Basil Jellicoe
John Basil Lee Jellicoe (5 February 1899 - 24 August 1935) was a priest in the Church of England, best known for his work as a housing reformer. He is widely known as Father Basil Jellicoe or more formally as the Reverend Jellicoe.
Jellicoe was born in Chailey, Sussex. His father, Thomas Harry Lee Jellicoe, rector of St Peter's Chailey, was a cousin of John Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe. After graduating from Magdalen College Oxford, Basil was ordained as an Anglican priest[1] and became missioner at the Magdalen Mission in Somers Town, London.[2] He was founder of the St Pancras Housing Association (originally the St Pancras House Improvement Society) and persuaded Edward, Prince of Wales to become its patron, a move that attracted wider interest and much further patronage. He went on to found several other housing associations in London, Sussex and Cornwall. He toured the country in his small car fundraising and selling loan stock to fund these projects.
Philanthropic Work
Working in London as a young priest, Jellicoe was shocked by the poor and overcrowded conditions of working class people in the in Somers Town area near Kings Cross. He devoted his life to re-housing slum-dwellers, and the St Pancras Housing Association was responsible for a large programme of slum clearance and building several new estates including the Eversholt estate, the Sidney Estate, St Hubert's House in Janet Street E14 and the York Rise estate in Tufnell Park. Along with far better standards of accommodation, these estates included nursery schools , community centres and works of art in courtyards and gardens. Sculptor Gilbert Bayes was hired to make carved finials on washing line poles representing ships, saints and roses. These are now preserved in the basement of the British Library.
The Sidney Estate was built around a central courtyard and completed in 1938. It was designed by the Society’s architect, Ian B. M. Hamilton F.R.I.B.A., and the individual blocks of houses were named after saints: St. George, St. Francis, St. Anthony, St. Michael, St. Nicholas and St. Christopher. The rents was said to be the same or less than the average rate of the old houses and rebate was granted to those unemployed or in other difficulties. The defining feature of the estate are its Doultonware lunettes by Gilbert William Bayes above the French windows. It consisted of 230 flats in which 1,000 people had been rehoused. It was opened in 1938 by the Duchess of Gloucester and is still standing today. [3]
Father Basil Jellicoe showing a patron the society's work.
Personality and Later Life
Jellicoe was a flamboyant and versatile person who made his point about slum clearance by publicly burning models of vermin. As well as being a priest he was landlord of a pub in the St Pancras area, the since-closed Anchor in Chalton Street. He set this up as a place where working men could take their families and find an atmosphere that encouraged sociability rather than alcoholism.
Historian Paul Shaw writes, “In a very real way he [Jellicoe] probably worked himself to death over the issue of housing for the poor. He had his problems, certainly – he was forced to resign as president of the housing association because of his health, but even then he went around the country propagandising about improving social housing. Fr. Jellicoe’s role as a pub landlord grew out of his empathy for the working class families in the area. He wanted somewhere where working men could go after work, where they could take their families. Ironically, the pub, which opened as a “reformed pub” in 1929, served its first drinks to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Fr Jellicoe’s motivation was to run a pub in a way that didn’t take advantage of the poor or drive them towards alcoholism.
All of this came from Fr Jellicoe’s idea of how Christianity should be. “He believed people should see God’s work in action in their lives. Part of this was his great concern that religion should be all about showing people God loves them and they should have the right to decent lives.” [4]
Jellicoe died in Uxbridge on 24 August 1935. A blue plaque was unveiled in his honour in Camden in 2014. He is commemorated in the Diocese of London with a memorial day on 24 August.[5]
Notes
- ↑ Kenneth Ingram, Basil Jellicoe, Centenary Press, London: 1936.
- ↑ Roland Jeffery, Housing Happenings in Somers Town in Housing the Twentieth Century Nation, Twentieth Century Architecture No 9, 2008, ISBN 978-0-9556687-0-8
- ↑ https://baldwinhamey.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/sidney-estate/
- ↑ https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/lifestyle/21355967.father-basil-jellicoe-priest-transformed-somers-towns-social-housing/
- ↑ A Kalendar of Holy Days Approved for Use in the Diocese of London, Third edition, London: Diocese of London, 2014, p. 26.
Sources
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