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Writers Make Crime Pay
To Save Church

Jacqui Thornton

It is a church of such magnificence that it inspired novels by both P. D. James and Colin Dexter – not to mention Thomas Hardy. Now the two crime writers have joined forces to help save the building.

The authors – the creators of Inspector Dalgleish and Morse – agreed to hold a crime writers’ forum for 300 people to raise money for the listed St. Barnabus Church in Oxford.

The Victorian church, which has an impressive Italianate tower and a mosaic interior, was hit with a repair bill of £250,000 for the tower and for rewiring and drainage works.

Although English Heritage has provided a £53,000 grant, and thousands more was received in donations, fundraising and loans, the vicar, the Rev Michael Wright, needs to find another £50,000 – and hopes the literary evening will help tip the balance.

The red brick church has an impressive literary history. It was first mentioned in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as St. Silas Church, and more recently has been written about by A. N. Wilson. Alan Bennett also recently spoke there.

Lady James, who was born nearby and lived in the parish of Jericho as a child always visits the church when in Oxford. She immediately offered to help raise funds and asked her friend Colin Dexter, famous for his Inspector Morse books, for his support.

She had the idea for her novel A Taste of Death in the church, which she relocated in London, when she had a vision of two corpses with their throats cut. Dexter used the church as a setting in The Dead of Jericho.

Lady James, who is a trustee of the appeal, said: “We both felt we had to do something for the church which had inspired us. There are a number of reasons why I have affection for St. Barnabus. One of my books really began when I was in the vestry of the church.

“When I am in Oxford I go to the services. It is a very important church for Oxford, in the Tractarian high Anglican tradition in which I was brought up. It would be a terrible loss if it closed.

“Colin is a friend who lives in Oxford and was very willing to help. We hope very much that people will support the appeal.”

English Heritage said the building, designed in 1868 by A. W. Blomfield next to the South Oxfordshire canal, was of “outstanding architectural importance”.

It was given to the university by Thomas Combe, the superintendent of the University Press and consecrated by Bishop Wilberforce in 1869. It has been likened to an Italian basilica, with a lofty campanile and a gilded and painted dome. Suspended from the roof at the east end is a metal cross studded with brilliants.

In The Dead of Jericho, Dexter describes how the church dominates the landscape, and how when he was writing in 1981, the tower was in need of repair:

“Finally, beneath the towering campanile of St. Barnabus’s Church, he (Morse) found an empty space in a stretch of road by the canal. He got out of the car and stood in the rain a while, looking up at the dirtyish yellow tower that dominated the streets. A quick look inside perhaps? But the door was locked, and Morse was reading the notice explaining that the regrettable cause of it all was adolescent vandalism when he heard a voice behind him.”

In P. D. James’s A Taste For Death: “The campanile came suddenly into view. With its crossed bands of stone, its high arched windows and copper cupola it reminded Dalgliesh of the brick towers he had laboriously constructed as a child. It held for him some of the same hubristic impermanence and, even as he gazed, he half expected it to bend and sway.”

(article reproduced by kind permission of The Sunday Telegraph)