Foundation stone centenary 31 January 2010
One hundred years ago, Septuagesima Sunday was a lovely day [just like this one]. It was also a day which gave visible expression to the faith of a small group of committed Anglicans in this community. After just eight years of occasional and then weekly worship in and around the scattered settlement of Eastbourne, the local Church of England committee was poised to begin building the first Anglican church in the district.
Two sorts of people made up the Eastbourne community of those days – the permanent residents (fewer than 500) and another 300 or so who made up the ‘summer colony’. Among these was one Kathleen Beauchamp, who as Katherine Mansfield later wrote about this very place. [I urge you to re-read her soon.]  From the Beauchamp’s summer home just up there, the young Kathleen walked from the house across County Road (as it was then) and through sandhills and paddocks just here to the beach.
At the Bay describes vividly how Stanley Burnell ‘flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock and raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil and splish splosh into the water that bubbled around his legs’.   Replace grass with asphalt and little has changed.
Those who held the vision for the church of St Michael – it was not named St Alban’s till less than a week before construction was completed – were most but not all permanent residents. Sixty people were at the May 1907 meeting which resolved to build a church. They had 24 pounds – a bit over $3000 – in hand, collected another 20 pounds in pledges at the meeting, and had the promise of a section in Tuatoru Street (worth 60 pounds) gifted by the ecumenical Presbyterian Dr Mackenzie.
In 1908, however, they decided to buy land in Ngaio Street from a Mr Stubbs for 500 pounds and commissioned a design for a church on the site from diocesan architect Frederick de Jersey Clere. Fundraising proceeded apace in both East Harbour and Wellington. Building became more urgent when the Presbyterians, who had generously allowed Anglican Sunday morning worship in the five-year-old St Ronan’s, said they needed it themselves. Anglican services, now led primarily by lay readers Avery and Button with the vicar of Lower Hutt taking communion when time, roads and weather permitted, moved to the State School in Muritai Road. But having to set up for worship in a classroom, and then clear up afterwards, was demanding. (This was in the days of those old heavy double desks with inkwells and attached seats, for those who remember them, and shifting these around was a pain.)
[Raising money was complicated by Lower Hutt parish’s hostility to sales of work and fairs; St James’ churchwardens regarded bazaars as ‘laborious, anxious, precarious, wasteful and generally unsatisfactory’ after experiences ‘under very trying circumstances’.]
But after much effort and gathering of pledges, the requisite two-thirds (600 pounds) cash was in hand and a mortgage secured over the land. Building could begin.
There were a few hiccups. For some reason in December 1909 the committee decided the entrance porch should face south not its present east. It seems the architect prevailed. Then they discovered Ngaio Street was not gazetted a public road, and the Registrar would not issue title to land without a legal street frontage. Friends in the Borough Council – lay reader Mr Avery was Town Clerk – got over that one pretty quickly.
So at 3.30 p.m. on 23 January 1910 Bishop Frederic Wallis mounted an ’improvised platform’ [just around about here]. On it were also Lower Hutt vicar Mr Jones, temporary resident clergyman Mr J A Kayll, vergers Messrs Button and Avery – and Mr W F Shortt with his portable organ. Two hundred residents and visitors from the city gathered round. Luckily the weather was great.
During the brief service Mr Jones paid ‘warm tribute to those whose devotion had kept the cause alive when there was little to encourage and much to dishearten’. Bishop Wallis, who wielded the trowel, said it marked the beginning of a new era for the church in Eastbourne and was the outcome of much prayer and earnest work. He urged the regular worshippers to welcome those who were there ‘for brief sojourns only’, saying the church would be ‘a witness to God in their holiday-making’.
The New Zealand Times waxed lyrical about the event. ‘It would be hard to imagine an atmosphere more appropriate for the recital of psalmist’s song and Church of England’s noble liturgy than obtained at the popular seaside resort across the harbour,’ it reported on 24 January 1910. ‘To witness the ceremony and join in the incidental service, close upon two hundred residents and visitors attended.
‘Bishop Wallis, having recited the noble formula prescribed by the Church for occasions of the kind, expressed his great joy.’ 
[And well he might, since he seems to have holidayed regularly at Days Bay and in the early years of the century had leaned hard on the Lower Hutt vestry to begin services in the eastern bays. The fact that by 1905 both Presbyterians and Catholics had already built churches in Eastbourne may have had something to do with it.]
So the Anglican presence in Eastbourne was now cast in stone – as a piece of marble supplied by the Mansfield monumental mason firm of Karori. Those assembled sang a hymn – the same as that we sing/sang today. History does not record what followed the service, though almost certainly the official party partook of refreshments at the Shortt home Pembury, just round the corner in Karamu Street. Mr Shortt was very hospitable, and his son H W Shortt (for whom the nearby park is named) possessed one of the very few motor vehicles in the district and delighted in conveying important visitors from Wellington to and from the Rona Bay wharf.
We’ll let Mr Giles, the eighth vicar, have the last word (as he so often did). ‘Our Anglican parish [he wrote]  owes its existence to a small band of loyal men and women who had the courage and faith to buy a site on which to build this little Church of St Alban with its beautiful simplicity and dignity , and then 19 months later to decide to support and house a fulltime priest. It was their belief that Eastbourne Anglicans  needed something more than a vicar who lived seven miles away and whose means of transport was a horse and buggy.
‘With faith and determination,’ said Mr Giles, ‘they determined that God the father of our Lord Jesus Christ should be continuously worshipped in East Harbour and that all who wished to learn, whether adults or  children, be instructed in the Christian faith. They had faith in the future.
‘That is, they had faith in you and me.’

A presentation given by Julia Stuart, Parish Historian, in St ALban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on the Centenary of the laying of the Church Foundation Stone, on Sunday 31 January 2010.

The basic building and land cost, in today’s terms, 1200 pounds or $160,653.95. (No electric light, no piped water or sewage).