The Beginnings

In the 1840s Scarborough began to expand onto the South Cliff with the building of The Crown Hotel and Crown Terrace.

By 1858 South Cliff was criss-crossed with a network of roads and drains, and terraces and crescents were steadily rising as building plots were acquired and new houses built.

People moving to the South Cliff or staying there for a holiday needed their own church. Otherwise they had to walk across the Spa Bridge to St. Mary’s Church near The Castle. So the Corporation of Scarborough and the directors of The South Cliff Company set up a committee to build a new church on South Cliff.

An announcement in The Scarborough Gazette for August 19th 1858 read:

The proposed new church on South Cliff, Scarborough.

The great inconveniences which result from the limited extent of the church accommodation in this parish, and the want in particular of a public place of worship on the South Cliff have long been felt, both by the inhabitants and the visitors.

In order to obviate disadvantages so serious, it is proposed to erect by subscription, a suitable church.

This was the first public mention of St Martin’s Church. The project got off to a good start because the owners of The Crown Hotel donated land that they owned on Albion Road, worth £1000, for the church to be built on. There was also a published list of fifty subscribers who had donated amounts for the building of the church from £1 to £50.

By September 1859 the fund had reached £2,969/10/0. However, this was far from the estimated £6,000 needed to build the church, and it began to look as if the project would fail. However, it was at this point that a South Cliff resident stepped in to rescue it.

Miss Mary Craven (1814 – 1889)

Miss Mary Craven was one of the four daughters of Robert Martin Craven, a wealthy Hull surgeon who had retired to a house at 5, Esplanade, Scarborough, and who had died on 2nd January 1859.

Miss Mary Craven has already donated £1000 towards the building of the church, and she now guaranteed to add the necessary money to cover the full £6000 estimated as the building costs. In the end she lavished well over £10 000 on the church, which is the equivalent of about £500,000 today.

Miss Mary Craven saw the new church as a memorial to her father and the dedication to St. Martin of Tours was chosen by her as his name-saint.

She was responsible for more than the financing of the church. Her family connection with Hull led to the appointment of the first vicar of St. Martins, the Rev. Robert Henning Parr, and she may have been responsible for the selection of an architect for the new church, George Frederick Bodley, who was the son of a Hull physician.

What sort of a person was Mary Craven? She remained a spinster for all of her life, and besides lavishing money on St. Martin’s Church she also provided money for the church of All Saints on Falsgrave (now demolished), St. Martin’s vicarage, and St. Martin’s Grammar School (£1,000) at 60 Ramshill Road.

She had her own special seat in the nave of the church from which she could easily observe the proceedings in the chancel, which remained unscreened until after her death. She seems to have been prone to nervous illness and some minor eccentricities.

A good example of this is recorded in The Book of Scarborough Spaw by Meredith Whitaker (1984) in which he records from the 1870 records of the Spaw Committee: “When Miss Mary Craven, a respected and substantial citizen of the South Cliff, who had provided most of the money to build St. Martin’s Church, was caught ‘purloining flowers from the grounds’ she was threatened with proceedings if there was any repetition”

She also had a strong enthusiasm for the royal family at a time when the monarchy was generally unpopular with the majority of people. There is of evidence of this through her lavish donations of stained glass windows to thank God for the recovery of The Prince of Wales from typhoid, which he apparently caught when visiting Lord Londsborough in Scarborough, 1871.

What did she look like? As yet we have not been able to find a photograph of her despite the existance of Oliver Sarony’s famous photographic studios which were built prior to the church on an adjacent plot of land.

However, a recent publication on George Frederick Bodley by Michael Hall (2015) does identify Mary in a sketch by John Dinsdale in his book Sketches of Scarborough (1881):

Hall writes: This depiction of the congregation emerging from the church plays on popular preconceptions of the Anglo-Catholic laity as upper class and predominantly female. The imperious figure on the right is probably Mary Craven who largely paid for the church.

She died, aged seventy-five, in March 1889. The report of her funeral, held in St. Martin’s church, talks of a large congregation and very numerous wreathes. The body was taken by train to Hull, and buried in the Craven Family Vault in the Church of Sculcoates.

The Building of St. Martin’s

The necessary arrangements to build the church were well underway by April 1861 when the chosen contractor submitted his final agreement to the architect:

Scarborough, April 6th 1861
G.F. Bodley, Esquire
Sir.
I will undertake to complete the whole of the various work required to be done in building a Church called “St. Martins on the Hill” South Cliff according to proposed Plans and Specifications by yourself.

The final sum for the building of the church of £6,328/16/5 was accepted and, with considerable ceremony, the foundation stone was laid on 7th November 1861. Miss Mary Craven was unfortunately ill for this ceremony, but was represented by her sister, Anne. However, her prayer of dedication associating her father, R. Martin Craven, with the church was read aloud by Archdeacon Long, who laid the stone:

If a sinner such as I very much am, may dare to utter the wish, may heaven bless this Church, and may it give help to the saving of souls. I have a strong affection for Scarborough; I had a deep love for my father, as was his life to me I trust, is now his memory and his example.

With an engraved silver trowel and mallet the stone was set in place. Both instruments carried the inscription:

Presented to Miss Mary Craven by the inhabitants of the South Cliff, Scarborough, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough, in testimony of the high esteem they entertain of her generous character and energy in promoting the erection of the new Church, 7th November 1861.

In his address to those assembled the Archdeacon pointed out that although Miss Mary Craven had guaranteed funds he hoped that the wider community would not disregard its duty. Recent coastal storms, he added, had passed, but worse dangers lurked…

the pleasures, vanities and pride of life this resort so abundantly offers to its visitors…

He recommended the church as a lifeboat for sinners for which all should do their utmost.
The laying of the foundation stone was followed by a grand dinner at The Prince of Wales Hotel for the 134 workmen engaged on the Church. The dinner was Miss Craven’s idea, and a good time was had by all.

The church was built with Whitby sandstone from the Aislably quarries twenty-five miles away.

Bodley employed the then newly-launched firm of William Morris and Company, of Red Lion Square, London, to tackle most aspects of the church’s interior design and decoration, and it took Morris and his partners ten years to complete the work. As a result of this St. Martin’s boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of Pre-Raphaelite religious art to be found in any one building.

You can see work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and several other lesser artists of the Pre-Raphaelite School of 19th century English art. The quality of their stained glass windows is reckoned to be second only to that of the very best medieval glass.

Early Problems

The church was completed by April 1863, but its consecration was delayed by what today seems an unusual argument. It was common in those days for wealthier families to rent seats in a pew for their exclusive use. This rent provided an income for the vicar rather than free collections. However, the Rev’d R.H. Parr proposed that all the seats in the church should be free, and in this he was strongly supported by Miss Mary Craven.

This caused a considerable local row, and attempts were made through the archbishop to prevent free seats, but through Miss Mary Craven’s support the opposition was overcome and the new church was consecrated by Archbishop Thompson of York on 11th July 1863.

Later Additions

The first addition, in 1869, was a vestry and sacristy (room for the vestments and vessels of the church).

The original church soon proved to be too small for the rapidly expanding South Cliff population, and plans were soon developed by Bodley to extend it. In 1879 the seating capacity was increased to 1200. To do this the west end was reconstructed with a new bay, baptistry and narthex (porch or vestibule found in early Christian churches, extending across the width of the nave at the opposite end to the altar, originally used by those not in full communion).

One further addition was made in 1902 when the north aisle chapel was extended east as far as Carlton Terrace to form the present Lady Chapel. Again the architect was Bodley, and the church as it now stands is more or less as he left it.