COSMOPOLITAN rarely refers to the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell, but he “might well approve of Tinder”, a writer in that magazine once suggested. Whether he would have grasped “swiping right”, the dating app has united two young churchwardens at the London church where he is buried, and he would, perhaps, be pleased to hear of their union.
Oliver Flory and Catherine Campbell, wardens of St Giles-in-the-Fields, were married there last month, having met on Tinder ten years ago. Both had been raised as Anglicans. Oliver was already attending St Giles’s, after seeing a play there. Catherine soon joined him.
‘It’s a modern-day fairytale’
The 1662 Prayer Book rite was used for their wedding on 30 August, and was an opportunity to “show off St Giles in all her glory” to a packed church, with music by Purcell and hymns composed of “all bangers, no clangers”.
“We were sitting at the front on the two chairs and the anthem was playing and we had a moment to look out into our church full of our people and see them all together and it just felt really special,” Catherine said.
She recalled how she had initially found the BCP service to be slightly “stuffy”, but reflected that “the more you get into it, the more you start to hear the cadence in it, and it becomes this wonderful framework. I feel you hear a new word in it every time you listen and it shifts and changes. It takes on different complexions, I think, depending on time of the year.”
As a married couple, they continue to serve as churchwardens — an office that Oliver has held since 2018, before Catherine was elected in 2022. Having grown up in Bermuda (Marvell’s “isle so long unknown And yet far kinder than our own”) with a churchwarden father, she said that she had memories of him travelling by moped during hurricane season “with giant sheets of plywood, boarding up the almshouses”. While the weather is less dramatic in central London, her husband said that they had recently had to use nappies to soak up water ingress.
Churchwardening has brought them both joy. “I think we have been a really good team,” Catherine said. “We had to develop ways of working together on a big project.” Being a lawyer by profession “is being inherently a bit of a stickler”. Oliver — who said that his wife was “much better than I am” — hoped that she might continue for another 15 years, as only the second woman to be a churchwarden in the parish.
Against the backdrop of a national shortage of churchwardens, both spoke encouragingly about the office and what it involves.
“I won’t sugar-coat it: it’s a lot of responsibility,” Catherine said. “We are incredibly lucky that we have a network around us of very knowledgeable people. But it’s really rewarding. You have an opportunity to be part of a bigger project. You don’t need a sign-up fee, you get to meet people from walks of life, from ages and stages of life, different generations, that you wouldn’t get to within a social-media bubble, school bubble, sometimes even a work bubble.”
“I feel so much more involved in the life of the parish; I have made many more friends out of parishioners,” Oliver said. “It’s very unusual for people of any generation, let alone our generation, to be involved in a project that’s maybe a hundred-year project, that you will never ever see the end of, and you are just helping that.” Before stepping down, he said he hoped to see the floor of the crypt levelled, to give a “flying start” to a future generation “so they can do what they want with it”.
As part of their duties, they recently led the “beating of the bounds” around the parish. Worries about succession were diminishing, she said, as St Giles’s was seeing signs of its own quiet revival. “It’s a cumulative thing. One younger person starts coming; another walks in.”