Andrew Saint | In Memoriam

August brought the sad news of the death of Andrew Saint, co-author of our recent parish history. Wil James offers a reflection on Andrew’s singular contribution to St Giles.

It is a sad truism that one often only really learns about someone when attending their funeral. When you have only known that person for a brief period later in life, this is even more the case. I first encountered Andrew Saint in late 2018, when Rev. Alan Carr proposed the idea of publishing a new history of the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. Over subsequent years, as I helped to shepherd the book to completion, I worked closely with Andrew. Our exchanges were often over the phone or on unreliable Zoom calls (which I suspect he hated), as the demands of the Covid era required, but eventually we were able to gather together last spring to celebrate the launch of the book with his co-author, Rebecca Preston.

It was, all in all, a brief acquaintance. If you only encountered Andrew at last year’s book launch or one of the subsequent talks, you will have had an even briefer impression of the man. Yet, despite the brevity of Andrew’s association with St Giles, his contribution to putting the church and its surrounding parish into the wider historical context of London is a lasting legacy for which we must all be enormously grateful.

My first impressions of Andrew situated him squarely amid the broad stereotypes that attach to historians – somewhat ascetic, impatient with woolly thinking… and perhaps a little cantankerous. He was a deeply private person and did not give away his opinions freely; nevertheless, over the years of collaboration on the parish history, I discovered that beneath the surface, he was immensely generous both with his time and his scholarship. Of course, he had a profound knowledge of London and its buildings but, more fundamental, he had a deeply humane appreciation for the people who have, over the centuries, breathed life into our city. Although he never disclosed this himself, as the son of a vicar, I sense he also had a grasped the role the church has attempted to play in knitting those people into communities such as that around St Giles.

We are poorer for the loss of Andrew’s intellect and imaginative understanding of the past. The glowing obituaries he has received in The Times, The Guardian and Apollo reveal the extent of his scholarship and show just how fortunate we were to have won his commitment to our parochial project. But among his many valuable contributions to our understanding of the past, he has left a lasting legacy for St Giles-in-the-Fields that has meaning not only for the past but also for the future.