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Imperial to International

Sheng Kung Hui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China
The Anglican (and Episcopal) tradition has been present in China for almost two hundred years. The purpose of this series is to publish scholarly, well-researched and authoritative volumes on the history of the Sheng Kung Hui (��Holy Catholic Church��), with an emphasis on its life and work in Chinese society. Sponsored by the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, separate volumes in this series will include studies of particular people and institutions, as well as studies of the broader intellectual and social significance of Anglican involvement in Chinese history.
Series Editor: Philip L. Wickeri
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Imperial to International
A History of St John��s Cathedral, Hong Kong
Stuart Wolfendale
With a Foreword by Paul Kwong, Archbishop of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org
c Hong Kong University Press 2013
ISBN 978-988-8139-87-3 (Hardback)
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China
To the memory of Francis Batson



Contents
Series Introduction by Philip Wickeri ix List of Illustrations xi Foreword by Paul Kwong xv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Genesis, 1841�V1850 9 Chapter 2 Imperial Parish, 1850�V1873 35 Chapter 3 Quiescence and Struggle, 1873�V1906 71 Chapter 4 The Search for Substance, 1902�V1927 107 Chapter 5 The Making of a Cathedral, 1927�V1941 139 Chapter 6 Out of Darkness, 1941�V1953 173 Chapter 7 Shedding Colonialism, 1953�V1976 201 Chapter 8 Towards an International Church, 1976�V1992 243 Chapter 9 Into the ��Chinese Century�� 271
Appendices
1. List of Chaplains, Deans and Bishops 283
2. List of Stipendiary Assistant Chaplains and Chaplains 285
Notes 287 Bibliography 299 Index 303


Series Introduction
Sheng Kung Hui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China
The Anglican (and Episcopal) tradition has been present in China for almost two hundred years. The purpose of the series ��Sheng Kung Hui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China�� is to publish scholarly, well-researched and authoritative volumes on the history of the Church as a contribution to the intellectual, cultural and religious history of modern China. With an in-depth focus on one particular denominational tradition, the series will present an interdisciplinary perspective that will also contribute to the history of Christianity in China. The emphasis throughout is on the life and work of the Church in society. Individual volumes are written for an educated audience and a general readership, with some titles more academic, and others of more general interest.
The spirit of Anglicanism is expressed by the Chinese term Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui, meaning the ��Holy Catholic Church of China��, the national church that was founded in Shanghai in 1912, and the first non-Roman church body in China. Anglicans stand between Protestants and Catholics in their approach to Christian tradition and church order, but are usually regarded as part of the Protestant movement in China. Since the nineteenth century, the Sheng Kung Hui has been involved in a wide range of education, medical and social welfare work, alongside efforts to spread the Christian message and establish the Church. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Chinese Sheng Kung Hui leaders began taking the lead. The Sheng Kung Hui has also played an important role in cultural exchange between China and the West, in Hong Kong and in Greater China.
Co-published by the Hong Kong University Press and the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (Anglican Church), the first volume in the series is Imperial to International: A History of St John��s Cathedral, Hong Kong. Subsequent volumes will include biographical studies,
Series Introduction
institutional histories, women��s histories, a collection of essays and a general social and intellectual history of Chinese Anglicanism. It is hoped that the series will encourage further dialogue on the place of religion, particularly Christianity, in the history of modern China.
Philip L. Wickeri Series Editor


List of Illustrations
1.
The trowel from the foundation stone laying

2.
View of the cathedral looking north, 1897 (Wattis Fine Art)

3.
St John��s Cathedral. Early artist��s rendering from the Pictorial Times, London, before the church was built

4.
Three prominent clergymen from St John��s history. Chaplain Vincent Stanton, 1843�V1851, Dean Alfred Swann, 1928�V1935 and Bishop George Smith, 1849�V1865

5.
First known colour photograph of the cathedral from a postcard, 1899

6.
The nave decorated for Easter with Mr. White, verger and ��Number 1 Boy��, 1897

7.
The choir with Dean R. F. Cobbold (third row, fifth from left),

c. 1900 (The Cobbold Trust)

8.
Foundation stone for the chancel extension, 1869 (Public Records Office)

9.
Unveiling the Memorial Cross, January 1921 (Public Records Office)

10.
Thanksgiving Service for The King��s Recovery, January 1929. Dignitaries entering St John��s, the congregation dispersing and Dean Alfred Swann conferring with Governor Sir Cecil Clementi (South China Morning Post / Public Records Office)

11.
Bishop Duppuy and some Hong Kong clergy

12.
The cathedral looking east, c. 1930

13.
View towards the Peak from the Hongkong Club, c. 1912.

14.
The ��Jelly Mould��, The Peak Church, 1929

15.
The nave looking east, c. 1934.

16.
Ordination of C. B. R Sargent, 1934. Front left is Archdeacon Mok. Back row includes second right, assistant chaplain H. W. Baines, later a bishop, and A. S. Abbott as crucifer.

17.
Font and cover in former baptistery

18.
A 1930s wedding with Reverend Nigel Bates

19.
Procession for Bishop Wilson��s consecration

20.
The Tower after wartime shelling, 1946 (Public Records Office)

21.
The Lady chapel in south transept before the war

22.
The Organ and the Bishop��s throne

23.
Former Dean, Leonard Wilson after his consecration as a bishop at St John��s, 1941

24.
Makeshift altar in front of Japanese-built wall across the chancel, 1945

25.
Ordination service with Bishop R. O. Hall and Dean Rose flanking Michael Goulder, 1950

26.
Mrs. G. E. Marden opens the Michaelmas Fair, 1951

27.
Bishop R. O. Hall and Michael Goulder at the Michaelmas Fair

28.
East window with plain glass at Easter, 1954

29.
Cathedral choir with Alaric Rose, Dean Temple, Donald Fraser, Cynthia Kwok and George She, 1954

30.
The new hall, 1956

31.
The Duke of Edinburgh greeted by (left to right) Bishop R. O. Hall, Dean Temple, former Dean Alaric Rose and Chaplain John Foster

32.
The Captain Bate memorial before its demolition, 1953

33.
Alaric Rose and son at Kai Tak airport departing Hong Kong, 1961

34.
Colonel Harry Owen-Hughes says farewell to Mrs. Rose at Kai Tak with Dean Barry Till behind.

35.
The Reverend Frank Roe

36.
Bishop R. O. Hall, unidentified man, Dean Barry Till and Mrs. Shirley Till

37.
Governor Sir Murray MacLehose and Lady MacLehose talk to Dean John Foster at a St John��s Ambulance Brigade annual service

38.
The east window and the north window central panel by Joseph Nuttgens

39.
Princess Alexandra with (left to right) Cardinal John Baptist Wu, Bishop Gilbert Baker, Reverend Hugh Stevenson and Dean Stephen Sidebotham

40.
The nave looking west, 1954

41.
An overview of St John��s, 1987

42.
The cathedral looking south, 2012


List of Illustrations
List of Illustrations

Foreword
With a history of more than 160 years, St John��s Cathedral is one of the oldest churches in Hong Kong and the oldest neo-Gothic cathedral in East Asia. During all this time, St John��s has not only been a centre of Anglican activity in the territory, but a church for all peoples, a cathedral church for Hong Kong. St John��s is deeply rooted in Anglican tradition, but at the same time part of the life of this important city. In the heart of the Central district, St John��s Cathedral has been a site of Christian worship, a place for individual prayer and meditation, as well as a venue for public events and cultural activities. It is a church to which all are welcomed regardless of their beliefs. Hong Kong is an international city, and we like to think that St John��s Cathedral is a spiritual centre for the community as a whole, open to the city and the wider world.
The book that now lies before you is the first full history of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, to use the formal name of our church. It is also the first volume in our new series, ��Sheng Kung Hui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China��, co-published by Hong Kong University Press and the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (Anglican Church).
A few years ago, Andrew Chan, then Dean of the cathedral, and I asked Stuart Wolfendale to consider writing this history, and he committed himself to this task. As a member of St John��s and a well-known journalist attuned to Hong Kong history, Stuart was the perfect choice. He has written a lively and engaging narrative, one that allows us to see the development of St John��s from a colonial cathedral to an international church. He puts the history of the cathedral in the context of Hong Kong social history, especially in its first decades. In tracing the history of the cathedral as a building, a community and part of the fabric of life in this cosmopolitan city, he offers us many fascinating stories of people and events that have shaped the cathedral history.
This is not a story of the ��glorious past��, but one that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of a community in historical perspective. In Wolfendale��s view, the cathedral is a living community, rooted in the past but looking to the future. The building up of any church or religious institution is the product of the dedication and faithfulness of men and women, clergy and laity, who have also made their share of mistakes. This is not an ��official�� history of the cathedral, and there has been no suggestion from any quarter to shape the history in a particular way or adhere to a theological perspective. I have never liked official church histories, for they always seem either very dull or not very real. There are controversial parts of any history, includ-ing this one, and I am sure that aspects of the narrative will raise eyebrows in some quarters. I hope this means that the book will provoke further discussion of our past, for this will help to influence our present and future.
As Wolfendale notes in his introduction, this is not a complete or comprehensive history of the cathedral, but a thoroughly researched study. Sadly, many cathedral records have been lost, especially those from the nineteenth century and the war years (1941�V1945), and these are irreplaceable. Nevertheless, Wolfendale has unearthed reports, letters, minutes, photographs and other archival records that I did not know even existed. Imperial to International is therefore as full a history of the cathedral as we are likely to see for some time, and indeed, it may be seen as a model for future cathedral histories in this part of the world.
A cathedral church is the seat or the ��throne�� of the diocesan bishop, an important episcopal insignia, and thus a ��mother church�� (matrix ecclesia) dedicated to the worship of God. St John��s Cathedral has been the seat of Hong Kong Anglican bishops since the arrival of Bishop George Smith, my predecessor and the founding bishop of what was from 1849 onward the Diocese of Victoria. Initially, the diocese included all of China and Japan, which made it the largest diocese of any church in the world. For the next one hundred years, the diocese was gradually reduced in size, and in 1951, we became the Diocese of Hong Kong and Macao. In 1998, the new Anglican Province of Hong Kong was inaugurated. St John��s Cathedral then became not only the cathedral of the Diocese of Hong Kong Island, but the cathedral for the Province as well. This book centres on the history of the cathedral church, but it is also an important part of the larger history of Anglicanism in China as well.
Throughout our history, the cathedral has been served by outstand-ing clergy and lay leaders. In the mid-19th century, chaplains were appointed by the British Colonial Office, but subsequently they were named by the Bishop, in consultation with the Church of England Trust. Alfred Swann was appointed the first Dean of the cathedral in 1927. Most of the early clergy were English, but in the twentieth century, there were Eurasian and Chinese chaplains, as well as clergy from other parts of the world. Some cathedral clergy went on to dis-tinguish themselves in church careers outside of Hong Kong. Leonard Wilson and H. W. (Harry) Baines became bishops of Singapore, and subsequently Birmingham and Wellington respectively. Barry Till and Michael Goulder had distinguished academic careers in England. Timothy Beaumont later became a politician and Liberal Peer, Lord Beaumont of Whitely. In 2005, Andrew Chan was installed as the first Chinese dean of the cathedral, a position he left in 2010 to become Bishop of Western Kowloon. Our new dean, installed last October, is Canon Matthias Der.
The clergy can never be the Church by themselves. This book shows how important the laity were for the development of St John��s Cathedral. From its inception, the idea of building a cathedral in Hong Kong was a lay initiative. The laity have been the core of all cathedral committees, and they have lent their material and spiritual support to the life of the church and the wider community. Many of the laity used their expertise to help build up the cathedral, in tasks as varied as architectural advice, financial oversight, and the sharing of musical gifts. The laity pioneered in the mission and outreach work of the cathedral. The Street Sleepers Society in the 1920s, support for the Taipo Orphanage in the 1930s and the St James�� Settlement beginning in the 1950s, as well as assistance with the Michaelmas Fair and support for Domestic Helpers�Xall these were lay initiatives. The names of many prominent figures in Hong Kong history, with dis-tinguished careers in government, business and the financial sector will also be found in this book. Together with the countless numbers of women and men who have supported the cathedral through their prayers and contributions, laity and clergy working together have transformed St John��s Cathedral from a colonial institution to the international community it has now become.
I heartily recommend this book to readers in Hong Kong, mainland China and overseas. It offers a perspective on Hong Kong history through the life of one institution, St John��s Cathedral. Hong Kong is very much a secular city, but as this book shows, it has also been a society deeply influenced by people of faith and by religious commu-nities and individuals. I hope this book will encourage readers to visit the cathedral for a quiet moment, a service of worship or a musical performance, for these have all been part of our history.
Paul Kwong Archbishop of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Lent 2013

Introduction
Up to this point, the Cathedral Church of St John the Evangelist has been served in print by a hardback handbook, The Story of St John��s Cathedral, published by FormAsia and briskly written by journalist Stephen Vines, and by a softback, St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: A Short History and Guide, by Doreen King. Vines writes a concise account of the historical milestones, and King��s particular contribu-tion is an informed and expert summary of the fabric and furnishings upon which this book has gratefully drawn. Imperial to International moves on from both of them.
Any great and antique place of Christian worship in Asia which has survived and continues to breathe its faith is a phenomenon which deserves to be recorded. Anglican cathedrals in Asia are particularly rare phenomena which merit close attention. St John��s in Hong Kong commands the particular attention which this book gives it, not just for its near pristine Victorian Gothic form set in a twenty-first-cen-tury Chinese city but for its testimony to the survival of organised Christian worship in Hong Kong from an era which we can barely recognise into an era we hardly dare make prediction for. This book looks not only at its architecture but at the development of its status, its liturgy, its ministry and charity, its social impact and, above all, the souls who populated it through its first one hundred and fifty years.
In September 2009, the Most Reverend Dr. Paul Kwong, Archbishop of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, whose seat St John��s is, and then Dean the Very Reverend Andrew Chan asked me to write a thor-oughgoing story of the church. Initially the dean conjured with the idea of an ��extended King��. The archbishop took it further and into hardback. He saw a spiritual and political history as well as one of structure and contents.
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Archbishop Kwong added that he would like it to be ��readable�� too. He was not looking for a work of microscopic academic propriety which set off ruthlessly along donnish tangents and performed feats of bar-bending to bring them back to the plot. He wanted people to put the book down and look forward to picking it up again. I have regarded this as one of the most important charges of my commission.
The commission was a generous one. It allowed the writer his own interpretation of events, which steers away from excessive idealism or hagiography towards a more realistic account. A consequence is that my views expressed are not necessarily those of the cathedral or of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui. This book does not pretend to be an utterly complete history. It is a chronological medley of the important strains that ran through the life of St John��s. It is not split into topic areas, which would have reduced it to a collection of essays and a great deal of repetition. It is a story during which, for certain topics, the narrative slows a bit, harks back and looks forward before resuming its pace. It remains, above all, a narrative.
As a story, there are parts which are missing. Records have vanished or were never properly kept in the first place. In a Christian congrega-tion in which there was familiarity and trust, matters more to do with mission and spirit and less with law and cash were handled by word of mouth or unofficial jottings. The Japanese Occupation accounts for some of the shortfall and for the fact that, after the economic devastations of their stay in Hong Kong, paper of any sort became attractive as cooking fuel. Over a century and a half, there will have been remarkable instances of enterprise, enmity and charity of which we will know nothing.
There are also tantalising and quite unpredictable clues to struc-ture and behaviour at the cathedral that can only be found in refer-ences in other subject areas. An aside remark in Church Missionary Society (CMS) correspondence or between church schoolteachers or government servants or Freemasons can throw a thin but fascinating beam on something that may have been going on in St John��s. The history of the cathedral is a subject about which there will always be something new to be found. I am aware, for example, that the ��dises-tablishment�� of the bishopric from 1874 and the Second World War and its immediate aftermath are periods on which more detail may exist but distantly and in the shade.
This book is not an exposure of what was previously unknown. It is an attempt to gather together and put into order material which has
Introduction
already been uncovered to some degree and from sources which are already familiar to many.
The Hong Kong Public Records Office (PRO), relocated in a Kwun Tong public housing estate to test the ardour of true scholars, is where all the official records of St John��s Cathedral are kept up to 1965. These include the minutes of trustees meetings and their correspondence, minutes of some committees and guilds, an uneven spread of birth, marriage and death registers, Church Notes magazine and a few references to chapels of ease. Diocesan records at the PRO include the bishops�� ��scrapbooks���Xinteresting if indeed scrappy correspondences and diary entries of bishops up to and including Gilbert Baker.
These records seem to have been a primary source for G. B. Endacott and D. E. She��s The Diocese of Victoria, Hong Kong: A Hundred Years of Church History, 1849�V1949. This work includes a helpful narrative account of the major constitutional events in the cathedral��s life up to the Second World War. The records also informed Colonel R. F. Johnston, a Cathedral Council member who typed up a manuscript history of St John��s in 1937, when the volumes were still in the church. This document was uncovered in the cathe-dral��s own record office along with more recent official records.
Whereas the PRO records are open to the public with the per-mission of the Dean of St John��s, the more recent records, dating from 1963, are kept in the cathedral office and can only be viewed by appointment. These include all council minutes and Annual Church Meeting reports, the latter being published in St John��s Review. Within this more contemporary material are folded occasional fading gems of correspondence or memoranda from earlier decades which await rearrangement. It was from one such paper, a letter to Bishop Hall, pressed between dull accounts folders, that I learned that Dean Wilson, later the legendary wartime Bishop of Singapore, was less than universally liked among his parishioners.
There are more documents of interest in a series of basement rooms in Bishop��s House, Lower Albert Road. A wealth of diocesan material has collected there over the years, initially, perhaps, because the occupying Japanese and the foragers who came after them did not intrude there, and pre-war documents were allowed to survive. This space is a prime example of where material telling the history of the diocese in other parts may well come to have a bearing on St John��s. Its cataloguing was not quite in time for this book.
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The fascinating and unimaginably painstaking card index of local people compiled by Carl T. Smith, historian of Hong Kong Christianity, and kept in the misnamed Central Public Library in Causeway Bay, often helped to flesh out names penned in the well-drilled Victorian handwriting of the minute books. Attendances at trustees meetings were recorded using only initials for Christian names. The minutes themselves followed the tradition of the passive voice and collectiv-ity in decisions. Many of those listed left no trace of an opinion, let alone an identity, and could disappear either to ��home�� or the grave-yard without even getting onto the jury list either. In many cases, Carl Smith��s monitoring of the courts and the obituaries gives these early church stalwarts a skein of identity.
The newspapers were available too at the Hong Kong University Libraries along with Colonial Records Office documents. The latter have already been well mined to discover the details of the cathedral��s construction and financing and the colonial government��s involve-ment. I have simply attempted to put the accounts in order and sieve the sensible from the implausible.
Newspapers I have resorted to for reportage on events that took place in and around St John��s which the cathedral itself has left no record of. Sometimes the press could not be bothered with it, or an edition has been lost. I have included accounts of church services where they are particularly significant, moving or unusual and not just because references exist; otherwise, the book would become a catalogue of orders of service.
Structure and fabric receives attention where it matters, but this is not a handbook of architectural minutia which goes into detail over every roof repair and exterior wash. Nor does it trace the replacement of every altar frontal. That would not be the sort of book you would want to pick up again.
Attention has been paid to the people, long forgotten, who wore out the rattan in the rosewood pews and whose voices were absorbed by the silence of the stone and brick. Many hours have been spent with Church Notes and its successor, St John��s Review, as well as elec-tronic copies of The Outpost, the magazine of the Victoria Diocesan Association, trying to hear these people. The church itself is an impressive building in its quality, simplicity and neatness of design, but the overarching fascination to it is how its congregations of for-eigners survived and even flourished to support it in this far-from-Christian land.
Introduction
The story is not an entirely comfortable one to tell. The extraor-dinary geographical position which the newly founded church was placed in 1849 created a dichotomy in its purpose which was never completely resolved. It began as a colonial parish church for Hong Kong��s expatriate British. Within a year, it also became the seat of a diocesan bishop with a missionary purpose for the whole of China. St John��s could not opt to move between the roles when it suited it. They existed as ��parallel universes��, as one dean described it, sometimes touching, even overlapping, but most often, keeping a distance.
As a colonial cathedral playing the role of imperial parish, St John��s was always very grand and civic in its function. It was the state church of the colony. All the events of empire were celebrated there, and the national services held in the churches of London were duplicated as best they could be. The cathedral would be packed with Westerners and Chinese, and services in both languages might take place during the great day. Yet on an ordinary Sunday, for the first hundred years of its life at least, rarely was a Chinese to be seen at matins, and services would be dutifully, if sometimes thinly, attended by the white administrators and merchants of the colonial establishment to whom responsibility for St John��s survival ulti-mately fell.
Their priorities and those of the missionary bishops, who either fancied the cathedral might do more towards China mission or put it at the back of their minds, were hard to reconcile. At the very least, St John��s congregation believed the bishop should be more often at home as a bishop of Hong Kong. The bishops themselves�Xall CMS men up to the time of R. O. Hall�Xstated quite bluntly that their main responsibility was to spread the Word in China. This led to the existence of two Anglican churches in China, the English and the Chinese, each with its own structure. Even when China was removed from the equation in 1950, the distinction lived on within the Hong Kong rump until 1974.
A truth at once uncomfortable but honest to arrive at is that St John��s Cathedral was never effectively a diocesan cathedral. It was the ��cathedral��, the seat of the city��s bishop, but it was rarely a focus or a resource for the parishes within that diocese. It was, however, a very effective civic church, a focus of thanksgiving or remembrance for the whole city, even as the leading lights within that city shifted from Western to Chinese faces and the faiths of the establishment became less and less often Christian.
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There were moments when the parallel universes overlapped, and they were inspiring. Examples are the ordination of Lo Sam Yuen, the first Chinese to be made a deacon in Hong Kong, and the conse-cration of Bishop Mok Shao Tsang in 1935, prior to him becoming Bishop of Canton.
Yet, for the most part, the order of the day was linguistic and racial distinction, not of an antipathetic sort but one easily resorted to by two cultures which were happy to view themselves as mutually exclu-sive. Up to 1941, at least, St John��s was, for the most part, a church of the British and their sympathisers. The inevitable detachment of that once exclusive, colonial congregation from the mission work of its bishops among the Chinese has left a legacy in the organic relation-ship between the cathedral and the Chinese parishes, even though the diocesan pattern and the constitution of St John��s have altered beyond recognition.
On the face of it, it would seem difficult to write a sympathetic history of a Christian organisation which operated in a world of colonial exclusivity. Yet writing history is neither about delving for sentiment nor arriving at judgement. That, as sensible Christians know, lies elsewhere. There is no purpose in bringing the haughty lib-ertarianism of the twenty-first century to bear upon men and women who believed in all sincerity that they were trying to live their very best by the precepts of God, king and country.
I have tried to write about St John��s in the light of the social condi-tioning by which the cathedral��s succeeding generations lived. When I describe certain situations in which behaviour has been somewhat archaic, I hope I will be excused if my tongue is sticking through my cheek a little. Otherwise, I have seen people of a different age going about God��s business with a period purpose and admire them for it.
If I have felt any annoyances at the material, it has been with some expatriate church people of the more immediate past who persisted in a suburban, Little Englander parochialism which kept China at bay as effectively as a ��members only�� recreation club. One eminent historian in Hong Kong told me that he only liked to write about people who are ��good ��n�� dead��. In the case of the St John��s story, I could not afford myself that luxury. For those who I refer to who are good ��n�� living and don��t like what they read, may they forgive me as they are commanded.
The narrative proper stops around 1998. That is the point by which the last significant structural alteration within the cathedral
Introduction
compound was completed. Most of the current outreach ministries had been set up. All the present daughter churches had been estab-lished. The clergy structure and the council and committee structures were all very much what we have in 2011. At the diocesan level, the Province of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui had just been created. The remains of the colonial period were about to end.
The diocese had its first Chinese bishop. The cathedral was yet to see Andrew Chan as its first dean. Yet, by this point, it is already moving towards a multinational purpose which will reinforce its civic importance to Hong Kong as an international finance centre and, in a sense, compensate for the historical imbalances which prevented it from being a purely diocesan centre.


Chapter 1 Genesis, 1841�V1850
On the afternoon of Thursday, 11 March 1847, in Hong Kong Harbour, a piratical craft, with all the appearance of a mandarin boat, fired upon a Chiu Chow (Chaozhou) vessel. It was an ambush. The lead pirate was known to the Chiu Chow ship��s master as a man to whom he had sold salt. The imposter craft carried twelve-pounder guns of European mounting, according to a report on the incident in the Friend of China.1
A few column inches along, the paper gloatingly noted that, since Hong Kong had so thoroughly usurped Macau as an enclave in the six years since the Union flag had been hoisted at Possession Point, the Portuguese colony was ��ruined and insupportable��. It was rumoured that France or the United States was considering buying it.
On that same day, at the centre of this typically confused Hong Kong canvas of lawlessness and a risk being well run, the governor, Sir John Davis, was laying the foundation stone of the colonial Church of St John the Evangelist, halfway up ��Maritime Hill�� in the City of Victoria. The first Colonial Chaplain, Vincent J. Stanton, made an address based on Matthew 12:6: ��I tell you something greater than the temple is here��. He was, hopefully, out of earshot of the bogus mandarin��s twelve-pounders.
We cannot see the foundation stone anymore. We do not even know exactly where it is, short of it being somewhere under the nave. Records tell us what it says down there under the concrete:2
The cornerstone of this church, dedicated to St John the Evangelist and destined for the worship of Almighty God, was laid by Lord J F Davis, Baronet, a legate of the British Queen in China and bedecked with proconsular dignity on the fifth day of the Ides of March in the tenth year of the reign of Queen Victoria AD 1847.
Imperial to International
Though Davis was a baronet and so merely ��Sir John��, he gained an unwarranted peerage in translation from the Latin. Also odd is the use of the ��Ides of March��, which was the fifteenth of the month in the Roman calendar, marking a full moon. How one can have a ��fifth day�� of it and line it up as the eleventh is an early puzzle of St John��s.
It had taken seven years just to achieve this stone-laying although events were to pick up speed from here on. Yet, though fundrais-ing had been criticised as dilatory, and discussion over costings and architecture had taken up years and thousands of sea miles in a time before the telegraph, there is little trace of any doubt amongst the traders, military, clergy and officials who lived there that there should and would be a church of the Anglican rite built on that island.
Scepticism about the future of Hong Kong seemed to be much the preserve of officials in Britain. Palmerston��s complaint that Hong Kong was a barren rock with barely a house upon is set to be quoted in perpetuity. His successor, Lord Aberdeen, saw Hong Kong as too expensive and potentially a political embarrassment in dealings with China itself and other European powers.3
People on the ground in China perceived the advantage of Hong Kong more keenly. Captain Charles Elliott, who had replaced the late and floundering Lord Napier as superintendent of trade in China and succeeded in first acquiring the island under the briefly observed Convention of Chuenpi (Chuanbi), was obviously a fervent advocate of it. He in turn was replaced by London for his presumptions in the absence of clear direction. He had exceeded himself in bagging a doubtful outpost and restoring to the Chinese the ostensibly more attractive but in fact most perilous island of Chusan (Zhoushan) outside Ningpo (Ningbo). An East India Company factory had been set up there. It was briefly but uncomfortably occupied by British troops in 1840, and the home government thought more fondly of it than it did of Hong Kong.
His successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, who became Hong Kong��s first governor, carried with him officials�� doubt about Hong Kong but came to share Elliot��s enthusiasm for its strategic and financial possibilities. In this, at least, he was in harmony with the British traders who were desperate for a haven from which to pursue the trading of opium along the China coast.
The die was cast over Hong Kong as early as the spring of 1839 and the onset of the First Opium War between Britain and China. Macau had never seriously pretended that it could defend itself against an
Genesis, 1841�V1850
attack from the Chinese rear or organised disobedience by Celestial subjects living within, so when the unusually upright and passion-ate Commissioner Lin Zexu in Canton (Guangzhou) ordered the Portuguese governor, Pinto, to expel the entire British community, the governor did as he was told.
The British all took to their ships and sailed off to wallow for weeks in the calm if pent-up safety of Hong Kong Harbour. As they lay there, reinforcing their dwindling provisions from nearby villages, cramped in their hulls, slippery from the humidity but not quite as unwell as they might have been on the mosquito-ridden land, the seed of a project was planted in some men��s minds, and it germinated with alacrity.
The opium business, which was the fulcrum at the time of the British imperial trading system, had fallen into rougher hands after the Qing forbad its import in 1796, and the monopoly of the relatively gentlemanly East India Company ended in 1834. The Chinese gov-ernment and its officials, who ran the stringent factory system which penned up Europeans in Canton, were used to dealing with the com-pany��s sense of collective responsibility. The Honourable Company had directed business from its mansion on Portuguese soil. It was the small adjacent building, housing their printing press, which was bought as a mortuary chapel in 1830, passed into the care of the British consul in Canton in 1859, along with the Protestant cemetery, and became what is now the Anglican Morrison Chapel.
The company��s control was wound down and then replaced by a large unorganised body of independent traders. These more free-wheeling traders were an increasing aggravation. Business became perpetual conflict, a running war with Chinese authority. The hapless and poorly Lord Napier, appointed superintendent of trade with extraterritorial jurisdiction in 1834, was supposed to resolve this but lacked the knowledge, finesse and stamina. The decidedly unaristo-cratic Elliot had all of those if not much direction. He delivered not a resolution, which would never be happily arrived at, but at least a safe harbour.
The British free traders, like W. Jardine, the Matheson Brothers and W. S. Davidson, needed a safe haven of their own, and there was no British-held territory between India and Australia. The deep, completely sheltered anchorage, free from danger and unpleasant surprises, in which the British lay homeless and at anchor that spring, must have recommended itself mightily. The traders were the
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men that mattered, their business being the very purpose for the civil servants, the sailors and the soldiers in China. What they needed they were likely to get. If there can be any doubt about what the men who mattered wanted, for this world and the next, it is helpful to look to the very beginning of the yet-unnamed and unfounded colonial church.
Even before a flagpole had been stabbed into the hard soil of Western, a circular memorandum was issued in spring 1840, to the ��British and foreign community residing in China��. It spoke of a ��very prevalent wish amongst those residing at and acquainted with Hong Kong�� that a church should be erected ��in the event of it becoming a British Settlement�� so that ��Divine Service could be performed according to the Rites, Ceremonies and Doctrines of the Church of England��.4 The notice declared that a provisional committee had been formed to raise private subscriptions.
Sir Henry Pottinger, as administrator of the new acquisition, responded to the committee. He undertook that Her Majesty��s gov-ernment would match the amount raised privately. He promised that a colonial chaplain would be appointed and said that he had already earmarked a site on ��Marine Magistrate��s Hill��. All this was of course contingent on the island becoming a permanent British colony. The provisional committee announced themselves as George Cooper (Chaplain of HMS Blenheim), Alexander Matheson, M. Leslie,
I. Pearse (commander of HM Sloop Cruizer), Crawford Kerr and Captain John Mylius of the 26th Foot.5
Placed between the chaplain, the soldier and the sailor were three influential representatives of the British merchant class in those parts at that time. Their foresight for Hong Kong was firming up.
The Friend of China of July 1842 reported its belief that 5,000 to 6,000 dollars had already been raised and that the list was being sent up to the British expeditionary force fighting the Chinese in the north. It also said that Lancelot Dent, taipan of one of the most princely of hongs, although in Singapore on his way home, had transmitted five hundred dollars, so much did he approve of the venture.
References to the subscriptions committee are scanty in its early period. By October 1842, the Friend of China was wondering whether it existed anymore and accusing it of ��supiness�� if it did. Little is recorded from it until July 1844, when Governor Sir John Davis came up with an amended and more specific funding proposal. Her Majesty��s government had confirmed it would provide double the amount of
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voluntary subscriptions raised up to a maximum, on its part, of 6,000 pounds. After that, the subscribers were on their own. The three civil-ians, Matheson, Leslie and Kerr, clearly remained from the original subscription committee. They were joined by fifteen others, including the Reverend Vincent J. Stanton, occupier of the newly minted post of colonial chaplain, who acted as committee secretary.
As far as they were concerned it was the government that had been dragging its feet. It had not been until September 1843, after the ratification of the Treaty of Nanking formally secured the colony, that the governor, Pottinger, had told the secretary of state, Lord Stanley, that a new church was wanted.6 The committee deeply regretted that ��so long a time of action has passed�� and thankfully welcomed the offer made by His Excellency. At an early date they hoped to ��behold a building rising in our midst, commodious, substantial and, in every respect, suitable.�� Despite the alterations, pinching of pennies, the occasional stiletto between the shoulder blades and a long wait, this is close to what they got.
Their subscription list, thus far, was an impressive one. It had two hundred seventy-five entries. Pottinger himself had given $150 and John Davis, his successor, had matched that. The earliest merchant settlers vied for spiritual as well as social prominence. Jardine Matheson gave $500 and was matched by Launcelot Dent��s donation signalled en route to Singapore. W. T. Gemmell and Co., opium traders recently moved down from Canton, gave $400, Lindsay and Co. $200 and M. Leslie $100. Cockerell and Company, one of the largest firms in the East India trade, pledged $500, but there seems some doubt as to whether they paid up.
There were scores of $10 and $5 donations from individuals. ��A Friend�� gave a whole $200, and Mr. J. McGregor may have changed his mind about his $100 because it seems to be scored through. The officers aboard the Peteiro gave $82.50. Given the transience of their profession and that their chances of worshipping in a cathedral for which sod had not yet been broken were small, their generosity was large.7
By 24 April 1846, Stanton could report to the government that 2,726 pounds had been pledged and 1,379 pounds collected although 120 pounds had been lost because some pledgers could not cope with the delay in beginning the building. They had died, or some had simply left.8 They may have felt firm in their obligation to worship in dignity, but the merchants of Hong Kong were not entirely sanguine
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about the future of the colony. In fact, in the early years, they were having a hard time of it, or at least that is how they liked to present themselves to the home government and Parliament.
Thirty-one firms memorialised Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley on the serious decline of the European commerce in Hong Kong, on 13 August 1845. A deputation consisting of A. Matheson, G. T. Braine, Gilbert Smith and Crawford Kerr presented a second memorial on 29 August 1845. Three of those men, Matheson, Kerr and Smith, sat on the church subscriptions committee. ��Hong Kong has no trade at all and is a mere place of residence of government and its officers with a few British merchants and a very poor population,�� it read.
The Times of 6 April 1846 sympathised with them. ��Hong Kong has quite lost its caste as a place of commercial operations. Many of the merchants have already abandoned the Island.�� The Economist, suitably primed, declared on 8 August 1846, ��HK is now nothing more than a depot for a few opium smugglers, soldiers, officers and men-of-wars�� men.��
Commentary in the colony itself could be equally gloomy for its spiritual and temporal future. In its 1 August 1846 edition, the Friend of China was characteristically sarcastic:
If the British Government has made Hongkong the seat of a Bishopric�Xas was announced in the late monthly papers�Xthere is no idea among the Magnates of Saint James that the colony is falling into insignificance, and that it has lost the commercial character, which it was rapidly acquiring, when the ill-advised measures of the Governor blasted the vigorous shoot, which promised to flourish in the youthful colony.
Later, as head of Jardine Matheson and a member of Parliament, Alexander Matheson was to tell the House of Commons in May 1847 that, had they not already invested so much money in land and build-ings, most English firms would have left Hong Kong years earlier.9
Missionary, sinologist and Hong Kong government official Ernest
J. Eitel, writing in his history Europe in China, thought that this represented merely the disappointment ��aroused by an unusually prolonged period of depression consequent upon a previous unnat-ural inflation �K Hong Kong itself stood smiling like Patience on a monument bearing the bold legend ��Resurgam��.��10 Eitel may be right, but even if the words of Matheson were not a petulant push for politi-cal favour over tariff changes, the point was that these men had taken careful calculation, considerable faith and made those investments.
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This was now being tested. A telling testimony to their deeper certain-ties was their committee and that subscription list, begun even before the beginning and being held to in the hardest of times.
The British were bent on building a colonial church in Hong Kong. It would only become a cathedral the year after it was completed, but that status was already being talked about by the Church in England, and Hong Kong had a sense of it as early as 1844, when the church��s design was being discussed, or rather, disputed. The British Empire was not at its height in this period, but it was arguably at its most vigorous. It may have swapped backwaters or given up redundant coaling stations, but it did not walk out on Crown Colonies or desert Anglican cathedrals. Opening the book on St John��s was, for the hardier of the merchants, administrators and clergy, a statement of resolve.
The other constituency with a strong interest in a proper church was the British military which garrisoned the island or passed through to combat in China. St John��s was at its inception a garrison church as well as a diocesan cathedral, and it was to remain so with gently decreasing intensity for another century. In truth, the most immedi-ate need of the troops was proper or, to the point, disease-free accom-modation. They eventually got this from 1845 onwards, when Major General D��Aguilar began the Murray Barracks, directly opposite the site for the church. In the meantime, European and Indian soldiers died from malaria, typhoid, dengue and dysentery in numbers which Qing troops could only have dreamed of inflicting.
Captain Mylius, who was on the original provisional subscriptions committee, served in the 26th Regiment of Foot which, at one point, could only field 110 weakened soldiers out of a complement of 900. The 55th were so in danger of ��dissolving away�� that they were simply sent home in 1844. The 98th, which had arrived in 1841, were in a terrible state. In 1845, 167 men were dead and 200 invalided. The garrison overall had 858 dead or sick out of a total force of 1,600.11
The very first church constructed for this needy army was a wooden hut with calico windows, built in 1841 by Reverend Edward Spencer Phelps, Chaplain in HMS Bellisle, and Captain Thomas Maitland Edwards of the long-suffering 98th Regiment. Family connections in the colony sometimes ran long. Cathedral Council member Colonel
H. L. Dowbiggin, in letter to St John��s Review in October 1948, recalls that Edwards was his great-uncle and assistant adjutant general to the China command. He died in Hong Kong on 13 November 1844, aged 35, doubtless of the plague that wracked his regiment. There is
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no clear account of where the wooden hut was put up. It is likely that it was near the present cathedral, and it is equally likely that it was at Stanley. There was a fort there from the earliest times, and a later Senior Chaplain of St John��s, Vyvian Copley-Moyle, was quite clear in his view, written in an article in the 1927, that Stanley was where the wooden church was built.12
About a year or so later, a much larger ��mat-shed�� church was con-structed on what was to become Murray Parade Ground and is now the Cheung Kong Centre, and other bits and pieces of roadway and overpass that lie between the tramway and St John��s north wall.13 The mat-shed was a bamboo frame covered with woven rattan and palm mats. It provided shade and some shelter from the weather, but it decayed quickly and was hopeless as a home for any perma-nent fittings. This makeshift church was an unhappy match to the mat-shed barrack rooms where the soldiers slept in soft, wet, ram-shackle conditions. These structures provided easy passage for the mosquitoes which were the unrealised cause of the sickness.
Two years after St John��s was opened in 1849, the mat-shed barracks were gone and a new bricks-and-mortar complex spread down the hill over what is now the Citicorp Building, China Bank Building and Murray Road car park sites. The church and the army were to stand close together commanding the city centre, in comple-ment and paradox, and in a fashion that only a colony could conjure.
The Church of England itself had views on its position in Hong Kong and China as a whole and, as usual, they were diffuse. In the early 1840s, Anglicanism was still pondering on what mission it could achieve in this massive and incoherent zone. A Baptist chapel was opened early in Hong Kong, and William Boone, an American Episcopalian Bishop, headed a diocese that had already been estab-lished at Shanghai. From London, George Smith and Thomas McClatchie were sent out by the evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) to the China Treaty Ports to examine which would be suitable for missionary purposes. It is mildly ironic that, seven years later, Smith would be appointed to Hong Kong as first Bishop of Victoria because, at this point, he thought very little of the place as a potential nurturer of Christian mission.
In his account of the trip published in his Travels, he makes unfa-vourable comparisons:14
While in the northern cities on the mainland of China daily inter-course may be held without restraint with the more respectable
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classes of native society, and a foreigner everywhere meets an intelligent and friendly population, at HK on the other hand, missionaries may labour for years without being brought into personal communication with any Chinese except such as are generally speaking of the lowest character and unlikely to exert a moral influence on their countrymen.
His perception of the problem from the Christian standpoint is quite accurate. ��Two other serious disadvantages to Hong Kong, however, are the frequent spectacle of European irreligion and the invidious regulations of the police,�� he says. ��Scenes frequently occur in the public streets and in the interior of houses, which are cal-culated to place the countrymen of Missionaries in an unfavourable aspect before the native mind.�� Observing that the Chinese were treated as a ��degraded race��, he concludes that, until a more liberal policy was adopted towards ��Chinese fellow-subjects��, immigration of a more respectable class of Chinese would be looked for in vain.
It was going to be even beyond the end of Smith��s bishopric in 1867 before the colonial government felt secure enough to let up on the curfews, floggings and other regulations in place to hold down a volatile and transient population. At the time and in many ways forever after, the future Bishop Smith was preoccupied with the CMS remit to take the mission to the Chinese. The Church of England in its role as the established Church was mandated to minister through-out the empire to those British ��countrymen of missionaries�� who were making such an exhibition of themselves indoors and outdoors.
It was the officials and subjects of Her Majesty residing in the colonies for whom a church would be built and a colonial chaplain appointed by her government. The Hong Kong administration, heeding the call of the provisional subscription committee and assessing the development of the island, applied for a chaplain to the Bishop of London, who handled these affairs overseas where there was not a diocese.15
The choice of the Reverend Vincent J. Stanton could not have been more appropriate. His determination to serve in China had been irre-pressible. In 1836, in his second year at St John��s College Cambridge, studying divinity, he went to the CMS in London and offered himself specifically for China. He was below the recruiting age limit, so they sent him back to university. Stanton had money of his own, though, and shortly afterwards, he made his way to Macau under his own steam. He began by doing what most freelancing students do to earn
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money on foreign soil: he tutored the children of the wealthy; in this case, British merchants. It was here in 1840 that he fell victim to an intense bout of hostility between the British and the Chinese.
In June of that year, the British laid down a quite effective blockade of the Chinese coast in reaction to Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu��s intensifying campaign against the opium trade. The Chinese authori-ties put a price on the head of British soldiers but could not really get at them. In decrepit Macau, which was becoming overrun with Chinese soldiers and agents, foreign civilians were more accessible. In this situation, Stanton was incautious. He went bathing with fellow missionary David Abeel in Macau Bay. He went a little ahead of Abeel, who could not find Stanton when he arrived. With pessimism, the bay was dredged for his body, but it was eventually learned that he been abducted on the shore by agents of Lin Zexu and imprisoned in Canton.
Protracted negotiations were going on over two hundred British and other Europeans captured from the vessel Kite near Ningpo, who had been kept, initially, in chains and cages. Stanton was released by the Chinese to Captain Charles Elliot, as a sign of good faith. The imperial official Qishan, with whom Elliot negotiated most closely, is said to have visited Stanton in prison on 10 December 1840. He walked in on the young man deeply immersed in his Bible and was so impressed by his piety that he took him to his residence as a guest for a few days before handing him over.16 If Stanton himself was kept in chains,17 they must have been lightly applied.
He returned to England. One might think that, after three months in a Qing jail, his interest in China might have been thoroughly lost. Missionaries of that period were made of redoubtable stuff. He was ordained by Charles Bloomfield, Bishop of London, in June 1842. He served a mere eight months as a curate at St Peter��s, Mile End, Stepney, and with delighted haste, accepted the offer of the new colonial chaplaincy of Hong Kong in January 1843. In March, he married Lucy Head, daughter of a prominent missionary and herself a teacher dedicated to Christian education. In June, now fully packed, he set off on the six-month voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, back to China.
He had already been raising funds in England with the clear prospect in mind of putting up a church and a school in Hong Kong. The church was ���K to be of a large size, on a more expensive plan than those already operating in England��, he explained in a submission for
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aid to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Already, in 1843, Stanton could foresee St John��s cathedral status. He also asked for assistance towards ��schools for Chinese children, conducted by English and Chinese teachers��.18
He may have had a series of schools in mind, but the one he suc-ceeded in starting became known as St Paul��s College and has been associated with St John��s in varying degrees of intimacy ever since. It is worth mention at this early point because it was actually open and with students before the St John��s foundation stone was laid. The school was originally intended to train young Chinese catechists to go out and convert their brethren. As such, it was not the concern of the subscriptions committee, the governor or the secretary of state. The SPCK gave 250 pounds in response to Stanton��s request. He raised or personally donated much of what was needed to build the beginnings of St Paul��s College, which is now Bishop��s House, on its promontory at the corner of Glenealy and Lower Albert Road.
In a letter from retirement in England to the diocese��s second Bishop, Charles Alford, he explained that the college was founded by 1,000 pounds from family and friends and gifts of library books and of furniture.19 There lingered a barely restrained resentment against the first Bishop, George Smith, who went into Hong Kong in 1850, as Stanton was on the way out, sick. Armed with 5,000 pounds in donations specifically for the school, he took over and expanded the building. The reputation for foundation shifted from Stanton to the bishop and his benefactors. It is the date of Smith��s foundation, 1851, that you can see still carved into the boundary wall on Lower Albert Road.
When Vincent Stanton first arrived in Hong Kong, he and his wife lived in Morrison Hill, where their son Vincent Henry was born, a novel birthplace for a future dean of Trinity College Cambridge. The subscription committee was in place and Stanton joined it as secre-tary, bringing a single-minded and now clerical vigour to the effort.
Military Anglicans were worshipping in a soggy mat-shed. Not all the civilian congregation was necessarily with them. By April 1848, provision for Divine Service had been made in the Cover Hall of the Supreme Court Building, according to a notice in the Friend of China. This placed them opposite the old Hong Kong Club building at the junction of D��Aguilar Street and Queen��s Road Central.
In 1847, Stanton sent a progress report to his SPCK benefactors on both school and church.
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I have the gratification to inform you that a large portion of the house is now ready for occupation. I have the prospect of com-mencing early in the summer �K The Church is in progress �K On 11 next month, we hope the foundation stone will be laid. The grants of Her Majesty��s Government and your Society together with the subscriptions are equal to all the anticipated expenses.20
The Reverend Stanton��s powers of anticipation failed him at this point, as had everybody else��s. The funds available would not be equal to the cost overruns, changed plans and false assumptions which were to dog the management of the project. The process was a mudbath of misapprehension, confusion and some politicking, which clerks and clerics splashed around in for the best part of seven years. It is a testimony to the powers of dogged determination, artful compromises and doubtless blind faith that it all eventually worked out in stone and brick and on balance sheet.
Coming to grips with a coherent and safely costed set of plans proved a slippery business. In March 1845, not a sod of soil had been broken. Governor Davis was explaining to the secretary of state that
A. T. Gordon, the surveyor-general, was on long on leave, the office was understaffed and producing plans for the church was beyond its capability. By August he was more confident that his deputy, Charles St George Cleverly, a power in the early story of the cathedral, should be able to handle it.21
Cleverly appears as a man of determination, intellect and techni-cal skill, with probably a generous dose of political guile. Born in Kilworth County Cork in 1819 but not thought to be native Irish, he was the grandson of a Thames shipbuilder. He was probably most famous for the construction of Government House, Hong Kong, which was neither as complex nor as sturdy as the cathedral. For further posterity, he got a street named after him in Sheung Wan (Central) district and a son, Osmund, who was private secretary to British Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. He retired to homes in South Kensington and Worcestershire, where he died in 1897.22 While it would go too far to describe Cleverly as the architect of St John��s, he was the adapter, pilot and project manager who got the building up.
In the six years between 1844 and 1851, a series of crises was kicked up over plans for the church and their costs. A dust of mystery has settled over the muddle, but the one item that comes out of it
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upon which the church was built is the plan presented and then implemented by Charles Cleverly.
In all, three plans for the church are referred to in the correspond-ence between Hong Kong and London.23 The first plan was the Hardwick design in the pointed or Gothic style. This is presumed to be Philip Hardwick, a distinguished London practitioner, whose work is associated with railway stations, warehouses, some parish churches and one Church of Ireland cathedral. He appears to have produced a plan for a Hong Kong church through the offices of the Bishop of London sometime around 1844. Indeed the governor, Davis, was quite closely concerned with it. He wrote to Lord Grey on 25 August 1845, telling him about the plan and that it had originally been ��procured by my brother Major Davis of the 52nd from Mr. Hardwick the Architect��.
This plan would doubtless have been splendid had it resulted in its entirety. Unfortunately, nothing of the original drawings survives and, according to Doreen King, author of St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: A Short History and Guide, Hardwick��s biographer can find no reference to them in the architect��s papers. However, the influence of these ethereal drawings floats through the story. Doreen King, in her history of the church��s fabric and fittings, says that a revision of a design was ordered by A. T. Gordon, the surveyor-general, before he left Hong Kong. This Gordon design, King believes, was likely drawn up from Hardwick��s by an office draftsman called George Strachan, who disappears off the scene in 1844, probably, like modestly placed young Europeans of the time and place, on to more lucrative business or down a drink and opium sinkhole in the Lower Bazaar.
Before Strachan left, John Pope, a civil engineer, joined the office. He was a nephew of Sir William Cubbitt, the prominent builder, and was much thought of. The Friend of China goes as far as to say that he was ��without doubt the greatest genius the Surveyor-General��s department in Hong Kong ever knew�� and attributes the design of the church to him. It was more than usually wise at the time not to believe everything one read in the newspapers. There is no evidence to support Pope as the creative genius. He worked as an assistant to Cleverly. We have one letter from him to the trustees in August 1844,24 telling them that he would supervise the project if they wanted him to, since the government was a principal subscriber, but they still needed the services of an architect. Pope died aged 27, of a plague, in December 1847.
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Gordon himself disappeared at the same time as Strachan but for more accountable reasons. He went on leave for two years, as civil servants did in the age of long home voyages, and returned only very briefly in 1846, before giving up his office altogether. This long leave, more than anything else, did much to harm Gordon��s reputation in this story. He was not there to prevent his own modifications being modified further in ways he did not like, nor could he halt the run of doubts that were being cast over his ability to make accurate esti-mates, doubts which Charles Cleverly did nothing to dispel and not a little to support.
While Gordon was away, Cleverly��s design came into being. Professionally, it was a fair and necessary response to criticism from the Colonial Office that Gordon��s estimates were too expensive. Although there was an attempt to resuscitate the original Hardwick design, that too was now pushed aside in a drive for economy and simplicity. Both the Hardwick design and the Gordon modifications were considered stylistically too tricky for local Chinese workers to execute.
A letter from Sir John Davis to the colonial secretary, Lord Stanley, as long into the process as 24 February 1846, illustrates the time, distances and lapses of attention from which a project like this could suffer in those days. He thought it ��desirable to draw your Lordship��s attention once more to the great want of a fitting place of worship��. He reminded Stanley that ��the servants of the Government and other English inhabitants have for more than three years assembled in a sort of a shed��. He wrote of the need for a ��modern�� church. Enclosing Cleverly��s design to Stanley��s successor, William Gladstone, three months later, he described it as being in ��the plainest Norman style��. Davis was mistaken in his architecture. The church was not to be Norman but Gothic in the Early English style.
For this design being more faithfully kept to, we may have a soldier to thank. Major Edward Aldrich, commanding officer of the Royal Engineers, who had much to do with the building of Murray Barracks and who was thanked with shoddy treatment, wrote to Major Caine, acting as colonial secretary, later in 1846, having looked over the estimates and drawings. He had crossed out the word ��Norman�� and replaced it with ��Old English��. He knew more than just the terms.25
��The roof will be more in keeping with general style if trusses are ornamented with painted arches in the intervals on a Queen Post Truss instead of in a Norman style on a King Post Truss.�� Here
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was a couth and knowledgeable engineer. Yet, he and the rest pre-dictably underestimated the skill and adaptability of the Chinese masons and craftsmen to skilfully imitate the finer points of English medieval architecture.
Both the relationship between the estimated and the actual costs of the plan and the equation between the government��s contribution and those of private subscribers disintegrated as the building of St John��s proceeded. By August 1845, the Colonial Office was losing patience with the staffing shortages in the surveyor-general��s depart-ment. On the 20th, Davis was ordered to send thorough plans. The governor had not received that instruction before he wrote to London on 26 August, asking to be supplied with the original Hardwick design in the possession of the Bishop of London. Cleverly had urged him to take recourse in Hardwick��s design because, understaffed and Gordon on long leave, he did not relish the work that would be needed to alter Gordon��s version.
Why it was still not in the possession of the surveyor-general is not clear. If they never had the Hardwick design in the first place, then what was Gordon��s design based upon? At the bottom of this lies the difficulty in believing that Gordon or anyone in a colonial surveyor��s office would have had the skill and application to come up from scratch with a building of the authenticity and accuracy in style and structure which St John��s turned out to have.
In the meantime, on 24 October, Davis came to grips with Lord Stanley��s overlooked missal of August. Patching up misconcep-tions from dispatches which crossed under sail-powered mail was commonplace before the telegraph was laid. Doing as London was bidding him, he enclosed the 1844 Gordon design, which Cleverly did not want to deal with, hurriedly priced at 11,000 pounds but without working drawings or detailed estimates. This was all too vague for London.
A new secretary of state, William Ewart Gladstone, acted with characteristic firmness and wrote straight to the Treasury, asking for approval to proceed with the Hardwick design because Gordon��s was too expensive and uncertain. Gladstone, said the clerk, ��needs a quick reply��. He got one. A month later, he was telling Davis not to proceed with the Gordon plan. Hardwick��s original was now enclosed, and he was to work out an estimate for that.
On 22 May 1846, Davis reported to Gladstone that Hardwick��s design turned out to be almost identical to material from Hong Kong
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that he had already reported to Lord Stanley. If everything that had been done in Hong Kong had been based on drawings that were Hardwick��s in the first place, this should not have been surprising. To pull out of this cul-de-sac, Cleverly and his team seemed to have buckled down to his own adaptation. Cleverly made a series of modi-fications to the Gordon design, but the one that was most telling in both structure and economy was his reduction of the chancel from three bays to barely one. A single-storey structure containing vestries skirted around its side, but the chancel proper now just had room for the high altar. The church had become, effectively, T-shaped.
His main aim was to produce a cheaper church and one that would fall within the scope of the government��s original promise to provide a maximum 6,000 pounds as two-thirds of the total cost. He came in with a design at a pre-contract estimated cost of 6,600 pounds. Almost inevitably, this turned out to be a work of fiction.
The governor wrote to Gladstone telling him that, though he would level the ground for the church, he needed confirmation of approval of the proportion the government should pay. Cleverly��s estimates of 6,619 pounds 12 shillings 4 pence for the main building and 1,686 pounds 9 shillings 8 pence for the tower, along with Colonial Chaplain Stanton��s optimistic accounts of the subscription campaign, were enclosed for Gladstone. Gordon had returned to the colony from leave just in time to put his signature, in no service to his reputation, above Cleverly��s on both the estimate and the plans. Gordon foresaw the need for St John��s to be a cathedral church. He took the opportu-nity to object to the truncated chancel but to no avail.
Five months later, on 8 October, the secretary of state replied to the governor that a promise to cover two-thirds of the cost of the church had been made in March 1844, the estimates complied with the costings of 1844, and therefore work could commence. This did not include approval for the tower. The government never intended to approve a tower, a point over which Davis, Cleverly, Stanton and the fundraisers charged on with fervent disregard.
As early as November 1846, alarm bells were being sounded over the estimates. Major Aldrich, in his capacity as superintendent engineer, told Colonial Secretary Caine that they were too low in some specific respects. Carpenters and plasterers in particular had not been fully accounted for, and their costs estimates needed raising by 20 per cent. In response, Gordon, in his last official gasp, raised the whole estimate to 6,959 pounds from 6,600 pounds, making
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further allowance for timber costs in unkind anticipation of defective workmanship by Chinese carpenters.
Work could be postponed no longer. Davis passed an ordinance on 11 March 1847, fixing the government��s contribution to 4,600 pounds. Responsibility for the site was handed to a board of trustees. Building the church was handed to Cleverly, and the inadequacy of the estimates was instantly revealed. All the tenders for the project were described by Cleverly to Caine as ��extravagantly high��. In fact, it was the estimates that had been scrimpingly low. Even the lowest tender for the whole job would have exceeded the estimates by 3,000 pounds.
Cleverly was resourceful. Building was proceeded with in piece-meal contracts. He was buying time rather than economy. The trustees were taking one step at a time even though they knew that, whatever happened, they had somehow to go the whole way. The work was divided into six contracts. The initial site works had gone to Ah Wei in August 1846.26 For reasons unknown, he failed to complete the job, and it had to be finished under a new contract, with Ah Sing and Ah Chi in May 1847. The substantial contract involving $16,000 for the walls and roof went to Lei Ah Tung, as did the third contract for plastering and flooring. Hau Ah Lok took on the work of cutting the approaches. Wong Ah Fo put in the seating and the pulpits, and Ah Ming completed the controversial tower, last of all in 1850.27
Charles Cleverly must have suspected that the November 1846 estimates would not hold. As early as May 1847, he was already laying the grounds for disappointment at a trustees meeting. He told them the estimates were too low and that costs would overrun.28 But Chaplain Stanton was in a more buoyant mood. He could affirm that donations stood at 1,963 pounds and 400 pounds more would come. He wanted more stonework introduced in the light of this prosperity. He also foresaw the need to extend the chancel for a future bishop and the church��s inevitable cathedral status. He urged this even though he knew it would affect the acoustics and that the congrega-tion would hear the east-end celebration of the Communion service less distinctly.
One might imagine the ire rising in Cleverly over this insupport-able wishfulness. With the backing of one equally cautious trustee, Colonel Philipson, he persuaded the trustees that the delay alone was impossible to accommodate and heartily concurred in the acoustic values of a short chancel. It must have been an annoying meeting for Cleverly. A rambling and heated discussion disguised as a ��general
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conversation�� took place over trustees poking their noses into the building site and giving orders as well as interfering with payments agreed by the surveyor-general and the colonial secretary.
The trustees agreed to organised site visits and to engage an English foreman at $60 per month. That same day, they decided on an aes-thetic improvement which is enjoyed to this day: wooden shutters on the windows. It was only 900 pounds and a two-month delay which prevented them from ordering stone and not wooden window jambs.29
In an April 1848 meeting, Cleverly, who had now been surveyor-general since November 1846, decided to reveal to the existing trustees the extent of the pickle they were in. They were, he told them, underfunded by 1,041 pounds 17 shillings and 4 pence. The Roman cement for exterior plastering had been seriously underesti-mated, and the stairs in the turret could not be put in for five times the sum allowed. This was entirely the fault of his predecessors, he said, and there was some restrained mockery of the unnamed Gordon. The trustees, though they had not existed as a body at the time, most surely would have realised as individuals that the esti-mates were something of a guess and deliberately on the low side to ignite progress, said Cleverly. Not wishing to appear as impercep-tive individuals, they quickly and unanimously absolved Cleverly of any blame.
A strategy of justification began, which was to run until 1851 and to the final payments. Cleverly, in a spurious take on accountabil-ity, said that he had not informed the trustees earlier because the inadequacy was public knowledge anyway. Had not the Aldrich report made that clear, and he had done his best to stay within bounds by running piecemeal contracts? Of course, Governor Davis had been forced to approve the building work because building season had to be caught.
These arguments were to take different shape and direction depend-ing on who they were put to. Gordon would remain the whipping boy, but one strain of truth runs through what turned out to be a difficult argument with the Colonial Office. These pioneering colonialists, businessmen and officials, soldiers and clergy were adamant in their intention of seeing a church of the national religion standing in their colony as quickly as possible. None of them could have known with any certainty what quantities, quality and time would be involved in building a large Gothic Revival church using a workforce to which it meant nothing in a setting and climate for which it had never been
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conceived. If it took an overly optimistic estimate to get the founda-tion stone laid and a string of moving excuses to get it topped out, then so be it.
A new governor, Bonham, party to none of that, yet stoically in the middle, asked a new colonies minister, Lord Grey, if he could help in all this. The trustees had told Bonham that the job had to be finished while the scaffolding was up, a forceful persuader in the building trade. Bonham asked Grey for 694 pounds to finish off the tower; the remainder of the shortfall, 347 pounds, could be raised by subscription, in keeping with the two-thirds principle.
Mentioning the tower was a strategic error. Grey declined the request. No more public money than was promised on 2 February 1847 could be spent. The tower was unnecessary. If the CMS-trained clergy were adept in taking the Gospel out to China, the lay trustees were practised at playing hardball back to London. They asked the colonial secretary to tell the secretary of state that it was the poor subscribers who did not know that the estimates were too low, not the trustees, who had not even been created at the time. At a stroke, this public who had been so knowledgeable had ceased to exist. The now-departed Davis had his colours repainted. His laying of the foun-dation stone suddenly became less to do with the weather. It had implied to everybody else that there was enough to proceed on, said the trustees. They topped off their plea by playing the patriot card. An unfinished tower would damage the image of the British.
Grey still saw ��no reason for altering my earlier decision�� which, in ministerial language, means that he could not be bothered to argue. By then, St John��s had opened with funding still a hole in its confi-dence and a stop to its progress.
The trustees were tenacious. Throughout 1850, they pressed their point on the home government. The obstacle to their relief was that the amount the government had agreed on and contributed had been set into the legislation which had established the church, Ordinance 2 of 1847. At the time 2,300 pounds had been contributed by subscrib-ers, and so the government gave 4,600 pounds. In fact the church was costing 8,736 pounds, of which the government should have paid 5,824 pounds under the two-thirds arrangement.
By 19 August, 863 pounds remained outstanding. Colonial Secretary Caine, repaying the trustees with some of the abruptness for which he was known when he was chief magistrate, told them to lop off the costs outstanding on the tower which would never be
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met. That left 165 pounds which he would refer to London and the discretion of the minister. Grey still stood firm until Bonham, though tactfully agreeing with his position, pointed out to him that the trustees had in fact settled the outstanding debts and were person-ally 455 pounds out of pocket. Did not the circumstances suggest a payment? This must have touched the gentleman in Lord Grey. The irksome trustees had behaved like gentlemen themselves. It was not right in law, he said, but they should be reimbursed. They had not established any legal claim, but the consecration of the church could not be delayed because, under ecclesiastical law, no church can be consecrated whilst it lies under outstanding debt.
In the end, the total cost of the church was 8,673 pounds, 371 pounds over the original 8,302 pounds�Xincluding the tower�Xwhich went with the Cleverly design. Just under half, 4,136 pounds, was paid for by subscription. This set a precedent in the relationship between Church and state up to 1892 for regarding government con-tribution to major works as fifty per cent and not two-thirds.
One payment that does not seem to have been made was the alleged promise of a 460-pound commission to Charles Cleverly for architectural services. It seemed a doubtful arrangement for a civil servant and trustee. An attempt was made to include it in the request for funds to London. It is easy to see how that was dismissed out of hand as Bonham��s problem by the Colonial Office. There is no record of Bonham or anyone else taking it on.30
Cleverly was a politician and an opportunist. He had the traits for survival in an unstable environment, unforgiving of the slow witted. Amongst them, and most clearly to his credit, were determination and skill which delivered a physically sound, well-planned and aes-thetically accurate Gothic Revival cathedral on the coast of South China. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it serves its Anglican congregation as fittingly as it did in the middle of the nine-teenth. Although it is unlikely that a building in that style would be begun from scratch now, its arches and turrets, its tower and stained glass are looked upon by passers-by more as regal old friends than as colonial oddities. As Jan Morris said in her book Hong Kong: Xianggang, what had ��once seemed so alien an intrusion now looked almost venerably organic��.
Charles Cleverly leaves us a clear account of what the church was built of, and the materials are summarised in the St John��s Cathedral Conservation Report of 2007.31 The foundations are of dressed
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granite on limestone and sand, and the plinth, the platform between ground level and the finished floor surface, is of ��wrought granite��.
The nave is of paved granite, and under the seating and in the vestry it was overlaid by timber flooring of China board over Manila joists. The aisle and side aisle are Chinese marble on eight-inch thick concrete. The Roman cement, which Surveyor Gordon is supposed to have sadly underestimated, covers granite steps, the pillars inside the church and was on the mullions in the former east window. The former high altar at the east end has marble steps.
The walls are of Canton grey brick which were covered with one layer of Roman cement with joint marks to imitate ashlar stone blocks. This imitation, as we shall see, is the one minor misfeasance in St John��s display of the neo-Gothic. The church��s doors have moulded panels and are studded, bolt style, in Manila wood. Granite blocks at two-foot intervals hold the doors and windows by iron bolts leaded into them. Mouldings are cut in brickwork and finished with plaster coats.
The roof was a double layer of red tiles lined with softwood pine, which was to prove a running banquet for termites and was to be twice replaced. The underside plywood lining is currently an interest-ing mid-tone blue, but the original specifications called for varnish. The roof supports were queen post trusses with a curved brace spring-ing from a stone wall bracket. The only decoration is a red and yellow dogtooth design of the brace infill. From correspondence,32 we know that more elaborate designs for the roof were discussed. Economy may have snuffed them out, but the plainness of this beautiful feature bears faithful witness to its medieval origin, and there may have been a resolve to stick with it. Its impact on those who look up at it for the first time justifies that.
Out of the criss-crossing of plans, the turmoil of costings and the husbandry of Cleverly, St John the Evangelist grew to be an almost textbook example of Early Victorian Gothic. It would have passed the scrutiny of the pickiest of its proponents such as Augustus Pugin, a Catholic convert, who gave form to the belief that classicism had helped suck the life out of religion and that a return to a medieval style would restore the values of a more passionate religious age.
It is true that the Gothic Revival in church architecture in English cities was for a while closely associated with the Anglo-Catholic movement which was gaining traction at the time. Yet evangelical revivalism in the Church of England was a power which coincided with it, and by mid-century both wings of the church took the Gothic
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to heart. Gothic��s vaunting, buttressed romanticism struck a chord with the Victorians. Although the origins of St John��s plans back in England may have lain with High Church sympathisers, their adoption in Hong Kong did not necessarily represent similar sympa-thies amongst the merchants and military there. Quite the contrary, a more Protestant and less sacramental approach to worship seems to have been the preference amongst the English colonial population then and for some time after.
Given its timing, St John��s is an early and seminal expression of the form based on Early English Gothic. Its sculptural sense, details like the bar tracery in the windows, the lancet arches, the ribbed course lines and the roof��s queen post trusses, make it a thorough example of the Early Revival.
Pugin himself laid down some strict rules about what was genuine Gothic, important among which is that the original construction material must be frankly expressed and not disguised. St John��s fell down on this point with the lines cut in the cement covering the bricks on the walls, faking stone blocks. The cement could be excused as moisture control for damp weather conditions. Adapting to climate was a central tenet of the Gothic school, and Cleverly did just that with the church. He installed prominent shutters and ventilators. ��Ventilation in the ceiling is made in the bosses, passes into the roof and exits through circular openings in transepts�� is how he describes it. He raised the seating six inches above the floor ventilation, a thoughtful move for humans in the climate, but did not appreciate the paradise he was building for rodents.
He built only a short tower with typhoons in mind. English church towers of the type and period can be much loftier. A previous design of Philip Hardwick, Holy Trinity, Bolton, built in 1837, in wet but not so windy Lancashire and an optimistically enormous parish church in a Victorian boom town, attests to this.
The shortened chancel of 1849 was a cost expediency, lamented by Gordon and Stanton, among others perhaps, but turned into some-thing of a virtue. It was a novelty, almost a T-shaped church, and it was dealt with skilfully. Around the back of this briefest of chancels was a projecting, semi-circular vestry or ��half ambulatory��, as the architects describe it. It was flat roofed, kept to a small scale and considered unusual. The shift in scale from the main building was dramatic.
The design gives the impression of an easy symmetry, but this is an illusion. There are departures from it. The most significant is the
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double-height extension of the north transept over the original bap-tistery, which is now the quiet chapel. This skillion roof structure is recessed slightly behind the transept��s main north gable so it escapes too much attention. Originally, the north and south transepts also had entrances on their east side, both sides of the ��half ambulatory��. For the general coming from Flagstaff House and his officers from their Mess a little lower down the hill, this would have been most convenient.
These arrangements were all to be done away with only twenty years later, when the chancel was extended. Yet from the very opening, chaplain, trustees and congregation would face challenges from the structure and its installations and to their own tempers and charity as the cathedral broke itself in.
Since 11 March 1849 was two years exactly from the foundation stone laying and was to fall on a Sunday, it was resolved to declare St John��s more or less complete and hold the first Divine Service that day. It is fair to imagine a few ragged edges to the event. There would have been walls not quite painted, trim to be finished off and bamboo scaffolding still lodged in corners and most prominently around the porch. The tower was not completed and would not be for another year. Negotiating entry through the west door may have been hazard-ous to clean uniforms and civilian finery.
The records do not go to lengths about the proceedings.33 The newspapers seem not to have bothered with it. Quite simply, the Reverend Stanton conducted a morning service with the Reverend
N. L. Onslow, the Chaplain from HMS Hastings, and in the after-noon�Xpresumably evensong�Xhe was accompanied by the Reverend
A. Studman, the Military Chaplain. We have to remember that this was not a service of consecration. That could not come for another three years, until the debts were settled. Happy and populated though it would have been as an event, it was more akin to what the hotel business calls a ��soft opening��.
As with all first runs, discoveries were made. A row of seats was afterwards taken out of each transept. They were too packed. Bamboo blinds had to be found for the doors. If these were against the sun, they may also have been to keep out mosquitoes.34 Years later, in 1868, bamboo sun screens were extended as awnings over all the entrances so that ��chairs�� could be put down under them and occupants pro-tected from the sun as they got in and out.
Shortly before the service, the colonial chaplain made another dis-covery, along with the other trustees and some of the press. The coat
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of arms of Sir John Davis and Sir George Bonham had been moulded above the north and the south sides of the porch. There was objec-tion to this.35 ��Disgraceful appendages�� is how the Hong Kong Register described them in its edition of 15 October 1850. Interestingly, the press reserved particular venom for Davis, levelling accusations of self-promotion and private enterprise. He was long gone by then, but it was a measure of his unpopularity in the colony even though, through his persistence in the building of St John��s, he probably deserved the memorial. It was too late to chisel them off and there they remain.
A summary look at St John��s in 1850 shows us what can be fairly described as Cleverly��s plan now brought to its conclusion. Moving from west to east stands a five-bay nave with aisles, transepts and one bay of chancel, creating the near T-shape. Behind the high altar is the half ambulatory, a single-storey canted bay acting as a vestry.
At the west end is a porch inside a tower, a tower built more with bluff than with funds, for which the trustees were staring down London until it blinked and paid, which London did in 1851. Original designs for the tower were altered. An 1845 drawing of the west elevation shows that battlements were planned. They never appeared. Another fortress theme, the slit lancet window, was disapproved of. ��This little window is bad�� a no-nonsense critic has scrawled next to it. The round one has replaced it. The stained glass in there may be the only original glass left in the building. Round windows in the tower and on each of the transept gables are a last-minute excep-tion to generally pointed windows and openings. The aisle and lower transept windows are all lancets with a Y tracery supporting a small round window at the junction. The corner turrets of the tower kept their pointed ��archer-slits��.
The interior lining of the porch is timber framed with a hard plaster ceiling. There is manhole in it. If necessary, a rope could be dropped from the bell tower, down through the gallery and through the hole so that a bell could be rung from ground level. Inside the tower, directly above the porch, is the west gallery looking out over the nave and, beneath, a timber-panelled tympanum over the door. You get up to the gallery by a tight little staircase in the tower��s north turret. A stair was never put in the south turret, so it is definitely difficult one-way traffic, in and out. The uses the gallery has been put to are obscure and intermittent. There was once an organ up there. From time to time choirs have taken themselves up to sing. Currently, it is reposi-tory for amplifying equipment.
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Eastwards, at the end of the nave, stood the pulpit, up against the main ��pier�� pillar where the nave meets the south transept. It was regarded as an integral part of the structure and included in the plans. Drawings for it still exist. It was of surprising elegance. A graceful curving balustraded staircase led up to the pulpit itself. The octagonal desk was decorated with lancet arches to match the windows, but the surprise was in the backdrop and the canopy (or sounding board) with fleur-de-lis crenulations, which look distinctly Tudor. It must have been an interesting delicacy in a stronger and simpler setting.36 The reading desk, of which we have no pictures, was directly opposite on the north side, and this may have been the undoing of both of them. According to some conventions, they were wrong way round. When that was righted, the Tudor gem did not survive the move.
This readjustment of the fittings was one of several that the trustees had to cope with in the coming twenty years. None was more sensitive and persistent than the manoeuvring of the seating. St John��s pews are a generous delight to the worshipper. Made of teak and rosewood, the benches have individual seats with arms and rattan insets. They have the depth and width which would allow an officer with his sword or a lady in broad crinolines to sit in comfort in the tropical climate. The space between the benches allows you to thrust yourself onto your knees rather than slide down as is customary in tighter layouts. On the lightly clad congregations of the twenty-first century, this space is almost extravagant.
Some of the pews are original, and you can tell them by the slightly more elaborate carving at the arm joints. The ones with arms were for renting, and those without, in the aisles, were free. In the planning stage, it was decided, thoughtfully, that these seats for the poorer classes should have backs to them.
The seats in Cleverly��s plan ran right through the crossing of the nave and the transepts. In each transept there were originally eight rows of pews, until the opening service demonstrated that this was at least one row too many. Finding enough of these pews, placing the people in them and keeping them there contentedly was a repeated strain on the nerves of the trustees and, of all their tasks, the most thankless. There were times in the years up to 1873 when disputes over ��sittings�� were so relentless and acrimonious that they must have wondered why they took on the office at all.


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It is surprising for such a prominent detail but why the cathedral was named after St John the Evangelist is unclear. This is a nugget of fact waiting to be dug up. It has been suggested that it was to honour Sir John Davis, the governor, who did enough to bring about the church��s existence, but he was so widely excoriated as to make this unlikely. The answer could be more covert. St John the Evangelist, with St John the Baptist, is considered a co-patron saint by the Freemasons. A significant number of British merchants, clergy and officials in Hong Kong were, in those days as in this, Freemasons. There may have been a natural inclination to the apostle when time came to title the church.
The government of St John��s was established by Ordinance No. 2 of 1847. For a brief year after its opening, it stood as a church. Ordinance No. 3 of 1850 elevated it to the status of a cathedral upon the creation of the Diocese of Victoria and transferred certain powers held by the colonial chaplain to the bishop.
St John��s as a cathedral in 1850 was governed like none in England. It had no dean and chapter of canons. Its governing body was a small group of laymen. Its chief and sole clergyman was a chaplain on a government stipend. It was structured to operate as a colonial church ministering principally to the British population along with any overseas Episcopalians, occasional Presbyterians and local Chinese converts who chose to attend.
There were six lay trustees, four appointed by the government and two by an annual meeting of the subscribers and seatholders. The 1850 ordinance made the bishop chairman of the trustees, with authority to depute the chairing of the regular meetings to the colonial chaplain. Given the lengthy absences and other business of the bishops, this became a de facto situation. The trustees were required
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to meet quarterly. The Annual General Meeting of Subscribers and Seatholders could not propose actions but just approve them so usually no one, except the trustees, bothered to attend.
The trustees were responsible for the finance, the fabric and the general management of lay affairs, including the rented seating or ��sittings��. The chaplain concerned himself with matters spiritual and pastoral, including the liturgy and the ordering of services. The bishop could request special services such as confirmations and ordinations to be held at particular times. Because the bishop had ecclesiasti-cal control over the chaplain and the cathedral was his seat, it was unlikely that any radical liturgical changes could have been made without his consent. In the first two episcopacies of Bishop Smith and Bishop Alford, it would have been difficult to oppose any service proposals that were the bishop��s will.
But then the government had controls over the chaplain too when they wanted to exert them, for the chaplain was paid by the govern-ment. The governor could and did require special services to be held for matters with bearing on the community. Overlapping authorities provided potential for friction though constitutional disputes involv-ing the cathedral are not a pressing feature of the first two episcopa-cies, very likely because the bishops were so rarely in town. In those early days there were more practical teething troubles.
Trustees noted as attending a meeting of 31 May 1847 included Cleverly, Lieutenant-Colonel Philpots, a royal engineer representing the military; W. T. Mercer, colonial treasurer at the precocious age of 25; and Wilkinson Dent of Dent and Co., elected by the subscribers. Dent was succeeded at the annual meeting in April 1849 by another Dent and Co. merchant, C. J. Braine, who was a passionate collector of ferns and had one he found in Hong Kong named after him. T. R. Neave also joined as an elected trustee.1
As well as providing four trustees for the cathedral and the chap-lain��s pay, the government was responsible for contributing funds for its repair and maintenance. Precisely for which purposes and up to what point was not defined in law. The government��s say in what happened at St John��s could be a loud one in those early days. Its voice was raised surprisingly rarely, but its influence could be felt in odd ways. From time to time, a governor might choose the hymns for Sunday if it suited him.
A bishopric was created for Hong Kong in February 1849. George Smith was consecrated as its first bishop, with Letters Patent2 on 29
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May, and he arrived in his new diocese on 27 March 1850.3 What had been, for the briefest of periods, a colonial parish church now became the seat of a bishop whose diocesan authority reached, conceptually at least, from Hong Kong Island to Japan and whose objective was to spread the Gospel there in hegemony with the imperial purpose.
The idea of the Church of England expanding among the pagans in tandem with the empire did not sit comfortably with Liberal politi-cians in mid-Victorian Parliaments back home or those who saw the established Church as a facility for England and the English. Funds for it to do this were not being voted. Others, prominent among them Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, who had ordained Victor Stanton, believed that the state had deserted its religious obligations and that the expansion of Anglican Christianity in the British Empire could not be left to missionary societies. It must be episcopally rooted. A bishop had to be planted in every territory.
A meeting of clergy was held in London on 27 April 1841.4 The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, was present and vocal. Bishops, he said, exerted authority and moral influence. Dissent had spread in the North American colonies for the lack of them. The Roman Catholics threatened to reap a harvest in the British Empire. Blomfield pressed that the country��s huge expansion made the Church of England a missionary church. Greater integration of the two would present a united front throughout the empire.
Blomfield proposed a fund administered by a committee of English bishops to complement funds raised by colonists. The committee would confer with government ministers on the creation of new bishops, and the bishops would be issued by the Crown with Letters Patent to secure their legal status. The pressure group was a powerful one in both Commons and Lords. The Colonial Bishops Act was passed in 1841, creating the Colonial Bishoprics Fund. Both colonial and missionary Anglicanism was to come under episcopal control.
You needed private donations to make this work, of course, and it did catch the imaginations of the wealthy. Angela Burdett-Coutts, for example, gave 35,000 pounds for dioceses in South Australia and the Cape and 50,000 pounds for British Columbia. Hong Kong found a brother and sister as benefactors, J. C. Sharpe of Gosling and Sharpe��s Bank, and Lady Elizabeth Smart, wife of Admiral Sir Robert Smart, ultimately commander-in-chief, Mediterranean Fleet. They donated 10,000 pounds, 5,000 pounds of which was intended for St Paul��s College.
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A pastoral appeal in England brought 6,000 pounds to the Hong Kong fund, 2,000 pounds came from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and an equal sum from the SPCK. This total satisfied Her Majesty��s government that sufficient funds existed for a bishop to function without embarrassment or turning cap in hand to them. The Bishopric of Victoria could be created.5
This plan for the Church as a missionary church to the Chinese, and colonial bishops as missionary bishops covering imperial dis-tances, was a plan which St John��s, conceived as a parish church for the colonial English, had to sit up to. It was a dual role which created demands on the cathedral that were sometime risen to, sometimes just met but never fully accommodated.
Bishop Smith arrived in Hong Kong on 27 March 1850. The Friend of China, using an adjective all of its own making, gushed over the bishop in the tones of a celebrities magazine. ��Mr. Smith��s appear-ance and preaching are familiar to many of us�Xa young man having a particularly ��youthy�� look, with which his soft and dulcet tones are in perfect harmony.�� Mr. John Wright, a post office clerk who kept a rather interesting diary, confided to it on 30 March 1850,6 that he was less taken with the bishop��s appearance: ��His Lordship the Bishop of Victoria landed at 8.15 a.m. in HMS Hastings�� barge. He is a tall thin pale looking man.��
The colonial chaplain received him at home, in the college on the promontory above Glenealy. It had been cut into the hillside and embanked with solid granite. It is known today as Bishop��s House though the building was St Paul��s College right up to the Second World War. Bishops lived there in their role as college warden, of which Smith became the first.
Present at his reception were teachers and students, including thirty-four boarders.7 The teaching staff were to have a chequered history. J. Summers, the Precentor, was cast into a Macau gaol in June 1858, for showing insufficient respect to the Corpus Christi procession and was sprung by a Royal Navy raiding party. Tutor E. T. Moncrieff and his wife died in the Siege of Cawnpore in 1857.
Stanton handed staff, students and authority over the college to the bishop before leaving Hong Kong for good, a sick man, ��never to see its pleasant rooms and balconies again,�� as he lamented. Stanton��s role in the foundation of St Paul��s was diminished by Smith��s immedi-ate expansion of it. He got to work applying the earmarked 5,000
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pounds from Sharpe and Lady Smart, which included building a terrace of houses on the upper slope.
��The income from that is what you are enjoying,�� noted Stanton in a later, somewhat rueful letter to the second Bishop, Alford.8 In it he claims that his founding struggle for the college was being forgotten, as it was until later historians such as G. B. Endacott disinterred it. Stanton��s son, Vincent Henry, when Dean of Trinity, wrote to Bishop Alford about his father with a rarely recorded note of criticism on Bishop Smith. ��[His] weakness was that he was too much absorbed in that which was more immediately concerned with himself.��
On Easter Day 1850, Bishop Smith preached his first sermon in the cathedral. John Wright, clearly not a fan, says of it, ��At Church in the morning the Bishop preached�Xdid not think much of his sermon.��9 The bishop administered Holy Communion to seventy people, ��mer-chants, government officials and naval and military officers��.10 That can be pictured as a thin gathering in the nave of St John��s. However, in June of that year, Governor Bonham was telling Lord Grey in connec-tion with quite another matter that ��the whole Protestant community in this Colony does not exceed, exclusive of the Troops, two hundred in number.�� Some of those Protestants would have been Dissenters disinclined to attend an Anglican service. Not all of those present will have received Communion. To have garnered nearly half of that com-munity together, including leading lights, was a significant showing.
Smith��s presences there were to be intermittent. Essential to his role in expanding the Church of England��s mission in China and Japan was that he should be a travelling bishop. His Letters Patent covered all the domains of the emperor of China and ships within one hundred miles of his coast. All persons in Holy Orders therein were placed under his jurisdiction. He was a body corporate and a perpetual corporation. He was Lord Bishop of Victoria. The cathe-dral was his seat, he had episcopal oversight over the clergy and he could�Xand did�Xappoint canons and archdeacons though those canons would have no part of its government.
This is not to say that the bishop was at all timid or indifferent in exercising his authority over the cathedral. On 5 June 1855, the Hong Kong Register published a notice of ��a day of fast�� for the disasters of the Crimean War.
Given out at the cathedral on Sunday last. That Wednesday the 13th to be a day of public fast and humiliation on account of the war, and of prayer for the restoration of peace.
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National fast days were popular among Protestant Victorians and the Queen herself, who declared these days to make atonement at times of crisis. Bishop Smith and the Reverend James Legge at Union Church announced Her Majesty��s penance to Hong Kong. The gov-ernment was furious. This was a declaration that should have been executive, not episcopal, said the governor and, anyway, it applied only to England and Ireland. Smith insisted that government employ-ees be allowed to down tools and come to the cathedral, even that Irish Catholic troops of the 59th Regiment could go to their church. Many did, including all the senior officials who usually attended church, except Bonham. Most European businesses closed for the day. Ships could not leave port for want of paperwork.
In the service itself, the bishop pointedly omitted any references to Britain��s allies, ��the infidel French nation��, as he was heard to describe them by Sir John Bowring. The governor suspected that the Roman Catholics cooperated in the fast day because they mistakenly believed it was officially sanctioned. A Colonial Office note described Smith as ��factious��.11
Of the fourteen years Bishop Smith was in the diocese, he spent a total of six in Hong Kong itself. Apart from China, he visited Japan, Australia, India and Ceylon. His energy and courage were remark-able. Whilst delivering an episcopal charge at a service at Holy Trinity, Shanghai, the building itself came under fire. He was greatly taken by Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion. He saw it as a tremendous opportunity for a sudden rush of Christianity across China and wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury at excited length with his observations.
For many Christians, most particularly men of missionary spirit like Bishop Smith, the empire was at once a great opportunity for them and a cause of arrogance and abuse which offended Christian principle. In May 1857, he explained to an audience at Exeter Hall, London (where the Strand Palace Hotel now stands) what drove him in his dilemma and articulates the resolution of it for many colonial Anglicans.12
We are impelled forward in spite of ourselves �K it might be appalling unless every new accession of territory is made an opportunity of advancing the Redeemer��s kingdom �K every new addition to the territory of Britain is laid as a humble additional contributions at the foot of the Redeemer��s cross.
Victor Stanton, far from travelling, had been absorbed by reli-gious and education work within Hong Kong. The contrast was one
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St John��s was going to have to accommodate throughout most of its future. It was the seat of bishops who were forever far off on horse-back and riverboats getting to the Chinese. It was the responsibility of chaplains who stayed at home and ministered to a congregation that moved around by chair and rickshaw getting to business.
Stanton left in 1850 because of illness. Most chaplains, deans and bishops retired prematurely from maladies well into the twenti-eth century. Stanton himself, though in fluctuating health, became Incumbent of Southgate in Middlesex, followed by the chargeship of the Parishes of Halesworth and Chediston. He survived until 1891, outliving Bishop Smith by twenty years.
Many sick clergy also had similar good fortune. Hong Kong��s climate and its viruses were potential killers. Europeans who tried to weather them or withdrew too late often died. Those who took doctor��s orders, read the signs or got out while youth was on their side, survived to reminisce and pester new men going out with outdated advice.
It was Stanton��s successor, Samuel Watson Steedman, who was present for the consecration of St John the Evangelist on 19 September 1852. The cathedral has no surviving records of this service. We have what we know from the correspondent of the Friend of China edition of 23 September. A service order sixteen pages long was left in each pew. The trustees and the registrar read a paper, standing near the Communion table, ��the purport of which was difficult in the distance to obtain��.
The bishop, followed by Steedman, the Colonial Chaplain, and Reverends Carroll, Harrison, Brown and Odell, walked from the east end to west door and back again repeating alternately verses of Psalm
24. The bishop then sat on the north side of the communion table and received the deed of conveyance and read it to congregation. The chaplain read the first sentence of the consecration and then commenced the usual service of the day. The formal ceremony was concluded. The correspondent went on to observe:
The Bishop preached on 2 Chronicles 7�V12. He exhorted his
listeners to make offerings of a suitable value. As it was not
shown that there was any great want of funds, the appeal was not
responded to we apprehend with general liberality.
Hale men of the 59th regiment were in attendance and being
provided with hymn books, assisted in better harmony than the
churchgoers of Victoria are in the habit of hearing, a defect which,
now the church is out of debt, we trust will soon be remedied.
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Details of St John��s early colonial chaplains are sparse, and their impact on the cathedral is difficult to assess. The minutes and cor-respondence of the trustees, the narrative backbone of intelligence on the cathedral itself in the earlier years, are lost between 1850 and 1858. Samuel Watson Steedman took up his post in 1852. The ill-fated E. T. Moncrieff from St Paul��s was acting chaplain in the interim. Steedman had been military chaplain in Hong Kong and had officiated at the opening of ��the British church�� as it was called, in Canton in 1849.
If Steedman��s tenure was brief, Reverend William Baxter came and went after him in a blink. Baxter, it turns out, was in debt in England, where he had been charged by petition to the House of Commons. This gave rise for a letter on the matter from Major Caine, as acting governor, dated 21 August 1854, to Lord Grey, the secretary for the colonies. Bishop Smith suspended Baxter��s licence, pending investi-gations. This must have curtailed his use to St John��s, and then he was gone.13
James John Irwin, who held the position for over a decade from 1855, we are a little more informed on, at least about his domestic life. He married twice and had four children by two wives. His first wife, May, who bore him a son, died in July 1857, which may explain the leave of absence he took in the October of that year. It lasted till February 1859. In May 1865, now with his second wife, Emma, who had given him two children, he took leave again to return in December 1867, when he appears to have been immediately replaced by William Beach.14
Irwin was a friend of Robert Lechler, a vigorously eccentric pioneer of the Basel Mission, who worked in China for fifty-two years and took Irwin in a missionary-cum-shooting party up the Pearl River to Sham Chun (Shenzhen). It was an interesting group, including Thomas Stringer, a CMS missionary; Ernest Eitel, linguist and historian; and one Captain Drummond of the 99th Foot. There recording this was Jonathan Fry, a young Englishman from CMS, who was teaching at St Paul��s College and doing his best to immerse himself in Chinese language and culture. Unfortunately, all he could note of Irwin in this account was that he slept on deck at night.15
For whoever held it, the colonial chaplaincy was no sinecure. Ministering alone to a fluid, opinionated parish, trying to teach and to take the Gospel to the locals as well as being responsible for a large and developing cathedral church bore with it considerable strains. One
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of the most testing tasks was to mediate among the trustees, usually men of confidence, authority and attitudes under pressure from other colonialists who were bent at once on maintaining Christian virtues and social status.
An issue delivered to them even before the building was completed was the putting up of memorials. The procession of coloured windows, tablets and plaques that the cathedral was to collect over ninety years became inexorable. Only invasion halted it. Even at the beginning, the trustees sought restraint, but it was difficult to exercise. By the time of their removal by the Japanese during their occupation, they had become an elaborate, cluttered, often poignant mural of clues to the past of both church and city.
The first application was quite grand. At a meeting of 1 May 1848, the family of Lord Napier, the late superintendent of trade, asked that a memorial be erected in the grounds of St John��s.16 This memorial already existed. It had been bought in England years before, fallen into pieces after a fire and become an unlovely wreck. The trustees baulked at accepting the shambles. However, rejecting it would have been letting the imperial side down. They agreed to repair and erect it. Whether it ever stood in its entirety is questionable. Certainly an inscribed part of it got to the church wall, telling us that Napier had been ��sacrificed to zeal with which he endeavoured to discharge the arduous duties of the time��. Also approved was a plaque erected by the ship��s company to William Hardy, captain of HMS Scout, who had been killed in a pirate attack. Rather ungraciously, it would appear, the Reverend Stanton asks that the sailors be charged for the inscription. By the late 1860s, a charge for erecting a tablet, at a starting point of $100�Xfor Thomas Boulder, bosun of HMS Perseus, lost fighting the Great Fire of 1857�Xto $250 to P&O for the loss of a ship, was becoming as predictable as a funeral fee.17
The same meeting welcomed the gift of encaustic tiles from Herbert Minton of Staffordshire. These innovative, delicate and col-ourful pieces can still be seen in the quiet chapel, which they first adorned when it was the baptistery, and in a part of the sanctuary. What cannot be seen is decorative crosses that had been cut into the building��s buttresses. Objection on grounds unknown, perhaps exces-sive Romanism, was made to them, and they were filled in.
The cathedral��s walls were quick to remember those who had perished in the early days before they were built. A sizeable tablet stood to all those men of the early regiments, the 11th, 18th, 20th,
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75th, 98th, the Ceylon Rifles and in some cases their entire families who died from plague and are buried at Stanley. From it you learn, with pathos, that in 1844, Mary Anne was a popular name.
The sea is not forgotten. There was a tablet to the warmingly named vessels of the India and China trade which had disappeared beneath the waves in the ten years previous, sixteen in all, includ-ing Mischief, Coquette, Mavis, Caroline and The Anna Elisa. Some of them perhaps were named after the women who would be standing on paths up the Peak straining to see the Lye Mun Gap for ships that would never return.18
A sign of where not so much the sympathies as the assump-tions of the cathedral community lay at that time was the erection of a memorial tablet in 1851, to the extravagantly named Augustus Frederick Hippolyto Da Costa, a 27-year-old captain of the Royal Engineers, who was ��wantonly attacked and murdered by Chinese pirates while walking by the seaside�� accompanied by Lieutenant Dwyer of the Ceylon Rifles, who was also despatched.
This was briefly a cause celebre in Hong Kong, not all the foreign community��s sympathy lying with Da Costa. The alleged killers were a pirate, Chui Apo, and men in Wong Ma Kok Village near Stanley Fort. The pair were beaten, trussed and thrown into the sea. Villagers gave a convincing account of two young European men, arrogant with alcohol after a long lunch, abusing and molesting a girl. When Chui Apo asked them to stop, they fought.
Police identified the village, and Chui fled to his pirate fleet, which was decimated by the navy. He hid in China for two years before being arrested by Manchu officials and taken away from Canton by a British ship.
The plaque went up even before a verdict. The judge agreed that the soldiers were provocative but gave Chui life transportation. A huge controversy raged, including on the point that he should have been tried by Chinese court. Chui preferred, he said, to die. He hanged himself in his cell. Da Costa remained on the cathedral walls described as ��esteemed for �K his upright character�� for ninety more years.19
Naturally, some memorials were put up by families who could afford it. One such with great loss to assuage was the family of Fitzroy Delamere Foster, who died on Her Majesty��s Brig Bittern in 1857, on ��the Canton River�� from causes unspecified. He was 16, most likely a junior midshipman. George Urmson, a 37-year-old merchant who
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had been in Hong Kong for sixteen years, was trying to get home to Frodsham, Cheshire, in 1860. He did not make it. He died at sea before he got to Penang. Somebody missed him enough to want us to remember.
Other tablets went up by public subscription. One of them�X��a faint expression of universal regret at lamented death���Xis to Lieutenant Colonel Richard Tomkins RA and Lieutenant James R. Lugg RA, who were blown up by a dynamite stock whilst fighting the Great Fire of 1857. Another is to the crew of the P&O steamship Corea, lost in a typhoon in June 1865. This so touched the public heart that the governor, McDonnell, used his authority over the cathedral to require a memorial service.
More onerous for the trustees than the control of memorial plaques and tablets was the ordering of worshippers in their rightful seats. Encouraged by England��s Church Buildings Act of 1818, the better seating in a church was often rented out to individuals, firms or families on an annual basis, as a means of raising funds. The welcome revenue was called ��pew rent��. In the case of St John��s Cathedral, seats were allocated by the trustees not only according to availability but to the perceived station of the applicant in society. As well as sitting uncomfortably with the spirit of the Gospels, this was a system sufficiently subjective to prove inflammatory amongst rank-conscious Victorians, unless operated with unfailing deftness. Such was the pressure on early cathedral seating that it was sometimes not.
Of the 640 seats available in the completed church, 250 went to the military. One-third of the total was reserved for ��the poor��, that is to say they were free, and the balance was for rent. The original pick of the rented seats or ��sittings�� was made by the principal subscrib-ers before the military took their apportionment but after free seats had been allocated to the governor and the military commanders. On 13 December 1848, choice was taken in order of the amounts sub-scribed, and gentlemen who had subscribed equal sums balloted for first their order of choice.20
It is no surprise that the front row pews in the nave and seats immediately behind went to names like Dent, Matheson, Bell, Lindsay and Halliday. Of individuals, Mr. Braine, our ferns collector, had fourteenth choice. Messrs. Parker, Cleverly, Mercer and Johnson, all serving or future trustees, had between eighteenth and twenty-second pick, and Major Caine, formerly chief magistrate and later colonial secretary but never a trustee, was twenty-third.
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The trustees�� correspondence still carries details of the military allocation by seat numbers but, such have the changes been in seating layouts since then, they do not signify very much and the cathedral gave up numbering seats a long time ago. There are still occasional hooks at pew ends, where the rent account book would have been discreetly hung.
Pew rents were set at $5 per sitting, per annum, in 1849. This was not the Hong Kong dollar that we know today. It was the Mexican silver dollar, a persisting legacy of the Spanish imperial trading network. The Mexican dollar enjoyed wide confidence in East Asia into to the twentieth century.
There was a hunger for seating and a need for revenue from sittings in a church not yet grown into the role it had been cast in. In a meeting of the trustees on 14 May 1858, there is a lengthy, faded record of their discomfort over how the cathedral was built to a scale which was meant to accommodate the military, the government and the Christian populace but had been left to the ��seatholders and stakeholders���Xthe original subscribers�Xto maintain. The cathedral needed official, regular financial support, they agreed as one.
St John��s never did get precisely that. Indeed, the prospect of it receded over the century and had vanished entirely by the end of it. Sittings were to remain a major revenue source. It is unreason-able perhaps to have expected the congregation to be so ahead of its time, or the trustees so self-sacrificing of scarce income, as to abolish pew rents. Indeed, over time, when needs became urgent, up went the rents.
For example, the trustees held their quarterly meeting on 12 May 1859. Present in the vestry were George Cleverly, Francis Firth, George Lyall, M. Leslie, Thomas Walker and Henry Kingsmill, heavy-weights of the early cathedral. This was not always the chosen venue. Sometimes they met in St Paul��s College. Once they met in the rooms of the Asiatic Society. On some occasions the venue is not referred to. On this occasion, the accounts, audited by Hugh Bolder Gibb, showed a balance in favour of $155.45.
Francis Firth, who was with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, actually proposed dropping the pew rent from $7 to $6. The argument for this generosity must have been interesting but is not discernible. He did not find a seconder. On the contrary, they put it up to $8.
There was pressure on space, and this was aggravated when fixtures and fittings were moved around and added to as the cathedral
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discovered how to operate better. On 4 August 1858, Cleverly, as surveyor-general, was authorised to take down the ��Singing Gallery�� in the south transept and put ��fittings�� in the vacant spaces. Victorians hated a decorative vacuum. At a meeting on 13 June 1860, after obvious delay, he was further pressed to take down this gallery and put in seats at floor level, where it had been.
We do not know what this gallery looked like or what sort of singing went on in it. We might presume it held a choir, but references to a choir are few up to this point. We can be quite sure, though, that it was in the south transept. A trustees meeting of 14 July records pretty prompt complaints from seatholders in that transept saying they had been moved to inconvenient places because of the addition of the seating.
At the time, the trustees were also trying to plan for a new organ up in the west gallery. There must have been seats up there, because they were having to be moved, and a ruckus was building. The trustees decided on firmness.
Resolved that rows of seating in the West be immediately �K added to the number of pews in the North transept and those sitting in the East {of the South transept} �K be written to asking that, for the sake of providing sufficient accommodation for the choir, to suspend any further complaints until the organ gallery is completed.
Here there is a clear reference to a choir, in its infant state, and that it is destined for a place in the east. Where precisely the choir was seated is not exactly clear. One clue lies in a resolution of the trustees at their meeting of 2 November 1865. It was resolved that seats and cushions for the choir should be provided on the north side of the chancel, similar to those on the south side. This was seven years before the completion of the extension. In the shortened version of St John��s, there barely was a chancel. It must have been a tight squeeze or a small choir.
Apart from costs and congestion, a significant pressure on sittings and the temper of the trustees was precedence. A 31 March 1866 meeting considered the request of Vice Admiral Sir George King, the naval commander-in-chief, for a row of sittings for him and his staff. The trustees were aware that there was disgruntlement in the Senior Service that the general officer commanding, then Major General Sir Philip Guy, had better seating and that some ��adjustment�� needed to be made. No equivalent seating was available in either transept.
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There was nothing for it but to squeeze another row at the front of the south side of the nave.
A four-foot depth was needed for a pew, but only two feet could be shaved off the area taken up by the altar. Trustee Wilberforce Wilson came up with an idea. Wilson was an assistant surveyor-general who was to succeed Cleverly that year. Three years later, he was to set up Wilson and Salway and build St Peter��s, St Joseph��s, Hong Kong Pier and Godown, and the German Club in Wyndham Street. This proposal was more modest. Shift all the pews starting from the west end back one inch and by the time you had reached the front, the clearing would be achieved. To avoid perceptions of demotion, the seat numbers behind the new naval row would remain the same.
Such simplicity took no account of the perception of one Albert Emile Vaucher, Broker and Merchant, formerly of Canton and now of Balls Court. Mr. Vaucher and his wife worshipped in seats 36 and 37 of row 6. Now they perceived that they were worshipping in what was really the seventh row, probably about eighteen inches further back from the pulpit from where they had been. That precise space was now taken up by seats 29 and 30, rented by Captain H. G. Thomsett RN (retd.), the harbour master.
Vaucher believed that the seats he had rented went with the very square of granite they stood on proximity to the pulpit being as much to do with rank as spiritual uplift. On 2 June 1866, the trustees were persuaded to write to Thomsett asking him to swap seats. They picked the wrong sailor. Thomsett was a sea dog in an already wounded frame of mind over sittings. Twice the trustees had given him the promise of a sitting and then broken it because, Thomsett suspected, somebody more important than him had come along. Finally installed in seats, he was less likely to move of his own volition than was Lion Rock.
There was a testy correspondence, head-tossing and the stagey turning of backs and, worse, a scene in the nave in which Mrs. Vaucher confronted Thomsett. Mrs. Vaucher was alone, either because Sunday recreation was more attractive to her husband or he thought that Thomsett would not hit a woman. The trustees, at a loss, asked the Attorney General to mediate, which goes to show how much of an officials�� church St John��s was.
But not sufficiently for this. The governor himself replied with a refusal. ��The aisle is not a suitable place for disputes �K a little common sense and forbearance �K�� was the command of Sir Richard McDonnell. He was not obeyed. The matter was sent to legal counsel
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in London. Opinion along the lines of ��parishioners have the right to be seated according to their rank or station�� came back. Somehow, this told against Captain Thomsett, which must have heated his sense of social grievance. Vaucher was restored to his seats.
The row was acclaimed as ��The Great Pew Debate��, or words to that effect, although less had been said about a much more exalted and aggressive struggle coming out of the same furniture move. It erupted from James Whittal, a junior partner in Jardine Matheson who, on 27 April 1866, vigorously objected to the hong being shunted out of rows 3 and 4 by the army. He was furious for the standing of his firm, at the lack of notice and the indignity of being told by ��a sexton�� to leave the seats.21
Francis Parry, trustee and lawyer in the firm of Birley and Co., replied in a direct fashion, laying out the regulations and powers of the trustees, which fanned flames and incurred dissent from some of his fellow trustees. Whittal waded into the division, questioning the very right of the trustees to tell subscribers where to sit. Jardines would not move. The fuss got bigger. The heads of the trustees were clearly singing over sittings. The suggestion was made that Jardines and the general sort it out between them.22
General Guy swept away the problem at a stroke. He was not very concerned. Jardines could have the seats they insisted on, and his entourage would shuffle elsewhere. In a statement of marked ungraciousness, Whittal said that he got what he wanted not by the general��s consent but as of right. Whittal was clearly a tempestuous man. He left China in 1878, and started his own business based on London and Colombo. He was a director of the Chartered Bank until his death in 1894, upon which the China Mail wrote of him:
He had a kindly disposition �K a splendid specimen of what the British merchant can be �K shrewd and honest with a kindly thought and word for all with whom he was brought into contact.23
His recorded contacts with the Church in Hong Kong were short on the ��kindly��. In 1872, he fell into a rash dispute with trustee F. W. Mitchell after termites had been found in the nave roof, claiming that Mitchell, in exchange for a donation he solicited from Whittal, guar-anteed that the roof would last ten years. The accusation was made in the Legislative Council where both sat, Mitchell being the post-master general. Mitchell denied in the chamber even having solic-ited a donation. Discomfited, Whittal had to back down and donated
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iron railings for the chancel, in penance.24 These have not survived. Temperamental to the end, his will records that he cut off his son Percy ��with only a shilling��.25
Behind the unseemly squabbles around seating that had been dis-turbed lay the nineteenth century��s argument in favour of the pew rent system. In a society that drew its certainties from the justness of rank and seniority, assurances were needed for calm within the church. On Sunday mornings there should be no rushes for favoured places, ill feelings over pre-emptions, squabbles over good seats being saved for latecomers or, most commonly, a false sense of proprietorship over perfectly free seats sat in repeatedly. The allocation of rented pews put all these concerns away, so that concentration before the service could be on devotions and snatches of socialising, sotto voce.
The trustees attempted flexibility and sympathy in the manage-ment of the system. By April 1866, Lindsay and Company had gone out of business. They had been $500 subscribers to St John��s foun-dation. Now their seats were to be redistributed like the property of a deceased. At their meeting of 13 April, trustee Cecil C. Smith, then registrar general and one of the first three administrative cadets recruited to the new Hong Kong Colonial Service, proposed that a Mr. Linstead, who had occupied one of their seats for nine years as a company representative, be allowed to keep it instead of being cast onto the waiting list. After a little juggling with the wording, the motion was passed.
The largest and most costly item the trustees had to juggle with was the organ and, given its size, it was to be the most delicate. In fact there have been five organs installed during the history of St John��s. Two were pipe organs, although they were moved about or modified and, since 1949, there have been three electronic instruments. The installation of the first organ was understandably the most protracted, coming all the way from England with an organist preceding it and, relatively speaking, the most expensive.
Consideration was given to raising money for an organ in January 1850. The trustees held back from this until the bishop arrived and in the hope that subscriptions to the tower appeal might cover the organ. That hope proved a forlorn one, and time drifted on until 5 May 1858, when there was a special meeting of the trustees to discuss the project. Present were the bishop, Henry Kingsmill, John Day, Thomas Walker and a Lieutenant Sewell, who may have been of the Royal Scots, stationed in Hong Kong at the time. The bishop
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was probably present, acting as chairman in the absence on leave of James Irwin and out of undoubted interest too.
Up to now, singing had been accompanied by a harmonium. It was decided to obtain a proper instrument from England at a cost of no more than 425 pounds. With what wisdom this sum was arrived at is not known, but clearly some homework had been done. They knew that they wanted an instrument with 25 stops and 1,124 pipes. They also knew that they would need an organ fund for raising the money. They had $1,400 earmarked already and were optimistic of subscrip-tions from European residents. Mr. Day was charged with forwarding the money to England.
The bishop was requested to contact Sir Frederick Gore-Moseley, professor of music at Oxford University, and ask him to find an organist and choirmaster for 200 pounds a year. One hundred pounds was to be spent on his passage round the Cape.
In an August 1924 edition of the cathedral��s magazine, Church Notes, an article delving into the records has Henry Kingsmill writing to Gore-Moseley, countermanding this request for an organist, leaving the other trustees furious.26 There is no obvious wording to this effect, and there was no clear reason for him to do this. What he did do was to alter the travel arrangements for the newly appointed organist, Mr. C. F. A. Sangster. An extra 50 pounds was voted to bring him overland so that he would be ready and waiting for the organ��s arrival. In the event, he could have sailed twice round the world and still have been there before it.
By May the organ fund was overdrawn by $625. This was offset by $200 raised through collections by the Reverend W. R. Beach. Mr. Beach was to become colonial chaplain in December 1868, after returning from missionary work in Tientsin (Tianjin). However, in 1858, he was announced in the Government Gazette as being acting colonial chaplain, replacing the Reverend Harry Robinson, who had also been acting thus. Beach was demonstrat-ing the enthusiastic energy for structural improvement that was to mark his later term.
By November, frustration was registering over delay in the organ. Bishop Smith said he had written in ��strong terms�� to builder Bryceson and Sons, a highly respected but smaller, fast-growing organ builder in London, whose order book had probably bitten off more than it could chew. The bishop formed an enforcing subcommittee of himself and G. C. Leslie to deal with the unfortunate builder.27
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The two must not have been quite tough enough. The organ had still not arrived by the trustees quarterly meeting of 9 May 1860. Mr. Sangster had long since arrived and had to be paid 100 pounds for doing nothing. He would not have been personally idle though. He came with legal qualifications too, and for much of his time as organist he was also a clerk to the courts and in the registrar general��s office. The 100-pound payment was a rare moment of generosity towards Sangster. The trustees were to prove ever after grudging over giving him money. A striking example was their initial refusal of half pay while he applied for long leave in 1869, for the first time in nine years. Only when he suggested finding a substitute organist for half his pay would they pay him the other half.28
Present at the fully attended quarterly meeting were the main players in the organ drama: W. T. Mercer, the colonial secretary; Henry Kingsmill, Acting Attorney General; Charles Cleverly, surveyor general still; and Thomas L. Walker, architect and surveyor and deputy to Cleverly. The two elected members were James J. Mackenzie, a partner in Dent & Co., and George Lyall, a merchant of Lyall, Still and Co. and agent for the Hong Kong Steam Packet Company. Lyall had the distinction of buying what was effectively Government House in Spring Garden Lane, Wan Chai, when it was vacated by Sir George Bonham. In what was becoming the spirit of Hong Kong, he cleared the site and built godowns and a coal depot.
Discussion that day postponed talk of the organ and focussed on the ��circumstances of the last meeting��, which remain mysterious, except that we know it involved the chaplain, the bishop and the colonial treasurer. The minutes themselves admit to a ��heated dis-cussion��. There was no resolution. The ��question�� was dropped. On 28 May, at a special meeting with Beach in the chair, calmer heads discussed Kingsmill��s proposal to alter the western gallery and put the organ up there.
Henry Kingsmill was a barrister who had just worked his way up to the post of Attorney General. One senses a certain sunniness and imagination under what would have been the starched cotton and heavy frock coats of his position. Before he left the colony in 1877, he is recorded as living in a house called ��As You Like It�� on Albany Hill Road.29 Kingsmill said that the organ could be low enough off the gallery floor for the pipes to clear the roof. Thomas Walker countered with a motion that it be put on a platform in the south transept. Not
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having a head for heights, Beach, Walker and Lyall outvoted Kingsmill and Mercer in favour of that.
At the next meeting, on 4 June, Kingsmill rallied with objection that the south transept windows are always open in summer. Perhaps disingenuously, he suggested a move to the north transept. Lyall objected immediately, pointing out that that was where the typhoons come. Mercer slipped in with a motion that it should go back to the west end, and this is carried unanimously. Walker must have swapped sides between meetings. He pulled out a plan for a western gallery extension, showing how to alter the west door to preserve the symmetry of the cathedral and how the height of the gallery above the west door must be altered some feet to give the organ pipes clearance.
Thomas Walker��s plan did not survive. Although we can be sure that the organ did spend time in the western gallery, we can only imagine what shape this outward extension took. If you stand in the east and look back at the gallery, everything is in perfect symmetrical order. There is no evidence it was tinkered with. Perhaps this is tribute to the care the trustees took to restore the site when the short-lived installation came to an end. It was taken down, eventually, in 1872.
By the end of the month, the trustees were paying off Messrs. Jeffrey Livingstone, freighter, and the organ account with Brycesons, the builder, was being settled. By Christmas the organ had arrived. Only a casting vote by Reverend Beach got the impecunious trustees to approve $20 to Quarter Master Sergeant Margate, recruited by Kingsmill, to put up the organ. The harmonium was bought by the navy, possibly for the dockyard.30 There was so little in the trustees�� purse that they had to be tight with the strings. They had an annual cash flow of only around $600, which was manageable if nothing untoward cropped up, but the costs of installing the instrument and paying the organist were overpowering and called for another appeal for subscriptions.
The placement of the organ made great vibrations through seating arrangements and the positioning of other fixtures. The unforgiv-ing climate and technical ignorance made the instrument a rolling curse on costs. Even the church coolies wanted more pay because they had to pump the bellows. They got a dollar. Mr. Sangster ran up $15 costs for buying music and was paid with a grinding of teeth and the admonition that he must get trustees�� approval before he bought any more.31
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By June 1864, it was broken. Sangster had spent $180 on ad hoc repairs to the pipes and bellows. Agents and solicitors J. J. Mackenzie in London were told to arrange repair with Brycesons�Xand substitute a trumpet stop for a posaune, according to a hasty insertion in the minutes. Mackenzie was to make a deal to bring out a skilled builder who knew his stops, for a total of $325 including passage, freight and insurance, second class return. The report back was alarming. Such a package would cost 415 pounds. The trustees were not ready to bite that bullet. They cast about for local solutions. An encouragingly musical-sounding Mr. Montabelli was considered but regarded as not up to it.
By November 1865, the trustees were desperate to bring out from ��home�� a competent organ builder, repair it and remove it to the ��north end��. We have no plans for what was intended there, but it seems likely the organ was placed at the east of the transept and into the area now called the quiet chapel. Gone were Mr. Lyall��s sensitivities to typhoons. Indeed, gone was Mr. Lyall, but not from this earth or even yet Hong Kong. He was to die in 1890, in Wellington, Somerset, the birthplace of Bishop Smith.32 Thomas Walker on the other hand passed away only six months after he had sketched out the organ��s future in the west gallery. Whatever happened up there cannot have been satisfactory, but a measure of consolation was that the gallery would be space for more free seats.
The 1865 trustees were W. A. Alexander, Wilberforce Wilson, Cecil C. Smith, Francis Parry, Robert Walker and J. Simpson. Unfortunately, Alexander and Smith had not been at the November meeting, they had not received notice of the proposals and did not approve of the resolutions. At the December meeting they forced a further resolution that ��no meeting shall be called unless the main business is clearly defined in a circular from the secretary four days in advance��. So it remains to this day.
Trustee Alexander suggested, sagely perhaps, that organ altera-tions should wait until the projected chancel extension was built, but he was voted down 4 to 2. The original proposals were carried by the same margin. ��H. E. Governor��s approval was laid before the meeting.�� The governor��s approval was an interesting condition to an internal alteration, particularly since there is no record of him paying for any of it. At this point, Bishop Smith has gone, the see is vacant and the colonial chaplain is on leave. Perhaps the trustees looked for sanction from some higher authority. The trustees decided on another appeal
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for money. At this point Wilberforce Wilson suggested to unanimous and relieved approval that work on the west gallery at least should be delayed until the results of the appeal were known. It seems likely that the fitting of seats up there was never gone through with.
There were predictable tensions with the organ builders Brycesons, who were considered responsible for a defective organ. Brycesons, however, did not consider themselves responsible for its reaction to destructive humidity it could not be designed for. R. B. Parr, a former trustee and acting for them in London, had a ��most unsatisfactory interview�� with the company in February 1867. They despatched to Hong Kong an organ builder, an unfortunate Mr. Stuckey, who died so early on the way out that Mr. Parr was told to try and negotiate a full refund of his ticket from P&O. It became a Mr. Fletcher from Brycesons who, having survived his passage, was called on to account for repair costs at the trustees meeting of 5 November. This was followed by a ��long discussion���Xminutes�� code for disagreement�Xon the way money was being spent.
The trustees showed their irritation by being disapproving of a $100 payment made to the hapless Mr. Sangster by Francis Parry, acting as treasurer, he having simply circulated his intention to the trustees. Wilberforce Smith went as far as to call it ��irregular and illegal��. Parry was deeply upset, calling the language ��very unparliamentary��. Smith appealed to Bishop Alford, who had now arrived in the diocese and was in the chair in the absence, still, of any chaplain. Allowing just one of those words and not the other, His Lordship ruled with obtuse diplomacy that, ��in abstract��, Parry��s action was irregular.
A row followed over the settling of the organ account with Brycesons. They claimed that 191 pounds was outstanding. The trustees denied there was a penny. Disagreement was so protracted that a settlement of 29 pounds 10 shillings was not reached until April 1871.The original estimates for this work, arrived at on 1 January 1866, were $1,750 for repairs to the organ, $100 for its removal, and $700 for altera-tions to the north-east corner. The bill from Mr. Fletcher of Brycesons in 1867 turned out to be 200 pounds for ��materials��, 230 pounds for Mr. Fletcher himself, whose work on the organ was acclaimed by Mr. Sangster, 10 pounds for coolies and 10 pounds for ��travel��. The trustees at this point were 328 pounds short of meeting the bill, plus the fare for the deceased Mr. Stuckey, which they seemed unlikely to get back. Chow Ah Tuck was the contractor who moved the instrument, and it was reopened at a choral service of celebration on Sunday, 23
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February 1868, to a setting by Tallis. Chaplain Beach preached, and they sang the ��Hallelujah Chorus�� whilst a collection was made for the organ fund. The local Musical Express magazine described the organ as ��decidedly the best this side of Suez��.33
In that long-ago 1866 meeting which sanctioned the moving of the organ, approval was given to the extension of a more mute fixture which had just as much impact. Punkahs had been installed in part of the cathedral the previous year. Languidly inefficient though they were, it is difficult to imagine the discomfort that the stoically formal and heavily dressed European congregation must have suffered before them. Now they were to be extended throughout the building. The punkahs were made of fabric, 540 square feet of it costing $1,081, and stretched out on iron frames costing $393. A ��special collec-tion�� was made for them. W. L. Pattenden, a trustee and an original Cathedral Council member, in his farewell speech in the cathedral hall in March 1930, recalled how they were operated. Boys, real, small boys, sat in the gutter outside the church building, pulling the ropes that swung the punkahs, and an adult ��boy�� wandered round giving them a kick if they slowed down or nodded off.34
No sooner had the new punkahs been put in than pulley wheels were stolen in ��sight and sound�� of the church coolies, who seemingly made no effort to catch the thieves. There were usually two coolies on staff at this stage. The Number 1 Boy was paid $8 a month and the other, $6. Fire them both was the initial temper of the trustees. However, following a motion by Mr. Simpson, in a calmer mood, they fired the older coolie as more culpable and as a warning to the younger one, who probably got his job.
Where to keep the coolies was a question that occurred around this time. Although they were expected to live around the premises, they were not supposed to live in them, so it was quite a surprise when one clergyman discovered bedbugs in the vestry. Clearly, the men had been dossing down in this solid structure instead of under flimsy outside awnings. So, they built them a coolie house for $400. That was not of bricks and mortar either, more of wood and fillings, but better than before and what they might expect elsewhere. The location was in the area of what is now the Li Hall kitchen and lava-tories extension.
If the organ and the coolies�� house represented extremes in altera-tion, other substantial changes to the look of St John��s were made in the twenty years before its lengthening. Important, a little mysterious
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and with a moment of farce was the repositioning of the pulpit. In February 1862, both the bishop and the governor asked the trustees to consider moving it from ��its present position at the first and most eastern pillar on the south side of the nave��. The objection was not only that, liturgically, it was on the wrong side. Officiating clergy were having difficulty being heard in all parts of the cathedral, they said. Those in the most forward nave pews had the preacher talking away from them, and in the south transept they only saw the back of him.
Bishop Smith seems to have become as involved as he could in this. He formed a subcommittee of himself and Cleverly. Then he went to Foochow (Fuzhou). Cleverly and the influential Mr. Alexander also absented themselves. Those left behind conducted ��sundry experi-ments�� in placing the lectern where the pulpit now was. They were concerned that no move could be made without the consent of the affected seatholders. Sittings would be lost and ��injury done�� to some of the best of them by putting the pulpit further away. By the same measure, humbler folk in once ordinary seats would suddenly find themselves shot up in the order of things by it coming nearer.
Then came a moment of farce. There was, in some quarters, profound objection to the canopy, also known as a sounding board, which hung over the pulpit. The practical purpose of these features was to prevent the sound from the preacher drifting upwards, by deflecting it outwards to the congregation. They were often deco-rated, as this one was, rather elegantly, and may have offended more Puritan temperaments by seeming too regal or ��popish��.
There was a gathering on 11 February 1862, in the home of the Reverend Lewins, attended among others by Reverend Pitkins and Lieutenant Howarth of HM Gunboat Weazel. Given the company, we must assume that drink was not taken but emotions became heated nonetheless. Reverend Lewins declared to Howarth, ��I would give you $25 if these (sounding boards) were taken down.�� That would also include the back panel to the pulpit.
Howarth took him in earnest. The foolish fellow went to St John��s with men from the aptly named Weazel and dismantled and took away the boards. At the inevitable inquiry held by the more bemused than angry trustees, Howarth was required to reinstate the sounding boards at his own expense. Lewins said he did not expect to be taken seriously although he had told the gullible Howarth that he was ��chairman of the trustees�� and that ��the church coolies will assist without any trouble��. In that, he spoke the truth. When a party of
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uniformed Europeans entered the church giving orders, they pru-dently cooperated.35
Yet, as soon as Howarth had put the boards back up, they were taken down again. The trustees agreed by circular letter of 7 March to take down the boards, and they were removed later in the month. There was clearly inherent opposition to them. Howarth of the gunboat had just jumped the gun. The trustees convened again on 24 March 1862, with the chaplain, one presumes Mr. Irwin, in the chair. No direct reference to the removal of the pulpit to the north side is made here. All that is observed is a detail, that the preacher would be more audible if the pulpit was lowered ��one or two feet�� and placed against the north-east or the south-east pier.
What was actually resolved was teasing for pinpointing the pulpit. The reading desk should be relocated, they said. The only point in doing that would be to take it to the south side, and by conven-tion the pulpit would be opposite it. The bishop��s throne was to be moved to the south side of the choir, ��the usual and proper situation��. Bishop Smith approved these measures with his customary signa-ture, on 8 April and with the stipulation that the throne must be on the opposite side of the church to the pulpit. This and other adjust-ments were to be made as soon as funds were made available by the colonial government. The government had discretion over what of the cathedral projects it funded, and it was choosy in this. We cannot be sure if they came through with this money and whether the moves were made as completely as resolved. From a meeting of 25 April 1867, five years on, there is a motion ordering, or pleading perhaps, that arrangements of the bishop��s throne be carried out. An amend-ment to it, which was carried, stated ��that simply a chair should be made at present��.
It has been said that a pulpit move was not made until a time in the twentieth century. Photographic evidence seems to refute that. A photograph of the nave, looking east, taken around 1896, shows what appears to be a raised pulpit, without canopy or backboard, on the north side, in the same position as the pulpit of the present day. The strong suggestion is that the move was made after spring 1862, and certainly before 1896.
The other adjustments sanctioned by the bishop were to move the sedilia, the three-seat arrangement for officiant, deacon and sub-deacon, and the clergy stalls to the west of the choir. That is close to where they are presently positioned, yet how all this furniture
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could have been moved about with any distinction in such a tiny chancel as that of the shorter St John��s is a testimony to ingenuity. Included too was a decision that the ��present vestry should be made into the Bishop��s robing room��. The step is a measure of the author-ity that Bishop Smith had established over his cathedral despite his many absences. Never afterwards is there a reference to any room being in the possession of the bishop. Indeed, only eleven years on there would even be the question raised as to whether the bishop had any right to so much as enter St John��s without being invited by the chaplain.
In its earliest years, St John��s had just one permanent clergyman serving it, the colonial chaplain. The chaplain was to carry on largely singlehanded until the first assistant was brought in in 1899. He might be assisted or deputized for by CMS clergy, ministering or teaching in Hong Kong or in transit to China, or by services chaplains.
In 1851, the clergy consisted of Bishop Smith, Chaplain Victor Stanton, E. T. Moncrieff, the St Paul��s schoolmaster who deputised for Stanton and acted as domestic chaplain to the bishop, and M. C. Odell, ��junior tutor�� at St Paul��s. Odell, and C. R. Carroll, licensed to St John��s in March 1853, acted for the second Chaplain, Steedman. The Reverends Robinson, Beach, John Wilson and Charles F. Warren, who was made priest at the cathedral in December 1867, stood in during the lengthy absences of Irwin.
John Piper, ordained as a priest in St John��s in 1869, has been claimed by the CMS as Beach��s ��successor��, as colonial chaplain proper, for covering eight months of the interregnum between Beach and the fifth incumbent, Richard Hayward Kidd. That status has never been acknowledged, and his name does not appear on the roll by the west door of the cathedral. Thomas Talbot succeeded him until Kidd��s appointment. Thomas Springer��s name does not appear on the board either, he who was one of the Rechler mission and shooting party to the Mainland which Irwin joined. CMS records merrily claim for him three years as colonial chaplain, but it is dif-ficult to see how, entirely unsung, he could have squeezed those into the sequence.
Apart from men like Warren, who was licensed for work in Hong Kong, it became a policy that all men who were to be ordained as clergy for missionary work in the vast diocese should be ordained in St John��s. This gave the cathedral some founding connection with the missionary effort led by its bishops, who called it their seat.
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In those first decades of its life, though, it was rare for it to be involved in the ordination and despatch of Chinese missionaries into the field. There were few it could engage with, because the conver-sion of locals was slow and patchy. The cathedral��s attention was held by the city and its mostly British inhabitants. A confirmation service held at the cathedral on 25 January 1863 included 32 Europeans and 18 Chinese. Another service on 13 December yielded 9 Europeans and 6 Chinese. In fairness, the total numbers here are not too dif-ferent from those of adult baptism and confirmation services in the cathedral at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the ratio of Chinese to Europeans for the time seems encouragingly high. Yet the total number of Chinese confirmations recorded during the episco-pacy of Bishop Alford, 1867�V72, was 3 out of a total of 70.
In the shade of disappointment, the year 1863 stands out as a bright moment. On Monday, 21 December, catechist Lo Sam Yuen was made a deacon in an ordination service at St John��s. Bishop Smith was joyful over this. Lo was the first Chinese to be ordained in Hong Kong and only one of two deacons Smith had admitted in his time in China. In a report to the CMS made on 1 January 1863, he wrote that it was ��with much satisfaction and thankfulness that I have admitted your excellent native catechist Lo Sam Yuen to deacon��s orders��. He said that his knowledge of his character both in Hong Kong and the Australian goldfields fully justified admitting him.36
Smith had good reason to declare his certainties. He had suffered considerable hurt from another catechist, Chan Tai Kwong, whom he had taken up in London and actually presented to the archbishop, who had given him books. Back in Hong Kong, Chan, empowered by quick wits and English, quit St Paul��s College and became involved in a large opium monopoly. This fell apart and, accused of bribing the colonial secretary, he fled Hong Kong. Though he prospered again later, it marked the end of his connection with the Church.
Lo��s progress was a shining vindication. The ceremony took place in what Smith describes as ��the nave of our beautiful structure��. Forty English residents were present in the cathedral, including the wives of the acting governor and the Attorney General. Also present were two hundred Chinese ��among them the more influential portion of the native population��, the bishop reported to the CMS.37 This included the pupils of St Paul��s and the newly formed Diocesan Native Female Training School plus several native interpreters and writers in the public offices. This did not include the businessmen and secret
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society leaders of the Lower Bazaar, whose influence in the city was most considerable in those jockeying times, but that would have been too much to hope for.
On Christmas Day, Bishop Smith preached in the cathedral on behalf of the CMS and in support of the ��native minister��. Lo was in his surplice and assisted in administering the elements in their own language to the Chinese portion of the communicants. Chinese converts numbered 25 out of the 75 communicants. A collection brought in $400. Lo never went on to be priested. He assisted CMS agents in the running of St Stephen��s Church and looking after its congregation.38 In 1863, the bishop ordained another deacon in Shanghai and achieved sixty Chinese conversions in the diocese. It was his twentieth year of mission in China. He had been ��humbled under �K a sense of unprofitableness��. Now he saw ��streaks of hope lightning up the dark horizon �K To God be all the glory.��39
Glorification in bricks and mortar, with considerable complica-tions, was coming to St John��s. Ten years on from Bishop Smith��s streaks of hope, the chancel was to grow to its present length, bells were to be hoisted in the tower�Xand the nave roof was to be found rotten. Trustee Wilberforce Wilson, representing his architectural firm, Wilson and Salway, handed in his design for a chancel exten-sion to the trustees meeting of 9 June 1868. No mention is made of submissions from elsewhere. W. Keswick and Thomas Pyke, another merchant from Birley and Company, were new seatholders�� repre-sentatives, but attendance at this meeting cannot have been good. Francis Mitchell, postmaster-general, later auditor-general, was called away by the governor to an Executive Council meeting, so they adjourned inquorate.
The design of the cathedral with its abrupt chancel would obvi-ously have proved a restriction on choir and clergy seating and liturgi-cal movement. Yet reasoning for its extension remains obscure. More seats were needed for the military, was a principal reason given to government. There may have been a surge in garrison strength in the later 1860s. A sceptical Governor McDonnell observed that the church was never full as it was.
Trustee Edward Pollard, who arrived from New South Wales in 1847, began as a judge��s clerk and rose to become a Queen��s Counsel, was ��solicited�� to draft a letter to the government asking them to share the costs by matching public contributions dollar for dollar, as it had turned out with the original cathedral. His words had some effect on
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the doubtful McDonnell. He in turn had an impact on the Earl of Kimberly, the colonial secretary to whom he wrote on 11 September 1872, ���K the Colony should provide Church accommodation for the troops and it is partially on this ground that I think the vote of the Legislative Council to be justified.�� The government came back with a specific pledge of $3,500 if the same amount could be raised to match it.40
Even more tellingly, the governor, now Sir Arthur Kennedy and not even an Anglican, concluded with a piece of philosophy which was to resonate through the relationship between St John��s and the Crown even after the cathedral was ��disendowed��. ��In a Crown Colony,�� he wrote, ��having so long as the Church of England is the State Church, she has peculiar claims on the State for aid in carrying out works of necessity �K��41
At the same time as Wilson��s plans were being submitted, Francis Parry, a former trustee, was donating bells. One bell, cast as far back as 1845, was already up there.42 Parry is notable for having fathered seven children between 1865 and 1873.43 He was obviously at a stage in life when bells were ringing for him, and he offered three more to the cathedral, with ringing mechanism, if the trustees would pay for their installation. This was to cost them $329, but they agreed. On 2 January 1870, the second Sunday after Christmas, Parry��s bells, cast by Messrs. Mears and Stainbeck of Whitechapel, were dedi-cated in the belfry and rang for the first time. They were to ring on until a shocking Christmas seventy-one years later. Alan Jephinson, a clerk in the naval yard, was granted a free sitting in exchange for ringing them.44
Chaplain Beach was a writer not shy of flourish, and he penned a prayer to what he called ��the festal chimes��. The last line was as sonorous as any bell.
Grant that as the passing bell warns of a soul summoned home, we may have grace to think of our last hour and to prepare for the great account.
Mr. Beach was a man of some resource and sensitive to opportunity. To mark the visit of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria, to Hong Kong in 1869, he not only compiled and published an illustrated book from the visit which ran into two editions, but he also bagged the prince for the foundation stone laying of the cathe-dral extension.
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Now in the keeping of Cornell University, the book Visit of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh �K to Hongkong in 1869, written at the behest of the governor, according to Beach, gushes with patriotic deference and hyperboles which not even the most ardent royalists could bring themselves to today. Yet it is a splendidly full account of the visit down to the sailing history and complement of HMS Galatea (officers 46, petty officers 65, seamen 305, boys 46 and marines 68) which brought Prince Alfred, and excruciating detail of a comedy ��A Wonderful Woman�� staged for the prince by the Amateur Dramatic Club at the City Hall. Gratitude is owed equally to J. Thompson FRGS, who contributed invaluable photographs, including the one clear picture from outside the old east end of St John��s with the foun-dation stone, freshly laid and standing off on a plinth, ready to receive the extension.
Prince Alfred squeezed in the stone laying hours before embarking for his departure on the afternoon of 16 November. It was quite a grand affair, as one would expect. At 10 a.m. the clergy, choir and an honour guard from the 75th Regiment lined up to meet him along with the Honourables J. G. Austin, W. Keswick, E. H. Pollard and Messrs. Mitchell, Moorsom and Pyke, the current trustees. The national anthem and Psalm 84 were sung. There were prayers and a reading by R. O. Callaghan, the Naval Chaplain.
The prince placed mortar on the stone with a silver trowel and an invocation of the Trinity. There followed a hymn, suffrages for the Queen and royal family and then Canon Beach made a speech. It is worth noting that Beach described himself in his book as the Reverend Canon Beach.
It would appear that, by 1868, Bishop Alford had created, as he was entitled to do, four canons of the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist:
J. H. Gray, Archdeacon of Canton, T. McClachtie of Hankow (Hankou), C. H. Butcher of Shanghai, and Beach. All of them, bar Beach, were missionary clergy in China. If Prince Alfred could be described as a casual visitor, he might have thought he was officiating at an overseas version of an English cathedral. Beach occasionally styled himself ��The Reverend Canon�� and ��canon residentiary��, though resident in what is difficult to tell. You could hardly describe Battery Path and the coolies�� house as a precinct.
Canonical government was an illusion. It was an aspiration which was to reappear with Bishops Hoare, Duppuy and Hall, based on hope but not the mechanics of St John��s founding structure. In this Beach
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was, more modestly, an employee of the governor and under the eccle-siastical authority of a bishop. A prison chaplain would recognise the circumstances. Beach, though, had the added complexity of needing the cooperation of six laymen to conduct the secular business of his parish in an age before parochial church councils had been thought of. The relationships were fudged but they were to evolve. As with any evolution, this would not be without some pain.
Constitutional considerations did not distract Canon Beach from his liquid blueberry prose for the occasion or the placement of capital letters which put God and the Sovereign on almost an equal footing.
It is our constant prayer that the most high God whose servants we are may be pleased long to keep and bless the Person and prosper the reign of our beloved Sovereign and that He may ever bestow His choicest gifts upon all the members of the Royal family.
It is not difficult to see why republicanism in Britain enjoyed such traction around this time.
Starting the job was still some way off. In January 1870, trustee Moorsom was finding fault with Mr. Wilson��s plans, and it was not until April 1871 that they were resubmitted and steps were taken to begin the tendering process. Two days later, sanction from the ��Lieutenant Governor���Xan unusual title for Hong Kong�Xwas sought as formal authority to build.
No working drawings of chancel lengthening survive. It was com-pleted towards the end of 1872. There were complaints of a delay, put down to bad work by the contractor, who cut some stones wrongly, although that was nothing compared to the time it took for the trustees to get the work started in the first place. The result, though, is a quiet but considerable architectural achievement.
As Peter Lovell points out in the first volume of his Conservation and Management Plan prepared for the trustees of St John��s Cathedral in 2007, the 1873 additions all maintain the 1849�V50 style of Gothic detail. The architect�Xconceivably Wilberforce Wilson of Wilson and Salway�Xdid not fall into the temptation now all around him of moving into High Victorian Gothic. This new long church of 1873 was a ��transforming change in St John��s Cathedral��s perceived mass��. It moved from being what in England would have been recognised as a big parish church into the proportions which also define Ely, Canterbury and Salisbury Cathedrals as well as Westminster Abbey.
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Success was achieved by simply repeating the bays and keeping the structure, the windows, the angles and other details exactly the same as the nave original, except for one point. The chancel ended up one bay longer than the nave itself. This is not entirely unknown in other churches, but it is highly unusual.
One structural feature of the new east end has fascinated subse-quent generations. A narrow tunnel runs under the sanctuary from the clergy vestry to the choir vestry. Although servers at the Eucharist have said they found it useful for changing sides discreetly without cutting across the celebration, its purpose has never been clarion clear. One explanation is that, immediately before the service began, the chaplain, now robed, could have wanted to cross to the choir, lead them in prayer and then return to his vestry unseen.45
Outside, there was no expansion of ground levelling around the extension. The church was carried out on a deep base which simply fell away down a steep side. Development to its north over what was the Murray Parade Ground has filled in this effect, but contempo-rary illustrations show St John��s standing out commandingly over the scene.
Indoors, there was some indecision. Should there be congrega-tional seating in the new chancel? When you consider the argument that the trustees put to the government for chancel extension in the first place, it seems an extraordinary question, but Chaplain Kidd, who took office in 1871, after that pitch had been made, said he was against it. There was enough seating in the church already he said, echoing the previous governor��s view; there was no money to provide it, and anyway, there were ecclesiastical objections to seating the laity that far up. This was August 1872, and the contractor was tapping his feet, waiting to lay the flooring. The trustees decided to agree with Kidd. Then, at an October meeting of the trustees, Kidd surprised them by changing his mind. He would have 64 seats in rows of 8.46
Richard Hayward Kidd, who was the son of a Rector of Potter Heigham in Norfolk and grandson of the classical scholar Thomas Kidd, arrived in Hong Kong in October 1871. He was to have a dif-ficult personal life there. At this point his first son had just died, in March 1872, at 26 days old. Three years later his wife, Mary Maria, died at 38. Weeks later, he moved out of his Albany home, auctioning the furniture, and took leave in England. In July 1879, he died from dysentery at an address in Bonham Road, the only chaplain to die in office.47 A notable feature of Kidd��s incumbency was that he doubled
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as District Grand Chaplain for the Freemasons�� lodges in Hong Kong. He was described in his obituary as ��an energetic and enthusiastic mason ever ready to advise an erring brother and assist him with his purse as far as he was able��. The link between the cathedral and free-masonry was made clear when the Masons were permitted to hold a service there on the Feast of St John 1875, in the hope that this would become an annual event.48
Perhaps Kidd��s about-turn on seating was born of stress or pressure. He was to get more of it. Two trustees who had been absent from the meeting and disagreed with its decision forced a resolution, in October 1872, that no decision of a meeting could be reversed within six months without prior notice of intent to each trustee. They did not achieve a further reversal, but the point became moot. The roof was about to fall in, literally.49 Lieutenant MacHardy of the Royal Engineers reported ��white ants��, that is termites, in the roof of the nave. They had eaten their way into the soft wood. It would have to be replaced entirely by teak.
References to ��white ants�� are unbroken through the cathedral��s history. The first one crops up in May 1858, when arsenic and tar are purchased as the recommended measure against them. Over the years, enough arsenic must have been used around the cathedral��s affected arboreal perimeter to knock out an army. Costs were one of the reasons that the pew rents at that time went up to $8. In 1872, the rents went up to $10, though the government was applied to and did contribute $5,000. The congregation�Xall of it�Xwas forced to move into the new and hastily floored chancel for services while the nave roof was replaced. We hear nothing more of congregational seating in the chancel after the roof and order are restored.
The trustees were bracing themselves for another subscriptions exercise to find money for a new holy table, until unexpected help came from ��home��. A former worshipper at St John��s, now back in England, Herbert Lawrence, raised funds from old China hands in Britain. In addition to the table, they sent out an altar cloth, litany stool, credence bracket, altar book desk, kneelers, service book with plain song chants, an alms basin and a brass eagle lectern. The P&O Line shipped everything out for free.50 These were clearly shippers with conscience. They did it for St John��s, frequently, decades hence.
Also to be born in mind was that the P&O��s Hong Kong superinten-dent, Thomas Sutherland, was a partner of tycoon Douglas Lapraik, soon to be memorialised in coloured glass in St John��s, and both were
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Freemasons in the Zetland Lodge, along with many of the trustees, including Mercer, Kingsmill, Cleverly and Whittal of Jardines, who added his iron rails at this point. The charitable shipment would have come only naturally. Freemasonry was an almost ubiquitous broth-erhood among the prominent merchants and professionals in Hong Kong from its introduction in 1846.
This last item on the shipping list, the lectern, is the one survivor of this largesse. The Lawrence donation is the first significant donation of accessories and fittings by parishioners. The cathedral came to recognise the usefulness in asking individual parishioners for items of pure function, beauty or both. With rare exceptions, like Sir Paul Chater, they could not alone provide fundamentals, but they were a resource for beautifying the church. As we shall see, future chaplains and deans would openly advertise ��wish lists�� and wait for the pennies to drop.
The lengthening of the chancel and the altering of the east end of the church changed the destinations of stained glass memorial windows which were dedicated around that time. The original east end window consisted of three parallel lancets over the apse. At a trustees meeting of 24 January 1864, the officers of the Royal Regiment are thanked for donating two stained glass windows in memory of their men lost in the Arrow War. These windows are recorded as being installed in the north and south lancets. The centre lancet ��remains in its original state and irregular in appear-ance��. Henry Kingsmill and J. J. Mackenzie ask permission to put in a centre window that would harmonise. Then the wall changed and the window grew in size.
Into the new space went a memorial window to Douglas Lapraik. Lapraik, who had died in 1869, was a classic of the meteoric money legends which Hong Kong is made of. He began as a watchmaker��s apprentice, created his own watchmaking business, branched out into shipping, started a steamship company and co-founded Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company. He founded the Hong Kong, Canton and Macau Steamboat Company and was on the Provisional Committee of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He was certainly a man big enough for an east window, and his grateful nephews, to whom he left everything, donated it at a cost of 600 pounds.
The window was made up of five grouped lancet lights supporting a rose panel. It was in Decorated Gothic style, giving a distinct thir-teenth-to fourteenth-century look. Its themes were the Crucifixion,
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the Ascension and Old Testament stories. A much later Cathedral Council member and stalwart, A. S. Abbott, recalled it in a fundrais-ing booklet for the new hall in 1955, in which he wrote with barely muted dislike:
It showed the crucifixion involving centurions on horseback.
Elijah was in a whirlwind ascent. Samson was burning Philistine��s
corn and Adam and Eve were staring at an apple.
At the apex a green scroll read, ��That the abundance of Thy
goodness may be known.��51
The Royal Regiment��s windows would have been moved, because they are recorded as having been fitted into the north aisle. Henry Kingsmill must have waited long enough for his generous intentions to be deflected to the north transept. There, in 1868, was erected a window, by William Morris, to the memory of his wife, Frances. It featured women of the Old Testament. It was to share the site with a window to D. F. Stewart, a colonial secretary and former director of education who had clashed with Bishop Smith on the subject. Its theme was Christ and ��suffer the children��.
The south transept was not to remain bare. In 1872, former students of St Paul��s College collected $480 to raise a window there to the memory of Bishop George Smith. The bishop had resigned, a sick man, in 1865, and gone back to England. He had remained an ��active supporter�� of the CMS from whence he came, and he died in 1871.52
He was succeeded by Charles Richard Alford, a vigorous evangeli-cal, dedicated to mission who carried ��the rather unusual combina-tion of decided Protestantism with a vigilant guardianship of the rightful position of a Bishop��, according to a CMS report.53 His brief episcopacy was to be dogged from the beginning by a proposal to split his diocese. His successor was to arrive in 1872, reduced in authority.
St John��s Cathedral, though, was now greater in splendour and more established in its city. That it was the heart of civic worship was readily recognised even by society��s enemies. In 1858, there was an alleged if unpromising plot to tunnel under the cathedral and blow it up when the governor and the colony��s worthies were present. Reverend James Legge speaks of it in a lecture on the beginnings of Hong Kong, which he gave in November 1872 at City Hall.54 Governor Bowring, reporting to Lord Lytton at the Colonial Office, mentions it as one of several attacks on the authorities listed in a
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paper found on ��an emissary�� apprehended in Jardines�� stables.55 The conspirators were alleged to have originated in Shun Tak, present-day Shunde.
Fear of covert hostile action by ill-disposed Chinese was not entirely paranoia. The attempt to poison the European population through their bread supply on 15 January 1857 was very real and shook the foreigners. Four hundred people, including the governor��s wife, were affected, and some made quite poorly, but no one actually died. So rattled were they that a service of thanksgiving for their deliverance was held in St John��s on 18 January. The day before, the Friend of China had urged its readers to ��be on the lookout��.
The cathedral was never blown up. Apart from an occasional sneaky robbery and Japanese shelling, no assault was ever made on it. Yet, though St John��s was physically intact, it was about to have its relationships with bishop and government thoroughly shaken out.

Chapter 3

Quiescence and Struggle, 1873�V1906
The decades following the completion of the chancel extension were, for St John��s and its clergy, involved in defining boundaries. Mostly this was to do with the extents of authority within the church, but a boundary which defied precise description was one of the smallest of all, the extent of the cathedral compound and who the land belonged to.
On 6 February 1867, the trustees actually approved 50 pounds for the purchase of ��large and small�� gates for the compound, to be ordered from England. There is no indication this was ever carried through though it does suggest that the cathedral thought the compound was its to lock up if it wanted to.1
The point of principle first arose where money was concerned. In November 1867, Gepthard and Company asked the trustees if they could enclose a tiny piece of the compound which abutted their offices, for a consideration. Wilberforce Wilson was feeling robust on the issue and said that the 1847 ordinance vested the land in the cathedral. Trustees Mitchell and Smith were doubtful. Where was the deed of covenant?
Where indeed, said the government, and refused permission. A deputation from the trustees, led by William Keswick, went to Governor McDonald in June of that year, asking him to give them title or otherwise define the powers of the trustees in the compound. That may have been too vexatious at the time. They came away empty-handed. Attorney General Julian Pauncefote is on record in the trustees�� minutes of 1871, saying ��no grant even of the ground on which the cathedral stands has ever been made by the government��.
Undeterred and looking for some sort of security, in 1872 the trustees returned to the notion of setting up gates to the compound. Kennedy, now governor and an Irishman not worried about standing
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on ceremony, said he would come down and inspect the site himself. It is not certain that he took the walk, but the compound was cer-tainly not enclosed. Mr. Ford, the government gardener was, however, kindly sent to set out shrubs.2
Ambiguity on this issue was very difficult to shake. In those days the retaining wall at the north of the compound, topped by a balus-trade not more than waist-high on most adults, looked down over a vertical drop onto Murray Parade Ground. In 1879, it collapsed under two sailors.3 The implication of responsibility by the cathedral suggests they were merely sitting on it rather than coming at it with the force of a brawl. They seem to have survived the drop.
The trustees approached the colonial secretary, who agreed to repair the wall though not to liability for it. There was a price. The surveyor general declared that the roadway through the compound was ��a public thoroughfare as great a convenience as any other in city��. The trustees accepted this and a right of way was conceded. Their concerns were still with fabric. The east wall was in bad repair. Edmund Sharp, sometime Crown solicitor and founder of Johnston, Stokes and Master, the prominent Hong Kong firm, gave $500 to its repair, if the first, not the greatest of his largesse to the cathedral. The government, continuing to perplex in this matter, refused a contribution.
No granting deed to or article of conveyance of the compound may have been identified in the first forty years of St John��s, but the inten-tion of the law was made clear, in statute, after the Church Body was created in 1892. A plan of the compound was deposited in the Land Office on 29 April 1892. The St John��s Cathedral Church Ordinance of 1899, which consolidated the property-owning authority of the trustees, is clear on the position of the compound in section 6(1).
Saint John��s Cathedral Church and the precincts thereof (a plan of which, signed by the Director of Public Works and sealed with the seal of the Colony, was deposited at the Land Office on the 29th day of April, 1892) together with all buildings, rights, ease-ments and appurtenances thereunto belonging, and together with all the estate, right, title and interest of the Church Body as heretofore constituted shall vest in the trustees in fee simple for the sole and express purpose of a church and to the intent that divine worship and the services usual in the Church of England shall be therein performed and carried on in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of the said Church.
This was reiterated in the Church of England Trust Ordinance of 1930, out of which the cathedral finds its modern constitution, and included in all consolidating ordinances over subsequent years.
According to Colonel R. F. Johnston��s informal history manuscript of 1936, the plan deposited in the Land Office was rediscovered after having been mislaid for many years. Johnston tells us that it described the compound as a rectangle, between four boundary stones, conveyed to the trustees, subject to a public right of way from the north-west stone for 273 feet to Garden Road. The maintenance of this was the responsibility of the government, he says. Sad to say, this defining piece of paper disappeared for a second time, during the Japanese Occupation. Disappearing twice, it pushed its luck too far. It has never been recovered.4
As the years went on there were frequent references to the untidy state of the compound. Rectifying or even beautifying the place all depended on whether there was someone in the cathedral at the time with enough passion, or in the government with sufficient willing-ness. One such year was 1894. The government took steps to beautify the area, and the Public Works Department gave permission for the trustees to put up gas standard lights on it. In 1898, there was a planting of Formosan ferns, evergreens, two-feet high with pentago-nal tripinnate fronds, the two lowest pinnae pointing downwards.
In 1903, letters were sent by the then Church Body to the Public Works Department, claiming government��s responsibility for the appearance of the area and for the retaining wall over the parade ground. The government accepted its responsibility for maintaining the roadway but would be pinned down on nothing else.
In 1918, some improvements were made from private contribu-tions from a Mr. Tutcher and Phoebe May, daughter of the governor. One of them was to actually thin out trees around the cathedral. Foliage was denser in the cathedral compound by this point, so much so that it was said that visitors had searched for the building while being within a few yards of it.
The cathedral choir has known no bounds in the church��s story. At the very beginning, we have difficulty seeing it at all. In 2010, St John��s was home to seven choirs. The choir has shrunk or expanded for reasons of finance, liturgy, war and personalities. It has been one of the strongest centres of fellowship in St John��s, a font of rival-ries, a musical educator and creator of excellence which presented the cathedral to the wider non-Christian, non-British populace. Its
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origins are somewhat obscure. At times it dwindled almost to nothing. At others it had such a large opinion on affairs, it posed interesting challenges to both clergy and trustees.
The existence of a choir is referred to in the trustees�� minutes of 1858, when the need for more lady members is voiced. These would have been British ladies. It would be some time before Chinese ladies were heard.
We do not know exactly who fitted into the elusive ��Singing Gallery�� that was removed in 1860, but there is a clear need to find room for singers in the south transept furniture reorganisation of that summer. Four years later, Mr. Sangster, the organist and choirmaster, was asking for $45 for improved choir seating. He was very lucky to get that, because shortly afterwards he was refused hassocks for his choir members.
It is worth remembering how much this popular, long-serving and-suffering musician was ignored by the trustees. Not only did they refuse him hassocks and cause difficulty over his paid leave, they refused him an assistant and a free sitting, they rejected applications for tuning fees and cost for the repair of rain damage to the pipes, and they denied him metal organ stops instead of wooden ones.5 G. B. Endacott puts this down to an indifference to all matters musical on the part of the trustees, but it could also be an irritated suspicion on the part of merchants and lawyers of anyone whose principal talent and passion was for music over money.
In 1873, the choir sang at the inauguration of the new chancel, of which we know very little else, and in 1875 there was a fundraising musical event for them. There may have been a question of attend-ance dogging its future. It was suggested that the choir be paid or disbanded. It was decided to pay choirboys.
They were still in very short supply in 1898. ��Will not parents lend their children to the Lord?�� cried the chaplain, Cobbold, in his Church Notes6 message at Easter. ��The advantages to the boy are great.�� Perhaps there were not that many European boys available for borrowing. Children of better-off families would be packed off early to England for education, where the advantages were even greater. The younger boys of the cathedral choir were likely to have come from the less well off, senior clerical, technical and ��overseer�� class of the white population, where opportunities for betterment were fewer.
The 1897 Christmas services were ��bright and hearty��, we are told, but extra singing help was needed on Christmas Day.7 There became a long tradition of that help coming from servicemen in the garrison. In 1899, there was an innovation which may well have deterred the parents of some choirboys and turned lending to the Lord expensive. For the first time, offerings were taken from the choir during services.
Around the turn of the century, the choir seems to have been in the ascendant, as the empire was showing the first signs of decline. To ��acknowledge the signal mark of the providence of God without delay��, there was a service of thanksgiving for the entry of the Allied Relief Force into Peking (Beijing), to quash the Boxers. The choir practised specially after evensong on Sunday to sound at their best for this the following day. At 10.45 a.m. on that Monday morning, the church was ��almost full��, and the introit hymn was ��Now Thank We All Our God��. Readings were Isaiah 10:1�V5 and Romans 11:9�V21. Anthems included ��Why Do the Nations�� by Handel, and ��Oh Give Thanks��. Bishop Hoare preached on ��Behold God is my Salvation�� and ��Vengeance is Mine�� and, after the blessing, the choir, forty-four strong, sang the ��Halleluiah Chorus�� by Handel. Alex Marsh was a soloist, and A. G. Ward, Sangster��s successor, was on the organ.8
To improve quality and incentives amongst this growing band, choral scholarships were initiated and a scholarship fund was set up. With opportunity came stringency. Rules on discipline were estab-lished. Victorian children did not always only speak when spoken to. It seems that behaviour in the church and the vestry was poor.
The choir was ready to emerge as a force. In 1900, an agreement between the Church Body and a choir committee recognised the choir as a body in itself. There was to be a choir fund, for which the honorary treasurer would keep accounts distinct from those of the cathedral. Generally, income was from the Sunday collection, organ recitals, musical services�Xto weddings and funerals�Xand donations. Expenditures included the payment of choirboys, the purchasing of music, the scholarships, clothing and advertising. If the choir were putting on a performance, they clearly marketed themselves.
At its first annual meeting, the choir flexed its muscles, a little petulantly perhaps. Members said they felt unappreciated and unrecognised. Sufficiently strong was this feeling that they managed to nominate one of their members, W. Armstrong, to a seat on the Church Body, which had succeeded the previous committee of largely government-nominated trustees.9 The choir��s influence grew apace. In 1901, in the search for a new assistant chaplain, the choir
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was able to insist on a man with a baritone voice. This gave rise to Bishop Hoare��s agreement to use the single, cost-saving password ��trombone�� in a telegram if he found such a priest when he was on leave in England.10
Death swung its scythe through the ranks from time to time. Indeed, losses in the choir are some of the most frequently recorded in the cathedral. In 1899, for example, Francis W. Stokes, described as a stalwart of the choir, died, leaving a native Ceylonese wife without support. There was a whip-round for donations so she could be sent back to Ceylon, where she could work as a nurse in ��Native hospitals��.11 In 1901, on 14 September, a choirboy, ��little Stanley Ford��, was taken by the Lord on permanent loan. He was buried in Happy Valley, where he lies still. Nothing quite so final happened to leading choirboy, T. Martin, in the autumn of 1915. Only his voice broke. Then his dad, a sidesman, died. All Church Notes managed to say about that was that it hoped Martin junior could come back as a tenor or a bass.
The service marking the coronation of Edward VII on 9 August 1902 was apparently a tour de force. The choir was out in strength and with supporters. The complement of choristers is written in Church Notes as: Mrs. Hagan and Seth; Misses Hance, Chunyut, Leykum, Abrahan and Seth; Messrs. G. P. Lammert, (a soloist) A. Cunningham,
A. Russell, W. J. Terrill, F. G. Whittick, J. Jenkins, J. Moorhouse,
G. H. Rigby, J. Hays, H. Hughes, J. S. Mcnab, H. Arthur, W. V. Thompson, Master Gunner Thurloe and, from Union Church, Mr.
W. Coster, Mrs. Muidie and Miss Ramsey. The choirboys were E. and
W. Hagan, H. and B. Shortman, H. and F. Flood and E. Hickinsdon. Instrumental support came from Sergeant Hunt, Corporals Glanville, Bolstridge and Warner; Bandsman Morris and Drummers Evans, Wilmott Curl of the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
On Ascension Day 1903, a strong turnout from the choir nearly outnumbered the congregation. Mr. Sangster, who had retired in 1895, died. One of his more successful moments in a long career had been in 1883, when the first ailing organ in the north transept was declared ��past service��. With a budget of 2,000 pounds, he was com-missioned by the trustees to order a new one from Walker and Sons on his leave trip to London. The government refused any help, an appeal for $12,000 was launched and a now mysterious ��Snowdrop Society�� gave $246. The organ box was installed by C. E. Palmer, the archi-tect and partner in the prominent firm Palmer and Turner,12 and Mr.
Burdekin from the builders in what is now the St Michael��s chapel. The organ console sat where the present bishop��s throne does. The organ pipes were set out, less than decorously, on platforms without any casing. A trustee suggested the old organ should be raffled. This was thought ��undecorous��. It was sold to Union Church. The final cost was 1,346 pounds, and it would not be very long before this new one was broken.
Colonel R. F. Johnston, a council member, diligently composed a cheery manuscript account of St John��s history up to 1937, now held in St John��s Cathedral. The fading typescript on yellowing pages in a red folder, frayed by its passage down the decades, was meant to be helpful to anyone who might want to write a full history of the cathe-dral for the colony��s centenary. By 1941, folk found themselves other-wise occupied, and its usefulness was postponed. Johnston, who was not cavalier with his conclusions, asserts that A. G. Ward, Sangster��s successor from 1897, failed to match him and was squeezed out by the choir. This is difficult to believe. Ward lasted eight years. Evidently, much was achieved under him, including the beginnings of a diocesan choir festival. He left in 1905, because he was offered an interesting job in Japan, and died in that post a year later.13
Denman Fuller, the third organist, was a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, previously in charge of a large choir in Bournemouth. He played impressive voluntaries after evensong and produced a bound book of anthems. Almost immediately, battle was joined with the Church Body. He demanded a higher salary and control over the music in services. Coupling a merely difficult request with an outra-geous one worked for him. He got his raise but not musical control, which stayed with the clergy.
Choir numbers were hovering at just over thirty around this time. A choir festival was held on 15 March 1907 at 9 p.m., a helpful hour before which people could eat their dinner. Its lateness had unfore-seen consequences. There was ��irreverent behaviour�� during the per-formances, not through excess of wine with dinner but noise from visitors leaving before the end.
Featuring Walmsley��s ��Magnificat��, Mendelssohn��s ��Hear My Prayer��, Handel��s ��Organ Concerto no. 9�� and Stanford��s ��Last Post��, it must have been an irreverent success. It was repeated on the 19th, and takings were donated to the cathedral��s electric lighting fund.
The following year, 1908, saw two performances of selections from the ��Messiah�� in aid of the same cause. The Good Friday performance
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brought the largest number of people into St John��s ever seen there. The collection was a paltry $297. An anonymous donor, ��ashamed and angry ��at the news, gave $50.
Not all takings were so depressing. At Easter 1915, a first perfor-mance in St John��s of Louis Spohr��s oratorio, ��Last Judgement��, earned a record $650, which went to the wartime Prince of Wales Fund. At the time, Spohr was mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven. This oratorio was very popular and features repeatedly in the repertoire. By 1919, the choir was fifty strong, which was viewed as a matter of importance in the chief Anglican Church. Indeed, the colonial secre-tary and trustee Claud Severn was a soloist in Stanier��s ��Crucifixion�� and you could not, in those days, get more important than that.14
Still, the choir of the early twentieth century was a distant image from the one you would see in the early twenty-first. ��Bunny�� Abbott described it in his 1955 fundraising publication.15 There were no girls, only ladies. In 1909, Mr. White, deputy organist, was saying ��no�� to Diocesan schoolgirls for the choir. Get ladies with good soprano voices, was his direction.
The ladies did not robe. They did not process with the men. This led to odd sights at evensongs of low attendance, when clergy would process behind one choirman.
Furthermore, ladies kept their hats on throughout, and very large hats they were. Abbott described one lady member nicknamed ��Bassa Profunda��. Her hat had a veil and it was only lifted for actual singing.
There was one moment, in 1913, when the choir expressed a char-acteristic anger over a proposal from a Church Body member, whose name in this connection seems to have been expunged, to make services more appealing. Cathedral income was, as ever, parlous, and as a means of making services more attractive to the untapped agnostic public outside or loosen the purse strings of those within, he suggested in a Church Body discussion that the singing should be more ��congregational��. By this he meant that more of the music should be familiar hymns to tunes that vulgar, flat voices could sing with gusto.
Nothing seems to alarm a choir more than being deprived of the complex fretworks of difficult settings and acrobatic anthems. Forced to sing ��Praise My Soul the King of Heaven�� to John Goss��s ��Lauda Anima��, their eyes glaze over and they plan lunch. The reaction on this occasion was a defence of choral standards so furious that nothing more was heard of it.
If the choir expanded in its numbers and activity, the vast, mostly empty, Diocese of Victoria was shrunk geographically and altered constitutionally between 1872 and the First World War. This had little bearing on the life of St John��s. The cathedral was not much involved with farther-flung missionary work in China. That was run by the CMS which, in turn, had little to do with the English diocese. However, when the status of the Bishop of Victoria began to alter in the flux of events, the cathedral was pulled in.
Bishops were not easily accepted by everyone, even some who were members of an episcopal church. This was especially so with missionaries who saw themselves as purists, doing specialist grass-roots work and resented being under the aristocratic authority of a diocesan bishop. This implication of spiritual superiority caused an offence to bishops so abiding that Bishop R. O. Hall can be found inveighing against the vocational autonomy of missionaries as late as the 1930s.16
It is not as though Bishop Hall was shy of taking the gospel into the furthest crannies of ignorance and disbelief. None of his prede-cessors were, either. All the Hong Kong bishops had immaculate mis-sionary credentials and, until Hall, who came out of the Christian Student Movement, all were originally CMS men. However, once they put on the mitre, they took on themselves the wider authority and responsibilities of episcopacy which the founders of colonial bish-oprics believed were so essential to the correct dissemination of the Reformed Church in the empire. They earned thereby the powerful suspicions of the missionary societies.
The CMS did not see the Victoria Colonial Bishopric supplying their needs well. After Bishop Smith left in 1864, they pushed for a purely missionary bishopric in China, independent of the colonial one. Bishop Charles Alford, his successor, sometime incumbent of Holy Trinity Islington and later principal of Highbury Theological College, was a firm supporter of the CMS but also of his own author-ity. He came to Hong Kong at a point when the missionary bishop-ric idea had been approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but no practical arrangements for it had been made. On arrival, Alford, who had not demurred in London, dug in his heels and opposed any erosion of his territory or authority.
The CMS wanted the new bishop to take over all purely missionary work in China. Bishop Alford wished to maintain a missionary role for his diocese and responsibility for all Europeans in China. The
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Archbishop of Canterbury saw it neither way. Not quite Solomon-like, he split the issue in two. He divided China along the 28th parallel�X which would have bemused the Guangxu emperor, had he understood it. All Church of England work to the north was put under the newly consecrated Bishop John Russell in Ningpo, and that to the south of it, under the Bishop of Victoria.
When he heard of this, Bishop Alford was visiting England, where his wife had returned in 1868, her health unable to cope with Hong Kong��s climate. Finding this erosion of his commission difficult to accept, and unwilling to face the administrative complexities, he resigned, in absentia, in February 1872.17
Although he was rarely in Hong Kong, his relationship with the cathedral was significant. Alford pushed for the chancel extension, and his vigorous fundraising, much of it in England, aided the building of St Peter��s, the ��Seamen��s Church��. This was the second English-speaking church in Hong Kong and, as its life progressed, it grew so dependent on the cathedral for support, it became, in fact, its daughter.
Even before Alford had resigned, and the two years and eleven months of interregnum until the installation of John Shaw Burdon began, episcopal authority had been further eroded. This was not the doing of anyone in Hong Kong but the result of a dispute within in the Church in far-off South Africa and the obduracy of the mathematically precise Bishop of Natal, J. W. Colenso, who insisted that the calculations surrounding the Pentateuch were hopelessly wrong.
The outraged church authorities there were fundamentalists unin-terested in the transience of accuracy, and sought his removal. The ensuing fight went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which in 1865, found in Colenso��s favour. However, the Privy Council pulled a rabbit out of the hat. It discovered that colonial bishops were not what they seemed to be. This was to have an impact on Bishop Burdon and on what he had assumed was his cathedral.
John Burdon was Glaswegian and a missionary who had been ordained in Shanghai, been chaplain to the British Mission in Peking and had travelled and preached with great courage through Taiping rebel territory. He arrived in Hong Kong after what he described as a ��pleasant voyage�� on 4 December 1874, to find Bishop��s House in ��a wretched condition��.18
When he presented himself at the west door of St John��s on Sunday morning, 13 December, he would have appeared as a stout man, but the coolies did not find him a problem carrying him in his chair, it seems. There were four episcopal chair carriers in uniforms of bright red, and they moved along at quite a lick.
The bishop was received by the clergy, the registrar, the choir, even the verger, with all the respect and ceremony19 accorded to his two predecessors but, in his authority, he was travelling lighter than they did.
The bishop read the Antecommunion. The choir chanted the Nicene Creed with a moment of fame for choirboy Master Iburg, who sang a solo. Burdon preached to Romans 1:16. He took the oppor-tunity to strike a familiar chord. His first and foremost dedication was to missionary work, he said. It would be a mistake to believe that the bishopric had been founded purely for the English residents of Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports. To grind the point home to an audience which might not have been loving what it was hearing, he told them�Xwith what reads like an airy scoff�Xthat this congrega-tion of his fellow countrymen was hardly enough to warrant a bishop. There was a touch of hubris in this. Some were about to question whether he was a bishop at all.
Officiating as readers of the prayers and the lessons that day were the Reverend W. H. Baynes and the Reverend A. Hutchinson.
It is interesting that both these men were to have a falling-out with Burdon, Hutchinson over the correct Chinese form of address for God, a dispute known as ��the Terms Question��, and Baynes over the bishop��s very authority in Hong Kong. What that settled on came next. The chaplain, Canon Beach, read the Letter of Commendation of the Bishop from the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was not what that letter said but what it was not, which was Baynes��s bone of contention. It was not Letters Patent.
The 1865 Colenso judgement had revealed that colonial bishops were being appointed by Letters Patent to colonies, like Hong Kong, which had their own legislatures. This act was ultra vires, accord-ing to their Lordships, and contradictory to the authority of those assemblies. Appointment by the Crown had to cease and be replaced with appointment by the Archbishop of Canterbury. To the current observer, this may seem as inconsequential as it was sensible. To the Victorian mind, especially one stratified by life in the colonies, it was as important as it was alarming.
In the records room at Bishop��s House Hong Kong, the Letters Patent appointing the bishop as Lord Bishop of the Diocese of
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Victoria survive. Although he lived on until 1898, he never went back to collect them. It is a large document in excellent condition still, and clear and demanding across the top of it in a banner of scroll, are the words ��Victoria, By Grace of God �K��
You are looking at something rare, an issuance of the Royal Prerogative, a command of the monarch, in theory at least, beyond even the sanction of Parliament. It bestows upon a bishop authority which is quasi-secular and lordly in its extent. He may take actions in the interest of the spiritual realm which cannot be contradicted by the temporal power.
Since the appointment of Bishop Smith, the episcopal authority over the colonial chaplain in Hong Kong had been accepted, or at least never been challenged, by the governor even though the chaplain was his secular employee. Colonial bishops were a new thing, and the arrangement was unusual, but the Letters Patent could not be disre-garded. Yet now they had been swept away. A Letter of Warrant from Queen Victoria dated 1 November 1873, just as grand as her original Letters Patent, states with equal unequivocality ��that we have revoked and terminated the Letters Patent of 11 May 1849 and 14 January 1867 �K and every clause, article and thing therein.�� That left the bishop with purely a Letter of Commendation from the archbishop and, for standing a man in equivalent authority to a governor in his own colony, that simply did not cut it.
Burdon ran into trouble almost immediately from W. H. Baynes, who was Chaplain to the Mission to Seamen and therefore the direct employee of a British-based society. Baynes claimed the colonial bishop, without royal sanction, no longer had any authority over him. Burdon was ��merely a private person with no jurisdiction indeed with no connection to any clergyman of the Church of England except that of friendly feeling��.20
The bishop complained to the archbishop, who probably moved in the matter. In May 1875, the foreign secretary, Lord Derby, wrote to the British consuls, the Admiralty wrote to naval chaplains and the secretary of state, Lord Carnarvon, wrote to the administra-tor in Hong Kong�XJohn Gardiner Austin, in Sir Arthur Kennedy��s absence�Xall saying that recognitions and courtesies would remain as before and that it should be business as usual with the new bishop.21
The Archbishop of Canterbury said in a letter of 28 September 1874, ��Our endeavour ought to be as far as possible to place the bishop in the exact position of his predecessor.��22 Neither this endeavour nor the directions of the home government solved a problem peculiar to St John��s Cathedral. The Hong Kong Attorney General stated that ��the Bishop of Victoria is now not so styled within the meaning of Ordinance 3 of 1850��. So, could a bishop give instructions to a colonial chaplain? On whose authority did the bishop use the cathedral?
On 16 September 1875, the trustees arrived at a resolution and moved that the bishop consider St John��s as his cathedral and maintain his throne there and that none of that should affect the rights of the colonial chaplain under law. This reflected more goodwill than precise thought, but nonetheless it was conveyed to the government for approval. To do this, Cecil C. Smith, honorary secretary of the trustees, sent it to himself because he was also colonial secretary. As such he sent it to John Austin who, as we saw, was the officer admin-istering the government.
Austin took great offence. The trustees, he said, had no right even to draft this resolution. The colonial chaplain, as a servant of the governor, had control over services and the access of a bishop without need of a trustees�� resolution. The trustees did not take that lying down. They replied that they were representatives of the subscribers and seatholders and therefore they had some say in the overall order of things. Furthermore, the colonial chaplain had been in the chair and agreed with them. Again, Smith sent this to himself, who sent it to Austin on 4 October. Austin huffed off that claim in a one-line reply. The chaplain, Richard Kidd, now demonstrated a flair for diplo-macy which must have been valuable balm in these disputative times. He had dinner with Austin. A form of words was worked out. The resolution was acceptable if it said that it was arrived at in concert with the colonial chaplain ��by virtue of the power conferred on him by Ordinance 3 of 1850 section 6��. Cecil C. Smith, exhausted by his split identity, reunited himself by resigning as a trustee.23
This was an elegant courtesy but useless as a solution to the dichot-omy. The episcopate, in effect, had been disestablished. St John��s, by contrast, remained a colonial chaplaincy under the authority of the governor. The bishop��s position in ��his�� cathedral was an anomaly.
There is a story told, even now, that the bishop�Xlikely Burdon�X was physically denied access to the church, that a door was slammed in his face. This is possibly a legend mingling the sense of unease at the time, growing to mild paranoia on the part of the bishop, who wrote lengthy letters of affront and complaint to the Reverend H. Wright of the CMS. The particular responses he received from the
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Reverend Hutchison drove him to epic epistles of objection. The local press treated him in ��a low and scurrilous manner��. The ��extraordinary conduct�� of Dr. Eitel ��caused me bitter pain for weeks and has cast a cloud over me��.24
A feeling of exclusion from his rightful dignity hung over Bishop Burdon��s time. He may have been resilient in the missionary field, but when it came to being unloved as a bishop, he seems to have had thin skin. He wrote in hurt tones to Governor Sir George Bowen in 1883:
The local government considers the previous ordinance with ref-erence to the Bishop��s status null and void �K I think this was a mistake. It is a slight on the office. I am not seen as a bishop at all. There have been unseemly attempts on the part of chaplains to decline allegiance to me. If changes are to be made in the management of the cathedral, it is a fitting time to remedy this mistake. It feels like an anomaly going in as an assistant and not a chief.
His tone becomes more dismissive, then fatalistic:
I have done more English work in the cathedral than any of my predecessors yet, personally, I have no desire to take services in St John��s. On Sundays, I am occupied with Chinese services, lecturing, preparing books and training native missionaries. No change is likely to be made in my position. The retirement of the present chaplain is a remote contingency.25
The retirement of the Reverend William Jennings, appointed after the sadly deceased Kidd in 1879, came about in June of 1891. It was not too late for Bishop Burdon to see. He held office up to 1895. Jennings was 30 years old on his appointment, a scholar held in high regard who translated the Shi King and Confucian analects. He moved on to become Rector of Breedon in Berkshire and is described as an ��exciting�� translator of Chinese poetry for his ��unique�� 1891 translation of ��Fortuitous Concourse��.26
The letter suggests that relations between chaplain and bishop were strained. It was the departure of Jennings that the ��changes to the management of the Cathedral��, alluded to by the Bishop, were waiting for. Jennings was to be the last colonial chaplain. Once the terms of that appointment had been ended, the trustees and the government could embark on a process that was, to many, obvious, urgent and yet risky. St John��s was to be disendowed. Financially, it was to be cut off from the Crown and totter on its own two feet. For the congregation, this was to prove stimulating. For episcopal author-ity, it meant that the battle lines were being withdrawn.
The existing government of the church had worked itself into a simple structure given to wooliness where finances were concerned. The chaplain was provided by the Colonial Office. The Hong Kong government assisted on non-recurrent expenditure items, largely where it chose, which always left room for private effort.
The seatholders meeting was held every April, passed the accounts and elected two trustees and an auditor. Four trustees were appointed by the government, and so predictable did the proceeding tend to be that only the trustees showed up. A notable exception to this was the time Nathaniel Ede attended in 1880, to represent the congregation in passing a testimonial to the bishop for being such a good stand-in chaplain after Richard Kidd��s death.
References to individual parishioners are rare, so let us pluck Ede from the flow for a moment. Records tell us he was a seatholder who worked for Union Insurance, died at the ripe age of 80 in Hampshire in 1915, leaving $375,000. He had an interesting temperament. He got a Chinese three months in prison by complaining against him for cutting down a tree he was fond of. Defence of the environment could be brisk in those days. He also owned an Amati violin.27 He helped make the not-very-serious suggestion that Bishop Burdon might like to continue as chaplain permanently. The meeting��s warm disposal towards Burdon does hint that his difficulties may have grown with the arrival of Jennings.
The trustees looked after the fabric and administration of St John��s and had between $500 and $600 a year for general maintenance. The chaplain ordered the services, and the congregation remained largely mute. The arrangement might have appeared neat if uninspired, but the problem was that the church was never properly endowed.
The government contributed to fabric costs on a loose fifty-fifty basis. Assistance was vicarious and on merit as the government saw it. In 1872, they contributed to the roof replacement, but in 1884 not a cent was given towards the second organ. The trustees tried to live within their means, which were mostly pew rents topped up by occasional fees.
As early as 1873, the home government had suggested making a fixed annual contribution and leaving overall responsibility to the trustees. That proved too much to stomach for what was, after all, a volunteer body, and it was dropped.
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The situation was untenable, not least because of the struggle over control of the chaplain and because Hong Kong was, by now, being treated by the Colonial Office as a special case. All the other Treaty Port churches had been cut loose. In 1882, it was decided to do the same with St John��s. The trustees petitioned against it but in vain. In January 1886, they found themselves discussing a draft ordinance.28
At the April annual meeting of 1891, the process was begun, or rather it would have been if more than nine seatholders and subscrib-ers had attended. At a special meeting called for November to gain more consensus, eighteen showed up, and the form of a new ��Church Body�� was decided on to include the bishop, a senior chaplain and six elected trustees.
This took form in Hong Kong Ordinance No. 11 of 1892, to provide for the due performance of divine worship and other services in accordance with the rites of the Church of England at St John��s Cathedral Church at Victoria in this colony and elsewhere, to incor-porate a Church Body, to vest the said cathedral in such body, and for other purposes in connection therewith.
Thus began the blueprint for the cathedral to look after itself. The chaplain had control of services ��subject to the control of the said Bishop for the time being��, said the legislation. This was still vague enough to create a new line of tension between the bishop, now fully included in the Church Body, and the other members. Indeed, even before the ordinance was passed, a circular sent around the seatholders and subscribers proposed that services, rites and rituals should be clearly put in the hands of the chaplain. There was a vote of 40 to 34 in favour of that. An exasperated Bishop Burdon finally found the moment to make his stand. He stated plainly to the new Church Body that, if the condition was changed, he would resign from it. That was a disconnection far too difficult to digest, and the clause went unaltered. The bishop was re-established in the cathedral.
There was nothing inevitable in this. The authority of the bishop within St John��s is far more evident than it would be in an English cathedral where episcopal involvement in management is more distant. Closer engagement would be traditionally guarded against by a highly independent dean and chapter. The sense of that was strong amongst the seatholders who voted on the circular. Yet, in 1898, there was no dean and chapter, just one clergyman and a committee of volunteers, low on funds. They had just been cut off from a royal parent. To deny the episcopal one, at this point, may have courted an isolation too sudden and too strong.
The Church Body was in charge of the fabric. It could fill any vacancies on itself and appoint chaplains and lay employees. In addition to electing the trustees, the subscribers and seatholders could approve or veto proposals but not initiate or amend. This left possibilities for fireworks, which occasionally went off in comparison to the torpor of earlier years. The new ordinance continued the old trustee responsibility for the arrangement of sittings and the keeping of registers. Any changes to the regulations or Church Body would be notified to the colonial secretary and gazetted. As for the role of the government, firm commitment was confined to maintaining the public road through the compound.
G. B. Endacott describes the new system as a ��diarchy��. The mutual independence of the Church Body and the subscribers and seat-holders may not have been as marked as that term implies, but the liberties disendowment brought, along with its uncertainties, made the seatholders more perky about their oversight than before. This showed occasionally in the teething stages of the new constitution.
They began by appointing the six lay members to the Church Body annually. In 1897, as part of an overall redraft of the regulations to the ordinance, and with puzzling pre-emption, the chief justice and a trustee, Sir John Carrington, made the terms of office for life or until the holder left the colony. The next annual church meeting was mightily displeased by this turn of events. It demanded the restora-tion of annual renewal. As a demonstration of intent, five of the six members resigned on the spot and stood for re-election and, making the point that this was no hollow procedure, two of them were not returned. For five more years, which is how long it took to put the regulations back where they were, all six members regularly resigned en bloc at the annual meeting.29
Ecumenism did not come in tandem with democracy. At the 1900 annual meeting, the Church Body came up with a new form of quali-fication for its members. They should be ��communicants with the Church of England�� it said, to allow for Presbyterians to join. This is an interesting provision. The Scottish element in the European population was a significant one. The Presbyterian Church was the established church in Scotland. The congregation at St John��s would have been sufficiently ��low church�� to be accommodating. However, though the bishop may be put in his place from time to time,
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acknowledgement of the apostolic succession was not dispensable. At the meeting, ��there was much debate�� and, in the end, the proposal was voted down and the Church Body asked to come back with the words ��communicants of the Church of England��.30
There was a certain independence being asserted even if it did draw the occasional hard line. The governor, the service chiefs and the senior police had their free seats taken away from them. The governor had to wait to be allotted one for the memorial service for Edward VII. The royal coat of arms, carved into the end of the first row on the south side of the nave, was purely window dressing for the governor after the Second World War and long after the abolition of pew rents. The Church Body could now complain loudly to the military about the damage the soldiers did to the seats.31
There was a growing sensitivity too to being seen as still an outsta-tion of the government. In 1892, Attorney General W. M. Goodman refused to be appointed as a trustee because there would be, ��too many officials��. It was a worthy aspiration but not an easy one to meet. If we look at the members of the Church Body elected in 1897 as baldly listed, C. Ford, T. Jackson, F. A. Cooper, Captain H. B. Lethebridge, R. M. Rumsey, Sir Thomas Jackson of the Hong Kong Bank and Ernest Osborne of the Wharf and Godown Company were the only ones who were not members of the Executive or Legislative Councils or office holders.
No matter how much some in the cathedral may have wanted to at least strike a balance in the involvement of Crown officials on the Church Body and in later years the council, their personal loyalties to the established Church were, to a degree, inevitable and their presence in its counsels, in practice, desirable. Their knowledge, authority and connections made them invaluable to the survival of the cathedral in Hong Kong. Neither must it be forgotten that the cathedral itself, disendowed though it was, never shook off a sense of obligation as the Church of England far off, ministering to the subjects of His Majesty overseas and therefore deserving of govern-ment��s help and favour.
The new Church Body tested the limitations of its power not only with the bishop but on the chaplain too. With Jennings gone to become rector of Grasmere, it met in January 1892, to appoint the first ��senior chaplain��. This title dispensed with the word ��colonial�� and aspired to the notion of junior chaplains, who came rather later. They engaged the Reverend Rowland Francis Cobbold and appealed for donations and subscriptions to maintain him. He was appointed on a three-year contract and stayed in the post until 1902.
The Church Body took him to task twice at meetings in 1897. On the first occasion, Cobbold��s churchmanship may have been rising a little too ��high�� for the congregation��s taste. They criticised the number of candlesticks on the altar. Defending his control over liturgical matters but wishing to settle the issue, he said that this was not a point that could be discussed within the meeting but could be taken outside.32 Their second complaint was procedurally correct. They said that the chaplain had acted injudiciously in appealing for gifts for the chancel, without consulting the Church Body. Cobbold may have been impetuous in doing that. He had firm views on the standards of appearance in a church and lamented the absence of respectable accessories.
��We furnish our homes luxuriously �K the house of God goes uncared for,�� he observed scathingly in the newly created Church Notes in 1897. Church Notes was a publication giving notices of events and a usually quite lengthy letter from the chaplain. It was an early attempt at communications, which was supposed to be sup-ported by subscriptions that were notable for being overdue. It was wound up as too costly and was replaced by St John��s Review in 1924, which took advertising.
It was here that Cobbold began his lengthy ��wish list�� of improve-ments which got him in trouble with the Church Body and which were to launch a decade of additions and embellishments to the interior. The east end was cold and bare and the sanctuary was too small, he thought. The altar frontals and hangings were old and unsightly, he observed. Coolies nailed the frontals to the altar to stop them slipping off. The chaplain himself offered repositioned altar rails to make the sanctuary larger, if the congregation would do something to beautify the altar. Cobbold expanded on his theme. A reredos was needed at the east wall. The sanctuary floor was of ��rough granite and Cantonese marble�� and needed a carpet. A new chalice was sought, the current one being ��beautiful but awkward��.
Outside the sanctuary there was a need for a new pulpit, a new reading desk, even new offertory bags. Most important of all was the call for new choir stalls. The scruffiness of the compound had not avoided his meticulous eye. It needed to be more like a garden, he thought, and it needed a flagstaff.
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The response was sympathetic. The governor, Sir William Robinson, promised a pulpit and a brass desk. The pulpit survives. Captain and Mrs. Woodstock gave a silver paten. Alms bags were donated. Mrs. Ritchie gave red brocade as a dossal for the altar backcloth. T. Pratt and Sons gave a red silk frontal. Even a flagstaff was promised. The chaplain began the ��Sanctuary Fund��, which was later graduated to a general improvements fund.
Mr. and Mrs. Hancock gave a prayer desk, a litany desk and a Bible. Captain C. B. N. Dodd gave a carved credence. A chalice was presented by the Peak Church, a chapel-of-ease to the cathedral on Peak Road. An anonymous donor had suddenly given it a chalice, trumping the use of funds just raised for that purpose. The commu-nicants decided to buy one for St John��s instead. Of the heavier of Cobbold��s wishes, F. Danby, the honorary architect, drew up plans for the choir stalls which were of oak, procured from the hulk of HMS Victor Emmanuel, a former hospital and receiving ship in the harbour which was being sold.33 The new pulpit from the governor was being constructed by C. E. Palmer of Palmer and Turner. This firm grew out of Wilson and Salway, which we have seen (Chapter 2) built St Stephen��s Church and were, likely, the architects of the St John��s chancel extension.
No matter how skilled Palmer was, the pulpit could not be inau-gurated until the punkahs had been taken down for the winter. The punkahs did not let you see the preacher easily. If you were seated near a side aisle you got to see nothing at all. These devices were a blight upon sight, sound and lighting and were to remain so for some years to come.
The extension of the sanctuary was completed after Easter 1898, although Cobbold was still waiting for designs for a proposed chancel screen. The congregation had been generous. Subscribers to the Sanctuary Fund in 1899 included Governor Blake, and Messrs. Jackson, Gascoigne, Chater, Pollock, Mody, Babington, Chatham, Rumsey and Cox. The governor��s pier has been lost to reclamation, but a garden in his name survives. The rest of the list reads like a Hong Kong street map.34
In early 1899, the fund stood at $1,079 before becoming a general fund, yet donations and installations continued to come to St John��s as it passed into the Edwardian period. The two sons of Bishop Alford donated the cost of a bishop��s throne which was designed by
H. W. Bird and built in stunning detail by local artisans.35 Only the
basic chair survives and is used now by the bishop for confirmations and ordinations. It is modest evidence of the elaborate and glorious rosewood surround and canopy in which it was once set and to which a few photographs are left as testimony. This was a fitting that was truly cathedralesque.
J. A. Barton gave a font cover. There is more to that than meets the simple term. This was an enormously heavy wooden lid in the form of a four-foot tower in the Gothic style, which had to be raised and lowered onto the font by means of chains and a pulley. The Victorians were fond of this feature. It is with mixed feelings that one reports it was lost during the Japanese Occupation. The font it covered is an eight-sided stone Gothic basin supported by columns on a plinth. It was donated by the lawyer Edmund Sharp, who had equipped the baptistery with it and two windows in memory of his wife, Lucille, just a little earlier, in 1890. The baptistery, originally floored with the Minton tiles, had been enlarged after the chancel lengthening. It existed as an open extension to the north transept and quite a handsome sight, letting a lot more light into that quarter than is now the case. In the 1930s, the font was moved to the north door and the baptistery was turned into a choir ladies�� changing room, walling it off from the transept. This was an act of organisational attrition not yet quite recovered from.
Edmund Sharp, who was the Crown solicitor, a trustee, founder of a major solicitors firm and persistent benefactor to the church, died in 1897 but should not be let go without noting one of his forward views. On death, he wrote in his last testament, ��I am much averse to the present fashion of wearing black as mourning. Young people could wear grey and silver, which I want for my mourning cards.�� 36
Even more doubtful a gift than the Gothic font lid was from the Hong Kong Bank chairman��s wife, Mrs. (later Lady) Jackson, in 1898. She made arrangements for the glass in eleven clerestory windows above the chancel to be replaced by coloured pieces. Stained glass applied without restraint can be a dark, leaden business. Mr. Cobbold probably found it difficult to say no to a lady of such station. Dean Swann, arriving years later, had not a moment��s hesitation in having them taken out and replaced by plain glass, to ��let in God��s good light��.37
More elaborate stained glass made its way into St John��s in this period. A memorial window to Elizabeth Frances Higgin and Emma Gertrude Ireland, two nurses who died of the plague nursing victims
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in a government hospital, was erected in July 1899, in the north transept. Bubonic plague had struck Hong Kong in May 1894. It mainly affected the Chinese lower classes. Totally 2,500 died, and 80,000 people left the colony. The government introduced house-to-house searches for infected persons and quarantine on a hospital ship, measures which were widely resented by the Chinese commu-nity. The two nurses, working so close to the threat, were of the few Europeans who died.38
Designed by Kate Coughtree of a Hong Kong family and executed by Heaton Butler and Bayne of London, the window��s upper portion featured one woman looking up to Jesus and the other giving a cup to a dying man. Over them, an angel bore a martyr��s leaf and the words ��Inasmuch as you did it to one of these �K�� In the lower portion an angel carried a crown and another scroll saying, ��I will give thee a crown of life �K I will give them an everlasting life.��39
The window was lost during the Second World War. Ultimately, all the stained glass was, including a moving memorial to the Hong Kong inter-port cricket team, all but two of whom drowned, along with 114 others, when their ship, the Bokhara, was sunk in a typhoon on 10 October 1892, returning from Shanghai. Most of them were officers and non-commissioned officers from the garrison, and three civilians. That window had two lights, one featuring St Paul at his shipwreck and the other of St Peter walking on the water. The attached brass plaque stated, ��No other cathedral in the world contains a memorial to members of a cricket team and we trust that no occasion will arise for one to be erected.��40
The loss of the Bokhara caused much grief in European Hong Kong. There was a memorial service held in the cathedral attended by the governor, Sir William Des Voeux. Des Voeux complained that the date set for it was not to his convenience. This was the first year of disendowment, and the bishop must have taken at least a slight pleasure in reminding His Excellency that ��government grants to the Cathedral now having been withdrawn, the control of services now rests with the clergy��.41
Congregational life at St John��s involved increasing incidences of services such as memorials, thanksgivings and celebrations. The cathedral��s role in the diocese as the centre of ceremonial and com-memoration of great moments became firmly established. Chinese members of the community showed up in numbers for events like that, either to join the European congregation or to hold a separate service in Chinese. Even though St John��s had been formally disen-dowed, its role as the state church in the colony grew.
No grander example of this function was the Thanksgiving Service for Queen Victoria��s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Eight hundred seats were filled. The entire establishment of the colony was present. The Hong Kong Volunteers lined the nave. The Union Flag and the Royal Standard were suspended from the beams; the Standard horizontally, the Irish harp sagging a bit, from evidence of a grainy photograph in a collection at the cathedral. Otherwise, it was an event of ��hearti-ness and impressiveness�� according to Church Notes. Reverend G. R. Vallings, the Garrison Chaplain, intoned the prayers. The Reverend
W. Bannister, secretary of the South China CMS, read the lessons. Bannister, a selfless man and knowledgeable of his field, was to be made an honorary canon of St John��s and created Archdeacon of Hong Kong when the office was revived for him by Bishop Hoare in 1902. The chaplain, Cobbold, preached on 1 Samuel 10:4. ��God save the King.�� There was no bishop present. It had been six months since Burdon left, and the vacancy continued.
In the afternoon, there was a ��very large congregation�� of Chinese Christians belonging to the Church of England and other Protestant missions. They used part of the 1662 Accession Service, translated, and a choir of 130 young people sang hymns in Chinese. The Reverend Kwong Yat Shau of the CMS gave an address in Cantonese, concluding with a sentiment which carried an interest-ing distinction. ��We, who are not her subjects and yet are at one with them in the bond of a common faith, thank God today for the life and reign of the Queen of England.�� Mr. Li Shing Yau of the Basel Mission spoke in Hakka on the text ��Wait on the Lord and keep his way�� and demonstrated a similar dichotomy. ��Would that the rulers of our own Empire might speedily know this secret,�� he implored, wistfully, one imagines.
When the queen died, a celebration service for the coronation of Edward VII had to be hurriedly altered to prayers of intercession for his recovery from acute appendicitis, which carried a high fatality rate in those days. Cobbold described the event as part of the ��golden chain of sympathy which unites empire and home��. There was an afternoon service in Chinese, at which the prayers were led by a newly ordained deacon, Mok Shau Tsang, rather small in stature but muscular in spirit, who was to leave a deep impression on the Chinese Church over forty years as Archdeacon and Bishop of Canton. Church Notes
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observed that ��there was a large attendance of Chinese Christians with, as usual, the sexes being separated��.
The cathedral was generous to the Germans, having no presenti-ment of what was to come. In 1910, it gave itself over to the German community and sailors of the German Navy��s China station for an afternoon service at Christmas. In 1913, there was a celebration of Kaiser Wilhelm II��s own jubilee in the cathedral, attended by Prince Henry of Prussia, who was passing through Hong Kong, as well as the governor and the general officer commanding.42
A touching and unusual military ceremony took place in St John��s on 12 October 1902. A body called the Hong Kong Regiment laid up its colours there. This was not the local Hong Kong Defence Force, later ��the Volunteers��, but a regiment of Indian Muslims raised in the Punjab and north-west frontier by the War Office in 1891 specifically for overseas service. Their purpose must have been done. They were trooped in Happy Valley in front of the governor, Sir Henry Blake, and then marched to the cathedral. Subadar Major Sadar Khan, Commander of the Indian Empire (CIE), led the native officers and presented the colours for laying up. The regiment returned to India on 23 October and was disbanded. The colours of this brief and almost-forgotten regiment were later highlighted by Dean Swann in a glass case and subsequently lost.43
Governor Blake��s daughter provided a shining example of what would have been a society wedding in Hong Kong 1903. Olive Blake married Captain M. V. P. Arbuthnot of the Scots Guards, who was aide-de-camp to her father. It was a picture-book ceremony for a textbook match. The choir was out in force. The couple were married by the bishop in his convocation robes. The best man was Major the Honourable H. W. Trefusis. Mr. S. T. Dunn of the Botanical Department, but likely not the upper-middle class, was brought in to decorate the church.
In September of the following year, the chaplain, now Frederick Franch Johnson, made a stern observation in Church Notes: ��We do not often refer in these pages to any society that is not of an avowedly religious character.�� There was, he wrote, an exception in the case of the St John��s Ambulance. This was the first year in which the brigade was allowed to hold its annual service in the cathedral. It does so still. Once a year, their band approaches playing British marching tunes, and scores of Hong Kong Chinese men and women, in starch-ily immaculate British-style uniforms and caps, move amongst each other, briskly exchanging salutes with swagger stick clamped under arm, before filing in to give thanks. That over half of them may be Taoists matters not a fig.
Johnson may have been tough on who got mentioned in Church Notes, but it turned out that no such restraints were applied to who used St John��s. In the best tradition of the Church of England, anyone not known to impugn it publicly could go in it. The cathedral became a centre in the community for public groups which sought God��s blessing on their endeavours, be they judges, Freemasons, national groups, orders of chivalry or nurses. More specifically, Chinese Christians grew to appreciate St John��s significance as a place of worship on the greater church and state occasions. Even as the diocese altered its shape and texture, Chinese Christians came to St John��s for special events even though they would rarely be seen there on more ordinary occasions.
But then, neither would a majority of their European counter-parts. In a colony where life could be fast and stays were often brief, it was a struggle to maintain physical attendances, let alone spiritual commitment amongst the colonial British. This also meant that it was harder to sustain income. As Cobbold observed wryly, ��Losing the habit of attendance in a way relieves them of the duty and respon-sibility of support.�� He tried hard to establish new opportunities for fellowship amongst the congregation. He set up a parochial guild of the sort that flourished in English churches. He believed guilds would ��restore the church to its former noble influence��. He began a guild committee for district visiting, a repeated theme through the cathedral��s early twentieth-century ministry, imitating Anglican pastoral work in a typical parish. Cobbold attempted to set up a branch of the Brotherhood of St Andrew, an Anglican network whose mission it is to evangelise men and boys. He was the beginning of the clerical push at St John��s to introduce Holy Communion as more staple worship.
He strove to inform his flock of opportunities to come together. ��It is not generally known and not sufficiently appreciated that there is a bible reading fellowship for Men in St Paul��s College on Tuesday evenings.�� You can hear a stern deliberation in his phrasing which may have not have whipped everyone to his side, and he shared the Victorian belief that evangelisation was a muscular business with no place for women.44 After one guild meeting, the chaplain records simply, ��fair attendance �K one new member��. Communicant classes
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were thin, though, and references to the brotherhood disappear. He was working from a very small nucleus of committed men, and that may have shifted too from postings, leave trips and sickness, all of which were perpetual features of European society in the colony.
In 1898, the average attendance at the cathedral on a Sunday was calculated to be 328. The number of communicants for the Sundays of February 1897 was 38, 11, 18 and 6. For April it was 40, 6, 40 and 10. Holy Communion was at midday on the first and third Sundays at this period, which may explain the higher numbers. On the other Sundays it was at 7 a.m.45 Still, figures were slim and the subject of veiled sarcasm in high places. At the annual meeting in 1905, ��the bishop said that services were thoroughly enjoyed by those who attended them��.46 He meant that remark to have wide currency, because the cathedral��s annual meetings were reported in great detail by the English press until after the Second World War.
Sixteen years later, the governor, Sir Reginald Stubbs, opening the cathedral��s new hall, ��lamented that attendance at the cathedral shows that the congregation of the Church of England is not as enthusias-tic as it might be��. Stubbs knew perfectly well that the South China Morning Post report would reach the Englishmen who were home and abed. Attendances were an issue, pointedly so for the clergy, at least on high days and holy days. ��Good Friday is not a day of careless holiday pursuits,�� they were told by Cobbold. Easter is a day of obliga-tion; those who are satisfied with a minimum number of communions are reminded of this,�� he said, managing a double-headed lecture in one sentence.
Ascension Day was a particular source of disappointment. On one occasion, the choir nearly outnumbered the congregation. Ascension Day 1911 ��was observed in a slightly better manner than in some previous years though there remains much room for improvement��. Not just in numbers, either. Cobbold was also looking for ���K a little more decision in the utterance of the responses and the amens. At the early Celebrations it is sometimes impossible for the clergyman to hear even the slightest sound from the congregation.�� Some people were still not standing for entrance procession, either.47
There were frequent adjustments to the times and substances of services in the early twentieth century. Sometimes the garrison��s schedule had to be accommodated, often the social routine of the congregation had to be borne in mind�Xand this was a consideration that has never really gone away�Xand there was a growing attempt to encourage an interest in the sacraments and spread worship out from Sunday morning matins. There were certainly full schedules. On Good Friday 1898, there was a Garrison Parade Service at 8.30 a.m., Litany and Antecommunion at 10 a.m. and matins with sermon at 11 a.m. From 2 p.m. there was a ��special service with addresses�� and evensong with sermon at 5.45 p.m.
In early 1900, a circular was sent round asking for views on what would be the most suitable hour for a daily service. Attendances at weekday services were generally low. There seem to have been no replies whatever to that, so matins was set to be daily at 9 a.m. On Sundays that year, Holy Communion was separated from matins, to avoid ��unseemly exits�� and ��the tramping of feet��. This pairing then splitting of the services was to move in cycles over the coming years. By the Christmas Day service of 1910, Holy Communion was being held at 7.45 a.m. and 11 a.m., the latter with sermon. Indeed, people uneasy about overdoing sacramentalism were assured that, if per-chance they missed the 11 a.m. matins, the 11.45 service would still carry with the full diet of Epistle, gospel and sermon.
Some of the preoccupying spiritual issues were very much of their time. For the three Rogation Days before Ascension in 1898, the topics for intercession were ��country, colony and church��. Prayers of humiliation cropped up again in 1900 for the Boer War. Cobbold thought they should ��avoid extremes of fanatic and cringing humili-ation which is boasting��. This was thoughtful, yet the sincere terms with which Christian gentlemen could address war embarrass the eye today. He spoke of ��humble thanksgiving for the blessings of war which are already plain in evidence of the solidarity of empire��. That war could have blessings was still a digestible concept; 1914 and Wilfred Owen had not yet come.48
An aspect of the cathedral��s spiritual life which was of growing significance was Sunday school. Parents may have been slow to show up at church sometimes, but they were keen that those children who were in Hong Kong with them were tutored in the basics of the faith. In 1899, there were fifty pupils. Unfortunately, a Sunday school room at an estimated $2,000 was one item on the chaplain��s ��wish-list�� which did not find favour with donors. Only two guarantees of $100 each were made. The idea was that the once large, free-standing and hideous memorial to Captain Bate should be removed to the Happy Valley Cemetery from the site where the war memorial cross now stands and the room be put up there.49 Instead, the school had to meet where it could, including Bishop��s House.
Imperial to International
The school was also contributing to a backlog of young people waiting for confirmation. The vacancy in the See of Victoria between the departure of Bishop Burdon in 1897 and the arrival of Bishop Hoare lasted many months. Confirmation classes were being held in the hope that bishops from elsewhere in Asia might oblige if they passed through Hong Kong on their way to the Fourth Lambeth Conference. If not, then there would be a dispensation for the ��ready and desirous�� to take Holy Communion. By February 1898, Cobbold was ��quite unable to account for the extraordinary delay in filling the See��.50 Such was his frustration that he wrote a quite strident letter of complaint to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was, after all, responsible for the situation. It was brave move for a man who might have had concerns over his own preferment.
It was not only children who were in the queue. When he finally arrived, Bishop Hoare confirmed three bandsmen of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and one ��other rank�� of the Royal Engineers, on 8 December 1898. The following month he confirmed thirty-six civilians, of whom one, George Ng Fuk-shan, was Chinese. Church Notes must have thought this worthy of mention, since the cathedral had stopped dis-tinguishing Chinese from Europeans in its confirmation records.
The Church Body was acutely aware that the more they committed themselves to the church and took an interest in the church��s affairs, the more financial support was likely to be forthcoming. The bulk of income was from pew rents, raised to $18 in 1902, then subscrip-tions and donations and service offertories in almost equal portion although offertories showed the healthiest increases. In 1913, the Easter Day offering actually went directly into clergy pockets in line with Church of England practice, but it found its way back to general funds within a few years.
In 1898, Hon Treasurer A. P. McEwen, definitely a man who worried a bone, made an analysis of the service collections for the preceding year. Given in total, by type of coinage, there had been 1,923 one-dollar pieces given, 3,831 twenty-cent pieces, 6,579 ten-cent pieces, 2,864 five-cent pieces and 1,436 one-cent pieces. This averaged out at $0.24 per person. ��Bad money�� found in the bag was up to 4 per cent.51
Repeatedly, the chaplain and trustees hammered home to the congregation that there was no endowment fund and no government safety net. The government had offered $600 per annum for services at gaol and hospitals plus $5 for the burial of a destitute. The Church Body eventually beat them up to $1,200. Burial fees�Xa clergy perk�X were set at 1st class, $10; 2nd class, $5; 3rd class, free. It remains a matter of speculation as to who qualified as a third-class corpse.
St John��s got by but in a hand-to-mouth fashion. The treasurer��s report stated that the 1908 financial position was ��distinctly bad��. Three years before had seen a ��high water mark��. It had been all ��downhill�� since then due to financial depression, low trade levels and a very high exchange rate�Xthat latter point inflicting serious cramp on clergy incomes too. There had also been the loss of some ��liberal subscribers�� to homeward passages, which, as with the Sunday school, seriously affected numbers. Still, the report insisted, a rich colony should be able to find the $1,400 and the $1,200 shortfalls of the previous two years.
There really was not very much available to disperse amongst charities. Charitable activity was largely funded by individual money-raising events. Outreach of that kind was through some very generous loans of locations. For example, the grounds of Government House were made available for a November 1898 fete in support of the Sisters of Charity. Money raised went to hot breakfasts for starving children and night refuges for women�Xin London. There may have been cultural confusion over the meaning of the expression ��charity begins at home��. Hong Kong were conditions not beyond St John��s imaginative reach. Quite imaginatively, Harvest Sunday, which was too far removed from the cycles of the waving wheat in English fields, was replaced by Hospital Sunday, at which offerings were made to the Alice Ho and the Nethersole Hospitals, both for poor Chinese, managed by the London Missionary Society.
Social concern was expressed by regular donations to a CMS institution, the Victoria Home and Orphanage. A report of 1903 by teachers Miss Hamper and Miss Bachelor describes it as having fifty-four residents, mostly girls and victims of the mui tsai system in which young girls whose parents could not support them were sold as ��little sisters�� into domestic service. Six girls had left in that year, two had died and the home had moved to new premises in Kowloon City, which was described as ��semi-rural and beneficial in many ways��. In fact it was the rapid development of that neighbourhood in the 1920s which forced the school to move and amalgamate with Fairlea Chinese Girls�� School and become today��s Heep Yun School.
Another favourite recipient of support from the cathedral ladies was the Eyre Refuge in Causeway Bay, run by a Miss Eyre, to provide a safe and Christian refuge, principally for ��fallen�� girls. Assisted by the redoubtable missionary lady Miss Pitt, the girls were busied with laundry, sewing and some reading. They ran classes for mui tsai who were brought by their mistresses. Some of these mistresses the ladies observed as soft, allowing their mui tsai to become vain and insubor-dinate and reject marriage. The refuge died with Miss Eyre.
Not all offertory monies were received in the cathedral itself. As an English-speaking church, St John��s was not entirely alone. The Peak Church opened as a chapel of ease to it on 17 June 1883. For the absence of any tower and the arrangement of its bays, it was known by the nickname ��Jelly Mould��. The church was built to meet the needs of the growing number of prosperous Europeans who were making their homes on the Peak, to escape the heat of the lower levels. Many were Anglicans in business and government for whom the journey down to the cathedral was an unwelcome trial and a repeat of one they made six days a week. The Peak Tram was not opened until 1888, so, prior to that, worshippers would have had to make the trip there and back in a sedan chair.
The principal service was 8 a.m. Holy Communion on Sunday mornings. Surviving records from 1904 to 1934 show that attend-ance was modest, at between five and twenty on most Sundays. However, on Easter Day and Christmas Day, numbers would shoot up to between forty and eighty.52 Usually the senior chaplain officiated at the service. Frederick Johnson, and then Vyvian Copley-Moyle from 1911, showed up almost without fail. With Dean Alfred Swann, the duty was more widely spread between him and his chaplains, Koop and Evans. This may show that life for the clergy was busier down the hill, and whoever officiated was the one who could slot in the trip the most easily. Evans, who lived in Lyttelton Road, made it less fre-quently than Koop on Tregunter Path. For a spell during the summer of 1906, the bishop was the celebrant every Sunday. These services were some of the last that Bishop Hoare was to perform before his sad drowning in a typhoon in September.
The Peak Church was used for baptisms and, in that restricted residential area, they were all European. The elite up there were not over-generous to the offertory plate. They gave between 50 cents and a dollar a head. If you look at the pavement on Peak Road opposite Stewart Terrace, you might try and imagine the ��Jelly Mould�� standing there. There are no remains. The Peak Church��s affairs were formally wound up at a Special General Meeting of Electors and the Committee of Management on 29 September 1958, but it had ceased to be a place of worship in 1941. The building itself was demolished in 1945, by which time neglect and an incendiary bomb had turned it into a wreck.
If not many dollars came down to St John��s from the Peak, none at all came from the other English-speaking church of the period, St Peter��s West Point. The flow had to be in quite the other direc-tion. The first mariners�� church came into being in 1851, but little is known about it. The Sailors�� Home and Mission to Seamen was built at West Point in 1861, and St Peter��s Church, also known as the ��Seamen��s Church��, was built next door ten years later. The seed money was given in memory of Henry Davis Margesson of Macao and Hong Kong, who had drowned. Bishop Alford raised considerable funds, and Jardines made a substantial donation.
The Hong Kong Daily Press tells us that, at the foundation stone laying on 26 March 1871, a choir chanted Psalm 84, the bishop read ��two or three collects�� and the Reverend Piper read from Hebrews 10. Our assertive friend James Whittal, representing Jardines, alarmingly ��descended into the pit�� with the stone, joined by the bishop, chief justice, colonial secretary, Attorney General, United States consul and Douglas Lapraik and gave an opening speech.53 The church turned out to be of stone and brick with a spire, a fifty-eight-foot-long nave and red and black brick window surrounds. Photographs suggest it was an acquired taste.
There were 200 seats, of which 50 were reserved for seamen. A chaplain was appointed, and the first service was held on 11 January 1872. Peace was disturbed in 1895, when the Mission to Seamen no longer considered it their duty to provide a chaplain. From 1900 to 1911, The Reverend J. H. France took charge, and the church prospered as an early example to St John��s of what a priest could do working with a lay council, created in 1909. There were even plans for expansion.
They were misconceived. Wharfing patterns changed. The ever-fleeting population of sailors gravitated to the Eastern Praya. Attendance dropped precipitously and income with it. The Mission to Seamen withdrew their chaplain again in 1913, and the cathedral took up the cost of supplying one, which it could ill afford. St Peter��s ended up hidden in an unrequited corner of Hong Kong up a very steep hill with no settled income. It had a band of dedicated laity, many of them Eurasians, attracted almost by its very helplessness.
With the Reverend N. V. Halward, the bishop��s chaplain trans-ferred to it, the flag was kept flying for a while, but it could not last. Under the Church of England Trust Ordinance of 1930, St Peter��s became a chapel of ease of the cathedral which, in a way, was its death knell. Its site became a trading point with the government for the establishment of a new Kowloon church. Closure was suggested in the cathedral treasurer��s report of January 1932. It happened barely months afterwards. It was used for a while after by the Street Sleepers�� Shelters Society. Its stained glass windows, though one had been given by Sir Paul Chater, were politely declined by anyone else and broken up.
Bishop Charles Hoare, who arrived in time to take the confirma-tions backlog in 1898 and was to preach his last sermons in the towerless church on Peak Road, was a scholar of Trinity College Cambridge and spent twenty-three years as a missionary in China and a publisher of theology who wrote in Chinese. He was forty-seven when he became bishop and retained an evangelical vigour. He was installed after evensong at 3 p.m. on 12 November 1898, the Reverend L. Lloyd as his chaplain and Sir John Carrington, chancel-lor. He had insisted that it be along the lines of recent installation at Newcastle, with ��less law and more worship��. In his sermon, he promised that he would not neglect Hong Kong, and within days he was off to Foochow.
Within Hong Kong, his shining achievement was the Chinese Church Body Incorporation Ordinance of 1902, which recognised the work of the Chinese-speaking branch of the Church and formalised it. It was an early move towards an Anglican communion apart from the Church of England, a first real attempt at Anglicanism without its Englishness and an independent Church in China. Inevitably, the English Church in Hong Kong continued. It effectively created two churches within one diocese. They took seventy years to fuse.
Hoare took an assertive position on his power in the cathedral. According to G. E. Endacott, he secured a decision from the Church Body at a 1901 meeting to the effect that, because, like all clergy, the chaplain was subject to episcopal control, the bishop had a voice in regulating the services of the cathedral beyond a mere question of legality. That is how the situation remained, but it did not necessarily rest. The Church Body were uneasy over the accretion of episcopal control it had allowed. It sought Sir John Carrington��s interpretation of the ordinance on the matter, and it did not like what it heard. He said that changes to services could not be made without the bishop��s consent. This was as a right, not an expediency.
The Church Body retorted with what they had wanted to hear. In March 1902, they wrote that the chaplain was subject to canonical obedience in a way he was not when colonial chaplain, but this did not give bishop the right to alter legal services, and the chaplain still had immediate and direct management of them.54 Simply stating that did not reverse the situation.
This, it appears, had a direct bearing on Chaplain Cobbold��s res-ignation that year. The chaplain had gone on leave to England and announced his resignation from there, for ��family reasons��. Then he returned, which other clergy, resigning similarly, did not find neces-sary to do. Writing in Church Notes, he explained why. He wanted to speak face to face to his parish and to supervise a handover. His reminiscences of his office were all about the sanctuary, the parochial guild and the choir and nothing of administration until the very last sentence when, suddenly, we read, ���K I found that I had not practi-cally such liberty in the management and direction of services as I think your chaplain ought to have��.55
Was this an afterthought, dwelling on the principle laid bare by the Church Body��s disagreement with Carrington, or was it a practical problem he had struggled with, at odds with the bishop? Was he a sad bystander in the struggle, or had he been an active part in the Church Body��s attempt to see the ordinance reinterpreted and now, thwarted, compelled to resign? Cobbold must have played his cards close to his chest. A further, powerful reason for leaving emerged only months after he had gone. He married Lillian Hoppe Parkes, daughter of Harry Parkes, minister to China and Japan and sister of Mrs. J. J. Keswick. He was made Rector of Beauchampton and later Bratton Fleming in Devon. He died in 1945.
Bishop Hoare died tragically sooner than that. On Saturday, 15 September 1906, he went on a seaborne preaching tour in a house-boat with four students, two sailors and a ship��s boy, up the western New Territories, spending the nights on board and preaching during the day. ��Evangelical theology through ambulando,�� he called it. On Monday, the 17th, they sailed for Sha Tan 6 a.m. on the Sham Chun River. They got stuck on an oyster bed for a while, got off it and anchored for the night. On the morning of the 18th, the bishop was intending to make for Tung Chung, but his crew told him a storm was coming, so they decided to head back to Hong Kong.
The strong and unheralded typhoon caught up with them in Deep Bay. The students and the bishop were last seen holding onto pieces of the superstructure. One boatman made it to shore to tell the tale.56 The 1906 typhoon caused the most fatalities of all in Hong Kong��s recorded history. It is estimated that 15,000 people died in it.
Memorial services for Bishop Hoare were held in the cathedral on 30 September, morning and evening. Archdeacon Banister presided, and J. H. France of St Peter��s preached. Mrs. Hoare pluckily played the harmonium. An afternoon service in Chinese was conducted by the Reverend Mok Shau Tsang. Ironically, but with equal sadness, the harbourmaster, Lionel Barnes-Lewis, a member of the Church Body, the Legislative Council and president of the YMCA, died that day on dry land, in bed, of an unstated illness.
A memorial window to Bishop Hoare was installed in the south transept of the cathedral. It was by William Morris, featuring, in the upper portion, St John on Patmos writing the Revelations under the instruction of God��s angel. In the centre light was the Lamb enthroned and the Book with seven Seals worshipped by the elders and surrounded by hosts of angels. At the base off the window were three scenes of Christ on the water. On the left He called James and John mending their nets, at the centre, He stilled the tempest and on the right, He walked on the water before the disciples in their boat.57 The governor, Sir Frederick Lugard, unveiled the window in 1909. It met with unusual critical acclaim. Our earlier commentator A. S. Abbott rated it as the only window he liked.
The year 1907 reaped some of the older personalities from St John��s formation. Mr. Sangster, the first organist, had died in 1902. Now A. G. Ward, the second one, succumbed in his new job in Japan, and a brass plate was put up to him in the north transept, along with another to the non-commissioned officers and men of the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters. Canon William Beach died in Reading, Berkshire, and Bishop Burdon died at Royston, Hertforshire. He had gone back to China at age 70 on missionary work and had only stopped after his wife died there in 1899. Major John Aldor Burdon of Nigeria and E. R. Burdon MA of Cambridge, his surviving sons, presented to the cathedral a solid silver alms dish, designed round Bishop Burdon��s seal. It is still in use.
In the late Victorian and Edwardian years, the cathedral had strug-gled for administrative boundaries. Its ��quiescence��, a word used by G. B. Endacott in his history, was more a spiritual one. A colonial congregation was sitting at the peak of imperial assurance, looking straight ahead and not at the inevitable and imminent descent. The cataclysm of 1914 was not far away, but its social consequences and its blow to the minds of men would roll out gradually through to the cathedral over the coming thirty years.

Chapter 4

The Search for Substance, 1902�V1927
When Frederick Franch Johnson stepped into the post as senior chaplain in 1902, he was already in office in St John��s. He was the first man to have been appointed as an assistant chaplain. Up to this point, the colonial chaplains, followed by Cobbold, had ministered alone. They had been backed up intermittently by CMS missionaries, naval chaplains and ordained schoolmasters. Commitment to a full-time assistant chaplaincy found great difficulty in gaining a foothold on the craggy finances of the cathedral.
In 1896, Cobbold had wrung a commitment of $200 a month from the Church Body and went to find a chaplain while on leave in England. He cabled success to the Church Body and they cabled back that, on reflection, $200 was not enough. They got ��cold feet��. We have seen how simple and unadorned the cathedral��s income was in those days. They had a genuine fear that they might ship a man all the way out and run out of the funds to keep him.1
Bishop Hoare, prior to his arrival in 1898, was very keen on having an assistant chaplain to handle the Peak Church, the Kowloon ministry and the Treaty Ports. The Church Body felt the pressure and found $250 a month to offer. Hoare picked Frederick Johnson, and he arrived in February 1899. His role in the Treaty Ports turned out to be imaginary, but he took services in Kowloon, where worship was held in the curiously transient setting of the navy��s torpedo depot, before St Andrew��s Church was built.
When Cobbold��s initial three years as senior chaplain had been up in 1895, the Annual Church Meeting (ACM) renewed his appoint-ment but only after the newly invigoured subscribers and seatholders had held a ballot. In 1901, when the Church Body offered Johnson the job, the ACM found a new if finicky reason to posture power. It claimed that Johnson was too young. It questioned the process of his appointment. It demanded that the Church Body minutes on the matter be read. This was objected to on the grounds of propriety, but they were nonetheless read as ��a matter of courtesy not a matter of right��.2 The strutting did not stop. A resolution was passed condemn-ing the Church Body for appointing Johnson without consulting the subscribers and seatholders. Fervour took them too far in that. The Church Body definitely did have the power to appoint under the ordi-nance, but the meeting had become very serious about its rights to oversee. Mr. Johnson��s age was not the true concern. The issue was the power of appointment, not the appointee. He could stay.
Johnson��s promotion meant that a new assistant was needed. Imagining they had coped with an assistant chaplain only by the skin of their teeth, vacillation returned to the Church Body. When Bishop Hoare sent his single-word cable ��trombone�� from London saying he had found a musically inclined replacement, the Church Body reneged, saying they needed the money for an organ overhaul.
The foundation stone for a new church in Nathan Road, Kowloon, had been laid in December 1904. Funds for it were provided by Sir Paul Chater and land by the government. Eventually, the Church Body was persuaded that this new Kowloon vestry could share, with the cathedral, the costs of an assistant chaplain. His special preserve would be what was to become St Andrew��s, but he would still be a cathedral chaplain with duties there too.
The Reverend A. J. Stevens was appointed. He was a Durham University graduate and well travelled after curacies in Birmingham and Gateshead and chaplaincies in Odessa and South Africa, where he had been acting chaplain to the forces. He was secretary to the British Syrian Mission. His wife was more cautious in her move-ments. She would not come with him to Hong Kong at first.3 Steven��s time was almost entirely taken up by Kowloon. St Andrew��s was dedicated on 5 October 1906, by Archdeacon Banister, accompa-nied by the Reverends Stevens, Longridge and France. In the Early Gothic design with a fifty-five foot long nave, it seated three hundred people. These people no longer had to consider themselves cathedral parishioners. Mr. Stevens was now in complete control, according to the Church Body.4
Even so, Stevens was not allowed to forget who employed him. In 1907, he took a short holiday without notice. This annoyed the Church Body. They ruled that clergy must apply for an exeat before leaving Hong Kong. This tidy, boarding school rule must have lapsed. Church Council members of this era would find it hard to recall any occasion when they were asked to grant an exeat to a dean or a chaplain.
The Reverend Stevens left St Andrew��s in February 1909, but his full-time work there had left St John��s once more understaffed. In 1908, the Reverend A. B. Thornhill, a curate at St Philip��s, Litherland, was appointed as a new assistant chaplain on a three-year contract year. Thornhill was married in the cathedral by the bishop to Ada Jones St Clair, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel T. Y. St Clair of the Royal Berkshire Regiment. Mrs. St Clair was working with Queen Alexandra��s Royal Army Nursing Corps at Bowen Road Hospital. The honeymoon was spent in far-off and rural Tai Po. When his contract was up in 1911, Thornhill left.
Very shortly after, so did Chaplain Johnson. His health seems to have been unsteady during his time. In 1904, Johnson spent six weeks on a busman��s holiday in China and Japan, staying exclusively with clergy. He is reported as ��feeling healthier than when he left��. In August 1911, he went to Sydney for treatment and rest, which was quite a jaunt, but had returned to Hong Kong still in ��conscionable pain��.5 By November, it had become all too much and he resigned, leaving in March 1912. For one who was not well, he took a poten-tially jarring route home too, by train through Russia. He was mostly fortunate. ��It was quite interesting and comfortable as far as Moscow��, he reported, ��but the slow train to Berlin was most uncomfortable.��
His successor, Vyvian Henry Copley-Moyle, asked for an appoint-ment on permanent terms with a notice period, and this time there was not a peep of protest out of the seatholders and subscribers. Copley-Moyle was a man of interesting shades. When he retired fifteen years later, Bishop R. O. Hall described him in a letter to the Victoria Diocesan Association newsletter, The Outpost, as a man of ��strength and humility�� and of ��faithful unflinching life��.6 He had charm and a penchant for socialising, a flowery pen, a talent for self-promotion. Some of his fame was uncomfortable and called on that unflinching quality. P. S. Cassidy, stalwart of the cathedral, in his retiring speech to the Victoria Diocesan Association, recalled how Copley-Moyle had been the centre of controversy in 1913 by refusing to marry a high official whose wife had been divorced and being admired for his courage.7 Ultimately, he had a desire to stay in office, eventually stronger than that of the Church Body, which prised him out of it very much against his will.
One of the legends that built up around him is that he soldiered on alone for much of his term. This is not strictly accurate. For slightly over three of his fifteen years, he was without an assistant chaplain although his longest spell, which may have founded the impression, was from his appointment to February 1915, when the Reverend
H. T. H. Holman arrived. After Thornill had left, the Church Body decided, yet again, that they could not afford a chaplain. Now that Johnson was gone too, they were forced to offer $25 a Sunday for CMS clergy to take the services, which was something of a staffing low point.
In 1912, the Honourable Claud Severn, colonial secretary, sometime officer administering the government and Church Body member, offered to the Church Body 25 pounds a year for three years towards the salary of an assistant chaplain if nine others would do the same and he could select the man. Severn was a short man of otherwise considerable stature and energy, a choir soloist and clearly fond of a dramatic packaged solution. His colleagues did not want it. They raised the barrier to 300 pounds and refused to surrender appointing power.
By this point in its history, the finances of the cathedral were in a poor condition. The cost of the assistant chaplaincy had been con-siderable. St John��s had given unstinting assistance to St Andrew��s Kowloon�Xas it did to St Peter��s West Point�Xand it had suffered a loss of seatholders living in Kowloon who were now attending St. Andrew��s. Essentially, the income it could earn from parochial services and the offerings it could expect from its congregational base were simply not enough to meet its costs. It crucially lacked endow-ment and therefore investment income.
The financial crisis of this period is interlocked with the desperate need to afford assistant chaplains. They had to be resolved together, or St John��s would have faced a certain if imponderable decline as an active church. The leadership at the time could see this. There were hapless attempts at solutions and doubtless a lot of prayer until a Good Samaritan was sent along the way, a surprising one, a little shocking perhaps, and unstinting as Samaritans usually are. In 1910, a Cathedral Endowment Fund was created, but the method of attract-ing an endowment was rather limp. Bishop Lander, Hoare��s successor, was asked to write to ��several gentlemen in England��, but the response was not overwhelmingly gentlemanly. Sir Thomas Jackson gave $500 and Sir William Goodman, $50.8
Bishop Lander, from Trinity College Cambridge and with Merseyside parochial experience, had been enthroned on 23 November 1907 in the cathedral at an evensong service. Archdeacon Banister and Chaplain Johnson took the principal parts of the enthronement. G. A. Bunbury and Sherwood Jones were his chap-lains. A. J. Stevens and Michael Longridge, the Naval Chaplain, offi-ciated at the evensong in two parts. The procession from the west door included both British and Chinese clergy, A. D. Stewart and Mr. Fong, the Church Body, Dr. Atkinson, Messrs. Hastings and Clarke, and ��Chinese Lay Representatives��.9 Lander arrived committed to a merging of the English and Chinese churches and, in this, he was to be disappointed.
In 1913, a special meeting was held on the assistant chap-laincy issue. Pew rents were raised. Suggestions were heard about how brighter services could attract more subscriptions. Then the Samaritan appeared. Sir Catchick Paul Chater was an Armenian, baptised into the Armenian Church of Nazareth in Calcutta in 1846. He was a renowned entrepreneur in Hong Kong, a founder of Hong Kong Land with James Keswick and the Dairy Farm Company, a Justice of the Peace, an epic racehorse owner and member of the Executive Council.10 He was not a regular attender or officeholder at St John��s. He preferred St Andrew��s, but at this stage of his life, his view of his adopted city was almost statesmanlike and the cathedral was a prominent part of its fabric.
The cathedral was informed that Sir Paul would take round a sub-scription list for an assistant chaplain. He came back with $12,100, almost all of which he probably gave himself. Eventually, the governor, Sir Henry May, who had a personal Christian involvement in the church, doubled the amount. The money was moved from what had been an Assistant Chaplain Fund into the Endowment Fund.
Henry May��s involvement was active and political. He believed in democratic government of the church, and he showed more personal interest in it than any other governor did. On 4 January, the Church of England Men��s Society branch in Hong Kong, an increasingly influential ��think tank��, offered to raise the income balance required for a chaplain of $114 per month. May objected to there having been no circulated notice of this resolution. He demanded and, unsurpris-ingly, got postponement for more thought.11 The scheme was printed and circulated, and the governor was satisfied. The Reverend H. G. H. Griffith was appointed in February 1915, and Chaplain Copley-Moyle got his first assistant. For the purposes of parish visiting, which was as vital an element of pastoral work in Hong Kong as it would be in High Wycombe, the two priests came up with an interesting division of labour. Griffiths took the island east of Garden Road, while the chaplain took it from the west.
Henry May��s procedural objection was not the last of the gover-nor��s interventions for a more broadly based governance. He fully supported a later push from the seatholders and subscribers, whose quietness over Copley-Moyle��s appointment had been misleading. In April 1918, they petitioned the bishop to call a special meeting of the Church Body to discuss amending the ordinance to give more popular control over clergy appointments.
Their proposal was that six fully communicant seatholders and subscribers should join the six Church Body members on a special appointments committee and that no further appointments or re-engagements of clergy should take place without the sanction of a subscribers and seatholders meeting.
It would be a mistake to regard the seatholders as a detached group of unruly radicals. The largest of them in 1918 were the Hong Kong Bank, the Hong Kong Dispensary, Jardine Matheson, Kelly and Walsh, Sir Henry May, Reiss and Company, Shewan Tomes and Company, Butterfield and Swire, and Chinese Maritime Customs. Amongst them too were Mrs. Earle, Mrs. Knight and Mrs. White (wives of Church Body members), Mrs. Lander (wife of the bishop), Mrs. Dowbiggin (wife of Colonel Dowbiggin), Lady Pollock (wife of Sir Henry Pollock K. C.) and Lady Jackson (wife of the chairman of the Hong Kong Bank), all three men pillars of the church and frequently Church Body members.12 If this was revolution, it was Presbyterian, in petticoats and rolling downwards. May would have put through an amendment along the lines demanded, but ill health forced his departure from office, apparently taking the steam out of the initiative.13 The Church Body remained in control.
Griffiths left in 1918, and still in October 1919, the Bishops�� Commissary in London, the Reverend W. R. S. Holland, was saying that no candidates were available. St John��s cast its net over the empire and came up with Holman Taylor Hunt in Canada, who accepted a two-year contract of $250 per month plus a $70 war bonus. Hunt, genial and helpful, was bookishly inclined and fell easily into a job as acting registrar at Hong Kong University. On 29 January 1924, we find the Church Body holding that perennial, cover-all social, an ��at home�� in the church hall for the Reverend T. B. Powell, Hunt��s suc-cessor, F. Mason, the new organist, and N. K. Peel, the new Chaplain to St Peter��s.14
Thomas Bertram Powell, out of Pembroke College Oxford and a Sheffield curacy, had served in the ranks in the Great War. He was a perceptive, passionate young man, and in his words you read the franker spirituality and sharper-edged aversion to hypocrisy gusting through with young men who had survived the trenches. He was popular but refused a second term. He said he felt unap-preciated, which was understandable since it was discovered that, through some administrative confusion, he had been underpaid. He did enjoy one new perk of office. Early in 1924, it was thought ��desirable�� for the assistant chaplain to be a member of the Hong Kong Club. Trustee Airey stepped in with a whip-round amongst his fellows and raised $105 for the $100 entrance fee. The $5 surplus was given to the Waifs and Strays Society, a neat counterpoint to the exercise, which one imagines the socially principled Powell bit his tongue over.
He was followed by the Reverend H. V. Koop in 1928, after the Reverend W. H. Cammell had served for the interim. The last time the question was raised, somewhat rhetorically, of an assistant chaplain being needed as against the incumbent going it alone, was by Alfred Swann to the Finance Committee of the new Church Council in 1931. The committee replied unanimously that Copley-Moyle did not really manage by himself for all that long and that those days were gone. The principal and practice of having an assistant chaplain was fully established.
Well established, well before the chaplains and costing a lot less, were the cathedral��s lay employees. There were, as we have seen in the scandal of the stolen punkah wheels, church ��coolies�� or ��boys��, at least two of them, and amahs of indeterminate number. Set above them would be a European, invariably drawn from the bottom drawer of the colony��s social chest. The first mention of one in surviving cathedral documents comes in 1877, concerning Sexton G. Saunders, who was described in the trustees�� minutes as being a verger too. The Oxford English Dictionary will tell you that a verger is a caretaker who carries a staff in processions, whilst the lowlier sexton ��looks after the church��, rings the bells and digs graves. Since no burials are permit-ted in St John��s, and there was only one bell till 1870, the distinction at the cathedral was probably a thin one.
Sexton Saunders obviously was not keen on the verger side of the job. He did not want to attend military services. Whether this was out of pacifism or idleness we do not know, but he had stopped wearing his gown too. For this he was reprimanded. In explanation, he said it had been stolen so, for this, the head coolie was also reprimanded.
Saunders had complaints about his pay, which was increased from $14.86 to $15 per month. When he quit, the trustees wouldn��t assist his passage home, but they bought him a church Bible for $10, and the police magistrate recommended a successor.15 How peril-ously close to destitution this income alone would have been for a European is shown by how near it was to the more senior ranks of the Chinese labouring class. At the end of the century, the head coolie was paid $10 a month after twenty-three years�� service. In fact the coolies complained that they had to pawn their clothes every month to make ends meet. It is not surprising that two of them had to be dismissed over some minor exercise in ��squeeze�� in 1892.
If the Church Body was not overgenerous in its payments, it was not heartless in its treatment of its local staff. The widow of Head Coolie Ah Yee was given a gratuity in 1916. They showed some indul-gence towards Ah Yun, the Number 2 Coolie who replaced him. The chaplain encouraged this:
�K be patient with him. He is new �K He doesn��t understand the dignity of an English cathedral. Nor does he understand that we rank cleanliness next to godliness. He is keen �K He rushes over to some coolie and forcibly removes his hat. His zeal needs curbing and directing along right lines.
In 1925, Copley-Moyle had sacked Ah Ling, a man of seventeen years�� service, and his wife asked the Church Body to rescind that. Claud Severn, honorary secretary of the Church Body, must have felt obliged to support the action but said it should have been brought to the Church Body. They awarded Ah Ling $80 in compensation, a not inconsiderable sum, and to do further penance and probably not before time, they installed flushing water in the coolie quarters.
One touchingly naive moment came that year when someone described as an ��old watchman�� donated one share certificate from a defunct company called My San, in case there might be some dividend from its estate. The Church Body, moved by the old man��s helpless piety, gave him a gratuity of $75.16
However much Sexton Saunders had to struggle on his pay, it seems that later vergers, as they became known, were part-time and had other, more sustaining employment, usually at some junior level of government service. Verger H. J. White is an example. He lived in ��White Dell�� on Queen��s Road East, a detail provided in the forepage of Church Notes. This tags Mr. White��s social status against the honorary officeholders of the Church Body who were listed as residing on the Peak, May Road and Queen��s Gardens.
Mr. White worked in government service but at what we do not know. He earned himself a promotion to a level which would not permit him the spare time to attend to his cathedral duties, so he resigned. Very shortly afterwards, according to the Church Notes of June 1905, he died ��under very distressing circumstances leaving a widow and six children��.
Mr. White was succeeded by James Vanstone, of whom we know rather more.17 He presents us with an interesting curriculum vitae for a working-class white man in a Victorian colony. He came to Hong Kong in 1874. The reason is not told, but military service would be a predictable guess, since one of his jobs was as a police sergeant in the naval yard. He also worked as head watchman at Kowloon Docks and, hard though it is to credit, a tramway brakeman.
He may well have been a full-time verger at St John��s eventually, because his 1921 obituary described him as a ��retired verger��, and the cathedral gave him a $500 retirement bonus after seventeen years. His last address is given as the Masonic Hall in Zetland Street. This is currently the site of an electricity substation at the top of the path from Ice House Street down to On Lan Street. He was a Freemason with the title of District Grand Tyler, a rank bestowed on brothers of more modest means and a rather grand way of saying ��district main-tenance man��. In its reflection of the Hong Kong establishment of the time, the cathedral was a raft of Freemasons, and Vanstone could have been easily recommended from one job to the other.
He is described in the newspaper obituary as having been of ��the most cheery disposition and greatly liked by all��. In that case, he was so against many odds. His first wife, Lizzie, died in 1907, and he was sick for weeks afterwards. Amidst the sonorous testimonies to benefactors and heroes and those who could well afford it, a plaque was placed in her memory on the wall of St John��s nave in 1909. A year later, their daughter, age 18 and a bride of a few months, died of pneumonia. He married again and carried on being greatly liked. In a foreign land where work could be dangerous and disease stalked, to let misery linger and not push on could be fatal to men like James Vanstone.
St John��s looked for a successor. If they failed to find a suitable European, the Church Body was considering promoting the ��Number 1 Boy��. Army Sergeant Everett, a member of the Church of England Men��s Society (CEMS), stepped up to the job for the two years left of his posting, to be followed by Charles Dodson but only for a year.
By 1920, the annual cost of the verger and coolies was $887. Night-time watch of the compound was not included even though the coolies lived on the premises. In fact, security in the cathedral��s early years was appalling. An English soldier stationed in Hong in 1849 recalls, ��On one occasion the Cathedral was robbed and the thief was caught as he was leaving a side door. A Chinese Policeman caught him and the thief cut the Policeman very much with a Knife.��18
In June 1865, it was realised that there was no key to the west door, which might have explained a lot. Not surprisingly, the silver plate was kept in Government House. By 1900, a night watchman�X perhaps the share certificate donor�Xwas employed but to little effect. On one occasion he did manage to stall a robbery, but neither he nor five others roused from their slumbers, nor three policemen who responded to their calls, could catch the culprit.
Staffing, both clerical and lay, was largely unaffected by the First World War. In 1915, the choir bade ��Godspeed�� to two members off to join the war, and men were reported missing from choir practice because of war work, but what that could have been, so far from the conflict, was not explained. There was a shortage of sidesmen, but the system had only been introduced in 1913 and was not catching on well. Endacott believes that the war made little impact on the cathedral at all. It raged too far away to touch the colony. This frus-trated some. Commodore Sanderson RN (retd.) is reported to have asked the Church Body to recommend steps to promote greater self-sacrifice among British residents of the colony.19
The cathedral did its best to promote greater self-awareness amongst its parishioners and a great deal more prayer over the slaughter that was going on. Intercessions were held daily at 10.15
a.m. for those fighting, but attendances were very small. Chaplain Copley-Moyle attempted exhortation. ��Ladies passing the cathedral might spare 20 minutes for prayer in this great crisis,�� he said. ��War should be a call to women to be more earnest and frequent in their prayers.�� He pressed on with the gender distinction. ��Men living on the Peak pass the cathedral every day on the way to business. Ten minutes makes all the difference to a day��s work.��20
Holy Communion on Thursday mornings was taken with the war in mind, but not by many. When special prayers were held in ��home�� churches, these were mirrored by St John��s. The service marking the second anniversary of the war was attended by the governor, but unlike the first one, there were no parades. By the third anniversary, attendances and the offertory were down by half.
On 6 January 1918, when war news would have been more than usually depressing, a day of prayer received a fulsome response, and a record $1,238 was collected for providing the navy with minesweep-ers. On 29 December, a service of thanksgiving attended by the governor and addressed by the bishop was well attended. The United States national anthem was played as the recessional hymn.
It is unlikely that the St John��s congregation was indifferent to the war. It is probable that clergy and laity saw it through a different lens. Priests would see public prayer as an urgency to widen the sense of consciousness over death and loss. The layman going down Garden Road to the office wanted to narrow that vision of hell down so that life remained bearable as the truth went out of control.
Copley-Moyle may not have heartened everyone by publishing what reads today as religious jingoism in Church Notes from time to time. A ��General��s Letter�� in March 1915 told readers they were fighting for world progress and the furtherance of the Kingdom. ��War is a great blessing for our Empire. It is bringing out the best of our national character �K and many millions to a knowledge of the truth,�� he said. He had never seen such religious feeling amongst men in the ranks, which one can imagine. All had an ��allotted part to play for Empire, king and King of Kings��.
The chaplain himself joined in with ���K till, with God��s good hand upon us, the purpose of Germany is utterly defeated��. But the biscuit was taken by the Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic who was otherwise a progressive priest and theologian. Out he came with, ��Many of us who cannot be soldiers find ourselves envying them a road so direct and simple into the divine kingdom.��
An urgent post-war task was to build a war memorial. The Church Body, consisting of Messrs. Severn, Earle, Hogg, Compton, Knight, Moorhead and the chaplain, discussed this in January 1919. The annual meeting of that year asked them to decide on a scheme. Three were considered: a memorial side chapel in the north transept, a rood beam across the chancel arch, a memorial cross in the Iona style. The second proposal had certain striking qualities, but the third, outdoor, option was chosen. Mr. Leask of Leigh and Orange had a tough time coming up with a satisfying design. One was too expensive, followed by another which was too indistinct. As the construction of the cenotaph in Statue Square was already in view, a question was put in a Church Body meeting as to why St John��s needed a separate war memorial. Because we have indivertible funds for it, came the ineluctable reply. A bronze tablet recording the names of the dead was set in the south wall of the porch with a shelf for brass flower vases given by the Mothers�� Union. So exposed, it disappeared during the Second World War.
On Sunday, 30 January 1921, the cross was unveiled by the governor, Sir Reginald Stubbs, at 10.30 a.m. Vice Admiral Sir A. L. Duff KCB, Major General Sir G. M. Kirkpatrick KCB, KCSI and
H. H. L. Gompertz KC, acting chief justice were in attendance. Claud Severn was there repeating that tricky combination of roles, colonial secretary and cathedral secretary. They sang ��For All the Saints��, and a roll of seventy-four names was read. It was, briefly, to be the centre of remembrance of the war dead until the cenotaph in Statue Square was completed in 1923.
A spiritual spin-off from war was a fast-growing healing ministry. By early 1922, intercessions were being made in the Lady chapel at midday on the fourth Sunday, and a 7.45 a.m. Holy Communion on the second Thursday was for the sick with the laying on of hands. Prayer circles for healing were formed and met in a union in the cathedral hall on Fridays.21
On Sunday, 30 May 1920, Governor Stubbs had laid mortar on the foundation stone of that brand new hall. The day after he unveiled the war memorial, he was back to open the completed building. Discussion about providing a Sunday school room was started in 1918. When it was found that there was a 75-pound balance in the Testimonial Fund for the departed Assistant Chaplain, H. G. H. Griffith. It was sent on to him, but he returned it to seed the fundrais-ing for a room. Sir Paul Chater, entering a high season of generosity to the Church, gave $5,000, and a donor, anonymous at the time, gave $20,000. History unveiled him as M. J. D. Stephens, a barris-ter. The rest was raised by subscriptions although, a promise being sometimes easier than its fulfilment, there was a shortfall of $1,500 on commitments.
Protracted discussions were held on plans and features. There was a Plan A, no longer to be seen, which was rejected. The Church Body went for the Perpendicular Gothic in a collegiate chapel style, one also popular with libraries and mental institutions at the time. Although it is a later fussier Gothic, they thought it more dignified and in keeping with the church��s style.22 That itself was momentar-ily in peril when a later suggestion was made in the January 1923 meeting that the cathedral be stripped of its stucco and replaced with Shanghai stone in emulation of the new Hong Kong Bank building.
The ACM was held inside the new hall as soon as it had been opened. Portraits of bishops had been hung on the walls, on the sug-gestion of the governor. A further anonymous donation had come as a $10,000 fund for the annual maintenance of the hall, any surplus to be spent on musical equipment for use within it. The Chaplain, Copley-Moyle, reported that they were no longer threatened with the closure of the church, and evacuation into the new hall because roof repair against the white ants, which had struck again, could be done in stages.
The hall was reported to be in regular use immediately afterwards by the Diocesan Conference, the Victoria Diocesan Association Working Group and the CEMS. However, after a short while and an incident with the Philharmonic Society, the Church Body decided that it could not be loaned free of charge to those considered friends of the cathedral, without Church Body��s approval.23 The Philharmonic Society came to be charged $250 for using the hall for ��practices��. During one season, they asked for a discount because their concert was cancelled for lack of support.
The hall had not been built without incident. Two coolies had been killed on the site during construction, and a collection was made for their families. The cathedral congregation raised $340. It does not seem much today, but in a time when there were no workers compen-sation schemes and the threat of legal action was not one available to the lower classes, it was a generous and helpful conclusion.
One more addition to the church��s fabric which has abided was made at this time. In 1919, Mrs. Anne Bowdler donated the reredos for the high altar at the east end, in memory of her husband, Edward, who had been assistant surveyor general for twenty-four years and had donated 1,000 pounds to both the cathedral and the Peak Church. The Bowdlers lived in one of the earliest houses built on the Peak and named ��Fung Shui��.24
The reredos was a screen of panels in marble and Derbyshire ala-baster by William Morris and Co., featuring statuettes of the Virgin and St John, sculpted by Henry Pegram RA. It is a striking and an unusual feature for a church in Asia. In considering the work at their meeting in April 1920, the Church Body had wanted to replace the cross and statuettes with mosaic panels. They may have considered the look to be too Roman. Mrs. Bowdler stuck to her ornate guns. ��After much consideration���Xyou can hear the discomfort�Xthey accepted the design as executed. A year later it was resolved that the ��squares at the back of the cross be permanently blacked�� and the statuette bases gilded.
All this could be seen rather better since electric lighting had been installed in St John��s in 1907. Vision was still impaired by the use of punkahs in the summer months. Claud Severn, with his usual passion, undertook to raise money to replace punkahs with fans. This he achieved for $4,000 by 1923. ��The view of the beautiful East Window is no longer blocked by ugly punkahs��, he declared with satisfaction when the task was complete. Press publicity surrounding the event suggested that, to keep cool, you should come to the cathedral. In the years after air conditioning became commonplace, opinion was to the contrary. Some of those same fans still rotate above the congrega-tion, occasionally groaning at their joints in the middle of a sermon as though to indicate that they have heard the point often and long ago.
Recalling when he first joined St John��s in 1921, ��Bunny�� Abbott remembers what he described as ��the gentry at Matins��. The men were dressed from Savile Row, with nosegay, gloves and silver-topped cane and the ladies in taffeta and lace, with feather boa and parasol. The church did not look so smart. The organ pipes on the south side of chancel were dirty green. There was a tray a half-inch full of water under the wooden pipes to prevent contraction but which attracted mosquitos. The pews were three inches off the ground, hosting rats. There was a label with the renter��s name on it and an IOU book with pencil for putting credit chits into the alms bag, the cathedral shroff having to chase around town afterwards to collect on them.25
In 1920, Bishop Lander resigned. An inscribed silver salver and $2,000 cash was presented to him at an ��at home�� in the Helena May Institute. Lander had been particularly involved with the organi-sation of the Chinese diocese and the setting-up of the Chinese Anglican Province, the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui. Synods were set up in every diocese but for the Victoria Diocese, which involved the English-speaking churches which still looked to the Church of England, and a distinct Diocesan Conference structure had to be organised.
Lander did not like this separation. In his enthronement sermon at St John��s he had quoted the conviction held by some that ��you can neither Europeanise the Asiatic nor orientalise the European��. There is no need to try, said the bishop. With Christ as the founda-tion, a church superstructure could be built, Chinese and European in perfect harmony.26 He expressed his disappointment that this had been fallen short of at the conference��s first meeting. ��Personally I would much have preferred to have one organisation �K but unfor-tunately Church of England members who sojourn here do not learn to speak Chinese.��27 For the cathedral, he had hoped to create a chapter of Chinese and European canons, but that did not even see a beginning.
That first Victoria Diocesan Conference on 24 February 1920 entitled St John��s to send two representatives for every one hundred communicants. Its deliberations came up with some proposals as sweeping as they were inoperable. One was that Hong Kong should be one large parish under the cathedral. Another, from Copley-Moyle, attempted to neatly package away the Oxford Movement by making St Stephen��s ��more ornate�� and having sung Eucharist every Sunday for those ��often described as Anglo-Catholics��.28
Succeeding Bishop Lander on 5 November 1920 was Charles Ridley Duppuy, freshly consecrated a bishop in St Paul��s in June, where he had an African and an Indian bishop lay hands on him and believed it was the first time a European bishop had had that expe-rience.29 The 1920s were to be a decade in which Bishop Duppuy moved the diocese and the cathedral forward in a manner not spec-tacular but substantial. According to Endacott��s history, ��His passion and genius were for order and administration.�� He was keen to develop the triennial synods of the Chinese Church and to move the Church of England, the ��colonial�� side of the diocese, closer to it. He was determined on a greater diocesan role for the cathedral. His collabo-ration with the future Dean Alfred Swann and the more progressive lights on the Church Body was crucial to the pivotal 1930 reform of St John��s governance.
Duppuy��s reception and first few days in Hong Kong are a rather apt summary of a bishop��s world there at the time. He was met off the SS Somali by Archdeacon Barnett, Chaplain Copley-Moyle, the Reverends Lindsay, Vicar of St Andrews and Waldegrave of St Peter��s, the Reverend Featherstone, headmaster of the Diocesan Boys�� School, and the Reverend A. D. Stewart, headmaster of St Paul��s College and his brother Evan, who was to succeed him. They all took the Seamen��s Mission launch the Dayspring from Kowloon and chairs up to Bishop��s House.
Duppuy met the staff and the boys, took lunch with the governor and had tea with CMS missionaries. In his welcome from the governor, he was told by Sir Reginald Stubbs that he was sorry to say that, in the past, the Church had not been properly supported. He spoke frankly, ��so that the bishop might know that he had not come into a field of roses��.30
There was a public welcome at the Helena May followed by his enthronement on 5 November. He was preceded down the cathedral nave by the choir, the St Andrew��s Church Body, the Chinese Church Body, the Cathedral Church Body, the clergy, the Archdeacon of Hong Kong and the chaplain. He knelt at a fald stool in the chancel, which survives there still, and presented to the archdeacon and the chaplain Letters Commendatory from the Archbishop of Canterbury, requesting that they ��acknowledge, install and enthrone�� him.
The congregation sang ��The Church��s One Foundation��, ��God of Abram��, ��Come Holy Ghost Our Souls Inspire��, ��Alleluia, Sing to Jesus�� and ��For All the Saints��. The Blessing from Copley-Moyle moved Duppuy most. ��Be thou worthy, just, patient, sincere, as an angel and messenger of Christ��.
��Nearly all the seats were occupied �K hardly a seat vacant,�� reported the South China Morning Post, trying hard to make the best of the fact that the cathedral was not completely full. The reporter had a good eye for a quote. He pulled out of the sermon an interesting light on Duppuy��s faith. ��Christian life in the world today is not a survival of the past, it is a fragment of the future, it is eternity breaking into the world of time and it is here by the creative act of God.��31
There was a garden party at Government House on the Saturday, and on Sunday, he preached in the cathedral and in St Andrew��s. They took him to Kowloon City, where he remarked on the ��many smells��, and to visit one 80-year-old Pastor Fong. The public welcome by the Chinese church was at the YMCA, which made him ��desire very keenly to know the language��. He was never to become good at it. He visited Fairlea School and St Stephen��s College and went to a St George��s Society smoking concert. He watched a game of inter-port cricket with Shanghai and attended a CEMS social. Then he left for Canton for a welcome dinner by the Chinese vestry.
On Armistice Day 1920, just a few days after the enthronement, the South China Morning Post could report with satisfaction that St John��s Cathedral was filled to overflowing with standing room only. Governor Stubbs was present with the General Officer Commanding, General Ventris and the navy commander, Commodore Bowden-Smith RN. They sang ��Fight the Good fight�� and the ��Te Deum�� to Oakley��s ��Quadruple Chant��. They all processed over to the new memorial cross to the ��Dead March�� from ��Saul�� and laid wreaths. Guns on Murray Parade Ground fired to signal the two-minute silence. Business was suspended; trams, ferries, motor cars came to a halt.32
World war had been succeeded by financial instability. The high exchange rate, which had come with the weakening of sterling at that time, reduced the effectiveness of the bishop��s salary from 10,000 pounds to 7,800 pounds. This had ��affected Bishop Lander keenly��, according to Stubbs in his welcoming address to Duppuy. Claud Severn, rashly loyal, had wanted the bishop to be paid as though there were still two shillings to the Hong Kong dollar and for the cathedral to make up the difference, but other trustees baulked. The Church Body decided to give $100, or around 10 pounds a month, towards the shortfall. The cathedral had financial concerns of its own. As the 1920s were to be the decade of Duppuy for church organisation, it was to be the make-or-break era for cathedral finances.
On 20 April 1921, the Good Samaritan lifted the church up from the roadside. Sir Paul Chater made a donation of 25,000 pounds towards an endowment fund. His intention was that the money could go ultimately towards making all seats free and pay for more clergy. There was a distinct intent, on the part of the donor, to see the end of pew rents. It is a signpost moment in the church��s physical survival. It turned the fiscal fortunes of the cathedral around, but not all at once. Endowment funds are meant for deeper planting, not for quick and easy disbursement. The cathedral��s cash flow was still shallow and anaemic.
In January 1920, annual expenditure consisted of chaplains�� salaries, $5,000; housing, $1,800; organist, $2,400; vergers and coolies, $887; punkahs and wallahs, $235. Income was from collec-tions at $4,396, sittings at $2,966 and subscriptions at $3,382. The Assistant Chaplain��s Fund stood at $16,900, and the Church Hall Fund had $31,445, which was about to be expended.33
Pew rents were $15. Jardines�� sittings bill was $105, the Hong Kong Bank��s, $150. Individual��s bills were led by Major General Ventris, the Honourable Mrs. E. V. D. Parr and Mr. C. G. Alabaster CBE. Mr. Alabaster��s career in Hong Kong is archetypical of the Christian Englishman of the time who worked for colony and cathedral. He was the son of Sir Chaloner Alabaster, for many years a British consul to China. He was a barrister called to the Hong Kong Bar in 1909 and made a Silk in 1922. Five times a Legislative Council member, he was Acting Attorney General, 1911�V1912, and made an MBE for his services to the censorship of cables during the war. In 1917, he became a member of the Sanitary Board, the first if rather elemental body in Hong Kong to be elected.
In December 1920, finances at St John��s were in such a poor state that an offertory donation to the Diocesan Boys�� School was can-celled. In 1922 there was a $5,000 debit. The Assistant Chaplain��s Fund had to be raided. The Church Body was in no mood to illumi-nate the tower to mark the Prince of Wales��s visit that year when they were quoted $700 for the job. There is no record of the prince setting foot in St John��s anyway.
The Assistant Chaplain��s Fund was raided again in 1923, to repair the house of the chaplain, Kellet Crest, at 66, the Peak, probably the unhappiest purchase the cathedral ever made. Copley-Moyle said he needed a house because of the ��system of boxes��. This referred to the habit of quoting merely a GPO box number as an address, which made pastoral visitations difficult to arrange. He needed a house which he could ask people round to for a meal or ��a game of tennis��.
Out of the sort of regard that the chaplain earned from people,
M. J. D. Stephens, who had donated anonymously to the church hall, gave $30,000, also anonymously, for the purchase of a house for him. The Church Body asked rather sardonically if he would care to donate another $15,000. The cost of building a new house on the Peak was $45,000 and a new build was what they believed was soundest. Copley-Moyle, however, wanted Kellett Crest, owned by Mr. Steeple-Smith. Initially the Church Body rejected this, but Copley-Moyle strong-armed it into rescinding the decision and buying the house, not least because it has shared access to a tennis court.
Almost immediately a typhoon hit it, and $10,000 was needed for repairs. In addition, the original donor now found himself being asked to pay for an extra room because the house was not really big enough. The steep drive made it inconvenient and was later to prove bad for Dean Swann��s weak heart. Unabashed, the chaplain declared himself uncomfortable at losing his $150 rent allowance, because the house was sparsely furnished and equipped. So, it was replaced by a $100 ��maintenance�� allowance and $1,000 payment for expensive essentials, which apparently included cutlery.
By 1924, the Church Body found themselves with a deficit of $9,000 and nothing to cover it. This situation was partly due to an encouraging expansion of activities and to the devaluation of sterling. Now they were forced to raid the treasure chest. They sold their investment in Central Estate Debentures, which involved Prince��s Building and the Hong Kong Land Company. This they credited to the current account. The Assistant Chaplain��s Fund was empty and was closed.
At this point, Sir Paul Chater weighed in again with $9,000 to cover the original shortfall, which now left the Church Body with $10,450 in its current account. In March 1925, as moved by Claud Severn, the Church Body resolved to transfer the Chater Endowment Fund from London to Hong Kong and into Hong Kong currency. That was a small but noticeable decline of empire and severance of the link with ��home��. Chater came up with a further $31,000 to round the transferred sum back up to the originally intended $250,000.
How must the congregation of St John��s have felt having to depend on the charity of an Armenian Indian to uphold the Church of England in the empire? Tellingly, apart from the fund itself, there was nothing material inside or around St John��s to carry Chater��s name. What must Chater have thought of these British businessmen and administrators who could not even support their own church fully? Perhaps he considered himself one of them. One of Chater��s stated purposes of the original cathedral endowment was so that ��more spir-itual help can be given to British people here��.34 On 29 June 1925, perhaps a little disproportionately, he established another endowment trust fund of an equal $250,000 for St Andrew��s, making that a very wealthy little church for its day. The comparative generosity may have reflected the fact that Chater attended St Andrew��s, not St John��s.
One pivotal source of income for St John��s also carried with it con-stitutional consequences and a rumbling social problem. ��Sittings��, also known as pew renting, yielded $3,000 per annum in 1919. By that time, reserved seating in church for the wealthy was falling out of accord with the shifting social feelings of the post-war period. An incident involving the military had begun the glacial erosion of the system. In 1915, the Territorial Battalion of the King��s Shropshire Light Infantry took up garrison duties. They needed space, and seat-holders were asked to make room. It was suggested that all seats should be free from three minutes to 11 a.m., the beginning of the principle service of Sunday morning.
It has to be appreciated that many seatholders did not come to church every Sunday. Worship would begin with empty seats in rows at the front of the nave. The objective was to provide a last-minute opportunity for those further back to fill them up before the service started. The grim prospect for some seatholders under this arrangement was that, if they arrived fractionally before the start or a few moments late, they would have to sit at the back with persons of a lower social class, possibly people they employed or, conceivably, Chinese.
At the 1917 ACM, outright abolition was proposed. The motion called upon each seatholder to give an equal sum in lieu of the rent. This was withdrawn in favour of a motion that all seats should be free five minutes before the beginning of the service. As usual, the turnout had been small, and alarmed seatholders called a special general meeting which overturned the resolution. However, as a compromise of sorts, all seats were made free at evensong. This was a service perpetually unfashionable with the social set but popular with young men from the armed forces. In 1918, there was further wearing away of the institution when the regulations changed to allow free seats at 11 a.m. matins after the bell stopped. You would have had to move quickly.
The influential CEMS�Xwhich had a Hong Kong branch that met in St John��s�Xweighed in by publishing arguments against pew rents and, in 1919, the Archbishop of Canterbury��s Select Committee of Enquiry findings led to the phasing out of pew rents in England, enabled by the Assembly Powers Act of that year.
St Andrew��s abolished its pew rents in 1924. Nothing was done at the cathedral until 1927, when the wind of reform began to gust more briskly through St John��s compound. The ACM of 1927 revis-ited the proposal that all seats should be free. It reviewed the various schemes concerning the ringing of the bells and the time of the clock. Previously, it had been felt that complete abolition could not be achieved for financial reasons, but now that the Chater endowment existed, they could think again.
Responses to a recent postcard vote had been 29 for and 23 against abolition. The poll was small but the size of the hostile minority was significant. Sir Henry Pollock K. C. of the Church Body suggested that 10.53 a.m. be the deadline for freeing up the seats. Another member, W. L. Pattenden, liked abolition but favoured starting that way. T. L. King asked the chaplain how evening services were affected when seating was free. ��Better congregations,�� he replied ���K and we get people up to the front row.��35
This turned King into favouring abolition and resorting instead to special collections. P. S. Cassidy worried that companies that had the security of seats through rents might stop making donations if they lost that. There was overall a cautious new feeling in favour of aboli-tion, but the vote was for referral to the Church Body.
The Church Body commissioned another survey, and 58 out of the 107 seatholders replied and reported on 19 April 1927. Eleven seatholders, representing $540 of income, opposed abolition. Seven, representing $210 of income, were uncertain, and thirty-nine were in favour and undertook to make annual donations to the church. This was finally enough for the Church Body. Abolition was recommended to the 1928 church meeting and accepted. The Dean, Alfred Swann, was memorable at this point for recalling to that meeting the words of a clerical colleague in England: ��All kneelings in this church are free.��
The abolition of pew rents was the trigger for an organisational and inevitably spiritual reform towards which some more enlightened souls were striving and the cathedral in general struggling from the war years on. The question at the root of reform was a simple one: If you abolish seatholders, who or what is the ACM? The eventual answer was in the Church of England Trust Ordinance of 1930, which gave St John��s its current form. It is worth taking a snapshot of a point in the middle of the preceding decade to see how far percep-tion of this had come.
The time is January 1926, the frame of the picture is the Li Hall, now five years old, and in it, the Annual General Meeting of the Seatholders and Subscribers was taking place. Facing the seatholders were the Church Body, made up of the Bishop of Victoria, Charles Duppuy, the Assistant Chaplain, the Reverend T. B. Powell and the elected lay members, Sir Henry Pollock, Lieutenant Colonel T. R. Robertson, Professor L. Forster and Messrs. Compton, Pattenden and Owen-Hughes. The Senior Chaplain, Vyvian Copley-Moyle, was on leave, ��back home��. Home leaves were months long, and one did not steam back specially for anything, not even the ACM.
The assistant chaplain who had felt so unappreciated was about to be compensated by a first-class cabin for his own voyage home. He spoke of an annus miribalis for the cathedral although life on the streets that year had been less than wonderful, there having been a general strike and violent protests which were the tense political hallmark of the early 1920s. Services had improved, he reported, with an increase in congregations. Congregational singing practices, hard to imagine now as then, had been met with some surprise, he said, chiefly because there was no Old Testament authority for them. One imagines Mr. Powell is being waggish here. Not so about the Women��s Guild, whose efforts, led by Lady Pollock, in keeping the church spick and span, he praised fully. The guild had been recently formed at the suggestion of the bishop who, somewhat frustrated by St John��s weak finances, thought it might be about time that women were brought in to help. Powell believed the guild useful in saving British women from the ��endless strain of enforced leisure��. Its inaugural meeting was held on 11 November 1924.
The guild��s main activities were supervision of the cleaning of the cathedral, care of altars, church plate, brasses, linen and furniture, and supervision of Sunday schools. Lady Pollock with the bit between her teeth went on to form the ��Women Church Workers Committee��, with a misleadingly proletarian ring having her and Lady Severn and Mesdames Foster, Black, Witchell and Airey as members. Mostly these were wives of Church Body members, and one can imagine many initiatives through pillow talk. The guild itself was succeeded by the St John��s Cathedral Women��s Fellowship in 1938.
Points of wonder were that there was a Chinese sidesman and that two Chinese now sat on the Church Council. Talk of an advisory council had led to a report from the combative Reverend Powell, who had found the need for more lay involvement and less secrecy in the cathedral��s government. This council which came about is not to be confused with the one that governs the cathedral today. In 1925, that was still firmly in the hands of the Church Body, which would not be reformed until the ordinance of 1930. The council was an imitation of the recently established parochial church councils in England. It was a gathering of well-meaning volunteers acting as ��watchdogs��, in an early attempt to spread more responsibility into the laity. However, lacking a budget or specific authority, all it had was gums.
There was a hope that Chinese language services would be intro-duced, but that was still a long way from becoming an expectation. The Women��s Guild and the CEMS had started a lending library, the ancestor of the present Kenneth Tyson Library, and the cathedral now hosted a Scouts and a Guides troop. Mr. Powell hoped that the coming year would see an end of pew rents. He was short of the mark but not far.
The treasurer, Mr. Owen-Hughes, reported on how the deficit of $9,000 had been wiped away by a donation from Sir Paul Chater. Without the monies that Chater repeatedly injected into the system, the cathedral could have been a wreck and St Andrew��s and Christ Church possibly not there at all. That more modest but still munifi-cent donor, Mrs. Bowdler, who had given the reredos, died that year. She left 2,000 pounds to the cathedral, which, thanks to the weakness of sterling, went into the books as $17,872. Sir Paul Chater found a safe investment for it to rest in. Collections were down $50 and dona-tions were down by $12 over 1924. Wedding fees yielded $147 less, but just to string out financial doubt about their abolition, pew rents brought in $187 more. There had been a successful special collection for renewing the hassocks.
Bishop Duppuy announced that the Church Body had decided to give a gift of furnishings to the newly built cathedral in Foochow. One form of outreach which the cathedral has excelled at from the beginning has been to give assistance to smaller churches struggling to make a beginning. This was often at a time when, such as on this occasion, St John��s itself did not have that much for its own needs. As we have seen, support was given to St Peter��s and St Andrew��s. After the Second World War, the cathedral was to have a policy for a while of donating to new or reviving Chinese parishes in Hong Kong. As recently as 2010, it gave HK$900,000 for stained glass in the re-opening of the former Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Shanghai.
Bishop Duppuy had clear visions of a cathedral as a mother church of a diocese, a spiritual centre, a source of nurture for the parishes, a headquarters from which men and women went forth to help. A determined man, ready to make a decision that could upset, he was doing what he could to push that new age in.
The meeting was told that a new organ, ��second to none East of Suez��, was almost complete in what is now the St Michael��s chapel. Sudden changes in temperature had precipitated a crisis in the old instrument. The blowing systems were, to use an expression, ��blown��.
The boards of the three manuals were in ��a deplorable condition��. Currently, pipes were held together by wire and were virtually impos-sible to tune. Proposed was a two-level scheme with options, one at $4,000 restricted to the present organ box, and the higher at $14,000, which would involve bringing the organ forward so that its pipes in a new and more impressive casing faced onto the chancel.
The Church Body decided to go for a full renewal at $14,000. The organ builder was a Mr. Blackett, an ��elderly, bearded gentleman��, recalls future organist Lindsay Lafford. He had been a member of an organ-building firm in England named Blackett & Howden, and had come to the colony to install one of their organs in a church. Finding the climate congenial, he had decided to stay, and set up a small organ factory in the city. He recruited a group of Chinese and taught them the trade.
Blackett��s design for a new organ casing and side chapel screen was preferred over that of the honorary architect, Mr. Clemens�� which was thought too elaborate and expensive, especially in the matter of certain stars embellishing the screen overhang. Carved woodwork was felt to be acceptable if it was kept below the line of the pipes. His was not. Mr. Clemens had always been that bit less favoured for his flourish, but he had successfully designed the flooring of Phoebe May��s Lady chapel.
Bishop Duppuy reported to the meeting that $6,000 had already been raised against the costs and the healthy prospect of more to come. Fundraising had been suspended because of what was politi-cally ��troublous times��. He was referring to the strike and anti-Brit-ish boycott which gripped Hong Kong and Canton in 1925. It was inspired by a deadly shooting in a strike in Shanghai and fuelled to fever pitch36 by a major shooting incident involving British and French guards killing demonstrators in the Shamian Island conces-sion area of Canton.
Organised by the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, pickets stopped food and essentials from being shipped to Hong Kong, which was paralysed by early June 1925. The draconian reac-tions of the governor, Sir Henry Stubbs, only served to exacerbate the problem. Servants withdrew their labour. Upper-class expatriates and wealthy Chinese had to do their own housework and dispose of their own night soil. A surprisingly indomitable spirit and sense of volunteerism was shown by both groups before the boycott ended in October 1926.37 Little mention is made of the boycott in cathedral records, but it would have made a considerable impact on the con-gregation. During the earlier labour upheaval of the Seamen��s Strike in 1922, Chaplain Copley-Moyle had preached against the exploita-tion of labour and the risks of ��class war��.38 By 1925, the people of St John��s would have been sensitive to the accumulating challenge to British imperialism and a shift from social docility in the workers around them.
None of this compromised the organ, though. Photographs pub-lished in The Outpost in September 1927 show it to be of grand proportions and a magnificent sight set over the carved canopy of the bishop��s throne. Services were first broadcast on ZBW Radio in 1927 from a transmitter on the Peak, and the organ would have been played to listeners over crackling radio sets and earphones. They had the advantage over us. Only a handful of people are left alive who can remember hearing it.
Musically, these were busy years. Choirboy scholarships to Central British School Kowloon were begun. Boys made progress through grades A, B and C, assessed on ability and good work by the cathedral organist. Mr. Mason offered $50 to increase the awards to $350 in 1930. A generous $30 was given to senior choirboy Herbert Smith on leaving the colony. Mason��s predecessor, Fuller, had been an inspir-ing man, but his health had not kept pace. In December 1921, his salary was stopped because he should have been back from leave in October, but nothing was heard from him. In March, he returned but went straight into hospital. The Church Body felt ��sympathetic�� and restored half his salary from the time he was due back until resump-tion of duties but ��withheld that for the time being�� from him.
In 1923, he resigned after seventeen years in the post. His conclud-ing effort was a concert featuring Wesley��s ��Choral Song and Fugue��, Stoughton��s ��Garden of Iram��, Widor��s ��Toccata��, Arthur Barclays��s ��Allegro Appassionato�� and Fuller��s own recessional. Remarkably, in aid of the Organ Fund, Denman Fuller had raised $20,000 over the years. A great fuss was made of him at the ACM. They put a plaque to William Gould Bennett Denman Fuller FRCO LRAM on the organ casing, which also recalled his donation of a rotary blower, and they sent him a commemorative plate. To replace him, the Church Body looked for a school that needed a master who could double as an organist. This tradition lives on. Trustee Dowbiggin thought they did not need a first-class musician. Bishop Duppuy strongly disagreed. The Diocesan Boys�� School agreed to guarantee a $150 salary for a ��priest-organist��. A Reverend Evers in India was found whom Duppuy knew and said would ��probably do�� if his preaching was adequate and he could intone properly. Mr. Evers was offered the job but declined.
Frederick Mason succeeded Fuller on 22 November, not as a priest-organist but as a layman teaching music at Diocesan Boys�� School and leading it at St John��s. Relations with the Diocesan Boys�� School were closer than they were to become after it moved from Hong Kong Island over to Kowloon. The school was a principal source of choir-boys, and the bulk of the school attended the cathedral on Sundays. In early 1925, the headmaster, the Reverend W. T. Featherstone, was asked to also put a senior boy at the end of each row of boys attending evensong because they were so badly behaved.
That they might be fractious at the end of the day is hardly surpris-ing. DBS was a puritanical place, according to the account of one alumnus, W. J. Howard, who attended it between 1911 and 1919.39 On Sundays, the senior boys had to walk from Bonham Road to St John��s for the 6.50 a.m. Communion service. After walking back, all boys marched down to St Peter��s church for 11 a.m. matins. After two hours memorising the collect and the gospel for the day, they had to walk back to the cathedral for evensong. It is a wonder they had the energy for mischief.
The boys were always impressed by Denman Fuller��s skill on the organ, which drowned out their chatter. Howard recalls the volume of the great pipe organ as ��a Niagara compared to the new electronic organ��s trickling stream��. He also recalls Sir Claud Severn��s strong bass voice in St John��s choir and how, as officer administering the government, Severn would send the governor��s Crown car to fetch boys from DBS to join the choir. Gossip had it that Sir Claud almost married Miss Goggin, the school matron, a socially unusual prospect only ended by her death in January 1920. The Chaplain, Copley-Moyle, taught scripture to the matriculation class and laced it enter-tainingly with Roman history. Howard recalls that his sermons were ��refined�� and ��fully prepared with copious notes��.
Ministry to young people was expanding during this period. Apart from the Sunday school at the cathedral, one was established at the Peak Church. There was also a weekly children��s service, which was run on the novel theme of all the roles such as readers, intercessors and sidesmen, which were normally taken up by adults, being per-formed by children. When Alfred Swann took over as dean in 1928, he was reporting to the ACM that these services were a great success.
At the adult level the garrison connection was beginning to loosen. Church parade services, which required the full use of chapel, chancel and baptistery, were now to be held bimonthly instead of once a week, partly because different and disparate barracks sites had developed chapels of their own. Since broadcasting from the cathedral had begun, the early morning parade services that were still held there had become popular listening. Unlike at the lay civilian services, the church was filled with the voices of hearty young men singing hymns deliberately chosen for familiarity and simplicity and accompanied by a military band.
The Mothers�� Union was strengthening its links to St John��s. They held quarterly services in the cathedral and knitted woollen clothing for the Tsan Yuk Hospital and the Waifs and Strays Society. Could they keep and disburse collections from their quarterly services, asked Mrs. Duppuy of the Church Body? Of course they could. Who was going to argue with the bishop��s wife?
The year 1924 saw some requests for a ��laying on of hands�� service although support for it had run thin. The chaplain appreciated it, though, and lamented that ��members of the Church are far from recognising the importance of a healing ministry��, which showed how quickly the post-war interest in this had waned. For the Advent season of 1925, a shortened evensong on Wednesday evenings at 6.30 was with organ music and a discussion meeting in the hall to follow. A ��teaching evensong�� it was called.
On the second Sunday, the chaplain preached on ��Declension�X and Ourselves��. He was not talking about grammar but in the sense of moral decline. From the 1925 Lent pew sheet,40 we learn that the bishop and the chaplain split the season��s preaching at matins into three Sundays each. At evensong, there was a series including ��Life��s Helps�� from G. E. S. Upsdell, ��Life��s Hopes�� and ��Life��s Ideals�� from
A. D. Stewart, ��Life��s Burdens�� from E. W. Martin and ��Life��s Triumphs�� from G. T. Waldegrave.
The cathedral��s natural role as a civic centre for memorial and celebration continued and extended itself. The loss of His Majesty��s Submarine M1, which sank in the English Channel on 12 November 1925 with all hands, must have had an unusual impact on the British public conscience, because the crew were memorialised in a service at faraway St John��s on the 21st. Attending were the governor, Sir Cecil Clementi, former governor Sir Matthew Nathan, who may well have been on his way home from his last posting as governor of Queensland, and Vice Admiral Sir Edwyn Sinclair Scott, Royal Navy Commander-in-Chief, China Station. The service was conducted by naval chaplains, principally, the Reverend W. F. Scott RN of HMS Hawkins. The bishop preached. Six days later, most of them would have to be back again for the memorial service for Queen Alexandra, widow of Edward VII. We are told ��Prince George�� was present. This was George, Duke of Kent, who was in Hong Kong serving on HMS Hawkins.41 The dear old deaf Danish queen consort was mourned in Hong Kong by a grandson.
Freemasonry began to look to the cathedral for its public worship. The first annual service of the South China District Grand Lodge was held at St John��s in January 1926. Officers of various lodges assembled in the hall, dressed in their masonic regalia, and processed across to the church. The bishop was District Grand Chaplain. The Honourable P. Holyoake, cathedral honorary secretary, was District Grand Master. J. Owen Hughes, treasurer, was Deputy Grand Master. The Reverends Scott (naval) Waldegrave and Upsdell were Masons and assisting. The bishop wanted this to be first of a series. The offer-tory went to the building of Foochow Cathedral.
Percy Holyoake, that prominent figure of English freemasonry, was not to see another masonic service at St John��s. Within weeks, he was to be the subject of his own memorial service. ��A fountain of force and a shelter �K of big spirit and big kindly constant heart��, he died at home in England on a trip charged with ��business of high importance to transact for the colony��.42 As well as being a member of both Legislative and Executive Councils, the Church Body and the committees of the Alice Memorial Hospital, the Boy Scouts and the YMCA, Holyoake was chairman of the General Chamber of Commerce and as such was known to have anxieties over the anti-foreigner boycott being waged by Chinese nationalist groups against foreign goods and outlets.
Perhaps this was the business of importance he was in England to discuss. As such, he was the classical and the best of the Hong Kong colonialist, embodying business, government, church and charity all in one and dying in their service. It showed very clearly at his memorial. The governor attended with the chief justice and all members of the councils. Ushers officiating were Colonel Robertson,
P. S. Cassidy, W. L. Pattenden and W. Jackson of the Church Body. The building was packed with Freemasons, which meant most coloni-als of substance in Hong Kong.
Another quite different stalwart of the cathedral, Paul Chater, had died on 27 March 1926, only the day before Holyoake. The Grand Old Man, as he came to be known, came of the tradition in which burials rapidly follow death. Telephone calls were made between clergy and Church Body members, and suppliers began shortly after his death at 5 a.m. to prepare for the funeral service. It was held in the cathedral at 11 a.m., and Sir Paul was buried at 5 p.m.43 Perhaps because of the unaccustomed rush, the local English journalists did not shift themselves in time to attend. There are precious few details of the service although it is fair to assume that the establishment as described for Holyoake��s memorial would have been in a hurry to attend.
St John��s could be a busy place in that it was a crossroads for Christians journeying into China in a way that was lost in 1949 and is only just, tentatively, re-establishing itself. The year 1924 was a notable year for this. The Church of England Victoria Diocesan Conference, which Bishop Lander had been so reserved about estab-lishing, was held in the hall at the cathedral, beginning on 10 March, at the same time as the General Synod, from which language and self-perception separated it, was assembling in Canton. Bishops on the way to Canton were staying over in Hong Kong and mingling with bishops attending the conference. The formalisation of this natural fellowship was not to come for fifty more years.
The Diocesan Conference held two discussion sessions in the hall between 2.30 and 6.45 p.m. Topics were ��Where is Church Failing?�� and ��What is meant by a Mission of Help? Do we need one in the Far East?�� It was decided they did, because one showed up to inde-terminate success some time later. Probably one of the most notable visits of the era was from the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, in 1926. He was the leading Anglo-Catholic intellectual of the period and quite a wit. He must have been a relaxed prelate and a pleasure to host. He managed to play a round of golf in the morning before getting back to the cathedral to celebrate Holy Communion.
The end of an era also coincides with the peculiar ending of the Reverend Vyvian Henry Copley-Moyle��s employment as chaplain. He is often referred to as Vyvian Copley-Moyle, but from the way he signed articles and letters he seems to have thought of himself as Henry. In October 1919, he had been employed on a permanent basis with six months�� notice of termination from either side. At the Church Body meeting of April 1925, it was said that, ��in the natural course of events, the time was coming to write to the chaplain exercising the option to terminate his employment��. This was when he had only left on leave to England some three weeks before. The offer made to him was to end his employment two years after his return, or by 31 December 1927, whichever came sooner. This was thought to give him ��ample time if he so desires to obtain preferment or some other suitable employment at Home��.
The blow, because that is how it was taken by the senior chaplain, was softened with an annuity of 300 pounds for five years after retirement.44 So ready were the Church Body to foresee him not coming back at all that, if he got a job while on this furlough and his return passage to Hong Kong was saved, he would be granted 500 pounds on top. Bishop Duppuy approved this decision on 29 April without demur.
An upset Copley-Moyle initially replied on 8 June asking that his services be kept to the end of 1930. Pollock, Severn, Owen-Hughes and Pattenden of the Church Body met on 27 July 1925. Were these the men set on ending the Copley-Moyle years? Could they have been acting for a bishop whose ambitions for the cathedral no longer chimed in with the chaplain��s? They were unmoved and sent the chaplain a telegram. ��Church Body cannot reconsider as to two years and strongly advise you make every endeavour obtain preferment at Home now.�� This did not have the tenor of a normal replacement process.
Copley-Moyle accepted these terms but wanted a separate agree-ment embodying them. He was told he could have that but was refused referral of the matter to the seatholders and subscribers, where, doubtless, the whole issue would have had a breezy airing. It seems likely that the view of the Church Body members and of the bishop on this matter would not have been easily shared by the wider congregation.
By 26 January, no further news had been heard from Copley-Moyle. Perhaps he was earnestly job hunting. A telegram was sent keenly extending his leave by a month in this interest. The bishop was actively seeking replacements for the chaplain in a far-from-pro-visional spirit. The Reverend Northcott of CMS was a hot favourite, followed by A. B. Thornhill, who might be persuaded to come back again from Holy Trinity Southport, or a C. G. Mannering from St Matthew��s Brixton.
These moves were thwarted by Copley-Moyle��s return on 2 March to serve to the end. His first meeting with the Church Body must have been uncomfortable, particularly for the laity who had perhaps hoped not to see him again. The chaplain reported that he had resented the tone of the correspondence he was having with the honorary secre-tary, ��particularly over matters of legal opinion��. The two sides had clearly been threatening lawyers. His house, Kellett Crest, had been let to a Mr. Dixon of Liverpool and London Insurance Co. during his leave. Now the Church Body had put a clause into the new agree-ment with Copley-Moyle, which provided for the continuing letting of Kellett Crest whilst telling the chaplain to go and find his own lodgings, again for $150 per month. He objected vigorously. The Church Body came up with a rather vapid excuse about it only being an option and relented.
A last-ditch plea from Copley-Moyle in 1927 to extend for a further two years was turned down, but an additional grant of 125 pounds for the years 1928 and 1929 was made to him. Was this compassion, lest he was poor, or unease over the treatment he was receiving? Whatever the reasoning, these payments were to become a considerable burden to St John��s.
It is interesting to note that, on 13 September 1927, the Advisory Church Council expressed to the Church Body ��dissatisfaction in the decision not to extend Copley-Moyle��s ��contract�� to the Church Body��, and ��considerable discussion�� took place at a subsequent meeting at which Church Body members attended to explain.45 We do not know what the explanation for the termination of Copley-Moyle was or whether the Church Council was given a thorough one. One pos-sibility was divorce. On 12 October 1928, Copley-Moyle petitioned for the dissolution of his marriage to his wife, Mary, in the Divorce Division of the High Court in London. The grounds were adultery with a Doctor Percival Sandys Connelan at the Haymarket Hotel London.46 In the days before divorce by simple separation, this would have been one of those tawdry set-ups whereby a private detective would have made a pre-arranged ��discovery��.
The Singapore newspaper report�Xwhich shows how widely publi-cised around the empire the event would have been�Xtells us that they were married in 1912 and had three children. We do not know how frequently Mary Copley-Moyle was in Hong Kong or how well-known she was to the parish, but it is possible that the marriage was founder-ing for some while before it ended. For a clergyman of that period, even as the innocent party, the circumstances surrounding adultery and the need for divorce would have been painfully embarrassing. If the Church Body had got wind of this in 1925, this may explain the haste with which they acted and the avoidance of confrontation.
At his last ACM in January 1927, the chaplain registered no rancour. He was happy to detail his achievements during his office as he saw them. When he arrived, there was no room to meet except the vestry, and now there was a magnificent hall. The east end was ugly, and now there was the Bowlder reredos. The unsightly rodent-ridden seating platforms in the nave were gone. The services were now aided by a Guild of Sidesmen, the Women��s Guild looked after the church, and the CEMS made the Church��s voice heard on social matters through its local branch. Copley-Moyle was particularly proud that it was a 1919 sermon of his on the evils of the mui tsai system of inden-tured child domestic labour that had been heard by Commander and Mrs. Hazelwood and which had sparked them to begin the campaign which was working for its abolition through the Anti-Mui Tsai Society, ��a society which every Christian in the Colony ought to join,�� he had said in a subsequent sermon on 5 February 1922.
Then there was, of course, the overarching benefit of the Chater endowment, which now brought in $21,000 per annum, when the cathedral��s running expenses were $9,700. There was one small legacy of his term which had long-standing consequences. If tourists ever wonder why they have to labour two-thirds of the way up Garden Road to make contact with the Peak Tram, they have St John��s to thank for that. When proposals were made to extend the tram right down to Central on trestles, it was the Church Body��s objection to the disturbance it would cause to services as it passed by which put a stop to it.
It is unlikely that Copley-Moyle��s successor, Alfred Swann, would agree to labouring up the hill for the tram. Despite his rowing blue from Oxford, he had a weak heart. In every other sense he was persis-tent: for reform, for the sacraments and for aesthetic standards. For the first time in St John��s history, the coming of a new chaplain is a clear cause of change.
Chapter 5

The Making of a Cathedral, 1927�V1941
A thinly veiled scrap was going on between the Cathedral Body and the bishop in late 1927. Flying between them were topics as varied as the management of St John��s itself to the use of ��at home�� cards. The issues at stake represented, on one hand, the guardianship of colonial distinctions which ultimately had nowhere to go but never quite went away and, on the other, the promotion of corporate and diocesan responsibility which had much of the future to address but never triumphed entirely.
Bishop Duppuy, on leave in England, had completed the recruit-ment of the Reverend Alfred Swann, Vicar of Liversedge in the Diocese of Wakefield. From his home in Harrogate, on 17 September, the bishop announced the appointment to the Victoria Diocesan Association, the foundation of which had been one of his first initia-tives as Bishop of Victoria. He told them, ��After consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, I have decided that the Senior Chaplain of the cathedral shall have the title of Dean.�� He pointed out that the title ��dean�� was given at Holy Trinity, Shanghai. In Singapore, the clergyman was an archdeacon and in Cairo a ��sub-dean��. He went on, ��I am also asking Mr. Swann to be Archdeacon for English work in the diocese. Other diocesan arrangements, I hope to make on my return.��1
He had written too about how much he would miss Mr. Copley-Moyle, who would have gone by his return. On a personal level, that was doubtless sincere, but there is every sign that the chaplain��s departure was what the bishop needed for a clean sweep in the cathe-dral. The Church Body did not exactly share his perspective. On 6 December 1927, they went on record saying that the bishop should have consulted them on the naming and status of a dean and arch-deacon. They also noted that it was too late. He had publicised it.
Nevertheless, they set about a rearguard action. Swann would have to be inducted as a ��chaplain�� not a ��dean��, to be in accordance with the ordinance. In their traditional anxiety over anything that might divert the chaplain from his cathedral duties to them, the Church Body objected to the description of the dean having ��oversight of English work in the diocese��. Duppuy, realising probably that some-thing would have to give and that the vision he had for the office would not suffer from the loss of this loose description, agreed to withdraw it.2
Annoyance was not quite done with. By 19 December, the Church Body had entered into an argument with the bishop over the recep-tion arrangements for the new dean. It would not be privately catered for in the Helena May Institute, as the bishop had suggested. It would be held in the cathedral hall, organised by the Women��s Guild, and no cards were needed. To rub it in a little, His Excellency the Governor would be informed of the changes.
Duppuy returned on 6 January 1928 with Alfred Swann, his wife and their two children, Timothy, aged 3, and Julia, aged 3 months. He counterattacked with a printed statement. St John��s was the mother church of the diocese and the title ��dean�� more accurately described this role. He quoted from Cathedrals Commission of the Church Assembly in support of this view.3
He explained that the dean was to be an archdeacon because the bishop needed a chief lieutenant. ��This is not primarily to provide me with relief,�� explained Duppuy. It was to give the chief clergyman of the cathedral an appropriate stature with which to deputise for the bishop. It was all part of giving a strong lead from the centre and promoting ��general efficiency and the corporate spirit��.
Dean Swann could adequately fill both roles, which would not be distorted by responsibility for Canton. In harness with Swann��s appointment as Archdeacon of Hong Kong, the bishop had announced the appointment of the Reverend Mok Shau Tsang as Archdeacon of Canton, an office which had fallen silent since the departure of the last occupant, John Gray. Mok could manage Canton and the Chinese church. Swann, who had more experience of the wider world, could handle English affairs from Hong Kong.
Duppuy��s vision for a cathedral was clear and encompassing. It should be a busy centre of the diocese. It was the convector of the wider church and world, and it should send men out to the parishes. The Church Body persisted in worrying the bone. At their 8 January meeting they again responded with an explicit statement. Regarding the office of dean, ��it should be placed on record that the first regard should be had to the duties which are due to the Cathedral.��
In accepting the appointment of Alfred Swann, they had taken on board a man of spirituality, conviction and some tenacity. He was one of England��s flowers who was not cut down by the war. Educated at Rugby School and Trinity Hall Cambridge, he took a first degree in medicine. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Navy, first as an ordinary seaman and then as an officer. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross�Xthe second highest award for gal-lantry�Xfor his part in the raid on Zeebrugge.
After the war, he felt a vocation for the ministry and went to Westcott House, Cambridge. He became president of the University Boat Club and earned a Half Blue as a runner. He painted landscapes in pastels and particularly delicate wildflowers and was keen on main-taining his own car. Swann was what they called an ��all-rounder��.
The disputed reception, held in the hall, seems to have passed in harmony. The bishop declared that Swann��s titles were now three-fold: Chaplain of the Cathedral, Dean of the Mother Church and Archdeacon. The middle one survived. The honorary secretary of the Church Body, J. Owen-Hughes, assured the Swanns that they could count on the spirit of tolerance and goodwill among the community. Swann himself seemed to fire a warning shot across the bows of the community��s social sensitivities in his reply. ��Prestige and dignity unless acquired of the Spirit are useless,�� he informed them.
The installation service which followed is described as ��amongst the most impressive as well as the most reverent and beautiful that the cathedral has ever witnessed��. The choir and sixteen clergy pro-cessed to the chancel singing ��All People That On Earth Do Dwell��. For his institution, Dean Swann knelt at the altar steps to receive his licence and benediction for Bishop Duppuy. He was inducted with Archdeacon Mok. The fair English rowing Blue and the diminutive, spectacled Cantonese priest stood together at the sanctuary steps while the ��Veni Creator�� was sung in invocation. It must have been a moment when the church must have felt in its fullest sense catholic. The bishop then led them in turn, by the hand, to their stalls. Duppuy ended the service by leading the congregation in responsive prayers from the chancel steps.4
Dean Swann��s arrival was just in time for the Annual Church Meeting, and to this gathering he delivered something of an opening manifesto for his term. There to hear it were the Church Body members, some of whom who had been so upset by the bishop��s pre-sumption: Lieutenant Colonel F. Hayley Bell DSO, of the Chinese Maritime Customs, T. G. Weall of Dodwells, T. L. King, W. Jackson,
P. S. Cassidy of Hutchisons and C. Blake.
Swann was an aesthete. He stated that services should be beautiful, orderly, stately and not stiff. The music should be ��as good as we know how to make it��. The choir needed to be larger, giving a strong lead but without always being at full blast. He moved on to what was probably for him the most consuming issue of his incumbency. He was worried about Holy Communion attendances. If Holy Communion is allowed to fall from its true place, the life of the church becomes weak. ��The position of the service in people��s minds determines the spiritual level of public worship��, was his conclusion. He hoped to encourage people to attend the early Communions by laying on breakfast. This was the optimism of the new boy.
He conceded that matins enjoyed good attendance and that there was an interestingly large crowd of men at evensong. These were servicemen, mostly. The Peak Sunday school under Mrs. Stark was doing well, he thought, but the practice at the cathedral of alternat-ing between Sunday school and a children��s service was ineffectual. There should be one or the other. He told the meeting that, essen-tially, the cathedral needed to be more of a house of prayer. There needed to be more services and people praying there every day.
There also needed to be another clergyman. Apart from interim help, there had been no assistant chaplain since the departure of Powell in 1926. The gap was now filled by the arrival of H. V. Koop and his wife from St Helen��s, Lancashire. He was a tall man and a very good rugby player, which was an interesting counterpoint to his sensitivity to good design, which he shared with his wife and would complement the dean��s when it came to improving the look of the church.
Koop could also write. He launched St John��s Review in 1929 to be a more ambitious and commercially successful successor to Church Notes, which nobody was actually paying for. The ��Review�� took advertising and was charged with paying for itself, but why it should command a circulation when the ��Notes did not is not clear. There was a continued reluctance to subscribe. By 1932, St John��s Review had three hundred readers but only ninety contributed to the cost. The magazine struggled. So did Koop in finding somewhere to live.
They started him on a $100 a month housing allowance, but he had a very difficult time finding anywhere suitable.
The project which the dean walked right into and helped carry through was the reformation of the cathedral��s government. By the time of the church body��s meeting of December 1928, a draft ordi-nance was ready for the next Annual Church Meeting��s approval. Work on it had been extensive. A subcommittee of Swann, and trustees T.
W. Ainsworth and W. L. Pattenden had dedicated themselves to it with the cooperation of Mr. Justice Jacks to help with the legal tech-nicalities. Bishop Duppuy took some of the strain, which was not to help with his weakening health.
The only Church Body member to vote against reform was Colonel Hailey-Bell. On 27 May 1928, he unveiled a memorial tablet in the Lady chapel with the inscription, ��Erected by all ranks 1st Battalion The Queen��s Royal Regiment while serving in China 1927�V28 in memory of the two officers and 25 Other Ranks of the 1st Battalion who were killed on Active Service in China in 1860.�� Colonel Bell had once commanded the regiment. Four hundred fifty of its troops were on parade. He left the Church Body shortly afterwards but not before offering the view that undergrowth outside the transept wall was affecting the organ.
Pew rents, or ��sittings��, were abolished, and a new electorate was formed from those registered on the church roll. The Annual Church Meeting became the Church Body proper. It elected a Cathedral Council to which it delegated its executive authority. The ex-officio chairman of the Cathedral Council was the dean. There continued to be an honorary secretary and an honorary treasurer, and the council was to meet not less than quarterly. It could set up committees, and it did, initially with gusto. There were com-mittees for arts, publications and publicity, finance, evangelism and children, and most of them found, eventually, that they had very little to do. The Advisory Church Council, which had the distinction of an army sergeant and two Chinese as members and concerned itself mostly with the problems facing single British women in the colony, was abolished.
An 1899 ordinance, strengthened by a further ordinance of 1904, had vested cathedral lands and leases in the trustees. Now, with these changes came the creation of the Church of England Trustees in whom the fabric and the finances of all Church of England places of worship in the colony were to be legally vested. The trustees were, ini-tially, the bishop, the dean, the Vicar of St Andrew��s and two members of the laity from each of those churches, this pattern to be repeated for any new churches added. This was all framed in Ordinance No. 2 of 1930 and signed into law by the governor, Sir Cecil Clementi. The Church of England trustees were to meet once a year as a body cor-porate and could acquire property and leases. St John��s Cathedral was and remains vested in the trustees. If services cease and its purpose is no longer fulfilled, the property reverts to the state.
In effect, the trustees delegate to the Church Council the care and maintenance of the cathedral and provision for its administration. Bishop Duppuy devised this scheme of vesting and delegating, and it forms the present government of St John��s. At last, the issue of who had authority over services was no longer filtered through stained glass but made plain and clear. Services are under the management of the clergy, subject to the bishop��s approval to any major changes to customary pattern. Neither can changes in the customary patterns be made without the council��s consent. The bishop has the right of visi-tation�Xto the layman, an inspection�Xand he can use the cathedral for special services of his choosing.
The council frames the budget, raises the money and allocates it. Jointly with the incumbent, it appoints and dismisses chaplains, the organist and all employed officials under the bishop��s signature. The appointment and termination of clergy is handled in a particular way. A Board of Patronage involving the bishop, the dean as archdeacon, one lay trustee and four council members, makes a recommenda-tion to the trustees who in turn seek the approval of the bishop. The appointees�� salary is fixed by the Finance and General Purposes Committee of the council, its standing committee. To appoint a dean, the Board of Patronage consists of the bishop, the two cathedral trustees, two lay members of the council and one trustee from each of the other churches.
The first meeting of the new church council was held on 28 January 1930. At a meeting three weeks before, the Legislative Council had breezed through the legislation just after considering amendments to the Opium Ordinance. The two trustees under the new system were Mr. Justice Jacks and W. L. Pattenden. The dean��s view was that the council��s first and foremost duty was the develop-ment of primary and spiritual functions. It should have representa-tion from the Victoria Diocesan Association, the Women��s Guild, the Mothers�� Union, Sunday school teachers and music makers.5 Swann persistently urged the laity to learn how to take executive roles and govern by committee.
So that it might hold this and staff an ambitious spread of com-mittees, the council was a large one and remains so. Other members were H. J. Best, Lieutenant Colonel W. F. Christiansen, Professor
L. Forster, Dr. G. A. C. Herklots (hon. sec.), F. Mason, J. Owen-Hughes (hon. treas.), E. G. Stewart, Lieutenant Colonel F. I. Wyatt,
G. C. Archbutt, B. F. Frelder, Professor J. L. Shellshear and�Xas they were listed�Xthe Medames, Black, Brindley, Evans, Forster, Grimble, Savage and Strachan and the Misses Acheson and Griffin.
On 5 February 1930, the council received its letters of delega-tion from the trustees and got busy on the housework that had to be done to meet the ordinance. Yet within six months, Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt, who had championed the Goodwill Offerings scheme to replace pew rents had gone back to England. So had Miss Acheson and W. L. Pattenden, one of the trustees. Such were the discontinui-ties that long leave furloughs and retirements back to England caused in organisation.
W. L. Pattenden��s departure was particularly poignant. He wanted to return home to his wife and daughter and mother, who was getting old, but he regretted having to leave a place where he had spent so many years and lifelong friends some of whom he would not see again.6 Such was the regard in which he was held that a farewell party was held on 19 March 1930 in the hall, presided over by the bishop, and the dean and stalwarts like P. S. Cassidy and Sir Henry Pollock present and praising him.
They spoke of his feeling for harmony and unity and his sense of kindliness and dignity. No specific act was attributed to him. Pattenden was a presence, a spirit, an aura of peace rather than a commander or leader. The dean said Pattenden��s phone number had never failed him. He was a stalwart of the Cheero social club for servicemen at the YMCA, and those men subscribed to a present of framed cathedral photographs. He was given a cheque and gave it back as a donation for a new set of altar rails.
He recalled the cathedral he first came to at the beginning of the century as ��a dull and dreary place��. He hoped it would become ��a centre of work in the colony, a gathering place of all Anglicans irre-spective of race and nationality and real force for what the people were striving for in becoming God��s kingdom here on earth��. Testimony from such a frank and ingenuous source shows how far in spirit and activity St John��s must have moved in those thirty years.
He was right about not seeing lifelong friends again. He died in England from a heart attack in his garden in December 1932, aged
68. In an obituary written for The Outpost, it was remembered that, in the evening, straight after a cathedral meeting, he would not go directly home or to dinner but could be found down at the Cheero club at the YMCA, ��moving among the men, quietly talking��.
Not everybody could match Walter Pattenden��s calibre in selfless-ness. Dean Swann discovered early the disinclination to church work which colonial living encouraged. In an early letter in the 1929 St John��s Review he observed rather quickly that the British ��who come out to Hong Kong stray from the habits of church going because old customs and connections which send them to church are missing and other newer distractions keep them away��. He soon felt for himself what he had been talking about. At the 1931 church meeting there were fewer present than had to be elected. He found he was doing everything himself, including making all the nominations. Swann pressed hard the concept of corporate responsibility.
The church is you and I and all baptised persons. It is here to set a standard of mental and spiritual outlook. We hold an incomplete view of it. The Cathedral Council is in its infancy �K it is useful but just arouses interest in two dozen people. Every member of the roll is of a band �K we lack the idea of responsibility.7
��The congregations are quite good,�� Swann told the 1932 church meeting, ��but the fans blow us away rather easily.��