St Stephen's Presbyterian Church and Manse, Queanbeyan

About

St Stephen's Presbyterian Church and Manse, also known as Queanbeyan Presbyterian Church, is a heritage-listed Presbyterian church and manse at 2 Morisset Street, Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Alberto Dias Soares (church) and James Barnet (manse) and built from 1872 to 1883 by Thomas Priest (stonemason), Thomas Jordan (carpenter), John Kealman (carpenter). The property is owned by Presbyterian Church of NSW Property Trust. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 24 May 2019.

The first Presbyterian services were held in the Queanbeyan district by a visiting minister in mid-1838, but it was to be many years before the town had its own resident minister. In the early 1850s, the Reverend William Ritchie, who resided in Yass rather that Queanbeyan, commenced services four times a year in the old Kent Hotel. It was during this ministry that the local Presbyterian community succeeded in 1852 in obtaining a grant of land at the corner of Morisset and Lowe Streets for a church, school and manse. The grant, which was apparently not formally gazetted until 13 December 1859, consisted of four contiguous allotments - Lots 1, 2, 3 and 20 - in Section 25, Town of Queanbeyan. Each of the allotments measured two roods in area. Lots 1 and 2 were intended for the church, Lot 3 for a school and Lot 20 fronting Lowe Street for the manse.

In December 1861, Dr Andrew Morton, a Queanbeyan medical practitioner, called the local Presbyterians to a meeting to initiate the building of a church in the town. A subscription list was opened and, by the end of May 1862, Morton had secured promises of A£ 400. But there the matter lapsed. The Presbyterian community was beset with troubles, partly caused by the Reverend John Lang, and was unable to find a minister to settle permanently in the town. It was only in March 1870 that the situation took on a rather more settled aspect when the Reverend William Mackenzie arrived in town virtually direct from Scotland. He would reinvigorate the church building project, as well as fostering the building of churches in Canberra and in Bungendore.

At a meeting following Mackenzie's formal induction to the Queanbeyan charge on 29 June 1870, his brother, the Reverend Simon Mackenzie of Goulburn, approached several prominent members of the local Presbyterian community for donations to build a church. He received promised of A£275, notably A£100 from Charles McKeahnie of "Booroomba" and A£50 from Dr Morton. It was estimated, however, that a sum of around A£750 would be needed for the construction and fitting out of the church. A Church Building Committee was formed with Morton as its chairman, but more than seven months on from Mackenzie's inauguration the committee had not raised sufficient funds to commence buildings.

Six months later, a fresh effort was made to get the project underway when a meeting of the Church Building Committee was called for 12 August 1871. The newspaper advertisement for the meeting specifically requested the attendance of collectors, adding hopefully that "in the interval they will exert themselves in gathering in all promised subscriptions". Evidently sufficient funds were collected for the committee soon afterwards engaged an architect to draw up plans and specifications for the building. The architect the committee chose for the task was the Reverend Alberto Dias Soares who was the local Church of England minister and Rector or Christ Church in Queanbeyan. Soares had actually offered his services as an architect gratis (for free).

Born in London in 1830, Soares was the son of the Portuguese Consul and merchant, His Excellency Manoel Joachim Soares, and his English wife Camilla (née Lodington). He attended the Putney School for Civil Engineers in London in 1849–1850. Apart from an innate talent for drawing and art lessons in Porto in 1847, his training as an engineer appears to have been his only qualification for undertaking architectural work. In August 1852, he departed for Australia with visions of a career in engineering and of furthering a grand scheme that had been proposed for a colonial railway. Once in Australia, however, he found that no-one was interested in the scheme. His life took a wholly new direction in 1855 when he felt, and answered, a call to the ministry of the Anglican Church. Taking Deacon's orders in May 1856, he was appointed to his first incumbency, Queanbeyan, in April 1857 and was ordained a priest on 7 June.

On his arrival in Queanbeyan, Soares met with an urgent need for his expertise in engineering and design. The existing Christ Church had been built in 1844 and was quite an inadequate structure. Soares thereupon designed a new church in Romanesque style and had it erected in 1859–60. The church now forms part of the heritage-listed Christ Church Anglican Group in Queanbeyan. Church of England authorities swiftly awoke to Soares's value as an architect and, when the Anglican Diocese of Goulburn was formed in 1863, the foundation bishop appointed him Honorary Diocesan Architect. During what would become nearly thirty years practice as an architect, Soares would eventually design at least sixteen churches, as well as major extensions to St John the Baptist Church, Reid in the ACT. St Stephen's in Queanbeyan was the only Presbyterian church he designed; all the other churches were Church of England establishments.

Apart from his work as an architect for churches, Soares designed nine parsonages or rectories, three school buildings and two church halls. He undertook a small amount of private work as well, notably the Hibernia Lodge, a stately Gothic Revival residence erected in Queanbeyan in 1865 and now listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register. His private work included some role, probably in an advisory and supervisory capacity, for extensions to Duntroon House in 1862 and 1876 and perhaps too for extensions to the stone Duntroon woolshed in the early 1860s. He may also have designed St Matthew's Rectory in Kiewa Street, Albury, in 1859 and the parsonage for St James' Church, Binda, in 1874 based on information from the NSW State Heritage Inventory. [ citation needed ] The architectural historian Morton Herman described Soares as "an amateur architect of no mean ability". The only comparable figure as a cleric architect in Australia is the Roman Catholic clergyman, Monsignor John Hawes (1876–1956) who practised in Western Australia in the period 1915–1939.

Although Soares designed buildings in such far-flung places as Balranald (St Barnabas' Church) and Wentworth (St John's Church and Parsonage), it is not surprising that more of his buildings were erected in Queanbeyan than in any other location. He was based in Queanbeyan for twenty years and, during that time, designed seven buildings in the town. Two of them, a set of conjoined cottages in Rutledge Street and the Protestant Church Hall in Crawford Street, have been demolished, in c. 1983 and 1994 respectively. Of the other five buildings, four are listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, three of them - Christ Church, the associated school extension (1864) and the Rectory (1875) - as part of the Christ Church Anglican Group. The other NSW State Heritage Register-listed structure is Hibernia Lodge. The remaining building is St Stephen's Church.

Design and construction of St Stephen's Church

Soares prepared plans and specifications for St Stephen's by October 1871. His design, which was for a fairly plain structure, was examined by the Church Building Committee on 20 October and it was probably at this time that its members requested a more ornamental appearance for the church. Soares obliged by adding buttresses to the design. These served no structural purpose and were purely for visual effect. They also added a sum of A£100 to the cost of the building, a cost that was covered by contributions of A£25 each from Dr Morton, Charles McKeahnie, Kenneth Cameron and Robert McKellar.

As construction was about to commence, the church in its final design was described as "a neat gothic structure with a bell tower surmounted by a lofty spire. The walls are to be of rubble masonry in courses with axed quoins, the arches copings, etc., to be finished with Portland cement".

In February 1872 the Reverend Mackenzie called for tenders to undertake the necessary works. As no suitable tenders were received, a further call for tenders was issued in the latter half of March. This yielded a positive result the following month when the committee accepted tenders from Thomas Priest for the masonry and Thomas Jordon for the carpentry and joinery.

The other contractors to work on St Stephen's were John Evetts (or Evitts) for the plastering, Augustus Ferdinand Helmund for the painting and, notably, John Kealman for carpentry and joinery. They were all local tradesmen. Kealman was a builder in his own right who would go on to establish a large brickmaking enterprise in Queanbeyan, as well as building the neighbouring St Stephen's Manse in 1883. His contract at Stephen's was to fabricate the window frames, interior fittings like the pews, and the picket fence and gates that enclosed the church. He also designed and built the pulpit free of charge for the congregation.

At a ceremony on 16 May 1872, Charles McKeahnie's wife Elizabeth laid the foundation stone of the church. Work on the building then proceeded very slowly. The main reason for this was that the Building Committee had neglected to bind the contractors to any schedule. Eventually, still in an unfinished state, the church was opened and the first service conducted in it on 8 March 1874. At this time, all of the church's window openings were covered with calico because the manufacturer had not yet supplied the stained glass windows. As well, a temporary fence of rough palings surrounded the church grounds because Kealman had been unable to obtain sufficient seasoned timber to complete the picket fence and gates. For the same reason, he had not been able to finish the pews, the church having to borrow seating from the Court House and the Methodist Church for the opening ceremony.

One highly satisfactory aspect of the opening was that the church had cleared all costs of construction and fitting out. The fees for the contractors on the building, the quarryman and the foundry, as well as sundry expenses, had amounted to A£583. It is unclear whether this amount included the additional 100 pounds for the decorative buttresses, but this cost had of course been met by four of the better-heeled members of the congregation.

The new church was Victorian Gothic Revival in style, with some Early English features. With space to comfortably accommodate 150 worshippers, it consisted of a four-bay nave, a porch on its east-facing front and a vestry or session room on its western end. The body of the church contained ten lancet windows, while the porch had two such windows of smaller dimensions and the vestry one. Behind the pulpit in the western end of the church was a large quatrefoil window. The label moulds over the windows featured bosses with foliage motifs and those over the doors had bosses composed of the heads of Grecian figures. The frames of all the windows and doors were of oak. The building had a shingle roof and a barrel ceiling lined with varnished tongue-and-groove pine boards. Thomas Priest's masonry work on the church was described as "superior to anything of the class in the district" at the time.

Rising from the southwestern corner of the building was a low bell-tower surmounted by a spire sheathed in zinc. This was evidently not the lofty tower that was originally envisaged for the church. John Gale, the Honorary Secretary of the Church Building Committee, described the tower at the time of the church's opening as having a "paltry appearance". A Mr Holdsworth of Sydney donated a bell for the bell-tower, but this was quickly found to be inadequate. Two women members of the congregation then purchased a "much larger and finer toned" bell and donated it anonymously to the church; it was installed on 25 April 1874. At the same time, Kealman was at work erecting the picket fence around the building.

St Stephen's has remained substantially intact since it was built, though some improvements and other changes have been made both to its interior and exterior. The church was provided with a reed organ in 1885, but this was replaced with a better one in 1904 and then with a more elaborate and expensive Estey organ in August 1913. The Estey, which features philharmonic reeds and sixteen stops, is still in working order in the church. A significant addition was made to the fabric of the church after a storm destroyed the circular quatrefoil window in its western end in January 1896. A replacement circular window of stained glass was unveiled by Amy Steel, the wife of the minister, on 31 May 1896, the window depicting the burning bush accompanied by the Latin inscription "nec tamen consumebatur" ('and yet it was not being consumed'). It was made of 394 separate pieces of glass, each piece having to be handled six times during the manufacturing process.

On 14 March 1897, less than a year after she unveiled the new window, Amy Steel died at the early age of 40. She was later commemorated by two memorials erected in the church. On 29 November 1910, at the time of the 50-year anniversary of the establishment of a Presbyterian charge in Queanbeyan, the congregation donated to the church in her honour a stained glass window bearing a Greek cross, Anchor Cross and "IHS", and the phrase from Revelations 2:10 "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life". It was unveiled by Amy's daughter Ruby, who was the wife of the incumbent minister, the Reverend E. Sydney Henderson. At the same time, the family donated to Amy's memory a memorial tablet that was erected over the pulpit.