Having found the buried ground of St Dunstan in the West, I had to find the church - and there it was - on Fleet Street. In the yard at the side of the tower I spotted coffee and chairs. I needed both. I was amused that three statues stood behind railings with a notice that told passers-by not to put anything behind those railings. As if I would do any such thing! Two elderly gentlemen sat inside the church to welcome visitors. Elderly? Both were a few years younger than me!
I am told by a good friend that this is known as the journalists church - so little wonder I felt at home. Here is some of the history:
The original St Dunstan-in-the-West stood on the same site as today, spilling in the past onto what is now the tarmac of Fleet Street. It is not known exactly when the original church was built, but it was between 988 and 1070 AD. It is not impossible that St Dunstan himself, or priests who knew him well, decreed that a church was needed here. The church narrowly escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666. The quick thinking of the Dean of Westminster saved the church: he roused forty scholars from Westminster School in the middle of the night, who extinguished the flames with buckets of water.
The wear and tear of time took its toll, however, and St Dunstan’s was rebuilt in 1831. The architect, John Shaw, died in 1832, leaving his son, who bore the same name, to complete the task. The tower was badly damaged by German bombers in 1944, and was rebuilt in 1950 through the generosity of newspaper magnate Viscount Camrose. In 1952, St Dunstan-in-the-West became a Guild Church, dedicating its ministry to the daytime working population around Fleet Street.
I much enjoyed looking at the Clock and Giants and having arrived just before 11.15am I watched as the quarter hour was struck. The clock dates from 1671, and was the first public clock in London to have a minute hand. The figures of the two giants strike the hours and quarters, and turn their heads. There are numerous literary references to the clock, including in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the Vicar of Wakefield and a poem by William Cowper (1782):
When labour and when dullness, club in hand,
Like the two figures at St. Dunstan’s stand,
Beating alternately in measured time
The clockwork tintinnabulum of rhyme,
Exact and regular the sounds will be,
But such mere quarter-strokes are not for me.
The courtyard contains statues of King Lud, the mythical sovereign, and his sons (behind the railings referred to earlier) and Queen Elizabeth I, all of which originally stood in Ludgate. The statue of Queen Elizabeth I dates from 1586 and is the only one known to have been carved during her reign.
Much of the internal fabric pre-dates the rebuilding of the church in the 1830s. The high altar and reredos are Flemish woodwork dating from the seventeenth century. There are also a large number of monuments from the original
church. Some of the earliest are two bronze figures thought to date from 1530.
Two unusual features - the church is octagonal and the altar is on the north wall not the east.
