A History of
St Nicholas, Plumstead

Our first recorded history dates from 960 A.D. — and for all the centuries since, a church has stood on this ground to serve the people of Plumstead.

Almost twenty years before the 1990 reprint of this history, the Parochial Church Council asked Mr Stanley Henwood to give visitors and locals alike a brief history of Plumstead's ancient parish and church. He did so with great care and skill. As one vicar wrote in welcoming its re-issue: “As we rejoice in our past, let us also look forward to our future in faith and trust, as well as with thankfulness.”

From a deed still preserved in the British Museum, in the year 960 Edgar, King of the English, gave and granted ‘to St. Augustine, Apostle of the English, and to the brethren of his Holy Monastery… the four ploughlands called Plumstede, with the consent of Dunstan, Archbishop, and of my nobles.’ By this gift the lordship of practically all Plumstead and Wickham passed to the Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury — then the premier house of the Benedictines in England, ranking second only to Monte Cassino.

Plumstead was of some significance even earlier: in 1887, foundations dug near Kings Highway and Wickham Lane uncovered a Roman lead coffin holding the skeleton of a young woman, the burial attributed to the first half of the fourth century and thought to lie near a Roman villa. At this stage there is no mention of a church, but under a powerful monastery and the influence of Archbishop Dunstan, such a building — probably of wood, and leaving no trace — would almost certainly have existed to house an altar.

Our early days were far from quiet. Plumstead, mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, is recorded by the thirteenth century as a well-ordered agricultural and fishing village, with its clergy, the officers of the Manor, the steward, the bailiff, and the galleys. Rents were often paid in capons and eels; in Norman times one tenant had to keep a boat plying between Plumstead and London.

In 1313 the Lord Abbot of St Augustine's was prosecuted ‘for that he did take a certain whale in the river Thames… and did retain the said whale for his own profit.’ He pleaded that he and his predecessors had ‘used from time out of mind to take whales stranded on their Manor at Plumstead’ — and his plea prevailed. With such an emphasis on fishing and boats, it is little wonder the church has always been dedicated to St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors and fishermen.

A wooden ‘Mass house’ likely came first, but in the present building we can identify distinct twelfth-century work — in the south and west walls of the present south aisle, and in the window above the porch that now holds a picture of St Nicholas (the glass modern, given by architect Thomas F. Ford at his 1959 restoration). The original church was about 24 feet wide, with a nave some 64 feet long, lit by narrow windows — nine inches at the glass line, splayed to three feet within — probably unglazed, and filled with hay or straw in winter.

In the thirteenth century came developments and enlargements: a transept on the south still stands, and excavations in 1906–7 revealed the foundations of a large new chancel that was contemplated. Work appears to have stopped abruptly. The antiquary Elliston-Erwood dated the work to about 1230 and linked its hurried finish to a passage in Stow's Chronicles for 1236 — when such abundance of rain fell that the Thames overflowed and ‘the greatest number of men, women and children inhabiting those parts were drowned.’ With the population so reduced, there was no further need to enlarge.

The mason's chisel

‘Has anyone seen my chisel?’ was probably a cry heard in the thirteenth century — and answered only in July 1958, when a mason's chisel was found in the walling at the junction of the south aisle and the transept, its wooden handle and bronze cap still in place. Examined at the Science Museum, South Kensington, it was dated to the thirteenth century; they had no tool like it in their collection.

The fourteenth century has little to show but a blocked doorway a few feet east of the present one — rediscovered in 1907 when a hollow sound was noticed in the wall days before the re-opening. The dearth of work supports the view that the village suffered a severe blow in the previous century, from which it took many years to recover.

By the fifteenth century there had been a recovery: the old north wall of the nave was replaced by the existing arcade of four bays, with an aisle thrown out to the north. A west doorway was cut into the twelfth-century wall, its door-pivots still visible outside. A corbel above the second pillar carries mason's marks read by the London Museum as an abbreviation of ‘Thomas Vicarius Londoniensis’ — doubtless Thomas Scraggeh, vicar in 1498.

Under the kindly rule of St Augustine's the village had reached a state of religious and material prosperity — so the Dissolution hit Plumstead hard. The Abbey was dissolved on 30th July 1538; the following January, Henry VIII granted the Manor and its advowson to his agent, Sir Edward Boughton. Thomas Cromwell's man Vaughan found the inhabitants ‘so obstinate that they were four days in finding a man to show the lands.’

A gravestone near the font records John Gossage, ‘who by his care and greate industry caused this church to be repaired after above twenty years lying waste and ruinous’ (died 1672, aged 50). It was Churchwarden Gossage who built the brick tower of 1664 — two-inch red brick in a belated Gothic style, with clasping buttresses carried up as turrets and finished with battlements, built into and not onto the fifteenth-century church. It is held by many to be the finest feature of the church.

After the revival at the Restoration, the parish entered another quiet period. The registers are full of life: against 16th August 1678, ‘Mary Griffin of this parish was buried in woolen’ — the first of many such entries under the Acts requiring burial in wool to protect the woollen trade. Others are anonymous: ‘A traveller from the Harow buried’; ‘Richard son of the Cobler’; ‘William Butler a dwarf buried two foot and a half in length aged 40 years.’

In 1818 the north aisle was rebuilt in yellow stock brick; further alterations followed in 1852 and 1864. As the Royal Arsenal and the railway brought people to the district, the church that had served a village found itself in a growing town. The area now comprising St Nicholas Gardens was bought in 1860; more than 40,000 interments were made before its closure in 1890.

On 11th February 1907 Woolwich was awakened by a terrific explosion in the Arsenal — a magazine, followed by a second blast as flying debris struck a gas holder. St Nicholas was badly damaged, though plans for enlargement were already in hand. In the rebuilding, vaults and traces of earlier walls were found; in one wall a bottle held a paper reading three times ‘George Bodie, June 1820’. The restored church was re-dedicated by the Bishop of Southwark on 18th July 1908, giving room for treble the previous congregation — the architect allowing no fragment of genuine old work to be destroyed.

On the night of 6th February 1945 a German V2 rocket — one of the last to fall in the area — dropped on the edge of the burial ground. The blast almost destroyed the thirteenth-century transept, severely damaged the 1907 Lady Chapel and its vaulted roof, and destroyed the roof of the south aisle with its seventeenth-century altar and many old memorials. Restoration followed in 1959, under Thomas F. Ford.

The flagstaff

For years the tower and its flagpole were a beacon for ships coming up the river, and later a range-finding mark for the Gentlemen Cadets of the Royal Military Academy. When the old staff blew down in a gale, a new one was raised in January 1884 — prepared in Woolwich Arsenal from a fir cut in a Russian forest, 30 feet long and weighing about half a ton.

The bells

Below the flagstaff hang four bells, tuned to A, B, C♯ and D. Three were cast by Christopher Hodson of St Mary Cray, inscribed ‘Christopher Hodson made me 1686’; the tenor was cast by Thomas Mears in 1790. All were cleaned and re-tuned in the 1960 restoration. (The ringers count six ropes today, and two bells are recorded as re-cast in 2000 — being verified against the tower records.)

The high altar & reredos

The reredos, baldacchino, font, and clergy and choir stalls were designed by Stephen Dykes Bower; the reredos painting is by Donald Towner, who set his Crucifixion against a Plumstead background of the Thames, the church and the vicarage. The faces of the painted saints are portraits — St Nicholas is Dykes Bower himself; St Dunstan, the artist Towner; St Augustine, John Walker, vicar at the time of the restoration.

The east window & the hanging pyx

The east window is a memorial to the parish's dead of 1914–18; boarded up during the Second World War, it suffered little damage. Its figures are St Michael, St Joan of Arc, St George and St Nicholas. Beneath the baldacchino, the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in a hanging pyx — a use revived in 1960 after a hearing in the Southwark Consistory Court.

A boy's epitaph

Among the memorials was that of James Darling, a cartridge boy in the Royal Arsenal, who died aged 10 in 1812 — the day after being caught stealing cherries, and, it was alleged, from the punishment he received. His friends devised a stinging epitaph:

From the earliest known clergy of Plumstead in the twelfth century to the present day — a line of more than eight hundred years.

Having read this short history — covering the many centuries during which St Nicholas has served the parish and its thousands of parishioners — let us not forget that it still carries on its Christian ministry today. You will always be welcome to share in our faith and worship.