1871-78 – Reverend Trigge and the new parish
Reverend John Davies Trigge came to Loxwood in 1871. Born at Brompton in 1828, he had worked as headmaster of the Central National School in Brighton before studying at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was ordained at Chichester in 1865 and later served at St Peter’s in Brighton. In November 1871 he married Emma Andrews at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, and they settled in Loxwood.
Loxwood was then a hamlet and chapelry within the parish of Wisborough Green. The church beside the pond served local worshippers, while the Vicar of Wisborough Green retained the rights of the mother parish. An Order in Council dated 9 August 1873 created the ecclesiastical district of Loxwood. Reverend Trigge became its first vicar that November, and a new vicarage followed in 1874.
Reverend Trigge’s earlier work in education continued in Loxwood. Emma Trigge started the first village Sunday school, and the purpose-built village school opened on Vicarage Hill on 7 January 1878. By then Loxwood had its own vicar, a new vicarage and new school, while worship still centred on the small church beside the pond.
The old church had been substantially rebuilt in brick in 1822 on the site used for Loxwood worship for centuries. It did not have a parish burial ground. Families continued to use churchyards elsewhere, including Wisborough Green and Alfold. Reverend Trigge pressed for a larger church with a burial ground of its own, but the scheme depended on diocesan grants and subscriptions from people connected with the village.
1889-96 – the Garton font and Rowland Plumbe’s first scheme
John Arthur Garton, who had been born at Garton House in 1829 and became a successful London businessman holding senior office in the Worshipful Company of Butchers, supported Loxwood during his annual visits to the village. At the 1889 festival Reverend Trigge thanked John Garton’s family for a font already presented to the church. Its inscription records that it was presented by the children of J. A. Garton to Loxwood Church.
At John Garton’s final village festival in July 1893 the proposed new church formed part of the speeches. John Garton recalled the Bible he had won at Alfold Sunday School as a boy and promised money towards the church, saying that he wanted ‘a brick in the wall’. He died on 8 April 1894. Sarah Garton and the family honoured his pledge and remained among the supporters of the building scheme.
Rowland Plumbe, a London architect and Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, designed the new church. His work included hospitals and housing; he also designed St Mark at Noel Park in north London. For Loxwood, the printed appeal notices carried an engraving picture of the design headed ‘Proposed New Church’ above a smaller engraving labelled ‘Present Church’. Reverend Trigge was named as chairman, Maurice Botting as honorary secretary and Corrall Farmer as treasurer.
At this stage the new church was intended to replace the existing building on the old site beside the pond. The subscription list recorded £300 from the Bishop of Chichester’s Fund, £100 from the Chichester Diocesan Association, £100 from Reverend Trigge, £200 from Sarah Garton and £200 from Corrall Farmer, with smaller subscriptions from other supporters. The design had been prepared and money was being collected, but construction had not started when Reverend Trigge died unexpectedly.
1897-1900 – Reverend Trigge dies and the project changes site
Reverend Trigge died on 12 July 1897. His funeral service was held in the old Loxwood church on 15 July and was attended by parishioners, schoolchildren, teachers and clergy. Corrall Farmer then accompanied the hearse to Brighton, where Reverend Trigge was buried.
The appointment of his successor produced a dispute over Loxwood’s relationship with Wisborough Green. The Vicar of Wisborough Green appointed Reverend Connard Hildebrand to Loxwood. Henry Napper of Lakers Lodge challenged the appointment and withheld six months of tithes amounting to £11 6s 10d. Henry argued that Loxwood’s inhabitants possessed a right to select their own minister.
Corrall Farmer assisted Henry Napper. In August 1897 Edward Ryley, a registrar of the London courts, translated the 1404 episcopal grant under which the inhabitants of Loxwood had been permitted to build and maintain a place of worship and provide for a chaplain. Henry relied on the medieval document in the dispute.
The later change of site was closely connected with Ifold House. The Ifold Estate had expanded eastwards during the nineteenth century. Edward Napper acquired Ifold in 1811, and his son John Napper later added Headsfoldwood and adjoining land. By the later nineteenth century the estate extended towards Vicarage Hill, including ground that had been farmed for decades by Henry Botting of Headsfoldwood. Henry became Loxwood’s first churchwarden after the ecclesiastical district was created in 1873.
The families then living at Ifold brought another connection. Lionel Constable had married Emily Farmer in 1884. Emily’s brother Corrall Farmer married Lionel’s sister Elizabeth Constable in 1887 and settled in Loxwood. Emily and Corrall were children of John Stinson Farmer, the railway-signalling manufacturer and partner in Saxby & Farmer. John Stinson Farmer spent his later years at Ifold House and died there on 12 December 1892. Rowland Plumbe was his long-time friend and one of his executors.
In spring 1898 Lionel and Emily Constable opened the grounds of Ifold House for a large bazaar in aid of the church fund. The project was then estimated at about £2,200, with approximately £1,500 still required. On 10 June 1898 Lionel Constable bought the Ifold Estate from the trustees of Anne Napper for £25,000. The purchase covered about 934 acres and included land extending towards Headsfoldwood and Vicarage Hill.
The church proposal then moved from the old site in the village centre to land from the Ifold Estate at Vicarage Hill. Church research identifies Emily Constable with the gift of the ground, while Lionel Constable was the legal owner of the estate after the 1898 purchase. The records do not state a single reason for the change but part of the decision may have been that the land was at the entrance to Ifold and could be seen from the manor house. The new site provided room for a burial ground, was opposite the school and close to the vicarage, and also allowed the old church to remain in use while the new building was constructed.
The patronage case continued while the church project moved forward. In October 1900 judgment was given for Reverend Connard Hildebrand. The court held that the claimed local right to choose the priest had not been exercised since 1628 and had lapsed through long disuse. Reverend Connard Hildebrand remained vicar as building work continued on Vicarage Hill.
1900-02 – building, opening and consecration
Henry Spooner of Alfold Bars undertook the building work with local craftsmen. On Tuesday 28 August 1900 Archdeacon Francis John Mount laid the foundation stone at 3.45 in the afternoon. Construction then continued while the old church remained in use beside the pond.
The church service register records the parish moving from one building to the other. After Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, Reverend Connard Hildebrand held two memorial services in the old church on Sunday 27 January. Morning and evening worship, Holy Communion and other services continued there while Henry Spooner’s work proceeded on Vicarage Hill.
By May the new church was close to completion. At the annual dinner of the Loxwood Fair and Show on 8 May, Reverend Connard Hildebrand said that it was nearly finished and that a service would be held there the following Thursday. He also said that the remaining debt had to be cleared before the bishop could consecrate the building. A test service was held in the new church on 16 May.
On 28 May 1901 a diocesan faculty authorised the removal of fittings from the old church to the new. The list included the Garton font, lectern, reading desk, seats, harmonium and books. Church records also identify the bell, pull rope and other furniture among the fittings taken over. Eight old oak seats were transferred from the earlier church, bringing medieval timberwork into Rowland Plumbe’s new building. Three of the old seats carried brass family name plates of the original petitioners of 1404.
The service register records the final Sunday in the old church on 18 August 1901. Two days later, on Tuesday 20 August, the next entry is ‘Opening of New Church’. Archdeacon Francis John Mount opened St John the Baptist at 4 p.m.; the register names him as preacher and records twenty-three communicants. Maurice Botting and Corrall Farmer were the churchwardens.
The first Sunday services followed on 25 August. The baptism register records Jessie Elliott, the daughter of John and Kate Elliott of Hill Top Stores, as the first child baptised in the new church that day. John Elliott was the Loxwood grocer who ran Hill Top Stores and gifted the land for the Reading Room. On 10 November the Bishop of Chichester, Ernest Roland Wilberforce, consecrated the church and adjoining churchyard. A handwritten statement in the service register records the consecration and bears the bishop’s signature.
The first marriage in the new church followed on 16 November 1901, when Middleton Charles Puttock married Lily Julia Wells. The burial register began to record use of the new churchyard in January 1902. Cecil Francis Joseph Cooper, aged nine months, was buried on 13 January, followed by William Randall, aged forty, on 24 January.
In 1902 Emma Trigge gave the east window in memory of Reverend Trigge. The window, by the stained-glass artist Arthur Joseph Dix, depicts Christ receiving the children and carries the words from Luke 18:16: ‘Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.’ Reverend Trigge had died before the site changed and before Henry Spooner’s building work began; his memorial was placed above the chancel of the completed church.
1903-13 – the old church is removed and parish life continues
The old church remained beside the pond. On 29 April 1903 the chapel trustees resolved to sell the old church and boundary-wall material by tender. The purchaser was required to pull down the building, remove the material and level the ground by 1 October.
At a trustees’ meeting on 22 June, chaired by Maurice Botting with Reverend Connard Hildebrand and Corrall Farmer present, William Thayre’s tender of £32 10s was accepted. The old church was taken down in September 1903. Bricks, roof tiles and arched window frames were subsequently reused in the Wharf Building beside the High Street.
St John the Baptist then carried the ordinary cycle of parish worship. The registers record baptisms, marriages, funerals, Holy Communion, morning and evening services, Sunday-school services and collections. The churchyard began to fill around the building, providing the local burial ground that had been absent from the old church site.
The people connected with the building continued to appear in the church records. A brass memorial on the south wall commemorates Henry Botting of Headsfoldwood, Loxwood’s first churchwarden. Maurice Botting, who had served as honorary secretary of the first building scheme and later as churchwarden, remained closely involved with the parish. The school opposite and the vicarage nearby kept education, parish administration and worship together along Vicarage Hill.
1914-21 – the First World War and the memorial
The First World War brought the names of serving men and wartime deaths into the church’s records and later onto its memorial. The Ifold connection returned through the family of Lionel and Emily Constable. Their son Basil John Leslie Clymping Constable served as a captain in the 1/4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment. He died of wounds at Gallipoli on 9 August 1915 and was buried at Green Hill Cemetery. His brother Lionel George Archibald Constable served with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and was badly wounded, while their sister Olivia Constable undertook Voluntary Aid Detachment work between 1915 and 1919.
Maurice Botting, churchwarden during the building and opening of St John the Baptist, died at Hillside on 1 February 1916 and was buried in the churchyard three days later. His son Maurice Botting, serving in the London Regiment, was killed on the Somme on 15 September 1916. John Puttock, a private in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, died on 4 July 1916 and was buried at St John the Baptist. William J. Batchelor of the 1st Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment died on 24 September 1918 and was also buried in the churchyard.
The church memorial records twenty-four men associated with Loxwood who died in the Great War: William Aylward; William J. Batchelor; Maurice Botting; William Boxall; Albert Charman; Basil John Leslie Clymping Constable; Clement H. Cooper; William Henry Cooper; Alfred Walter Day; George Day; Wallace Sydney Ede; William Henry Foster; Donald James Herbert Gregory; Albert Grinstead; Charles Edward Ketcher; William Otway Overington; Walter Henry Packham; Cecil Raymond Albert Packham; George Hamilton Powell; James Puttock; John Puttock; Frank Puttock; Percy Sopp; and Charles Stote.
A faculty dated 23 October 1920 authorised a war memorial tablet in St John the Baptist. The memorial was unveiled on Palm Sunday 1921. Its inscription begins: ‘To the Glory of God & in grateful memory of the men of Loxwood who gave their lives for their country in the Great War.’ Beneath the names are the words: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’
Remembrance between the wars
The Loxwood Comrades Club was formed in 1921, and its Memorial Hut later stood on the opposite side of Vicarage Hill. Its connection with St John the Baptist was through the former servicemen who attended the church for Armistice and anniversary services.
On Armistice Day in November 1923 Reverend W. H. B. Mainprice read the names of the fallen during the two minutes’ silence. Palm Sunday anniversary services at the church memorial followed in 1924, 1925 and 1926. Between those services the church continued its normal parish work of worship, baptisms, marriages and funerals, while the churchyard extended around the building.
1939-45 – the Second World War
The Second World War added two more servicemen to the names commemorated at St John the Baptist. Leslie William Cole, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, died on 22 September 1942. He was the son of Henry and Elizabeth Cole and the husband of Olive Cole of Loxwood. He was buried in the churchyard, where his grave is numbered 196.
Albert William Howick, a private in the Pioneer Corps, died on 21 October 1944, aged thirty-eight. He was the husband of Violet Howick of Loxwood and was also buried in the churchyard. The names of Leslie Cole and Albert Howick were subsequently added to the church memorial beneath those of the twenty-four Loxwood men who had died during the First World War.
1946-82 – later stained glass
In 1946 W. Morris Studios made the stained-glass window in the second window of the south aisle as a Second World War memorial. It depicts St George and St Michael.
Between 1980 and 1982 Penelope Neave designed and made five modern stained-glass windows for St John the Baptist. They were given by Elspeth Riley-Smith of Brewhurst in memory of her parents, Sir John and Lady Craik-Henderson, and her husband, William Henry Douglas Riley-Smith. The glass includes four figures representing the Beatitudes.
Six centuries of worship
The dedication to St John the Baptist passed from the small oratory founded in 1404 to the Chapel of Ease, through its rebuilding in 1822, the creation of the separate parish in 1873 and finally to the new church opened in 1901. Worship continued throughout these changes, allowing the same dedication to be carried from one place of worship to the next.
The new church also received the font, medieval oak seats, harmonium, bell and other fittings from the old church. It was built on land long farmed by Henry Botting, Loxwood’s first churchwarden, and given for the church and churchyard by Lionel Constable of Ifold.
Alongside the dedication of the church itself was the dedication of the people who served it: clergy, churchwardens, benefactors, teachers, musicians, families and generations of worshippers. St John the Baptist continues the worship begun in Loxwood in 1404 and the service given to the village by those who supported its places of worship over the following six hundred years.
