Christ Church

An ornamental chancel screen, alabaster tablet and side chapel commemorating the fallen of the Wellington parish of Christ Church was unveiled in November 1922.

Background

Christ Church was originally intended as a ‘daughter church’ (or chapel of ease) for nearby All Saints and built to serve the increasingly populous suburbs in the south of the town in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Designed by Thomas Smith of Madeley (who was also responsible for the strikingly similar St Luke’s in Ironbridge), it was consecrated in 1839, became the centre of a parish its own right in 1859 and, by the time of the Great War, served a district that incorporated much of the southeast of Wellington and also encompassed the nearby villages of New Works, Arleston and Ketley Brook.

Christ Church in the early Twentieth Century

The Memorial

In October 1922, the Wellington Journal announced that a memorial would shortly be erected to ‘perpetuate 80 men of the Parish of Christ Church’. The paper reported that a faculty (a license or authorisation from the church authority) had been granted for the commemoration, which would take the form of an oak screen separating the nave and chancel, the erection of a side chapel, and an alabaster tablet containing the names of the fallen. The cost of the screen and tablet was estimated at £850 (around £47, 000 today) towards which £722 had already been contributed, with the outstanding amount yet to be raised. Any surplus, it was announced, would be put towards furnishing the new chapel.

The unveiling ceremony took place just under a month later on Tuesday 7th November. After the Last Post and Reveille were sounded from the church porch by Bugler Bradshaw, the Right Reverend Bishop Taylor Smith (Chaplain General of the British Forces during the War) conducted a service before a ‘crowded congregation’ of civic dignitaries and worshippers. In a wide-ranging address, he reflected on the circumstances surrounding the unveiling some four years after the Armistice had taken effect, as the Journal duly reported:

‘He asked everyday, “What has the war done for us, are we better or worse”? His answer was that we are both better and worse’.

Christ Church from New Church Road

The unveiling itself was carried out by Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Oldham of Overley Hall, a veteran of the conflict who moved to the town in 1919 and became chair of the local Citizens Committee of the League of Nations and the Wellington and District Branch of the YMCA. The memorial, which also includes the wooden encasements of the pillars around the church interior, is still extant today. The screen contains the badges of the regiments the men were attached to, while the carved oak also includes the emblems of the four nations that comprise the British Isles. The alabaster tablet can be found to the right of the screen in the Memorial (or Lady) Chapel.

Note: At the time of writing, the doors to Christ Church are generally locked unless services are taking place, details of which — together with contact information for the churchwardens and other officers — can currently be found outside the New Church Road entrance to the building.