CHARLES FUGE LOWDER, the greatest of the ritualist slum priests of the nineteenth century, was born in June 1820 in Bath. His father was a director of a small independent bank. Lowder was educated in small, clergy­inn, private schools, and later at his public school, Kings College School, in those days still sited in the Strand. He was thus, by the standard of the times, a gentle­man from the mercantile classes. In 1840 he went up to Exeter Col­lege, Oxford. While at Oxford he attended St Mary’s, where, like the best of his generation, he fell under the spell of the vicar, John Henry Newman, whose sermons guided him to the priesthood. Mr Lowder took a second class de­gree in 1843, and in the autumn of that year was made deacon to serve a title in the parish of Street­-cum-Walton. His duties included acting as tutor to the three sons of Revd Lord John Thynne, his in­cumbent and the son of the Mar­quess of Bath.

By this time Mr Lowder had become the breadwinner for his family, the bank in which his fa­ther was a partner having failed. He thus required further and bet­ter income. On his ordination as a priest, by Bishop Denison of Salisbury, on the 22nd December 1844, he took up additional work as chaplain to the Axbridge work­house. He desired to work in a parish with a more advanced and catholic pattern of worship, thus he applied to become a curate at the famous ritualist centre of St Barnabas, Pimlico.

Criminal record
This parish, then a maze of slum streets, had been built to serve the poor and was the most catholic parish in London, in both externals and teaching. In the at­mosphere of a daily celebration of Holy Communion (with priest vested in cassock, surplice, black scarf and hood), daily Morning and Evening prayer, a Sunday sung Eucharist and strict pat­terns of parochial visitation, Mr Lowder deemed himself to be in the best possible situation for an Anglo-Catholic assistant curate. There was however dissension in the parish. A Mr Westerton op­posed the high-church practices and sought election as church-warden in order to end them. To this purpose he hired a man to perambulate the area carrying a sandwich board proclaiming the message, “Vote Westerton”. Mr Lowder, in what he described later as ‘a mo­ment of madness’ gave some of the choir boys 6d with which to purchase rotten eggs, and so armed, they as­saulted the. poor board carrier. Mr Lowder appeared before Westmin­ster Magistrates where he was fined £2, and be­fore the Bishop of London, who suspended him from duty for six weeks. Thus one of the heroes of the Anglo-Catho­lic revival began his great work as a man with a crimi­nal record and a diocesan black mark.

Lowder went to France, to spend his suspension out of the public eye. Being poor he walked, and stayed at the seminary at Yvetot. While there, he read Abelly’s “Vie de Saint Vincent de Paul”. This meeting with the great French apostle of the poor marked the rest of Lowder’s life. He conclud­ed that England was in desperate need of priests committed to the service of the urban poor of the great cities, just as St Vincent’s Company of the Mission served the poor of rural France.

Founding of SSC
On his return to England he called a meeting of Anglo-Cath­olic clergy, hand-picked as the most trustworthy. The group of six came together at the House of Charity, Soho, where on the 28th February 1855 they formed themselves into the Society of the Holy Cross and dedicated themselves to lives of self-disciplined service, first of the poor, and the extension of the Catholic faith. Member­ship required obedience to a rule of life, Mr Lowder adopted the white rule, the strictest, requiring celibacy.

A year later the Society was approached by the rector of St George’s in the East, the splendid Hawksmoor church on the Rat­cliffe highway east of the Tower of London. The rector Mr King had within his parish the notori­ous area of Wapping, the centre of the London Docks. The area, a separate world, cut off by docks and channels, was a ghetto of poverty. The population, swelled each day by in­coming sail­ors of every race and na­tion, was de­pendent for its economic survival on casual dock labour and prostitution. There was no school, no church, and not a single com­municant in the area.

Lowder took up the chal­lenge and on Ash Wednesday 1856 held a mis­sion service at 49 the Highway. A few weeks later he rented a sailor’s house in Lower Well Al­ley in the heart of the area. Mis­sion sermons were preached on the streets, Evensong sung, somewhat roughly in the house. The ser­mons were in­terspersed with cat-calls, danc­ing groups of prostitutes, and the throwing of stones, human ex­crement and once a dead cat. The missioners persisted; in August 1856 Mr Lowder moved to Wapping, rented a dilapidat­ed house in Calvert Street and named the new church plant ‘The Good Shepherd Mission’. On the first day children were welcomed into the house to learn reading and writing, the school was thus started. In the overgrown garden a corrugated iron church was erect­ed. Within a short time Elizabeth Neale, the sister of John Mason Neale, arrived with companions and, renting a house, they put themselves at the disposal of the mission as the sisters of the Com­munity of the Holy Cross; their work with prostitutes, girls, chil­dren, the sacristy and the school was carried on for seventy years; their name is legend still in Wap­ping.

Father to the poor
The heroic work of Lowder and his companion group of priests, sisters and lay workers, included church school, Sunday schools, an insurance scheme for dockers without work, coal for the old, a café for the poor but proud, lay­ettes for mothers, boots for boys and most splendid of all a ‘dirty girls club’. Lowder, worked with­out stint, raising finds, visiting, organising. Curates came and went, once all left the Church of England overnight, leaving Low­der alone. Those he trained in urban mission included two SSC heroes, Father Mackonochie and Father Wainright, both later vicars of the parish.

In 1866 Lowder completed work on the new parish church of St Peter’s London Docks. On the day following its consecration a case of cholera was discovered in Choppins court. The next six weeks where a turmoil of work, a tented hospital was erected at the east end of the church, the clergy, sisters, and laity nursed, and cared for the victims. The daily mass was started in the Good Shepherd Chapel of the new church.

When the cholera receded the people of Wapping were call­ing Lowder ‘the Father of Wap­ping’, and soon ‘Father Lowder’, the first Anglican priest ever so called.

The next twenty years followed the Anglo-Catholic slum parish pattern, clubs, schools, confes­sions, daily masses, a growing church with many children. By 1880 Father Lowder was exhaust­ed, the death of his beloved sister had created a gentler approach to others, but he was no less stern with himself In August 1880 he went on a walking tour of Swit­zerland and Austria, seeking re­newal and refreshment. On 9th September at Zell-am-see he died at five in the morning after a night of fever. He asked Miss Taylor, an English woman staying at the hotel, to assure people that, in spite of the visit of a local Roman Catholic priest, he had died in the faith of the Anglican church.

Lowder’s body was returned to England. At St Peter’s, open and thronged with people since the news of the death, Mass was said every half-hour for the soul of the founder. At the Church a solemn requiem High Mass was sung by Father Wainright, people crowded from the church along the road. The body was carried out of St. Peter’s by six SSC priests, in­cluding Father Mackonochie to the swing bridge at the tobacco dock, the edge of the parish. Over a thousand lay people took a spe­cial train from Liverpool Street to Chislehurst to see Father Low­der’s body laid to rest.

Continuing legacy
Lowder was the first and great­est of the East End slum-priests, the greatest of his breed. His Society of the Holy Cross now numbers over a thousand priests; the day before he wrote this short account, the present Vicar of St Peter’s was teaching Year five, at Father Lowder’s school, the story of their founder. The work of Charles Fuge Lowder lives today because what he founded, SSC, the school, the parish still, proclaim the same Catholic truth and Catholic vision, and they, like his story are eternal truths.

Fr T. E. Jones, SSC,
is vicar of London Docks
and Archivist of the Society of the Holy Cross