| Description | Guardian Angels Catholic Church was opened on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1868, by Archbishop Henry Manning. The building had previously been known as the Salem Chapel. It belonged to Robert Beeton, who lived next door, and was rented to Henry Adams, pastor to a Congregationalist group . When Beeton had died, the chapel was put up for sale and initially offered to the Congregationalists. Owing to a dispute between the Congregationalists and Henry Adam, the property was eventually sold to Charles Walker, a London businessman named Charles Walker, an ardent Catholic and pioneer member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Prior to the purchase of Salem Chapel, Catholics living in Mile End had to go to St Anne’s in Spitalfields, or St Mary and St Michael’s in Commercial Road, or to a school in Devons Road which doubled as a Mass centre.
The “Salem Chapel” inscription on the front of the building was changed to “Guardian Angels”. The second parish priest, Fr Angelo Lucas (only son of Frederick Lucas, who founded the Tablet newspaper) took over in 1873, his first priority was to enlarge the little school at the back. The school had space for 110 children, but there were 250 pupils attending. After he’d built an extension for the older boys, he was able to focus on the church, and by 1876 he’d made good the floor and walls, replaced the box pews with comfortable benches, and put up Stations of the Cross. The congregation did then start to grow.
Manning’s successor, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, was anxious about the growing social divide between the West End of London and the East. He wanted to encourage better-off Catholics to get to know how other half lived, so he started the Catholic Social Union to mobilize them to run clubs and settlements in poor parts of London. One of the first to volunteer was Lady Margaret Howard, youngest sister of the Duke of Norfolk. She offered to do whatever the Cardinal wanted, and he asked her to start a settlement in “the most unpromising portion of his diocese” – namely Mile End. So Lady Margaret took a house in Tredegar Square, and in February 1894 she moved in together with her friend Lady Clare Feilding, and two other women – Emma Lowe and Clementine Annesley – who were converts from Anglicanism, and who had previously obtained considerable experience as members of an Anglican Sisterhood working in the slums around Kilburn. The settlement movement had started with Toynbee Hall in 1884, since when all kinds of settlements had been established in the East End, but this was the first Catholic one, and it was named St Philip’s House. The volunteers did visiting all round Mile End, ran a girls’ club and a mothers’ meeting, and helped us in many other ways. We badly needed a larger school, and Lady Margaret lent us £6,000 to enable us to build it: it was opened in 1896. Sadly Lady Clare and Lady Margaret both died before reaching the age of 40. In her will, Lady Margaret kindly changed the loan for the school building into an outright gift.
It wasn’t long before we were even more urgently in need of a larger and better church. A notice was served by the local council condemning the existing building. With the external walls bulging and bits falling off, it had become a health and safety hazard, threatening to fall down and crush the congregation under a pile of rubble. The best option would be to demolish and rebuild, but at least £8,000 would be required, and we had no money. In those days every church in the diocese used to hold Forty Hours of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, taking it in turns throughout Lent. When it came to Mile End’s turn in March that year, our parish priest Fr William Donlevy invited everyone to pray hard for the appeal fund. At the end of the Forty Hours, during the Mass of Deposition, a letter arrived in the post from Lady Mary Howard promising to build a new church in memory of her sister!
The architect Frederick A Walters who was commissioned to produce the designs is also noted for other London churches particular St Anselm and St Cecilia in Kingsway, and especially the huge Benedictine Ealing Abbey: have a look – you will notice some similarities. For Guardian Angels he chose perpendicular Gothic, a uniquely English style rarely used for Catholic churches, thus giving ours a special character. It was opened on another Marian Feast, the Feast of the Annunciation, Wednesday 25th March 1903. Because Cardinal Vaughan was dying at the time the Bishop of Nottingham, Robert Brindle, who’d previously been an auxiliary bishop in Westminster and knew Mile End, performed the opening ceremony on his behalf. Let us remember all our benefactors and pray for the repose of their souls, for the Walker family, and the Howard family, and all those who have worshiped here over the past two centuries. |