougher priests for this tough parish. Father Brown turned
the crypt into a community centre: 400 coffins were
reinterred in a pair of tunnels that
had once been used by
grave robbers coming up from the Thames. The crypt
was to host all manner of things urban, from Caribbean
discos to gay nightclubs, under the next incumbent, the
legendary Father David Diamond. Here’s a clip from
Father Diamond’s obituary in The Guardian after he died
suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 56, in 1992.
A year after he arrived in 1969, Diamond started the
annual Deptford Festivals, determinedly anti-elitist and
inclusive. A thousand strong pensioners’ outing would set
off at the firing of a cannon (not the ecclesiastical variety)
– with the High Street lined by waving schoolchildren who
had collected the necessary finance. “High Mass: Licensed
Bar: Fireworks” would be the punch line of a typical
invitation card for the St Paul’s Birthday Mass at the
Festival’s climax. Among visiting personalities were
Princess Margaret, Archbishops Runcie and Carey and
Dick Emery.
Father Diamond officiated at the wedding of my friend
Peter, batting not an eyelid when the bride Jane arrived
astride a donkey provided by Peter’s pal Len Thorne, the
Blackheath donkey man (who sadly died just before the
Olympics last year). Father Diamond’s funeral procession
stopped the traffic as vast crowds of well wishers, believers
and non-believers and eighty Anglo-Catholic clergy, black-
frocked and wearing birettas, followed the coffin into the
acre of countryside that has survived inside the iron gates
of St Paul’s churchyard. I squeezed into the back of the
packed church to hear the Bishop of London give the
eulogy. The churchyard had been closed to internments
The chapel Of St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell in
the Denge Hundred in Essex, built by the missionary
St Cedd 1400 years ago