Lost in the Blitz: the buzzy churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral
Cathedral windows got smashed in football matches, and a foal was baptised in the font
IN THE SHADOW OF ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL by Margaret Willes 320pp, Yale, £25, ebook £17.99
★★★★ ★
The most celebrated image of St Paul’s Cathedral is the photograph taken during the Luftwaffe raid of December 29 1940. Its dome stands serene amid the fire and smoke. Churchill had issued a message that “St Paul’s must be saved at all costs”, and the efforts of firefighters – and luck – saw Wren’s masterpiece survive intact. The same could not be said for its surroundings – the subject of Margaret Willes’s enjoyable new study – much of which were burnt to the ground.
Fire is a thread that runs through this book. The modern cathedral arose from the conflagration of 1666, which not only rid London of plague, but also destroyed its vast medieval predecessor. When the third of London’s Anglo-Saxon cathedrals had succumbed to fire in 1087, Maurice, Bishop of London, aided by the ample pockets of his king, William Rufus, built a “Romanesque cruciform structure on a grand scale”. In the 13th century it grew grander, with the addition of the “New Work”, a steeple more than 200ft high: it was to remain the tallest building in the City of London until 1964. Tourists – St Paul’s has always attracted them – who slogged their way up the tower “made whooping noises when they reached the top, dropping stones into the garden of the minor canons and onto people walking within the cathedral itself ”. They would have looked down upon a churchyard boisterous and busy, often at odds with the cathedral’s religious solemnity.
Wrestling bouts were a regular feature, while football matches caused damage to windows. But it was the book trade for which St Paul’s Churchyard became famous, a manufactory and exchange for an exponential growth in knowledge, which went hand in hand with the Reformation.
Wynkyn de Worde, who had inherited Thomas Caxton’s Westminster printing press, decided in 1500 to transport his machinery east to a shop on Fleet Street, in the shadow of St Paul’s, at the “Sign of the Sun”. De Worde, and those printers that followed him, linked up with the scriveners, illustrators, booksellers and binders who had produced books before the arrival of printing. They had already formed themselves into a company of stationers, so called because they sold their wares from barrows or stalls known as “stations”. Willes, a liveryman of the Stationers’ Company, relishes this hive of industry; it is when she writes of the book trade that her own book comes alive.
The trade was innovative from the off. John Rastell, one of the first to work from within the churchyard, published a translation from the Italian by his brother-in-law Thomas More of the life of the Italian philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico. His own morality play, The Nature of the Four Elements, included a three-part song that was the first attempt to print a musical score. His contemporary Richard Pynson was the first printer in England to adopt Roman or “white letter” typefaces, more legible than Gothic type.
The Reformation raised the stakes, literally and metaphorically. The Protestant writer John Foxe believed that print technology was part of God’s providential design, writing that Lord used “printing, writing and reading to convince darkness by light, error by truth, ignorance by learning”. He had good cause to believe so. The reformist printer John Day, having lain low during the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor, celebrated the return of a Protestant monarch, Elizabeth I, by collaborating with Foxe on his Actes and Monuments, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a grim, compendium of the ordeals of men and women – and there were 300 or so – burnt at the stake during Mary’s reign. First published in 1563, it ran to more than 1,800 highly illustrated pages, and became the touchstone of English providentialism for generations, selling 28,000 unabridged copies between 1563 and 1616.
St Paul’s Churchyard witnessed its own executions when it was chosen in 1606 as the site for the dispatch of five men implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. The decision was not without controversy; one critic protested at the use of this “place of happy memory” as a charnel house. “Noxious chaos”, as Willes puts it, returned during the Civil Wars, when the very survival of England’s cathedrals came into question. On one occasion, parliamentary soldiers baptised a foal in the font and smashed stain glass, though the statue of John Donne, poet and former dean, was left intact.
The fire that began on the morning of September 2 1666 in Pudding Lane – named for produce akin to black pudding – allowed Wren’s Phoenix to rise from the flames, though he would be 76 by the time the dome was completed in 1708. Its churchyard remained a haven of the book trade, though unlike the cathedral, much of it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. “Simpkins, Whitaker’s, Longman’s, Hutchinson’s… are gutted shells”, noted one observer on that September morn in 1940. The last of them, Routledge & Kegan Paul, upped sticks in 1976, driven out by rent rises rather than incendiaries. The churchyard is much diminished, the cathedral endures.
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