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In Memoriam
23-Jul-09
IN MEMORIAM
Gordon Taylor, M.A, V.R.D .and Bar, F.S.A., R.N.R.
24 October 1915-27 June 2009.
Rector of St Giles-in-the Fields January 1949- 31 December 1999
If you want to know what Gordon Taylor was like, look round St Giles’s. The church and parish to which he gave nearly fifty-one years of his life, and which he loved with all his heart, along with Audrey, his wife, and Vanessa and Mandy, his daughters, and also the Royal Navy, in which he served as a chaplain from 1939 to 1946, is the memorial of his ministry as a priest in the Church of God.
When he first saw St Giles in November 1948 it was a sea of desolation. The paint was peeling off the walls of the interior, the windows were boarded up, the glass have been blown out by a bomb which had lifted the lead on the roof, through which, as a result water poured, and had caused the beam over the rector’s stall to rot through. The Vestry House was full of rubble, in which was buried the wicker work parish coffin for burying the poor. The Churchyard was a shambles, and fenced with chicken wire. The rectory had gone, and when he and Audrey were shown the flat in the School in Endell Street, where the previous rector had lived, they noticed that the bed had not been tidied since his body was removed from it six months before, and his housekeeper had absconded with the Parochial Church Council funds. St Giles was well on the way to following Christ Church Endell Street, St John’s Drury Lane, St John’s Charlotte Street, St John’s Red Lion Square, and numerous other local churches into the hands of demolition contractors.
Yet this bright, energetic, thirty-three year old said ‘Yes’ to Bishop Wand’s offer. His arrival in St Giles was not encouraging. As he often recalled, the sparse congregation at his collation by the Bishop were not even offered a cup of tea after the service, and at his first Parochial Church Council meeting no one was willing to be treasurer. They suggested that he, as his predecessors had done, should be treasurer. He refused.
He, with the devoted support of his newly-married wife Audrey, set out to put matters right. He drove the restoration of the church over the next four years. He raised the money, got the structure put in good order, and oversaw the redecoration of the interior which John Betjeman described as one of the best post-war restorations in London. He had an eye for detail. He persuaded Watts, the church furnishers to revive an early eighteenth century fabric design and colour for a new cloth for the altar at which he reverently celebrated the Holy Communion for more than fifty years. He picked up the chandeliers in antique shops. He rescued from the oblivion of the crypt the font designed for St Giles by Sir John Soane, a parishioner and a vestryman, for the baptism of the children of the parish. He had restored the pulpit, for which Audrey made the cushion to a period design, dying the material and the tassels herself, to get the shade he required, and to remind himself and other preachers what they were about, he had painted in gold, where only the preacher could see it, on entering the pulpit, the words of Greek strangers to one of Jesus disciples ‘ Sir, we would see Jesus’, and from the pulpit he preached robust and often riveting sermons, to help those who came into St Giles to see Jesus.
He recovered from grasping secular hands St Giles’s old mission chapel in Seven Dials, which had once been John Wesley’s headquarters in London, from which he rescued the pulpit, now to be seen in the north aisle, and, recognising that in a changed world, Seven Dials no longer needed a separate mission, he ensured that the old chapel became part of the endowment of St Giles that any central London church needs to fund its ministry and mission. He restored the finances and endowments of the parish, recognising that, without money, there can be no ministry or mission.
As part of his ministry in St Giles parish he built good relations with Holborn borough councillors and the town hall staff, who, in gratitude for his ministry gave the gates of the Churchyard through which his body was carried to its last resting place. He developed a ministry to people who worked in the parish, and with local businesses and companies and institutions, and became the president of the Art Workers Guild in 1970. His Thursday lunchtime services, started in 1950, became crowded, with an average attendance of a hundred or so. A men’s choir from the local business houses was formed to sing at the service. Phillips Electrics, whose head office was in the parish gave the flood lighting for the Queen’s coronation in appreciation for his ministry.
He and Audrey worked for the poor of St Giles, for St Giles was still a very poor area, in the 1940s still the home of flower sellers and barrow boys who laboured in Covent Garden fruit and vegetable and flower market. New Compton Street and surrounding streets of ruinous Georgian houses were full of brothels. Some of Audrey’s women’s fellowship members had very interesting pasts. He oversaw the modernisation of St Giles’s Almshouses in 1954, improving the accommodation for the almswomen, and again sorted out the finances of the parochial charities for the benefit of the poor, as a result of which many people’s lives were improved. As when he had been a naval chaplain, he visited the men in the engine room before going to the wardroom, so he and Audrey cared for the poor of St Giles. The stone tablets which were placed on the walls of the church in his time all commemorated people who worked here for St Giles with their hands to the glory of God.
He cared deeply for the heritage and history of St Giles, honouring those who had gone before him, and had contributed to the common good. He brought in from the Churchyard the memorial to George Chapman, the Jacobean dramatist, and first translator of Homer into English, put up by Inigo Jones. He celebrated St Giles’s links with the founders of Maryland and Sydney, by putting up memorials to them. He celebrated St Giles’s connection with the Roman Catholic martyrs executed at Tyburn and buried here in the Churchyard, by giving Pope Paul VI, in a private audience, a copy of the entry recording their burials in our parish registers.
Gordon Taylor, as rector, worked to endure that Christ was made known here to the people of St Giles whom the Bishop had entrusted to his care, and he worked to preserve and beautify the church for present and future generations, and to defend the Church against all-comers, and to raise the profile of St Giles. He, along with Austen Williams, the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, led the opposition to the whole sale redevelopment of Covent Garden, and he fought a proposal that St Giles Almshouses should be demolished to build a dual carriage way through Covent Garden to improve the traffic flow.
His six years as a war-time Royal Naval chaplain in his late twenties, which was in many years the high light of his life, and his reference point for all his future activities – more than fifty years after his naval service he told a new archdeacon that St Giles was run ‘naval-fashion’.- had enabled him to test himself out, and gain experience of mixing across social, racial, and age boundaries. There he learned to talk simply and confidently about the Christian faith. Those years were a source of inspiration from which he drew for his fifty years ministry at St Giles.
He began his ministry at St Giles as one of the youngest parish priests in London, and ended it as one of the longest-serving and oldest parish priests in the diocese. He should almost certainly have been offered a new challenge after he had achieved the post war reconstruction and revival of the church and parish. If that had happened who knows what he might have achieved. Sadly successive Bishops of London ignored his talents, and left him to the very difficult task of adapting his achievements to a changing world, in which he felt less comfortable, and in which he received no support or even acknowledgement from successive bishops, and in which he was desolated by Audrey’s death in 1981. He showed indomitable spirit in maintaining the traditions of the Church of England, as he had received them, and many people discovered that behind that often fierce exterior, there continued to be a heart of broad sympathies, and a kindly, if robust, pastor. Many people owed a lot to him.
As human beings created in the image of God, we have the awesome responsibility of reflecting to our fellows the nature of our maker. A priest has the duty of mediating the saving love of God made known in Jesus Christ to the people committed to his or her charge in their generation. Gordon Taylor, by God’s grace, sought for five decades to do that here. He offered his life to God as a priest seventy years ago, and God mysteriously, as God always does, worked through him, in his strengths and weaknesses (for it is in weakness that God so often reveals himself) in ways which Gordon may not have realised, and we may not have noticed.
For this we give thanks and rejoice that, as Gordon lives so vividly in our fond and loving memories as a father, grandfather, friend and priest, so he is held in God’s forgiving love, which unites us all.
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