When I visit London, and disembark at Fenchurch Street Station, so long as I’m not in a hurry I try to step round the corner to the nearest church, St Olaves which stands at the corner of Hart Street and Seething Lane. I’ve visited it many times, and hope to visit it many more. Despite all its splendid rivals, this small and unassuming building is my favourite of the London Churches.
At first glance, it has little to catch the eye. It’s medieval, built circa 1450, has a small tower of the seventeenth century, survived the 1666 Fire, and its external walls are something of a patchwork due to repairs made necessary by wartime bombing which gutted the building. So what is special about it?
The first thing the visitor should do is walk around the side of the church, to the churchyard with its entrance in Seething Lane. Betjeman described this building as ‘a country church in the world of Seething Lane’, with ‘a real churchyard not got up as a garden of rest’. He was correct: unlike most City churchyards, this one is small and surprisingly rustic. The ground is elevated, due to thousands of burials and a plague pit, so elevated that steps actually lead down to the old south entrance. An oblique line scars the exterior of the building, the last vestiges of a stair which once led to a gallery pew that was reserved for staff from the Admiralty offices in Seething Lane. In this quiet ground are interred Mary Ramsay, reputedly the woman who brought the Plague to London, and an eccentric Elizabethan known as ‘Mother Goose’. This woman used to knit little boots for her geese so that their feet wouldn’t get sore as they were herded to market. The 1658 arch over the churchyard’s entrance is crowned with a cluster of skulls, a Memento Mori carved from the stone, and it bears a Latin inscription which translates as ‘death is a light to me’. Charles Dickens was much taken with this. In his ‘Commercial Traveller’, he referred to it as the church of ‘St Ghastly Grim’, and wrote of ‘…a small small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross bones, larger than life wrought in stone.’ After a century and a half, his description is still accurate.
Through the north entrance in Hart Street, one enters a small vestibule before stepping into the church proper. Now it is possible to see why it is special. Following the wartime damage, the interior was lovingly restored, and the small building gives an almost palpable feeling of intimacy. The walls hold many colourful monuments from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, all in excellent condition despite the damage the church sustained in 1941, and all worthy of examination and admiration. It is clerestoried, with north and south aisles of three bays. There is modern stained glass but, unlike some other churches which have been cast into gloom by this form of decoration, St Olave’s maintains brightness. The pulpit is 17th century, originally came from the now destroyed St Benet’s Gracechurch and may be a Gibbons work, and there are swordrests and Communion rails which date to the same period.
However, despite its ingrained sense of intimacy, there is one other aspect of St Olave’s which adds to its atmosphere, and that is its most important historic connection: the parishioner Samuel Pepys. If ghosts really exist, then the spirit of this colourful Restoration figure surely blesses the church with his presence.
Pepys lived and worked for the Admiralty, and he lived in Seething Lane. The site of his home is now a small garden adorned with a bust of the Diarist. He would dutifully visit the church on Sundays, strolling with other Admiralty staff up the steps that led to the Gallery on the south wall. The sermons did not always please him, he is honest enough in his Diaries to admit that he sometimes slept soundly through them.
Although he also admitted impure thoughts about his maid, and had an affair with his wife’s best friend, there is little doubt that he thought the world of his spouse Elizabeth. She died in 1669 at a sadly young age, but Samuel ensured that her memory would continue. After her burial in a vault below the altar, he commissioned the sculptor John Bushnell – who was known for carving figures in animated poses, for example in conversation – to carve a bust which now adorns the wall high over the Sanctuary. Pepys died in 1703 and was also interred below the altar.
And this is what I mean by intimacy. Why is the bust set so high? Stand against the south wall of the church. Directly above your head is a memorial to the Diarist, set where the Admiralty pews were once fixed. This is where Pepys would have sat.
And now see what he would have seen. Every Sunday, when he sat in that pew, he would have been able to gaze across the church straight into the eyes of his much-mourned Elizabeth. When I first noticed this, I smiled to realise that such affection could still be traced after three centuries, and I could almost feel the ghost of Samuel Pepys standing at my shoulder and saying, “Yes, I know, I’m a sentimental fool!”
But it won’t be Pepys I finish with, it’ll be Dickens, and his own amusing anecdote:
“I once felt drawn to it in a thunderstorm at midnight. ‘Why not?’ I said, in self-excuse, ‘ I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it worse to go and see St Ghastly Grim by the light of lightning?’ I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes. Having no other person to whom to impart my satisfaction I communicated it to the driver. So far from being responsive, he surveyed me – he was naturally a bottle-nosed, red-faced man – with a blanched countenance. And as he drove me back, he ever and again glanced in over his shoulder through the little front window of his carriage, as mistrusting that I was a fare originally from a grave, in the churchyard of St Ghastly Grim, who might have flitted home again without paying.”
Author Mark McManus
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