Church of St John the Baptist

St John the Baptist's Church serves Penzance in the far west of Cornwall, a Victorian parish church of the Diocese of Truro born from a simple piece of arithmetic. On 22 December 1878 the vicar of Penzance, Prebendary Hedgeland, pointed out that his town of 10,414 people had only two churches, while Truro, with 11,040, had four. The case was unanswerable, and a new church followed.

The site — a generous plot of 324 by 257 feet, with room for a future vicarage and schools — was given by John Jope Rogers, and the architect was James Piers St Aubyn, the indefatigable restorer and builder of Cornish churches, with Messrs Carah and Edwards of Crowan as contractors. The foundation stone was laid on 23 June 1880, and the church was built of stone from Castle an Dinas at St Columb Major, with external dressings of Ham Hill stone from Charles Trask's Somerset quarries and internal dressed work in Doulting stone from the same source. The nave and aisle floors were laid with thin paving tiles in three colours from the Architectural Pottery Company of Poole in Dorset, with encaustic tiles by Godwin of Hereford elsewhere; the church was heated by Rimington's apparatus, the vestries by Welsh fire lamps, and the whole lit by twelve gas coronas hung from the arcade arches — a complete catalogue of high Victorian church technology. One venerable fitting came as a gift: the font, dated 1668, donated by the mother church of St Mary's, Penzance. The Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson — soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury — consecrated the church on 4 October 1881.

The furnishing continued for a generation. The porch was added around 1890 and a statue of St John the Baptist in 1891. In 1900 came the pulpit and choir stalls of West Country oak, seating sixteen men and nineteen boys; the reredos of 1902 and altar of 1908 were designed by George Fellowes Prynne, the noted Plymouth-born church architect, and made by H. H. Martyn of Cheltenham; and the wrought-iron chancel screen and gates followed in 1905. The stained glass gathers the parish's memorials: the east window of 1901 by Clayton and Bell depicts the Ascension in memory of Queen Victoria and the soldiers of the Second Boer War; the Poole Memorial Window of the same year in the north aisle, by Charles Eamer Kempe, shows St Michael the Archangel and St George; the south transept window of 1955, by William Morris and Co, remembers Ellen Carhart Lane, Mayoress of Penzance; and a north aisle window of 1970 is by G. Maile.

The organ began modestly — a single manual and pedal instrument by J. W. Walker, installed in 1883 for £220, with a second manual provided for but left without stops — and grew with the church: rebuilt by Heard and Sons in 1902, by Hele in 1931, by J. W. Walker in 1966 and by Lance Foy in 1990, it is now a three-manual and pedal instrument. Its organists have included George Sellers, who served an extraordinary sixty-eight years from 1887 to 1955. St John the Baptist's remains an active parish church of Penzance — the answer, still standing and still singing, to Prebendary Hedgeland's Victorian arithmetic.