beloved friend Revd Deepthi Wickremasinghe. We invited some of her friends to share their memories as we remember her in our prayers.
they moved from a large rectory to a small modern house and so I was given this portrait of my great aunt, Clare, who often appears over my shoulder in our zoom services.Clare was the youngest in an Anglican clerical family, she was born in Cambridge in1891. At her birth her brother Francis was 11 (in 1904 he was ordained, following the family tradition) and her sister Dorothy was 10. Her youngest sister, Phyllis, who was my grandmother, was 8. I have a portrait of Phyllis and Dorothy too which might appear in a future issue! In the portrait, we think that Clare is dressed as a bridesmaid for a wedding. The painter was H J Hudson.
Clare’s mother was Rose Elizabeth (née Woodbury). Clare’s father (my great grandfather) was Revd Henry William Fulford (1854-1931). He was the dean of Clare College, Cambridge, which is where my father studied and where my sister, Sue, also studied.(Sue was in the first year of women to be admitted to the College.) When Clare was 16, her father stopped working in Cambridge and became a parish priest. Her parents retired to Cambridge where Clare’s father died in 1931and her mother in 1932.
Since her early 20s, Clare worked in India as a missionary, based in Bannu on the North West Frontier, now in Pakistan. She returned to England around the time of her father’s death and she went back to India in December 1932 after her mother had died. Clare herself died in July 1933 shortly after returning to India. Looking at the probate records, Clare’s estate was valued at £14,748 9s 10d, which is worth about £1 million today.
Both of Clare’s sisters married brothers, their father being Rt Revd Henry Lowther Clarke, the first Archbishop of Melbourne (1903-1920). Dorothy married Revd William Kemp Lowther Clarke in 1907. Kemp, as he was known, was the curate at All Saints West Dulwich from 1921-1939. The family lived at 193 Rosendale Road. Dorothy and Kemp had 5 children, the youngest of whom was Joan Clarke MBE (1917-1996), the famous code breaker at Bletchley Park in the second world war. Keira Knightley played her in ‘The Imitation Game’, released in 2014. Kemp was the educational secretary of the SPCK and when he retired he was canon residentiary of Chichester Cathedral.
Clare’s other sister Phyllis married Herbert Lovell Clarke in Wimbledon in 1911. They had 6 children, of whom my father Revd Maurice Clarke was the oldest, born in 1912. He was named Maurice after a brother of Clare and Phyllis’s who did not survive infancy. My father talked of happy times spent with his ‘double’ cousins.
If you don’t mind a very steep climb, One Tree Hill is an interesting place to head to. I decided to walk there for the first time last Autumn when we were encouraged to avoid venturing too far from home. I was surprised to find it has several trees, not just one! The name, I have since discovered, derives from an oak tree which marked a historic boundary. This may be the oak tree referred to - it is protected by iron railings. 
I enjoy a wander through Nunhead Cemetery, and think it is a place many of us know well. Some of the paths feel like a little spot of countryside, other parts feel rather grand, such as coming in through the Linden Grove entrance and seeing the ruined Anglican Chapel ahead, or seeing the many elaborate memorials in the older part of the cemetery.
St Giles Camberwell. The Parish of Camberwell originally included Peckham, Dulwich and Nunhead, which is why Camberwell is used in the names of these cemeteries, even though they are distant from what we now think of as Camberwell.
and blossom was starting to appear. My route took in Peckham Rye Park going up-hill and then a descent through Brenchley Gardens afterwards.
One of the earliest maps of this area by John Rocque (1761) shows Goose Green as a small hamlet with a handful of farms and cottages in an agricultural patchwork of cornfields, vegetable gardens and pastures. Plaget (or Plaquett) Hall Farm stood on the site of today’s vicarage. The Green is bordered by Dog Kennel Lane and Lordship Lane to the west and Rye Lane to the east. Lordship Lane, a narrow winding lane, was the boundary between the ancient Manors of Dulwich and Camberwell Friern while Goose Green marked the southern edge of the Manor of Camberwell Buckinghams, which included the village of Peckham. The complex of buildings to the south, Rectory Farm, was built on the site of the former Dower House of this Manor.
His philanthropy did not stop with the building. He gave a house and garden in Baily’s Grove for use rent-free by the current and any future minister and gifted annual payments from a house and land in Lordship Lane (Holland House) to be distributed as follows: £10 to the mistress of the infant day school; £10 a year to the chapel clerk who also taught the Sunday school children; £10 to insure the minister’s house against fire, and for repairs and improvements to house and schoolroom. All the endowments were conditional on the recipients performing their respective duties to the satisfaction of the Trustees: Thomas Baily’s own son, Farmer Baily, his brother William the ironmonger, plus local worthies Robert Hichens, Robert Swansborough and John Horner. Robert Hichens, a very astute banker, was probably financial advisor to the Trust and will reappear later in the story of St John’s church.
some local entertainment. It was refurbished in 1829 and in addition to tea gardens offered a bowling green, assorted games equipment and newspapers. Parties were welcome: they could also go for donkey rides on Goose Green where Mrs Dench, a cowkeeper and one of the “local characters”, kept several donkeys.
History tells us that William Shakespeare had a son, Hamnet, who died in childhood in the summer of 1596. We know little about Hamnet or his mother Agnes, also known as Anne Hathaway. On the bare bones of these facts, Maggie O’Farrell builds the flesh of an enthralling and moving story of love, loss and grief. Shakespeare himself is never named, he is referred to as “the husband” or “the father”, “the writer” or even “the Latin tutor,” we learn little of his life in London; his career as an actor and playwright is kept offstage. We learn much more about Agnes, a wild, earthy woman, an outsider whose intuition borders on the psychic, and who is sought after for her knowledge of herbs and her healing powers. But even Agnes could not predict the death of her son Hamnet: her herbs proved to be useless in the face of the plague, she could not save him. Perhaps Shakespeare himself had been unable to give voice to this? In the endnotes, O’Farrell comments on the notable absence of any mention of the plague or The Black Death in Shakespeare’s works, and writes “this novel is the result of my idle speculation”.
