Sir John Betjeman, British Poet Laureate and authority on church architecture, had a particular association with Monkstown Parish Church. He served as press attache with the British Embassy in Dublin from 1941-1943.
He became an immensely popular figure in Irish Society during his short stay, learning the Irish language, socialising in Irish pubs, and becoming friends with many of Dublin’s prominent literary characters. When his official stay in Dublin ended in 1943, his departure made the front page of The Irish Times.
He maintained a life-long interest in church architecture – a subject on which he also wrote many books. He particularly admired Monkstown Parish Church, which he considered to be architect Semple’s greatest achievement, and he visited the church on a number of occasions when he stayed in Sandycove at the home of his friend, Lady Wicklow. In 1974, he agreed to become the first patron of the Friends of Monkstown Church, and corresponded regularly with the Rector at that time, the Rev. Canon William Wynne. The church was also featured in a BBC documentary entitled Betjeman’s Dublin.
The following is extracted from a piece written by Sir John Betjeman, with his views on the architecture of Mokstown Parish Church. It first appeared in The Monkstown Review.:
“In the reign of George IV and before the railway arrived and blocked up the old harbour of Dun Laoghaire, Monkstown and its neighbourhood were gaining favour as sites for marine residences. The sea was no longer regarded as something rude and inelegant, as it had been until late in the 18th century, but as something whose air was healthy and whose coastline was irregular, picturesque and therefore beautiful.
People were beginning to stress the importance of outline. Battlements and rugged rocks against the sky were greatly admired, as may be seen in the topographical watercolours and aquatints of Georgian times. The plain stone Protestant church of 1789, with its western tower, must have seemed out of keeping:
“All prim and trim in tidy ugliness,
A square box with a tall box at the end,
While through the wall a stove-pipe’s arms extend,”
(to quote William Allingham on another typical church.)
The Protestant population had increased with the growing popularity of the neighbourhood and so it was decided in 1825 to re-build the 1789 church, itself the successor of another church on the Carrickbrennan Road.
The architect for the Province of Dublin in the Board of First Fruits was John Semple. His best-known church is the ‘Black Church’, St. Mary’s chapel of Ease. Other of his churches near Dublin are Rathmines, Donnybrook, Tallaght, Whitechurch and Kilternan.
John Semple decided to reconstruct and enlarge the existing Monkstown Church rather than build a new one. He threw out transepts, added corner towers, heightened the west tower with a cupola and turrets, put on a battlemented west porch with corner pinnacles and added battlements to the walls. This exterior work was executed in gleaming Dalkey granite. Such ‘incorrect’ Gothic offended the duller taste of the succeeding generations, who described it as:
“an edifice sui generis ; outside it looks somewhat of a mule between the Gothic and the Saracenic : the steeple is surmounted by a cross, but the summits have something of a crescent.”
I think Semple’s idea was to provide a striking general skyline and an arresting termination to the roads that lead to his church. It was to be a cheerful Irish castle with a seaside rather than a fortress flavour. Why I like one building and not another I cannot always say. But in a life spent looking at buildings the bold turrets so suited in their mouldings and terminations to the beautiful granite of which they are constructed, the plain walls with their deeply splayed window openings and the solid looking base of the whole building make Monkstown Church one of my first favourites for its originality of detail and proportion. But I do not think such appreciation would have been possible in the climate or opinion less sympathetic to the late Georgian era, which persisted until only a few years ago.
Only today is the original genius of John Semple beginning to be appreciated. The interior of Monkstown Church displays what later generations thought of him. As he designed it, the transepts had galleries and the east end was provided with an unusual liturgical arrangement consisting of rails and communion table at the bottom, reading desk above and pulpit above that, so that all the offices of the church, except baptism, could be performed in one place. A similar arrangement was to be found in Francis Johnston’s round church of St. Andrew, destroyed by fire in 1860, and in the Free Church, both in Dublin. By the 1860’s this arrangement was regarded as too Protestant at Monkstown and the present chancel was altered and the organ removed from the west gallery and made to intrude into the chancel. The reredos, stone panelling, stained glass, cancellum, pulpit and nave pews are all later than Semple. They show a less eccentric taste but certainly do not fit in with the bold and enormous scale of Semple’s decoration which today only survives in the vault ceilings with their huge patterns, gallery and internal hand-moulds over the lancet windows. In an odd way the process of time has reversed the roles of the Georgian Semple and the Victorian church furnishers who tried to make him more respectable. Semple’s was bold, modern, vast and original. The Victorian church furnishing seems by comparison too small and too finicky and old-fashioned for so great a building.
I hope that when the time and money are forthcoming, someone will have found out more about John Semple, when he was born, when he died and what other work besides the churches mentioned and the Round Room at the Mansion House were his. This may lead to a furnishing scheme for the interior of the church which will bring it into scale with Semple’s architecture. I have an idea that his prevailing colour scheme was as it is now for the walls, with white for the plasterwork and window splays, grained oak painting for all woodwork and red velvet for hangings and cushions. The floors were once of plain stone.”