History of Christ Church Fairwarp- Fairwarp becomes a parish
- t44tea
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
In July 2023, the FADLHS held a talk on Christ Church, our village church,
presented by Fr John Caperon.
With the death of The Revd J B M Butler in 1897, a new era began for Christ Church: for it was at this point that people began to consider whether Fairwarp had sufficiently developed as a community for it to become a parish in its own right. As a ‘chapel of ease’, Christ Church had no churchyard of its own, and so anyone dying in the ‘chapelry’ of Fairwarp had to be buried at St Bartholomew’s, the parish church in Maresfield. A move was now under way to change all that, for Fairwarp to be a parish, Christ Church to be the parish church, and for the village to have its own vicar.
But why was Christ Church so named? The ‘mother church’ of Maresfield had been dedicated, like all mediaeval churches, to a saint (or to the Holy Trinity), and we might ask why Fairwarp’s wasn’t. Church politics is probably the answer. The nineteenth century had seen the rise of ‘high church’ or ‘Anglo-Catholic’ ways of worship, which sought to recover older, pre-C16th Reformation customs. But these were staunchly opposed by those who felt that to go back to the old ways would betray our English ‘protestant’ identity. Arguments were so furious that they led to riots. Exeter, for instance, experienced ‘surplice riots’ in 1840 when the then bishop directed priests to preach not simply in the customary black gowns but to add the white surplice over the top. Surplice wearers were pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes. It seems clear that Mr Butler was of the older, protestant school of thought and that naming the new church ‘Christ Church’ was a way of demonstrating that it had nothing to do with newer, ‘Anglo-Catholic’ ways. Despite this, however, the earliest photo we have of the chancel shows a rather lovely, almost ‘Anglo-Catholic’ style altar with beautiful hangings ….
But the name stuck. And on 26th October 1901, the Revd G C W Pimbury, an Oxford man unlike Mr Butler, and previously a curate in Maresfield parish, was instituted as Vicar of the new parish of Fairwarp. At the service, Bishop Wilberforce of Chichester, grandson of the great Abolitionist, urged ‘laymen to rise to their responsibility as members of the Church, and to do all in their power to support the clergy’. His words did not go unheeded; for in his first article in the new ‘Maresfield and Fairwarp Parish Magazine’ of January 1902, Mr Pimbury wrote of ‘encouragement and support on all sides’. Life in the new parish had begun well.
We can imagine life in those far-off, golden Edwardian days as pretty good. The new Fairwarp parish was evidently a lively social community. For example, the Friendly Society club began its annual celebrations in 1903 with a church service, and a band led a procession from the church to the village centre for the dinner for 120, followed by a cricket match.
Church activities included Confirmation classes; a choir outing to London; the Band of Hope excursion to Eastbourne; a men’s Bible Class (with magic lantern slides!); and an annual Sunday School treat. And each year there was a Parish Tea. The Ashdown Forest School was well-attended, and there were strong teams for cricket and stoolball.
But conditions of life – however elegant in the local ‘big houses’ – were tough for the rural working classes. Fairwarp burial records and churchyard - a further gift of land from the De La Warr family - tell a story here. The ‘children’s graves’, in the South-East of the churchyard, reveal the truth, as Rosemary Mulady’s researches have shown. The bodies of twenty-eight children were interred in those Edwardian years between 1902 and 1913. The oldest died aged 14; the youngest at 3 hours. Of them all, nineteen died before the age of one year. In 1910 alone six children were buried; in 1904-5, one family lost a boy and girl at 3 and 5 months. These were hard times indeed. And then came September 1914, and the lights went out all over Europe.
The Ashdown Forest School Stoolball Team 1910
(Pictures of stoolball and cricket teams taken from Peter Kirby’s Forest Camera –A Portrait of Ashdown)
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