Church campaigner behind social reform

Some 150 years ago, a freshly-ordained and eager young clergyman arrived in Bristol to work in one of the most deprived areas in the city and made himself hugely popular in some quarters, and very unpopular in others. Eugene Byrne looks at the brief Bristol sojourn of the man who would go on to co-found the National Trust.

- Eugene Byrne

ONE of the things every true Bristolian is supposed to “know” is that the old St Werburgh’s church on Corn Street was re-erected, stone for stone, in a new location that would become... St Werburghs.

This is sort-of true in that much of the original building was used to construct the new church on Mina Road, particularly the tower.

(It was de-consecrated in the 1980s and has long since been an indoor climbing centre.)

Much of this was thanks to a man who would soon become one of the founding fathers of building conservation in England, the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley.

He only spent two years in Bristol but during this time he would make himself very popular in many quarters, and deeply unpopular with a few more influential people. He would go on to become one of the founders of the National Trust, so perhaps it’s not surprising that even at the outset of his career he campaigned for the church, or at the very least its tower, to be preserved.

Rawnsley was given to frequent outbursts of poetry. Not long before he left Bristol in early 1878 he published A Book of Bristol Sonnets, verses inspired by his time in the city.

The collection included one that he had sent to the Western Daily Press when he was campaigning to save the church:

Not for themselves they built, the men who reared,

Bristol, they strange magnificence of towers!

Prophets, they saw the future’s busier hours,

When gold, not beauty, should be most revered.

Yet none the less those merchants dared and steered,

Because they knew High Art’s magnetic powers.

If in our streets greed cries, and havoc lowers,

By reverence only shall the mists be cleared.

O'ercrowded days, hot times wherein we live,

Crave that refreshment, Werburgh, thou canst give.

Tradition, townsman’s love, a scholar’s bones,

Plead for the peace of thy ancestral stones;