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Clergy of
S. Michael, Camden Town

St Michael’s interactive history with information about the church – its architecture, liturgy, clergy and people.

Priests

140 years but only 9 vicars…

Assistant Priests and Curates

The vicar’s right-hand men…

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Fr. Edward Penfold

1876-1903

Born in 1844 at Thorley on the Isle of Wight, Edward Bainbridge Penfold gained his middle name from his paternal grandmother Elizabeth Bainbridge (died 11th April 1810) of Pannal, a village two miles south of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, where her brother John (1781-1856) had funded a village Sunday School and owned Crimple House. The family land was leased from the Duchy of Lancaster. Elizabeth married James Penfold, Esq (1760 – 3rd January 1845) of Cheam, Surrey at St George’s Hanover Square in London on 3rd December 1799. Elizabeth and James senior had several children, of which six are known by name – the eldest daughter Eliza (died before 1838), James junior (born 1803, Cheam, Surrey – 14 June 1858, Croydon), Grace (born 1803, Cheam), Ann (born 1804, City of London), Jane (died before 1841) and Sarah (born 1805, Cheam). Grace and Sarah were still living with their widowed father at Church Farm in Cheam in 1841. Eliza married the Rev Thomas Taylor Lewis (1801-1858) in Cheam on 24th April 1827 – he was a clergyman, antiquary and geologist who had been educated at Cheam School. Ann married John Brewer on 29th August at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, then still a village to the east of London, whilst Jane married David Pocock in Hackney in 1828. David and Jane’s son was raised by his aunt Ann.

James junior was baptised in St Dunstan’s Church in Cheam on 30th August 1802 but otherwise had a rather different trajectory to his sisters, going on to study at Christ’s College Cambridge. He was made deacon on 24th July 1829 before getting married on 30th September the same year to Mary Brown (1806, City of London – 5th May 1882, Croydon). The wedding took place by licence at St Leonard’s in Streatham, since Mary was then living with her parents at Wellfield House at the south-east corner of Streatham Common. Mary was one of the children of Sarah Fenning (died 1847) and her husband Robert Brown (1771-1847), a London merchant, draper and warehouseman1. Robert had built Wellfield House around 1803 and appears there with his wife and six of his children in the 1841 census. Robert occupied the building until his death – it was demolished in 1906 and the 1930s Wellfield Estate now occupies the site. He was buried in the churchyard of St Leonard’s Streatham2.

The record of James and Mary’s marriage stated that the groom was then “of [the parish of]St Clement in [the] town of Hastings, Sussex”, showing that St Clement’s is where James junior served his title. He was then ordained priest at the bishop’s palace in Chichester on Sunday 1st October 1830. As with his deaconing, this was by Robert Carr, Bishop of Chichester – this time it was recorded that he was ordained by letters dimissory from Henry Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich, though it is unknown if he also needed them for his deaconing. These letters were required from the bishop of the diocese in which an ordinand was living or born and granted permission to him to be ordained by a different bishop – this may indicate that James was living back in Cambridge at the time of his priestly ordination. He remained in East Sussex, as his next curacy was from July 1830 onwards at St Mary’s Salehurst, and also gained his Cambridge MA in 1833. He then became curate of Thorley by at least 1835 if not earlier and from 1841 until around 1850 he served as its vicar.

James and Mary had three children, Mary Lesingham (1835, Thorley – 13th February 1902, Wimbledon), Emily Grace (1839, Thorley – 10th July 1853, Croydon), followed by Charles James (31st January 1841, Thorley – 16th July 1896, Melbourne, Australia) and Edward himself. James junior and his sister Grace were the executors of their father’s will in 1845, in which Grace and Sarah were each left over six thousand of his Bank of England consols. His remaining property and investments were then divided equally between Grace, Sarah and James junior. After James junior’s time at Thorley he and his family moved to Croydon, where they were living on St James’s Road in 1851. The census that year listed James as “Clergyman Having No Cure of Souls”, so he clearly had not found another parish. Emily Grace died in 1853 after a short illness – she was buried in the churchyard of St James’s Croydon, now a park. Emily’s parents were later buried in the same plot3. James junior’s wife long outlived him and in 1871 and 1881 was living at 23 Ridgway Road in Wimbledon, living off the income from “house dividends”. Edward’s elder brother Charles became a stockbroker and moved to Australia sometime after 1871 – he is buried in Melbourne General Cemetery. Their sister Mary Lessingham Penfold lived with their mother until the latter’s death. Mary Lessingham then lodged at 5 Homefield Road, Wimbledon until her own death in 1902, leaving money in her will for the “maintenance and repair of the Almshouses for the poor, aged or infirm persons of good character” resident in the area.

Edward went on to attend Worcester College Oxford. He was ordained deacon in 1867 and priest in 1868, both times by Charles Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. His first curacy was in the Gloucestershire market-town of Minchinhampton. In 1870 he moved into urban ministry as an assistant priest at Christ Church Albany Street, then a Church of England district chapel within near Regent’s Park, now St George’s Orthodox Cathedral. This would prove a good training for his later work at St. Michael’s, both in terms of churchmanship and of demographics. The church building had only opened in 1837, the same year as Euston station, and was sited within yards of the Cumberland Hay Market, which gave its name to the largely working-class area between the station and Regent’s Park. The p also included the soldiers serving at the Royal Horse Guards barracks, built just to the north of the Market only sixteen years before the church’s completion. The parish stretched all the way up to where Park Street (now Parkway) met Regent’s Park and thus included the Albany Street Barracks, completed only sixteen years before the church – many of its privates lived with their families in private accommodation within the parish.
Despite or perhaps because of this challenging area, Christ Church had already gained a reputation as a hotbed of the Oxford Movement. Its clergy team was headed by a perpetual curate, the first of whom had been William Dodsworth, an early Tractarian and member of the Cambridge Camden Society. He hosted sermons by Manning and Pusey, acquired a new copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration as a high altarpiece, placed candles and flowers on the altar, added a raised chancel and choir stalls and instituted one of the Church of England’s first surpliced choirs4. He finally resigned his curacy on converting to Roman Catholicism in 1851 and was succeeded by Henry William Burrows, who was still in post during Penfold’s time. Although pew rents were his main source of income, Burrows abolished them in 1865, making Christ Church far more accessible to the poor inhabitants of the area and leading to a huge revival in attendance.5 6

Burrows also continued Dodsworth’s attempts to adapt a classical preaching-box-style church to High Church worship, commissioning a stained-glass window from the Pre Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1864 and a marble inlaid floor from William Butterfield in 1867. Dante, his mother and his writer sisters Maria Francesca and Christina Gabriella had started worshipping at the church in 1843. The family attempted to set up a school in Camden Town in the 1840s7 and Dante took part in the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on nearby Gower Street in 1848. The family moved into 45 Upper Albany Street (now known as 166 Albany Street) in 1854, less than a hundred yards from Christ Church8, where Christina continued to worship until 1876. She became a close friend of Burrows and so it is not inconceivable that Penfold met her9. Penfold later invited Burrows to preach on 24th August 1879 at the first service in the ‘Iron Church’, which served as St. Michael’s from 1879 to 1881.

Penfold lived with two of his fellow curates at 156 Albany Street, just down from the church. Another of the curates there at the time, William Fairbairn La Trobe-Bateman, later wrote in Penfold’s Church Times obituary:

“At once, in that large London parish, his unobtrusive personal-holiness and deliberate commonsense began to tell. How well the writer remembers the high value that … Burrows attached to the opinion of his young ‘assistant priest.’ “Go and talk the matter quietly over with Penfold, and find out what he thinks about it.” This was our old vicar’s frequent prescription for us, when we young clergy were overtaken with our periodical phases of excited enthusiasm. Penfold, all-unconsciously to his humble self, was the oracle of the clergy house.”10

In November 1871 Penfold gave the meditations for a Mission to the whole civil parish of St Pancras, again providing valuable experience for future Missions at St Michael’s11 . These were possibly the basis for his only known book, Meditations on Passiontide, written at his next curacy. That curacy began in 1874 at St John’s, Hammersmith, a parish established only fifteen years earlier to meet population growth in the area and with a church designed by William Butterfield. However, he was only there two years before he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s to be the first vicar of the new ecclesiastical district of St Michael’s Camden Town, aged 32.

In 1903, after 27 years in Camden, he retired due to over-work and ill health in order to let a younger man take his place – that young man would prove to be his former assistant priest Fr. Francis W. Osborn.12 Penfold was appointed to the rural parish of Charing in Kent, where he died in 1907 and where he was buried in the village cemetery. His funeral took place in Charing, but about 200 people attended a Requiem Eucharist at St Michael’s on the very same day – La Trobe-Bateman notes they were “nearly all of the working class”. A memorial service was also later held for him, led by the Bishop of London and with a guard of honour from the Church Lads’ Brigade.13 La Trobe-Bateman concluded:

“Thus has passed on, beyond the Veil, one whose life, pre-eminently, was hid with Christ in God. Socially, Edward Bainbridge Penfold was very bright, well-read, observant, a most faithful friend, a keen mountaineer14, almost to the end he was ever a delightful companion. But, pre-eminent in his life was, as we have said, his personal holiness and selflessness. It was this that lifted us, who knew him, out of the restlessness of the controversy and noise, into the calmer atmosphere that breathes in the world unseen. While much was changing around him, he diffused rest in a time of restlessness to many. In his teaching, and by conviction, he was one of those of whom Keble was a type.
In almost his last letter [to me] he wrote,
“I am beginning to think that in some of us God perfects, or will perfect, a special Grace. In one, love ; in another, patience or faith ; and that we must not be too troubled if we are not conscious of possessing all.- Certainly, when I was ill, the patience I looked to God for never failed. It always seemed to come. This makes me feel I ought to trust, and that God’s goodness does not fail me; but when I ask myself, ‘ Do I love as I ought in return ? ‘I cannot say I do. I know a perfect character would have more than one Grace: but do you think that we are to be unhappy because we have not all?’”

Penfold left £1000 to St Michael’s, paying for the main east window (1908) and covering about half the cost of the parish rooms or vestries (1908). He also left £300 to Mary Bunker (1854-1910), his cook and housemaid for much of his time in Camden – she later bequeathed the first window on the left in the Resurrection Chapel, which was dedicated at Epiphany 1911. The remainder of Fr. Penfold’s estate was divided equally between the Church Penitentiary Association, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays. The east window of the Resurrection Chapel (1908), the new pulpit (1910) and the brass memorial (1908) in the chancel are all in Penfold’s memory.

Edward Smith.

  1. ‘Robert Brown’, Legacies of British Slave Ownership – UCL 
  2. Joseph Jackson Howard and Frederick Arthur Crisp, Visitation of England and Wales Notes: Volume 2, 1897, page 55 
  3. Annesley William Streane, Croydon in the past: historical, monumental, and biographical; …including also the villages of Beddington, Shirley, and Addington, 1883, page 66 
  4. Bernarr Rainbow,
    The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (1839-1872), Boydell & Brewer, 2001, pages 125-127 
  5. Mary Arsenau, ‘Pews, Periodicals and Politics: The Rossetti Women as High Church Controversialists’, in David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon (editors), Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, Anthem Press, 2004, pages 99-100 
  6. Henry William Burrows, The Half-Century of Christ Church, St Pancras, Albany Street, Skeffington, 1887, pages 43-49 
  7. Lindsay Duguid, ‘Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
  8. Emma Mason, ‘A Sort of Aesthetico-Catholic Revival: Christina Rossetti and the London Ritualist Scene’, in David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon (editors), Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, Anthem Press, 2004, pages 117, 122 and 126 
  9. Elizabeth Ludlow, ”Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints”, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 29
  10. Church Times, 9th August 1907 
  11. Henry William Burrows, The Half-Century of Christ Church, St Pancras, Albany Street, Skeffington, 1887, page 55 
  12. Parish Magazine, XVIII.7 (July 1903)
  13. Parish Magazine, XXIII.5 (May 1908)
  14. The 1891 census shows him holidaying at Caerleon in south Wales.
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Fr. Francis Osbor

1903-1927

On his father’s side Francis was descended from Peter Osborn, treasurer’s remembrancer of the Exchequer and Keeper of the Privy Purse under Edward VI and High Commissioner for Ecclesiastic Affairs under Edward’s half-sister Elizabeth I. Peter had bought the family seat of Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire in 1576. At Francis’ birth it was held by his paternal uncle Sir George Osborn (29th October 1813 – 11th January 1892), 6th Baronet, who was a Lieutenant in the 85th Regiment of Foot (1832-1835) and a Justice of the Peace. The family also owned the advowson of Campton and the manor of Hawnes Grange in Haynes, all in Bedfordshire, thus making them patrons of the livings in Campton and Haynes. Campton and Haynes were both held in the late 19th century by two of the 6th Baronet’s sons, the former by George Montagu Osborn (1846-1902) and the latter by Arthur Edward Danvers Osborn (1850-1888)1.

Francis was a family name – the first Francis Osborne (1593-1659) had been a noted author and essayist2. Francis Wilfrid’s father Montagu Francis Finch Osborn (1824, Marylebone – 14th December 1895, The Vicarage, Embleton, Northumberland) was Rector of Kibworth, Leicestershire in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses. There he met Catherine Barbara Marriott (1832, Kibworth – 1907, The Vicarage, Embleton), whom he married at Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington on 5th June 1861. Catherine Barbara’s parents were the surgeon John Marriott (1793, Kibworth – 1880, Kibworth) and his wife Georgiana Boulton (1796, Oxendon, Northamptonshire – 1884, Kibworth). This made her sister to the surgeon Sir Charles Hayes Marriott (1832-1910) and Richard Walker Marriott (1830 – 18th December 1910), vicar of Aldborough, North Yorkshire for twenty-four years and rector of Shelton, Nottinghamshire for ten years3.

Francis Wilfrid was born to Montagu and Catherine on 22nd April 1862 and baptised on 29th May 1862, both at Kibworth Beauchamp in Leicestershire. Four more children arrived between 1862 and 1871, by which time the couple and all their children were living at 13 Church Road, Kibworth Beauchamp – also resident was a cousin of Francis and three servants. In 1881 Francis was living at the Rectory in Kibworth with his parents, two siblings, a visitor and two servants and gave his occupation as “Undergraduate (Oxford)”. He was an exhibitor at Keble College, achieving 2nd class Mods in 1882 and a BA (3rd class Literae Humaniores) in 1884. He attended Cuddesdon College from 1884 to 1886 and was made deacon by the Bishop of Worcester in 1886, then priest by the same bishop a year later. In the meantime Francis Wilfrid’s father Montagu had become Vicar of Embleton in Northumberland (1884-1895) and Honorary Canon of Newcastle Cathedral.

His first curacy was in Rugby (1886-89), followed by St Michael’s (1889-95). He also achieved his Oxford MA in 1892. He was presented to the family benefice of Haynes by his cousin Sir Algernon Osborn, 7th Baronet (1889-1976) in 1895 but does not seem to have taken it up4. Instead he went to be Vice Principal of the Theological College and Chaplain of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh (1895-97), Assistant Missioner at the Charterhouse Mission in Southwark Diocese (1897-98). He then became Vicar of St James the Less, Plymouth (1898-1903), whose patron was his old college, Keble.

On 18th January 1899 Francis married Helen Osborn Lamb (14th July 1866, Dunkeld, Perthshire, Scotland – 3rd April 1953, Fingask, Scotland). The wedding took place at St Mary’s Church, Broughty Ferry, a suburb of Dundee in Scotland. The service was taken by Canon Gough of Newcastle Cathedral and the Rev Dr Mackness5. She was the daughter of David Lamb (died 6th January 1895, New York) and his wife Mary Honiball (maiden name unknown; 1844, Scotland – 4th August 1890, Dawlish, Devon). They seem to be the Mary Buik and David Lamb who married in Dundee in 1856. David traded as part of the Robert and David Lamb Company (registered in New York and Dundee) until 1883 and is referred to in his death notices as a son of a “David Lamb of Brechin” – this may be a man of that named recorded elsewhere as based in Glasgow as “a gentleman in the American trade” around 17996 McGavin’, Glasgow Gazette, 17th August 1850, page 1].

David and Mary are recorded in immigration records as arriving in New York on 26th April 1881. Helen’s sister Edith died at Cold Spring, New York on 3rd August 1864, however, suggesting that David and Mary were in the United States long before 18817 Baptised in Dunkeld in 1866, Helen was living on Latch Road in Brechin, Forfarshire in 1891. There she was a visitor in the household of the linen manufacturer James H Lamb (1837, Angus, Forfarshire – 1904, The Latch, Brechin) and his wife Catherine (1839, Angus). Also resident were three servants, another visitor Dorothea Lamb (1876, Angus) and James’ six children. James may have been an uncle of Helen and Dorothea a sister, but neither of these hypotheses is yet proven. James’ death notice recorded him as “the third son of the late Mr David Lamb, one of the founders of the firm of Lamb & Scott, linen manufacturers”8. The first mention of the firm dates to 1853. The youngest son of the firm-founding David Lamb was George Scott Lamb (1843-1933), who lived in Broughty Ferry9 One of George’s brothers was Dr Martin Brydon Lamb HETLS.

In the 1901 census Francis and Helen were living at 4 Lansdowne Place, Plymouth with a cook and a housemaid. Next Francis returned to St Michael’s, now as its vicar (1903-1927). At the Feast of the Annunciation in 1909 he presided and preached at the annual service of the Embleton parish branch of the Mother’s Union, which had been founded by his mother. At the same service a stained glass window was installed in the south aisle of Embleton Parish Church, commissioned from Kempe and Co. in memory of Barbara by Francis and his four siblings10. In 1911 he was living at 10 Gloucester Crescent with his wife and two servants. They did not have any children in 1911 and it appears they had not had any prior to his departure from St Michael’s. On 12th July 1923 the parish held a celebration of his 25 years with them, at which Canon Hunter (the first assistant priest of the parish in 1877), Fr Keelan and Fr Kett were all on the platform. Keelan wrote an account of it, published in the magazine

“A blazing afternoon during the heat-wave in grey old Camden Town, saw a gathering of the clans from far and near … The heat was terrific, but the enthusiasm surpassed it, and the thunder of applause which greeted the Vicar’s appearance must of made him think that the notorious storm of July 10th was repeating itself, but no doubt he found the electrical disturbance less of an ordeal than the outburst of affection from S Michael’s people and the words of the Bishop of London. Sincere and manly and with all his ineluctable charm, the Bishop in his speech, said all the kind things he could think of [before he] … handed him a book in which the names of the subscribers had been beautifully inscribed, and, keeping itself warm between the pages, a nice fat cheque with the order to spend the money on himself. It was not an unpleasing thing to hear the Vicar being ordered about for once! Mrs Osborn also received a charming bouquet and made a charming little reply. Then came a speech from the Vicar, who was obviously moved and touched. … The whole occasion was just a big family party, full of human feeling and human affection; yet one did not have to strain to hear the under-song, “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name give the praise.”

The November 1926 parish magazine carried Osborn’s resignation letter, which explained that he had not wished to ruin Michaelmas that year by announcing it any earlier. It also stated “For a long time past I have been feeling that the strain of keeping up the standard of work as it should be kept up was proving too much for me, and I am sure that in the best interest of the parish it is time for me now to make way for a younger priest.” All but one and a half of his thirty years in the London diocese had been at St Michael’s. In January 1927 a farewell letter from Fr Osborn appeared in the magazine, whilst the following month’s issue stated his wife had been given a handbag as a parting gift.

His later roles were as Honorary Chaplain to Bishop of Glasgow (1921-29) and as Vicar of Newland and Vicar-Warden of Beauchamp Almshouses in Worcester Diocese (1929-38) – at the latter he is mainly remembered for his lack of enthusiasm for plainsong and the choir school, where he stopped the choristers’ annual Christmas tea, filled in their swimming pool and enforced strict discipline. He left the post in 1938 and retired to Essex. In the 1939 Register just after the outbreak of war and in the 1940 edition of Crockfords he and his wife were living at Honington House, Matching Green, Harlow, Essex. They were bombed out of that house by a land-mine explosion during the Second World War and later moved to Fingask, Errol, halfway between Dundee and Perth in Scotland. He died at Fernbrae Nursing Home on Park Road in Dundee on 30th September 195111. His widow died two years later at Fingask – her funeral was held at All Saints Church, Glencarse four days after her death12 She is buried at the Western Cemetery in Dundee.

  1. ‘The Osborn Family’, Bedfordshire Archives 
  2. ‘Death of Sir George Osborn, Bart.’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 16th January 1892, page 8 
  3. ‘Strange Clause in a Will’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 4th March 1910, page 8; details his bequest of £1000 each to Barbara and Sir Charles, out of his total estate of £17860; also mentions his insistence in his will that “none of his property had been derived from the Church, whose earnest but unworthy minister he had been for so many years, but that all of it had come from his near relatives”. 
  4. ‘Haynes’, Bedfordshire Mercury, 9th February 1895, page 7 
  5. ‘Marriages’, Dundee Courier, 19th January 1899 
  6. ‘Walks in the Necropolis – Sigma Continued – Biographical Sketch of Mr [William 
  7. ‘Deaths’, Dundee Courier, 23rd August 1864, page 4 
  8. ‘Death of a Brechin Manufacturer – Mr James H Lamb – A Notable Career’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10th May 1904, page 5 
  9. ‘Handsome Bequest to Brechin Infirmary – Native’s Tribute to Parents’ Memory’, Brechin Advertiser, 16th May 1933, page 5 
  10. ‘Embleton Parish Church’, Morpeth Herald, 3rd April 1909, page 3 
  11. ‘Retired Vicar Dies in Dundee’, Dundee Courier, 2nd October 1951, page 3 
  12. ‘Deaths’, Dundee Courier, 6th April 1953, page 8 


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Fr. Norman de Langdale

1936-1972

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Fr. Alan Page

1971-1998

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Fr. Nicholas Wheeler

1996-2008

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Fr. Philip North

2008-2014

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Fr. Thomas Plant

2016 – 2017

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Fr. Michael Thomas

2017 –

  • B. 1974
  • BA University of Kent (1996); BTh St Stephen’s House, Oxford (2002)
  • Trained for priesthood at St Stephen’s House, Oxford
  • Ordained Deacon Petertide 2002, Priest Petertide 2003
  • 2002-2005 Assistant Curate, Aberavon, Llandaff
  • 2005-2008 Canon, Brecon Cathedral
  • 2008-2017 Succentor, Brecon Cathedral
  • 2008-2011 Priest in Charge, St Mary with Llanddew, Brecon
  • 2011-2017 Priest in Charge, St Mary, Brecon
  • 2017- Team Vicar for St Michael’s, Camden Town, in the Parish of Old St Pancras

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