Date  Saturday, 26th July
Time  10.00 am to 1.00 pm
Event  Clean-up day
Venue  St Giles’ church, Tadlow
Organiser  Friends of Friendless Churches

Address St Giles’s church, off Lower Road (B1042), Tadlow, SG8 0TP

• Map and parking arrangements etc
• Please take a broom, cloth, dustpan and brush – the FoFC is providing tea and cakes… and a mini-talk on the FoFC and what it does.
• what3words for the church – drawn.history.indulgent

St Giles’ church in Tadlow has just – 4th July 2025 – been vested with the Friends of Friendless Churches.

Like St Denis’ in East Hatley and the church in Hatley St George, it is listed Grade II*, and, like St Denis’, was restored by William Butterfield (in 1860, well before he came to Hatley) and again by the FoFC in 2022.

There was a Christmas Day service in 2019, but with bits of the ceiling falling down, the building stopped being used and the doors locked.

The FoFC, though is very keen for the church to be reopened to visit and enjoy year-round as well as being available to use for events, community activities and occasional services.

There is still some work to be done before it can be opened regularly – not least giving it a ‘good dusting’.

Which is the purpose of the ‘Clean up day’ on 26th July.

Please do come and help – it’s also an opportunity to see inside a church which is far more complete than the rather empty St Denis’.

There is some particularly good stained glass on the south wall by Alexander Gibbs – who also designed and made the old east window in St Denis’; the FoFC website page on St Giles’ includes a close-up of the window and a lot of other information.

Historic connection with East Hatley

There is a very strong historic connection between St Giles’, Tadlow, and St Denis’, East Hatley, writes Joyce Denby.

Tadlow church had, since the 1560s, been under the patronage of East Hatley’s Castell family, who bought its advowson and the vicarage after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Tadlow and East Hatley then had separate clerics, as the Castells did not own the East Hatley living. Under the Downings, who also acquired the East Hatley living, the rector of East Hatley doubled up as curate in Tadlow, and the parson, when locally resident, lived in East Hatley.

From the 1770s to after 1820, a period in which there were protracted legal wrangles about the income from the Downing estates and the foundation of Downing College, Tadlow church was neglected and the only services were one each Sunday, with Communion three times a year, held by curates from neighbouring parishes. There were only four communicants in 1825.

After Downing College was founded in 1800, and was sufficiently organized to do so, they provided the clerics for both Tadlow and East Hatley from among the College Fellows, starting with T C Willets in 1823.

In 1827 the then rector, Richard Dawes, arranged a payment of two guineas a year to the adjacent parish of Wrestlingworth for the foundation of a Sunday school, to be shared with Tadlow. Attendance at Tadlow started to pick up. From 1833 Sunday services were held alternately morning and evening and the church claimed eight communicants in 1836. In 1851 on one occasion there were 70 adults plus 25 Sunday school children at the single service.

The rectory in Tadlow, which had become separated from the village by the new turnpike road from Arrington, was in very poor condition by 1800. It became a labourer’s cottage and was demolished in about 1930. East Hatley’s rectory had burned down in 1822 and not been replaced. Much of the glebe had been acquired by the Downing family, including some to the first Sir George in 1670, when only a small area of land, including a two-acre patch of woodland, had been retained by the church.

The bishop was unhappy with the situation as now managed by the College. Clearly something needed to be done, and the solution chosen was to build a new rectory in Tadlow on a 6-acre site next to the church, purchased by the College. It was built in 1832/33, a rather imposing square brick house, known to the locals as ‘The Great House’.

Downing College provided a grant of £1,100, and the charity Queen Anne’s Bounty, which had been set up to help finance poor parishes, gave a further £200. Rev. Dawes, as the College bursar, very conscious of the dire state of College finances, offered to pay £200 himself towards the cost.

Four Cedar of Lebanon trees were planted in the rectory garden in 1841, some of which are still there; one fell onto the house front in the 1980s. From then on it was the usual home of East Hatley’s rectors.

The rectory was surplus to requirements in the 1960s after the amalgamation with Gamlingay, when it was sold off and became a private house. Most of he glebeland, the new six acres and an earlier four acres, was retained by the church until the 1970s.

From 1951 Tadlow and East Hatley were held with Croydon, and in 1966 Tadlow moved to the Shingay team group of churches. Owing to structural problems, the church closed its doors in 2020 – thanks to a considerable investment by the Friends of Friendless Churches, the building has been saved and in the not too distant future will be open again on a regular basis.

_{Post created by Peter Mann (with no AI assistance) on 18th July 2025}