It was 9.45 p.m. and yellow light beamed from the church windows into the rainy night. As I opened the door the last bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ reverberated from the chancel. This was a rehearsal by the London Docklands Singers.
‘Everyone knows the “Hallelujah Chorus”,’ said the conductor, Andrew Campling. ‘It’s in the DNA of the public.’ In his 33 years’ conducting he has put on Handel’s Messiah ten or 12 times.
He can’t help laughing at the judgment of the librettist of Messiah, Charles Jennens, who in 1743 wrote of Handel in a letter: ‘His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great haste, tho’ he said he would be a year about it, & make it the best of his Compositions. I shall put no more Sacred Words into his hands, to be thus abus’d.’
Handel made a few revisions, and the two men soon worked together again (on the oratorio Belshazzar). Messiah has never fallen out of popularity. It’s as English a thing to go to hear it at Christmas as to go to a pantomime. This year, Hereford Choral Society is performing it in the cathedral by candlelight and on the same day Harrogate Choral Society will sing it in the Royal Hall of the spa town. It works with vast choirs or almost as a chamber work.
Campling started the London Docklands Singers in 1992 with eight or nine members. Now there are 65. It is certainly not a Canary Wharf bankers’ hobby choir. Singers from many backgrounds live on the Isle of Dogs or travel from elsewhere in London on the good transport connections. Ages run from students to pensioners. His father still sings, aged 95.
‘Singing is a way of communicating to other people when ordinary words sometimes fail’
There are no auditions, but new members are expected to be able to read music, turn up regularly and not put off the others. ‘I’ve only had to ask one person in all these years to take a break and have singing lessons,’ says Campling.
He read theology at Keble College, Oxford, in the 1970s, and has made music ever since, but he is careful not to impose his beliefs on the singers, recalling the saying of Elizabeth I: ‘I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.’
‘It’s physically good to sing, and good socially. The pandemic showed the importance of this and raised the profile of choirs.’ He felt quite emotional when he welcomed the singers back after lockdown. This year new members swelled numbers by a sixth.
In Messiah Campling is struck musically by a passage that is rather the opposite of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’: the quiet a cappella four-part harmony of ‘Since by man came death’, followed by a sort of marching chorus accompanied by the orchestra: ‘By man came also the resurrection of the dead.’
It’s the 46th number in the oratorio, but the two hours or so of music is no strain on audiences, being (it seems to me) more like a musical, with catchy items, welcome for their familiarity.
Last month, the Docklands Singers performed the oratorio at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, and on 17 December will sing it at St Augustine’s, Honor Oak Park, in south London. Campling’s grandfather was the rector there. ‘It’s a lovely place to perform. There’s a special atmosphere on the hill.’
St Augustine of Canterbury Church has stood since 1873 on One Tree Hill. It is of rustic Kentish ragstone, its walls resembling vertical crazy paving. But the hill, being of clay, gives the church a tendency to slide down it, leaving cracks visible inside. ‘This one goes in and out according to the weather,’ says Canon Colin Boswell, the priest in charge, pointing to a fine specimen in the North Aisle.
At Honor Oak Park there was outrage in 1897 at an attempt to fence off One Tree Hill. A crowd of 15,000 pulled the fences down, sang ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and dispersed. They won a legal fight and it became a park, now a nature reserve, which means an undergrowth of brambles with old planes mixed with oaks and hawthorns. Certainly more than one tree.
It’s not all leafiness. On the northern marches of the parish a 25-acre estate of four-storey blocks was built between the wars into which more than 1,000 people were decanted from ‘slums’. In some of the new blocks, a bathroom was shared between three flats. Shops were distant, there was no pub. Many missed a feeling of community.
St Augustine’s is Gothic with lancet nave windows and some white arcades behind the old high altar heavily crocketed like a Christmas cake piped with royal icing. It is a listed building, Grade II, and on Historic England’s ‘at risk’ register, with the status ‘slow decay’. That sounds a little unfair to work done over the past decade to beautify it. Banners made by children brighten the walls and I sat next to a brightly worked hassock.
One of the Docklands Singers is the Revd Dr Michael Brooks, who urges me to call him Michael. He is a real medical doctor and serves at St Augustine’s as a non-stipendiary clergyman – he doesn’t get paid.
Music has meant a lot to him. ‘I enjoy singing for the praise and glory of God. It is also a way of communicating to other people when ordinary words sometimes fail.’ We speak after coffee and fresh apple cake in the parish room following a Sunday morning Eucharist attended by 30 or 40.
‘Singing in a choir is socially cohesive,’ Michael says. ‘I enjoy the company of the choir and it’s a privilege to produce something of worth and value.’
The performance before Christmas is classified as an act of worship. The Canon plans to read the Collect for Good Friday before it begins. Handel raised money for the Foundling Hospital in London. The performance at St Augustine’s raises funds for St Christopher’s Hospice.
In the oratorio, the Canon’s favourite air is sung by the alto: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’ Certainly the words from the Book of Job chosen by Jennens make a powerful combination with the musical setting: ‘And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’
Earlier this century, St Augustine’s actually closed for a couple of years, through lack of clergy and the prospect of expensive repairs. It is impressive to see what three men can do to revivify the worship of a church. Canon Boswell, pale and thin, has been 50 years a priest and does not get paid either, but is allowed a place to live. Fr Mark Hill is also non-stipendiary and like the Canon comes from the Anglo-Catholic side of things; Michael is from a more evangelical background.
‘We’re pretty straight down the wicket,’ says Canon Boswell, who wants to put no obstacle in the way of people coming to church. At Easter, St Augustine’s sees 115 worshippers. Messiah brings in 400.
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