Episode 5: Thaxted Church Life

SYNOPSIS

The interview provides an insight into the impact of the Christian Socialist ‘dynasty’ at Thaxted Church upon the life of the town in rural Essex. Conrad Noel, later popularised as the ‘Red Vicar of Thaxted’, was offered the living of the beautiful Parish Church by ‘Daisy’ Greville, Countess of Warwick, and arrived with his wife Miriam in the town in 1910. Immediately they started to enrich the church with ‘English Use’ ritual which Conrad had imbibed from the liturgist Percy Dearmer while acting as his part-time curate at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, London. Folk dancing, as practised by Mary Neal and her Espérance Club dancers, soon spread to the children and adults of Thaxted when one of Mary’s instructors, Blanche Payling, visited Thaxted in 1911. Noel notoriously put up the Red Flag in the chancel of his church. The tradition of ecclesial left-wing politics was continued by Conrad’s son-in-law and former curate Father Jack Putterill, who took on the living on Conrad Noel’s death in 1942 and remained priest for over thirty years. 

GUESTS

The late Peter King was born in Thaxted in 1932 and retained a life-long affection for and involvement with Thaxted Church and the communal life that its Christian Socialist clergy engendered. In the interview he remembers playing as a child in the Noel vicarage and being encouraged to take up a musical instrument by Conrad’s curate Jack Putterill. Sybil King who came to Thaxted in the 1960s remembers the legendary and captivating Christmas service, one of the most beautiful in England at the time, when the memory of Gustav Holst’s involvement as organist and choir master was invoked by the singing of his arrangement of I saw three ships come sailing in.

Simon Machin’s interview with the Kings was recorded at their home on 9 August 2019.