St Paul's first of 19th Century Adelaide city Anglican churches to follow pre-Reformation rites with wealthy flock
St Paul's Anglican church on the corner of Pulteney and Flinders streets, Adelaide city, attracted some of the city's most prominent residents in the 19th Century when it services brought “pre-Reformation (Catholic) ceremonial into public worship”. The city population flight to the suburbs led the church being deconsecrated in 1983.
Image at right, by Samuel White Sweet, courtesy State Library of South Australia
St. Paul's, the fifth Anglican church built in Adelaide city, was the first city Anglican church (until 1876 when St. Peter's Cathedral opened) actively involved in the Tractarian (Oxford) Movement or Catholic revival.
With city Anglican churches of Holy Trinity, St. John's (later rebuilt) Christ Church and St. Luke's before it, St. Paul's was built in the mid 1850s on the Pulteney-Flinders streets corner site, donated by Pulteney Street School that was next to it to the north.
Alexander Russell, invited to South Australia by bishop Augustus Short, took up positions first at St. Andrew's, Walkerville, in 1854, and St. John's in the then-remote city’s southeast. He started extra Sunday and weekday services in 1855 at Pulteney Street School. These attracted large congregations that prompted the Pulteney Street School trusted to give half an acre of their property for a church and set up a building committee to collect the funds to construct it.
The large St Paul's church, designed by James Cumming, was erected when the congregation lived mainly within the city bounds. Alexander Russell was among those who brought the Tractarian (Oxford) Movement, started in England in the 1830s, to South Australia. In the 1860s, as minister at the new St Paul’s in Pulteney Street, Russell joined St. Andrew's, Walkerville (George Dove), and St. Paul's, Port Adelaide (Samuel Green), in bringing Tractarians “pre-Reformation ceremonial into public worship”.
Colourful gowns, crosses and lit candles as well as Gregorian chant confirmed the belief that ancient practices of the Church of England were being restored. These colourful services attracted a large local working class and very cultured worshippers who saw these practices as the “beauty of holiness”'.
Among Adelaide's most prominent families were in the congregation was Edith Fergusson, the first wife of James Fergusson, governor of South Australia (1869-73). She and her husband tried nearly every Anglican church in the city before joining St. Paul's. Fergussons' attachment was St Paul’s “reputation for charitable works, one in which St. Paul's outshone all other parishes in the diocese”.
Edith Ferguson became active in charity while she and her husband avidly supported church furnishings and likely funded the controversial first surpliced choir of 1869. Russell justified this as a “long-established custom in all our cathedrals, and many of our Parish Churches” but some left the congregation, seeing it as extreme ritualism.
St Paul’s pew rents book for 1890 listed premier Henry Ayers, John Bray (the first South Australian-born premier) and Dr Richard Schomburgk (Adelaide Botanic Gardens director and principal designer, 1865-1891). Among entries in them baptisms register on May 2, 1905, was John Langdon Bonython, son of Blanche Ada and John Lavington Bonython (described as an “Adelaide Journalist”).
During its first 40 to 50 years, St Paul's kept a large congregation of prominent families and many small businessmen, professional people and tradesmen. But South Australia governors preferred to worship at St. Peter's Cathedral when it opened. Even in pre-World War I 20th Century, the population shift from Adelaide city to the suburbs started and, by 1983, St Paul’s wasn’t viable and was deconsecrated.
The fittings and memorials removed from St. Paul’s included two stained glass windows by Tiffany Studios of New York and presented to the church by Ada Ayers, wife of Henry Ayers' son Harry Lockett Ayers, in 1909. Before ending at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the windows went to the Pulteney Grammar School chapel. Always closely associated with the church where its students were choristers, Pulteney Grammar had moved to Flinders Hall, built by St. Paul's in Flinders Street in 1873, and then to South Terrace.
The St Paul's building had afterlives as a disco, a creativity hub and home for the South Australian music hall of fame. It was saved from being demolished in the 1980s because its prominent place on the Pulteney Street townscape
