St Michael and All Angels

His father's greatest work was accomplished while he was in Aberdeen when, in 1867 when he 'took a step down' to become Rector of the new congregation of St Margaret of Scotland, in Aberdeen's Gallowgate, the poorest part of the city. There he devoted his ministry to the care of his people, serving the congregation for 31 years. He persuaded the Sisters of St Margaret at East Grinstead (founded by his friend Fr John Mason Neale) to establish a Community in Aberdeen. This they did, working along side him, caring for the poor.

The lively and advanced Anglo-Catholicism amongst which the young Ninian Comper was raised, naturally had a dominant influence on his life. In later years the 'Anglo-' came to mean less and less to him, and he would often appear not to recognize any difference between the Anglican and Roman Churches, maintaining that through the work of St Pius X, to whom he had a special devotion, the two communions were already, if secretly, united.

After rather unhappy school-days at Glenalmond in Perthshire, Comper spent a year at Ruskin's Art School in Oxford, before going to London where he was articled to C E Kempe, and later to G F Bodley and T Garner. Bodley he always regarded as his master, and like him always steadfastly opposed the system of qualifying examinations for architects and architectural schools: in Who's Who he described himself as `architect (not registered)'.

With the exception of the Welsh War Memorial in Cardiff (1928), all Comper's work was ecclesiastical. His first independent building was a chapel added to his father's church of St Margaret of Scotland, Aberdeen in 1889. The chapel, known today as "the Comper Aisle" was built in memory of Ninian's father, the Reverend John Comper. The figure of Fr John Comper, keeling at a prie-dieu, is shown in the magnificent east window in the Comper Aisle.

Ninian Comper's unique signature can also be seen in this window, in its customary place in the bottom right of the window. His rather unusual signature of the strawberry is linked with Ninian's father and his devotion to the poor. Fr John Comper died in Aberdeen's Duthie Park giving strawberries to poor children.

The St Margaret's chapel was followed two years later by the new St Margaret's Convent Chapel in Aberdeen. This set the fashion, destined to become the norm for many successful Anglican convents ... a Comper chapel. One of his last works was the great window in Westminster Hall (1952).

In the course of seventy years Ninian Comper built fifteen churches, restored and decorated scores, and designed vestments, banners and windows in places as far apart as China, North America, France, India, and South Africa. There can hardly be a rural deanery in England without some example of his sensitive, expensive, and unmistakable workmanship, which is to be found also in churches of the Roman communion, among them Downside Abbey.

Comper's liturgical understanding of the purpose of a church was far in advance of any other architect of his time. It has been claimed that Ninian Comper was the greatest church furnisher since Wren. However, if he was primarily a decorator rather than an architect, his decorative art was never for art's sake, but for the sake of the function for which he held a church exists, as a roof over an altar.

Believing this, he built from the altar outwards, personally designing every detail of the furnishings, even down to the candle sticks, which had to fit in with his design. While bitterly opposed to 'modernism', he nevertheless anticipated by many years the changes that were to come: for example, his use of free-standing altars, of pure white interiors and strong clear colours, especially the typical Comper rose and green, and the combination of gilding, blue, and white.

At St Wilfrid's Cantley in 1893 Comper erected an altar with riddel posts, the first of that succession of 'box-bed' altars whose use by inferior artists he came to deplore. In 1892 he installed a hanging pyx in St Matthew's Westminster (since removed), thus leading to a development in the practice of reservation in the Church. St Matthew's was the first of many examples of the hanging pyx of which the most elaborate was the nine-foot silver turris at All Saints' Margaret Street, and that in the Grosvenor Chapel.

The following year, 1905, an impressive stone font on top of a three step pedestal was placed by the west entrance. The steepled oak lofty cover, also designed by Ninian Comper, was in 1905 in memory of Fr John Comper, Ninian's father, as a thanksgiving for his ministry in Inverness, as a mission priest.

The finest example of Comper's first medieval manner is the church of St Cyprian Clarence Gate in London (1903). His second style dated from about 1904 following visits to the Mediterranean which revealed to him the debt owed by all Christian art to Greece. Other magnificent examples of his work are Wimborne St Giles, where in 1910 he restored a classical church with perpendicular decorations and distinctive Jacobean screen.

Then there is the magnificent St Mary's Wellingborough (1904-40), where a perpendicular nave, middle-gothic side chapel, Spanish screens, and classical baldachino, combine brilliantly in one harmonious riot of colour and gilding. In his last period he grew more and more to see the importance of a free-standing altar, usually covered by a ciborium, as in St Andrew's Cathedral Aberdeen, the All Saints' chapel at London Colney (now owned by the Roman Catholic Church), at Pusey House Oxford, or St Philip's Cosharn, and by an uncumbered, translucent background to his windows.

Between 1923 and 1924, St Michael and All Angels Inverness, underwent extensive alterations. Canon Lachlan Mackintosh, Rector of St Michael's, had become a good friend of Ninian Comper. Together they had been planning to rebuild St Michael's but financial constraints (the reconstruction was paid for entirely by the Canon himself), a result of the effects of the First World War, meant a re-construction rather than re-building should be considered. The work was done under the guidance of Ninian Comper. The old dormer windows were replaced by new lower, wider windows and the roof of the church was panelled and painted. The Lady Chapel was also extended.

In 1890 Comper married Grace Bucknall (died 1933); they had four sons (the eldest of whom became an architect) and two daughters. He was knighted in 1950, and died on the 22nd December 1960. His ashes were buried beneath the windows of his design in Westminster Abbey where he had been responsible also for the Warriors' chapel.

Canon Len Black
Rector of St Michael and All Angels