OF SIR JOHN SOANE’s three churches, the first was St Peter’s, Walworth. It was a daughter church of St Mary’s, Newington, at the time in the diocese of Canterbury, and was consecrated by the Archbishop in 1825.
A concert last month at St Peter’s celebrated that 200th anniversary with an eclectic choice of music connected to Walworth. It began with Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, which had been sung at the consecration. The Te Deum was the only piece that was accompanied by organ (Harrison & Harrison, which has replaced the original Lincoln).
Externally, the church remains more or less as built. Internally, the galleries are a surprising survival, but little else remains from Soane’s day. The changes have had the usual causes: Victorian Anglo-Catholics, a German bomb in 1940, a post-war reconstruction by Thomas Ford, and a reordering in 1982. The church’s Bechstein piano came through the bomb damage unscathed, and was the accompaniment for the rest of the concert.
The programme progressed to a non-Walworth choice: the now largely forgotten writer George Soane was the disreputable and disinherited son of the architect. Two works were sung: “Laugh, my Girls!” (composed by Edward Loder, for the opera The Night Dancers) and “The Sun is o’er the Mountain” (by Sir Henry Bishop, for the opera Aladdin).
Many music halls were located near Walworth, and the programme included songs by Walworth’s Charles Collins and Barry Ono. Charlie Chaplin was born in Walworth to two music-hall performers, and began his career in the music hall; his much-recorded song “Smile” was performed by the Rector, who both sang and played the saxophone, to a piano accompaniment.
The little-known composer James Knottesford Ansell (1776-1860) had a music shop off the Old Kent Road. Late in life he wrote settings for O salutaris and Tantum ergo; these were sung, appropriately, by the Rector and curate. One of the Anglo-Catholic innovations had been the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament; a white lamp continues to burn outside the Lady chapel.
The concert ended with an enthusiastic singalong of the music-hall favourite Collins’s “Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way”.
It was not all backward-looking. Samuel Palmer was born in Surrey Square near by in 1805. One of his poems was “With pipe and rural chaunt along”, which, for the concert, was set in a new composition by Augustine Sisay. Sisay is an 18-year-old student of mechanical engineering, but music is his hobby, and this very competent composition is his first, and was his first public performance as a pianist.