I had supposed that the Church of England is busy selling off vicarages and closing churches. Now I have found a new church, opened on St Anne’s Day in July 1991 and it has a link to a mountainous Mediterranean island.
St Anne’s in Dean Street, Soho, was built in the second half of the 17th century but was destroyed, except for its tower, in the Blitz. In the 1960s the London County Council decided it was desirable that Soho should remain a residential area and re-building the church was part of that plan. Appropriately it was opened by Princess Anne and twenty-five years later, earlier this year, a new entrance (below), designed by students at Central St Martins, was opened.
Inside the glass doors on the lower left is a tablet commemorating the foundation of the church in 1677; something old, something new.
In the 19th century William Hazlitt was buried in the churchyard and Bach’s St John Passion had its first UK performance. In the 20th century Dorothy Sayers was a churchwarden and her ashes are buried in the crypt. Centrepont, the charity for the homeless was founded here in 1969. But let’s turn back to the 18th century and the year 1736.
Corsican rebels, they’d be called freedom fighters today if we were on their side, were struggling to make Corsica independent from Genoa. A German adventurer and opportunist, Theodor von Neuhoff, offered his assistance in exchange for the crown of Corsica. He mustered help from the Bey of Tunis, landed in March 1736 and was crowned King Theodore I. The hubris of calling himself “the first” surely sealed his fate. By November the same year the adventure was over and the King left Corsica never to return.
He had run out of luck and in 1749 was put in a debtors’ prison in London. He got out in 1755 by declaring himself bankrupt and making over his kingdom to his creditors, although I cannot imagine that they benefitted from this gesture. The following year he died and he is buried in the graveyard at St. Anne’s. His grave is commemorated by this stone set into the west wall of the church.
The inscription at the bottom reads:
The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings
But Theodore this moral learn’d ere dead
Fate poured its lessons on his living head
Bestow’d a kingdom and denied him bread
I have been lent a volume of Alan Ross’s autobiography, Coastwise Lights. His name may be familiar because he cropped up in a recent post, Men of Letters. Alan was commissioned to write a travel book (Time Was Away) about Corsica after the war. John Minton did the illustrations and they both travelled there in August 1947. That is how I discovered the link between Corsica’s only King and a church in Soho.
There were some lovely Minton’s in the Bowie Collector show at Sotheby’s. What a thrill that event was: fine, middlebrow, old-style Modernism, with its Cornish and Mediterranean diversions (and a bit of Germanic angst) on display. It may have been the B Team of Bowie’s hoard, but if it had been a Tate show it wd have stood up perfectly well. It made me admire – almost love – the man.
Alan Ross writes: “Johnny increasingly found himself in a limbo between the avant-garde and the academic. Those who held their ground like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud came through, and so, of course, would Johnny have done”. John Minton died from a mixture of drink and sleeping pills, aged forty, in 1957. (Indeed, a suspiciously large number of Ross’s friends succumbed to overdoses of sleeping pills.)