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Background
The building of this church started in 1824 and was finally completed 128 years later in 1952.
It is built on the site of De Rietfontein, the abandoned farmhouse of Lucas Meyer which Lt. Col. John Graham used as his first military headquarters early in 1812. On the 14th of August that year the Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir John Cradock, decreed the headquarters should become a civil centre, named Graham’s Town.
The first recorded reference to a church was made by the government surveyor, J. Knobel, who laid out the town plan in June 1814. He recommended the retention of the open area of the parade ground in front of the old farmhouse: ‘…although a triangular space would be left open, that space, having the most elevated ground in its centre, might allow a very convenient situation for a church or any other public building…’. This “convenient situation” was at the eastern end of the low ridge which became the High Street where it crossed the Uitenhage to Blawkrantz road. The first church services were held here by William Boardman, the Colonial Chaplain at Bathurst who had accompanied one of the two parties of 1820 Settlers that included clergymen.
The earliest real development towards a church came from a curious connection between the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.), the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Henry Bathurst, and the Governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset. In 1820 the Governor refused £500 offered by the S.P.G. for a church in Cape Town because of his doubts as to the inhabitants’ church-building abilities. However, while in England the following year, he wrote to Lord Bathurst, asking him to obtain the £500 for Grahamstown, where ‘there is a British Population of upwards of 3000 persons (including the Military) totally destitute of any place of worship whatever’. The S.P.G. agreed and later the colonial treasury provided the balance of the final cost of £4,404 15s. The plans were drawn by a Cape Town land surveyor, W. Jones, and George Gilbert of the same town started building operations in 1824. While this work was in progress an interesting light was thrown on local conditions by a proposal from the Governor in 1826 ‘that the English Church in Graham’s Town should be used by the Dutch congregation, in the same way that the Dutch Church in this Town (i.e. Cape Town) is used by the English’.
St George's Church
The first St George’s was opened in 1830 and, like Highbury church in Jane Austen’s Emma, was a Georgian church with galleried interior and white-washed walls adorned with memorial tablets. Its focus was on the Word preached from a lofty pulpit, below which stood the prayer-desk, with a desk for the clerk below that – a three-decker, in fact. The single-roomed church was large for a small frontier town, but it was doomed within a few decades for two main reasons. The first bishops were very critical of old St George’s at a time when the growing Gothic revival movement in Britain was beginning to sweep all other architectural styles before it.
When Robert Gray, the Bishop of Cape Town, visited Grahamstown on October 5, 1848 he noted laconically: ‘Church well situated, but miserable in point of architecture’.
St George’s Cathedral, Grahamstown
In 1853, the enormous Diocese of Cape Town (which covered all of southern Africa at the time) was divided into three: Cape Town, Grahamstown, and Natal (which was centred in Pietermaritzburg).
On his arrival, John Armstrong, first Bishop of Grahamstown, described St George’s exterior as ‘plain and uninteresting in the extreme… I do trust I may be spared to see a better and worthier structure reared as our cathedral’. There was an inevitability about the result of this thinking against the background of such a vigorous English church building movement as the Gothic revival – the new Grahamstown cathedral had to be Gothic. The task of designing it went to the best known and most prolific exponent of this romantic, symbolic and mysterious style, Sir George Gilbert Scott.
The second Bishop of Grahamstown, Henry Cotterill, having been very pleased with a house Scott had designed for him back in England, commissioned him to produce a plan for the extension of his cathedral in 1860. Scott completed the drawings the following year and they were sent out to South Africa in 1862.
St Michael's Pro-Cathedral
When Bishop Merriman died in 1882, Allan Becher Webb, at the time Bishop of Bloemfontein was elected to replace him. Dean Williams refused him access to the Cathedral as well, and Bishop Webb set up his pro-cathedral, dedicated to St Michael, in an iron shed on High Street, a stone’s throw from St George’s. After Williams’ death in August 1885, Bishop Webb set about the work of reconciliation. Having achieved this, he set about raising funds so that building work could commence again.
Cathedral of St Michael and St George
Sir George Gilbert Scott had died, however, in 1878, and so it fell to his son, John Oldrid Scott, to continue the work started by his father. He designed the chancel, which was completed in 1893. It was consecrated on All Saints’ Day (1 November) by Bishop Webb and dedicated to both St George and St Michael to mark the healing of the divisions in the Diocese.
The new Nave
J. O. Scott also designed the nave, but the work of fundraising and building for that project was interrupted again, this time by conflict on a national scale, with the South African War. According to Sir George Gilbert Scott’s original plan, the nave was to have had a clerestory, with lower aisles on either side. Before building work commenced, however, it was decided to do away with the idea of the clerestory, and instead to raise the arcade up to the roof, with taller aisles on either side. A further change to the original plan was made when it was decided to retain the original south wall of St George’s. The new nave was completed in 1912.
The Lady Chapel - a memorial to two World Wars
One last section of J. O. Scott’s design remained unbuilt: the north porch and Lady chapel. It took some forty years before it was finally completed in 1952. The intervening decades had been marked with yet more conflict, this time on a global scale, as the world went through two World Wars. The Lady chapel was built as a memorial to those from the town who fell in the fighting.
Chronology
1812 14 August. Graham’s Town established.
1824 Building started on St George’s Church.
1830 St George’s opened for use.
1834 Refuge for women and children in Frontier War.
1850 21 September. St George’s consecrated by first Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray.
1853 30 November, St Andrew’s Day. John Armstrong consecrated as first Bishop of Graham’s Town. He started missionary work and founded St Andrew’s College whose dedication commemorates the date of his consecration.
1860 9 August. Foundation stone of “Alfred Tower” laid by Queen Victoria’s fourth child and second son, Prince Alfred. Owing to subsequent complications this was not built.
1871 30 November, St Andrew’s Day. Nathanial James Merriman was consecrated as third Bishop of Grahamstown in St George’s Cathedral. (His son, John X. Merriman later became a prime minister of Cape Colony.) A period of conflict followed during which the Dean, Frederick Henry Williams excluded from the cathedral the bishop he had helped elect.
1874 Original tower found to be in danger and Dean Williams collected funds for new “Public Clock Tower”.
1879 Tower and spire, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, completed.
1883 In November, the fourth bishop, Allan Becher Webb, set up his throne in an iron building, formally a skating rink, on High Street and called it St Michael’s Pro-Cathedral.
1885 Immediately after Dean William’s death in August, Bishop Webb started negotiations with the Select Vestry and after the reconciliation he became “officiating minister” of St George’s and conducted the services on Christmas Day.
1893 1 November, All Saints’ Day. The chancel was consecrated by Bishop Webb and dedicated to both St George and St Michael to mark the healing of the breach in the diocese.
1912 6 August. The new nave, was dedicated just eight days short of the centenary of the establishment of Grahamstown. Both nave and chancel were designed by Mr J. O. Scott.
1924 The Cathedral celebrated its centenary – the first English church in South Africa to do so. (An older church in Simonstown was so badly built that it collapsed not long after construction.)
1952 Lady chapel completed. Various changes to the interior take place thereafter, including replacing the original stone floor with wood, and replacing the original pews with new ones – in both cases, following the style of those installed in the Lady chapel.
1971 The original south gallery, having been deemed no longer safe, was demolished. The plan to rebuild it was abandoned.
1981 The spire underwent extensive restoration to repair damage from a rusting weathervane.
2004 Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the thirteenth Bishop of Grahamstown, and first black bishop of the diocese, is enthroned. In 2007 he was installed as Archbishop of Cape Town, the fourth Bishop of Grahamstown to be so (the most of any diocese in the Province).