St James’ Church, Sydney

About

St James' Church, commonly known as St James', King Street, is an Australian heritage-listed Anglican parish church located at 173 King Street, in the Sydney central business district in New South Wales. Consecrated in February 1824 and named in honour of St James the Great, it became a parish church in 1835. Designed in the style of a Georgian town church by the transported convict architect Francis Greenway during the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie, St James' is part of the historical precinct of Macquarie Street which includes other early colonial era buildings such as the World Heritage listed Hyde Park Barracks. The church remains historically, socially and architecturally significant. The building is the oldest church extant in Sydney's inner city region. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 3 September 2004; and was listed on the (now defunct) Register of the National Estate. The church has maintained its special role in the city's religious, civic and musical life as well as its close associations with the city's legal and medical professions through its proximity to the law courts and Sydney Hospital. Its original ministry was to the convict population...

The eastern front With Hyde Park and St Mary's Cathedral in the background St James' Church is located at 173 King Street, Sydney, in the legal and commercial district, near Hyde Park and adjoining Queen's Square, adjacent to the Greenway Wing of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The church forms part of a group of notable colonial buildings along Macquarie Street, which runs from Queen's Square to Sydney Harbour. At the time of construction, the church and the buildings nearby were "Sydney's most distinguished structures... on the highest ground, and, socially speaking, in the best part of the city".

The geographical parish of St James' is one of the 57 parishes of Cumberland County, New South Wales, and it initially shared responsibility for an area that extended as far as Sydney Heads. St James' acquired its own parish in 1835. Its boundaries have since remained essentially unchanged.

The underground St James railway station is named after the church. The precinct around the church is informally known as St James'.

Architect Francis Greenway The Revd Richard Hill, first chaplain

The building of St James' Church was commissioned by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1819, designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway and constructed between 1820 and 1824 using convict labour. Governor Macquarie and Commissioner John Bigge laid the foundation stone on 7 October 1819. The building was originally intended to serve as a courthouse as Macquarie had plans for a large cathedral to be built on the present location of St Andrew's Cathedral but they were put on hold by the intervention of Bigge who had been appointed to conduct a Royal Commission into the colonial government. Bigge initially approved of the courthouse project but by February 1820, less than four months after his arrival, he strongly recommended its conversion into a church.

"The reason for Bigge's change of mind may be found in the appointment, three years later, of his brother-in-law [and secretary], Mr TH Scott, a wine merchant, as Archdeacon ". The design of the courthouse was modified before construction with the addition of a steeple at the western end, to serve as a church, while the adjacent school buildings were put into use as a courthouse. The first service was held in the unfinished church on the Day of Epiphany, 6 January 1822, the text being from Isaiah, Chapter 60: "Arise! Shine, for thy light has come. The glory of the Lord has risen upon thee". It was anticipated in the Sydney Gazette 's report of the event that the church, when fitted out with stalls and galleries, would hold 2,000 people. The church was consecrated by the senior chaplain, Samuel Marsden, on 11 February 1824.

Before the building of St James', Sydney's growing population had been served by St Philip's Church, York Street. However, as St James' was able to hold more people than St Philip's and clergy meetings as well as ordinations were held there, it quickly became the centre of official church activity.

There was both official and general concern about the lack of morality within the predominantly male population, and the establishment of churches and of education was seen as a method of combatting this. The 19th-century church historian, Edward Symonds, credited a "better moral and spiritual tone" in the colony to "decent churches" and "the advent of additional clergy, headed by William Cowper, in 1808". The first rector of St James', Richard Hill, was ordained specifically for colonial ministry and sent from London as assistant to William Cowper at St Philip's. Hill was energetic and a good organiser, with progressive views on education. He instigated a number of projects to aid the community, including an infants' school in the crypt of the church and a Sunday School.

The focus of the church's liturgy at the time was on preaching and the church's interior reflected this. The east end of the church had a triple-decker pulpit placed centrally, from which the service was led and the sermon preached. From this pulpit Broughton, Pattison, Selwyn, Barker and Barry preached. The parish clerk led the congregation in the responses from its lower level. Between the three windows which at that time occupied the eastern wall, there were two large panels displaying the words of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments. The church was full of box pews which faced each other across a central aisle. The western end had a gallery, which is still in place, for the convicts. Pews were rented to provide a source of income for the church and the whole was arranged in "rigid social order" with the poor occupying the free seats. Sunday services consisted of Morning and Evening Prayer, with Holy Communion taking place only occasionally as an addition to the regular service. For this reason, there was no visual emphasis on the communion table, which was a small portable one, and no reredos.

- View from the south east, with a path leading to Bathurst Street. Elizabeth Street runs left to right (south to north) across the painting ( John Rae 1842) Interior showing the original high pulpit, box pews and three windows of the eastern end (Bradridge 1831) St James' suffered from a major scandal in the late 1820s ("a period of personal quarrels and violent newspaper controversies") when Commissioner Bigge's secretary and brother-in-law, Thomas Hobbes Scott, who had been made Archdeacon of New South Wales in 1825, came into conflict with a parishioner, Edward Smith Hall. Archdeacon Scott ordered that Hall should vacate the pew he rented at St James' for himself and his six daughters. As Hall continued to occupy the pew, constables attended Sunday services to prevent his occupation of the pew by boarding it up and making it secure with iron bands. Hall, critical of both the archdeacon and Governor Ralph Darling, was also a partner with Arthur Hill in the ownership of newspaper The Monitor. He published an attack on the archdeacon, for which he was sued for libel. The courts fined him only £ 1 and placed him on a bond. Hall appealed to Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta (who was the relevant ecclesiastical authority at the time) and to the law where he was awarded £25 damages. The archdeacon, who was extremely unpopular, returned to London in 1828.

The first major alteration to the church was the enclosing of the south portico to form a vestry. In 1832 John Verge constructed another vestry at the eastern end of the church, in strict conformity with the architectural style of Greenway. Growth of the congregation necessitated further changes. Galleries were added along the northern and eastern walls. As the three eastern windows had been blocked by Verge's vestry, the interior became increasingly badly lit with every change. Verge's solution was to pierce ocular windows high in the walls to light the galleries.

In 1836, Richard Hill had a fit of apoplexy in the vestry and died. Soon after this dramatic event, and while the church was still in mourning, William Grant Broughton was installed as Bishop of Australia during a service in St James' lasting five hours. Since Macquarie's plans for a new cathedral on George Street had not come to fruition, Broughton acted as if St James' were a pro-cathedral. Robert Cartwright and then Napoleon Woodd succeeded Richard Hill at St James'.

- Interior in 1843 showing the altar surrounded by circular railing and the galleries King Street looking east towards St James' (watercolour by Frederick Garling 1843)

In 1839, Robert Allwood, educated at Eton College and the University of Cambridge, arrived in Sydney and was appointed to St James' by William Broughton, in which parish he served for 44 years until his retirement in 1884. Allwood was an important patron of education in Victorian Sydney. Under him, the parish school expanded and his teacher training college became a "model school". He was also the principal tutor at St James' College, which originally met in St James' parsonage (on the corner of King Street and Macquarie Street) until it was transferred to Lyndhurst at The Glebe.

In 1848, St James' was the venue for a full military funeral, "attended by 150 carriages" and in 1878 Allwood officiated at the wedding of Nora Robinson and Alexander Kirkman Finlay. As the second vice-regal wedding in the colony this ceremony was attended by many dignitaries and attracted a "crushing" crowd of 10,000 cheering onlookers. Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister of Australia, was baptised at St James' on 4 July 1849.

Unlike Hill, Allwood advocated the principles of the Oxford Movement (also known as "Tractarianism" after its publication of Tracts for the Times ), which stressed the historical continuity of the Church of England, and placed a high importance upon the sacraments and the liturgy. "The culmination" of a trend towards Tractarianism in the colony was the founding in 1845, of St James' College – "the first seminary for training local ordinands". However, many colonial Anglicans were unhappy with Tractarian trends because Roman Catholics "were equated with Irish", and with "Romanism". "Serious differences opinion in matters of doctrine" began to "escalate into public debate as the influences of the Oxford Movement began to be felt in the Australian colonies" in the 1840s.

Allwood's sermons were brief and Holy Communion was celebrated every Sunday. The organ, which had been installed in 1827, was moved to the space of the southern vestry, and the pulpit and reading desk place in front of it where they could be seen from all parts of the church. The holy table continued to be located at the eastern end of the building. Broughton supported the Tractarian views of Allwood, but his successor, Frederic Barker, who became bishop in 1855, was strongly Evangelical. The division in style between St James' and the "low church" ethos that predominated in the Sydney Diocese began at this time.

During the 1880s Sydney became a prosperous city, commerce and industry flourished, and the suburbs expanded. As more churches were built and fewer people lived in the heart of the city, the congregation of St James' Church shrank. The challenge that it faced was to minister effectively to city workers, rather than dwellers, to serve the poor of the city, and to attract those whose preference was for the style of worship and intellectual, topical preaching that distinguished St James' from many of the newly created parish churches. The young Henry Latimer Jackson, from Cambridge, was appointed in 1885. He introduced weekday services and a magazine called The Kalendar, one of Australia's first parish papers. He also lectured at Sydney University, addressed conferences, spoke at synod and acted as secretary to the newly established Sydney Church of England Boys' Grammar School. However, his sermons were described as "not so much opposed, as simply not understood". He resigned in 1895 after accepting a position in the Diocese of Ely.

Although Sydney was prospering, St James' had an acute shortage of money and "the government considered resuming the site for a city railway". The trustees at this time leased the parsonage and, in 1894, used the money for urgent restoration to the exterior of the building. The architect Varney Parkes replaced the old spire, using copper that was pre-weathered so that there was no radical change in its appearance. He removed infilling from the north portico and designed a new portico and entrance to the tower to match that of the eastern vestry. The result was to make the north face of the building its most significant aspect.