St John Beverley Groser

St John Beverley Groser (1890-1966)
http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/groser.html
http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2016/11/remembering-father-john-gro...

John Groser was the most famous – or infamous, depending on your point of view!- priest to serve this parish in the 20th century. He was the Vicar of Christ Church, Watney Street from 1929-48, and when this and other churches were blitzed, Curate-in-charge of St George-in-the-East and St John Golding Street from 1941 to 1947. Much has been written about him and the context in which he worked. This page is indebted to his biography, edited by Kenneth Brill John Groser – East London Priest (Mowbray 1971), to the many writings and web-postings of Ken Leech, recorder-supreme of all things Christian Socialist (see extracts from his Oxford DNB entry below) and to conversations with East Enders who remember 'The Old Man'. There is also a Groser family website.
He was one of 11 children of Thomas Eaton Groser, an American-born missionary who had worked among North American Indians, and English-born Phoebe Wainwright, who had worked in Labrador. He name reflects the date (the Nativity of St John the Baptist) and place of his birth (Beverley, a remote cattle station in Western Australia where his father was Rector). He retained a deep fondness for Australia, where other family members remained, though from the time he came to England as a teenager did not return until he retired.

He lodged with a rather grand family, and attended Ellesmere School, one of the schools of the anglo-catholic Woodard Foundation, before training with the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield (in contrast to his two older brothers, who trained at St Augustine's College Canterbury). Study was a struggle because his education in Australia had been rudimentary.

From 1914 he was a curate All Saints Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a tough slum parish, and the experience radicalised him: he was puzzled when the bishop complained he had been sent there to save souls, not bodies. Service as a front line chaplain to the Forces in France continued to shape his uncompromising views – and turned his hair white. His commanding officer put him in charge of a group of demoralised men in a time of heavy casualties. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1917, sent home wounded and received the Military Cross in the following year.

In 1917 he met and married Mary Agnes Bucknall (1893-1970) [right, 1919] at St Winnow Cornwall, where her father was vicar. It was a devoted partnership, and she was central to everything that he later did. They had two sons and two daughters. Her sister Nancy married Charles (Carl) Threlfall Richards, who had been at Mirfield with Groser, and was to serve as his curate at St George's for a time.

It was hard to place such a man after the war; he did a year as Messenger for the Church of England Men's Society in Carlisle, Durham and Newcastle dioceses, but this was no good, because he did not believe men could be brought back to the church as it had been. So he went to Cornwall, as curate at St Winnow, to reflect on his future. Mary's brother Jack had become curate to Conrad Noël, the 'Red Vicar' of Thaxted and introduced him to his Catholic Crusade. John was totally captivated by the ethos of Thaxted – the Red Flag, the liturgy, the music, which were all of a piece – and later did temporary duty there. Of the Crusade's creed/manifesto he said a bit unbalanced, but still pretty splendid, don't you think? (Compare this with the 1947 Socialist Christian Catechism by Frs Gresham Kirby and Jack Boggis.) Conrard Noël: an Autobiography (Dent 1945, p107f) refers briefly to Groser's time at Watney Street
The Crucifix, the Red Flag, and the Flag of St George

From 1922-28 John Groser and his brother-in-law Jack Bucknall were curates at St Michael Poplar, under Fr C.G. Langdon. The two families lived next door to each other in Teviot Street, where many meetings were held. They rubbed shoulders with the great East End political figures of the day – George Lansbury (Leader of the Opposition), Mary Hughes, Basil Henriques – and were a part of 'Poplarism', a 'can-do' form of direct action in the face of bureaucracy.

John and Jack held many street corner meetings for the Catholic Crusade [left, 1920s], always dressed in cassocks and flanked by the three symbols of the crucifix, the Red Flag, and the flag of St George. (Groser had no time for the Union Jack: scouts at Christ Church were only permitted to parade the George, and their neckerchiefs, significantly, were red.) Whatever the meetings had been called for, the message was always about the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God. So get organised, they told the unemployed; claim your God-given dignity and show the authorities who you really are. He was beaten by police batons in the General Strike. His licence was removed for a time.

Other Thaxted-inspired parts of his message may have been more surprising to East Enders. Jim Desormeaux, who attended many of these meetings and became a parishioner at Christ Church (and later at St George-in-the-East), commented The drabness of the Poplar homes was anathema to Groser. Get colour in your lives and in your homes, he would urge. Do away with your lace curtains and aspidistra plants; away with the dark brown and green paints. Did local folk share his enthusiasm for country dancing – or (rather less Thaxted) sword-dancing – as embodiments of the gospel?

There was continual conflict with Fr Langdon and his successor Fr Ashcroft, even though both shared many of Groser's view and ideals, and with Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, who, it was said, didn't understand what he was about but recognised him as a gentleman! There were threats of sacking; in the end, Groser resigned. A year of unemployment followed – he did not sign on, as he threatened, but supported his family by Sunday duties, selling life insurance, and some craft work.

Christ Church, Watney Street

In 1929 he was appointed to Christ Church, Watney Street. A commission on its future had sat for six months, and it was felt that he could do no harm in this hopeless situation. In the event, he transformed it, and put it on the map. High Mass and Solemn Evensong, both with incense (previously only occasionally used) were flamboyantly celebrated with Thaxted-style ceremonial. The church was re-ordered with a more open sanctuary [right in 1928 and 1932, showing the contrast] and limewashed, with banners – St George (the parish church) and the blood-red people's banner 'He has made of one blood all nations'. He had become a skilled weaver, and made many of the hangings and vestments himself – we still wear his hand-blocked unbleached holland Lenten chasuble at St George's. Out went sentimental music, and (with Mary as the organist, and from 1936 a new and smaller organ by Cedric Arnold, a Thaxted builder) in came Bach and Byrd, with hymns that combined radical politics and romantic pastoral nostalgia, such as Charles Dalmon's text, usually sung to the tune 'We plough the fields, and scatter', which included the verse (full text here in a 'modernised' version by Ken Leech; see here for connections with present-day St Georgestide events)

cry 'Saint George for Merrie England' re-echo to the sky.

(This hymn was sung with gusto at the centenary service for Stewart Headlam's Guild of St Matthew, at St Matthew Bethnal Green on 29 June 1977, with former archbishop Michael Ramsey as preacher, after which the congregation repaired in keeping with Headlam's views to a nearby pub, for he had written, in the Guild's magazine Church Reformer for May 1888 A public house is ideally a very noble, humane and social institution. It is much more democratic than the modern club.... The public house ... belongs to everybody whatever his class .... because he is human. This matches the views of Professor Bill Fishman noted here.)
The congregation expanded, though many on the Electoral Roll were Catholic Crusaders rather than local worshippers. At this time there was factional division among left-wing groups over Stalinism, and after long and bitter discussion John and Mary Groser and the group at Christ Church were driven out of the Crusade in March 1932, shifting to various other alliances, principally the Socialist Christian League [right in 1937]. In that year, Christ Church held a conference on poverty in the East End and the administration of the Poor Law; Groser wrote and spoke a good deal on unemployment. He opposed means testing and the use of police powers over 'loitering with intent' against the unemployed, and was a member of the LCC committee on poor relief applications and chair of the local public assistance committee.

Jack Boggis, whose vocation had been inspired by Groser at Poplar, came as curate (1932-36) and produced the radical Christ Church Monthly – he was to succeed Groser as Rector at St George's. Here is his tribute to his great mentor. Controversially, Groser disposed of Planet Street Institute to enable facilities at the church hall ('Dean Street Parish Room', in the vicarage garden) to be improved. The ever-open vicarage [left in 1929], with Mary somehow providing food and welcome for all comers, was at the heart of parish life.

In these years he galvanised local opposition to Mosley, addressing both the community and the police (see Kenneth Leech Struggle in Babylon: racism in the cities and churches of Britain (Sheldon 1988) p97f). He took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and had his nose broken by a police baton. He helped found, and from 1938 was president of, the Stepney Tenants' Defence League, a broad-based grouping, many of whose activists were Jewish and/or Communists; it had begun with surgeries in the vicarage. He later reflected, in Politics and Persons how the tenants' movement revitalised people from the defeatism of the depression by showing them a possible way out of at least one of their problems, and was amazed at the speed with which people came together, organised, and threw up their own leaders ... In spite of all their sufferings the masses generally were still far from accepting the Communist philosophy ... but I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the war had not come when it did. Things were pretty desperate. It is just possible that the workers would have turned to open revolutionary activity and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. Certainly there were a great many who were thinking that way and looking in that direction for guidance (pp 73-75). See further Sarah Glynn East End Immigrants and the Battle for Housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities (Journal of Historical Geography 31 pp528-545, 2005).