Peter Maplestone writes:
THE Revd Edward Thompson, who died on 10 July, aged 94, will be remembered for his ministry at St Mary-le-Strand with St Clement Danes in London.
On being appointed as Curate-in-Charge in 1967, and Rector from 1974, he was confronted with a church, James Gibbs’s great jewel of the English Baroque, in an advanced state of decay. The whole building was enveloped in a thick black encrustation, the result of centuries of soot and the London traffic.
The restoration programme that Thompson inaugurated would be one of the most high-profile church restoration projects of the early 1980s, attracting the support of such figures as the Duke of Gloucester, Sir Donald Sinden, and Sir John Betjeman. Betjeman, in particular, was an admirer of what he termed the “Baroque Paradise” and later composed a poem in honour of the church.
That the church was preserved and still commands the eastward view down the Strand is a tribute to the endeavours of Thompson and the body of heritage groups which came to its aid in those years. During his time, St Mary’s was adopted as the official church of the Women’s Royal Naval Service and the Association of Wrens, a link that has endured.
Edward Ronald Charles Thompson was born in Clapham in 1925. As a boy, he sang in the local church choir and, in 1939, was evacuated to Old Idsworth in Hampshire, where he worked on the farm of the family with whom he was living. At the age of 16, he joined the local Home Guard as a dispatch rider.
It was while working on the farm that he witnessed a plane crash. He rushed to the crash site and crawled in to the burning plane to rescue the crew. He dragged out the Polish pilot, who kept saying “Right me”. What he meant was that he should be given the last rites. The pilot died in his arms, and, at that moment, Thompson decided on ordination.
After the war, he worked for the Board of Trade and studied as an evening scholar at King’s College, London. He was accepted for ordination training at King’s College in 1950 and became Junior Vice-President of the Students’ Union there. He was ordained deacon in 1952 and priest in 1953. His first curacy was at Hinckley, in Leicestershire, and in 1954 he moved to a curacy at St George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem.
It was on the journey home from that curacy, while taking Easter services in Cyprus, that he was struck down by polio. He was flown back to the UK by the RAF, but, at the time of his return to England, the doctors did not hold out hope that he would ever regain much movement. In the event, he fought his way back to not only walking again, but being able to drive a car.
By 1956, he had joined the staff of St Boniface’s College, Warminster, King’s College’s fourth-year training college for ordinands. Incumbencies followed at St John the Baptist, Hawkchurch, in Devon and at St Michael and All Angels, Camberwell, before his move to the Strand.
In 1959, Edward married Mary Aird, whom he met at Warminster when she came to lecture on the work of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa; her brother, Donald, was a student at the college. Mary survives him with four children and seven grandchildren.
In his retirement, he continued to live at Sydenham Hill, in south-east London, where he occasionally assisted at St Philip’s. It is remarkable that a man who was not expected to live much beyond 40 lived on to celebrate the 66th anniversary of his ordination and 60 years of marriage.
