Fascinating was never the word I used to describe it, particularly the divorce bit, which I literally redacted from my copy. In addition to that nearly all of the services I modified to get rid of nauseatingly PC language.
Later on I discovered the best bits were actually just taken from the classic Edwardian-era liturgical boom
Devotional Services for Public Worship, a beautiful liturgical book by the extremely high church British Congregationalist minister Rev. John Hunter, D.D., who served at a number of churches, most notably the King’s Weigh House, which was at the time the largest Congregationalist church in the world.
Later, in 1920, an equally inspiring minister took over, who, like me, sought full ecumenical reconciliation, and this was reflected in his service book,
An Order of Divine Service for Public Worship, which alas is not quite as beautirul as Devotional Services, but still a very good service book, and which, in a manner I greatly appreciate, combines Anglican, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox material. He was ahead of his time as both an ecumenist and a pacifist, and his goal of turning the King’s Weigh House into an ecumenical bridge church failed; by this time he was a widower, and felt the only remaining course of action was to join the Roman Catholic Church as a priest.
After WWII, the King’s Weigh House merged with another Congregational church as the population in the Square Mile that is the City of London plunged, as the area went from being largely residential to almost exclusively commercial (the same did not happen in the adjacent City of Westminster or the other Central London buroughs). This transition may have been aided by the fact that the City is the only local government in the world where the electorate includes businesses (with each business receiving a certain number of votes based on how many people they employ full time in the City). Fascinating and deserving of a thread in its own right is the City of London, which should not be confused with London as a whole, it rather being the oldest part of the city, roughly one square mile in size with St. Paul’s Cathedral near to the center, connected to the adjacent City of Westminster, home to the eponymous Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament by the Strand and Whitehall, and across the river from Southwark and Greenwich (with Lambeth and Wandsworth further up the Thames).
However, the story does not end there - fortunately, the beautiful building that was once the King’s Weigh House is now the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, something I think Dr. Orchard would be happy about. The unusual name of the former Congregational church, by the way, is derived from the fact that it used to be the historic original home of what is now Her Majesty’s Customs, back when the City of London itself was a major port; it became obsolete in the 19th century with the development of the massive seaport now known as the Docklands, which was famously redeveloped into incredibly posh office space starting in the 1980s, as commercial shipping moved to modern deep water ports elsewhere in the UK (a trend which had started a century earlier, with Liverpool and later Southampton home to most of the great ocean liners like the
Titanic, the
Queen Mary, and others, as the Thames was too shallow for the larger ships, although Cunard did launch a smaller ocean liner in 1936, the second
Mauritania, after the famed original
Mauritania was retired, which looked like a miniature version of the
Queen Mary, specifically for direct service from New York to London (the original
Mauritania served Southampton).
