St. Mary's and St. John's, Hampstead

Yesterday was the Sixth Sunday of Easter and, in England and Wales if nowhere else, Ascension Day. Or, rather, the transferred Holy Day of Obligation for the feast of the Ascension. I went to Mass at St. Mary's church in Hampstead. It is an absolutely lovely little Italianate church and I am very sorry not to have any photographs of it.

The church is very thin, making communion a very interesting (for which, read squeezy) experience. A baldacchino stands over the altar which cuts a rather lonely presence due to the lack of tabernacle. It is in one of the side altars that form separate rooms (rather than being built into the main body of the church).

***

The Mass that I attended was the Family Mass so naturally the sound of children was strong! My sole ambition in terms of Mass attendance is to be at one that meets the Hilaire Belloc test - twenty minutes or less. Due to confirmations taking place at the following Mass, this one was truncated in length, ending up at 45 minutes. Not bad but could be better. 

At the end of the Mass, the priest pointed out a fact strangely missed out by the BBC during a recent TV programme on the development of English classical music, namely, that Haydn had a patron who was a Catholic prince. His name was Esterhazy. One year, he stayed so long at one of his holiday residences that Haydon composed a symphony in which the musicians leave the stage one by one until only a sole violinist is left!

Leaving the church, I visited the graveyard of the nearby Church of England church of St John the Evangelist. Some notable figures are buried there. For example, Hugh Gaitskell who died in 1963. He was the leader of the Labour Party between 1955 - 63. These were years when Labourwas in opposition. Thus, like John Smith thirty or so years later, Gaitskell is regarded by some as the greatest Prime Minister Labour never had.

***

Also buried at St John's is the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Gerald Du Maurier, son of George and father of Daphne. Du Maurier had a sister named Sylvia who married one Arthur Llewellyn-Davies. Their sons, George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nicholas became friends with J. M. Barrie and were the original Lost Boys. But as Peter Llewellyn-Davies notes in Finding Neverland, however, he was not Peter Pan. Barrie himself was. Anyway, Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies in buried just a few feet from Gaitskell, alongside her husband and one or two of her children.

When he contracted tuberculoses, the poet John Keats moved to Rome, but before then, he lived in Hampstead. Thus, in St. John's the Evangelist, there is a memorial bust to him. As he was a radical, however, I wonder if he would have appreciated the gesture. 

St. John's is over the road from the graveyard, but is surrounded by the original. Walking through it is like being in the country. Buried there are John Harrison, who invented the chronometer that allowed sailors to measure longitude while at sea for the first time, and - I think - the painter John Constable. If he isn't (the inscription seems also to suggest that he is buried in Cambridge), other members of his family certainly are.

St. John's itself is a lovely church. It looks like something out of the regency period. If a Jane Austen production has not filmed there yet, it jolly well ought to!