History

History
St Mary’s has its origins in Christian social action. In 1865 two Hampstead businessmen, moved by the sight of starving children on street corners, opened a home for destitute boys in Regents Park Road. Services in its iron church in nearby Ainger Road proved so popular with local people that it outgrew its premises and the present brick church next to Primrose Hill itself was built. This was opened for worship on 2 July 1872.

Musically, St Mary’s enjoys a unique place in the story of Anglican worship. In 1906, this is the church where Percy Dearmer (Vicar 1901-15) worked with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw to compile The English Hymnal. It was in Primrose Hill that congregations first sang many well-loved hymns such as ‘He who would valiant be’, ‘In the bleak mid-winter’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’. Dearmer made St Mary’s the show-piece for liturgy according to the English Usage. Our worship continues to be full of music, colour and ceremonial.

Worship in the catholic tradition of the Church of England, good music, and a concern for children and young people continue to be hallmarks of St Mary’s.

But church is not simply about Sunday. As Christians we want to make connections between our faith and the way we live and work. In partnership with our church school, St Paul’s, we strive to reach out to local families. We have a thriving Sunday School and an imaginative youthwork programme. Our Social Inclusion Programme is a contemporary expression of what the two Victorian businessmen were seeking to do in their generation.

Above all, we want people to be fully alive as human beings, and so give glory to God.

Percy Dearmer

Percy Dearmer, (27 February 1867 – 29 May 1936) was an English priest and liturgist best known as the author of The Parson’s Handbook and The English Hymnal. He was also the third vicar here at St Mary’s. A lifelong socialist, he was an early advocate of the public ministry of women and concerned with social justice. Dearmer also had a huge influence on the music of the church and, with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, is credited with the revival and spread of traditional and medieval English musical forms.

Born in Kilburn, to an artistic family, Dearmer attended Streatham School and Westminster School (1880–1881), before moving on to a boarding school in Switzerland. From 1886 to 1889 he read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1890.

Dearmer was ordained to the diaconate in 1891 and to the priesthood in 1892, and on 26 May of that year, he married 19 year old Jessie Mabel Prichard White (1872–1915), a writer (known as Mabel Dearmer) of novels and plays. She died in 1915 while serving with an ambulance unit in Serbia.

They had two sons, both of whom served in World War I. The elder, Geoffrey lived to the age of 103, one of the oldest surviving war poets. The younger, Christopher, died in 1915 of wounds received in battle.

Active in the burgeoning Alcuin Club, Dearmer became the spokesman for a movement with the publication his most influential work, The Parson’s Handbook. In this book his intention was to establish sound Anglo-Catholic liturgical practices in the native English tradition which were also in full accord with the rites and rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer and the canons that govern its use, and therefore safe from attack by Evangelicals who opposed such practices.

The Parson’s Handbook is concerned with general principles of ritual and ceremonial, but the emphasis is squarely on the side of art and beauty in worship. Dearmer states in the introduction that his goal is to help in “remedying the lamentable confusion, lawlessness, and vulgarity which are conspicuous in the Church at this time”. What follows is an exhaustive delineation, sparing no detail, of the young priest’s ideas on how liturgy can be conducted in a proper Catholic and English manner.

In 1901, after serving four curacies, Dearmer was appointed the third vicar of our church here in Primnrose Hill, where he remained until 1915. He used the church as a sort of practical laboratory for the principles he had outlined, revising the book several times during his tenure.

In 1912 Dearmer was instrumental in founding the Warham Guild, a sort of practical arm of the Alcuin Club and Parson’s Handbook movement, to carry out “the making of all the ‘Ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof’ according to the standard of the Ornaments Rubric, and under fair conditions of labour”. It is an indication of the founders’ outlook, emphasis and commitment to the English Use that it was named for the last Archbishop of Canterbury before the break with Rome. Dearmer served as lifelong head of the Warham Guild’s advisory committee.

While at St Mary’s, he worked with renowned composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and as musical editor, Dearmer published The English Hymnal in 1906. He again worked with Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw to produce Songs of Praise (1926) and The Oxford Book of Carols (1928). These hymnals have been credited with reintroducing many elements of traditional and medieval English music into the Church of England, as well as carrying that influence well beyond the walls of the church. In 1931 an enlarged edition of Songs of Praise was published. It is notable for the first appearance of the song Morning Has Broken.

Politically, Dearmer was an avowed socialist, serving as secretary of the Christian Social Union from 1891 to 1912. He underscored these values by including a “Litany of Labour” in his 1930 manual for communicants, The Sanctuary. After being appointed a canon of Westminster Abbey in 1931, he ran a canteen for the unemployed out of it. His ashes are interred in the Great Cloister at Westminster Abbey.