Several of the parish priests were members of the Norwood or Trye families. Notable among these was Charles Brandon Trye, son of the surgeon of the same name, who held the post for 58 years, from 1830 to 1888. He was responsible for a number of improvements for the public good: not only the moves to enlarge the church in 1834 and 1866, but also the building of the National School in about 1840 (now used as the canteen) and of the present rectory. He was a moving force behind the creation of a daughter church to cater for worshippers in the Park and Naunton areas. The church (originally just ‘St Philip’s’) was dedicated on St Philip and St James’s day in 1840; it became a parish church in its own right in 1869 and the present larger building, designed by Middleton, replaced it in 1882.
C B Trye’s son Reginald, who succeeded him in 1884, was last Trye to be rector of St Peter’s. He shared his family’s financial misfortunes and as a consequence in 1895 he had to give up the living, which until his death in 1929 was in the care of a succession of Curates-in-charge.
His immediate successor was the enthusiastic Clifford Aston, who encouraged the formation of many new organisations in the parish, eg Boys’ and Girls’ recreation classes, cricket and football clubs, a Girls’ Drill Club, and branches of the Church Lads’ Brigade, Girls’ Friendly Society, Church of England Men’s Society and the Mothers’ Union. Above all, he put much energy into having the Village Hall built, in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Appropriately, he is commemorated by a brass plaque in the Village Hall.
In the Twentieth Century two priests served as army chaplains. Augustin Hodson (1915 – 1921, later the first Bishop of Tewkesbury) was in France during the last half of 1918. He had 1500 people to look after, in two hospital camps, one occupied chiefly by ‘nerve’ cases and the other by Chinese labourers. He described serving communion from a table spread with a Union Jack presented to him by the St Peter’s choir. However, his experience was mild compared with that of Eric Cordingly (1939 – 1955, later Bishop of Thetford), who was a chaplain from 1940 to 1945, first in France, taking part in the evacuation from Dunkirk), and then in the Far East.
Eric Cordingly arrived in Singapore a few months before the Japanese invasion and became a prisoner of war at the Changi camp together with more than 50,000 British and Australians. He was allowed to convert an abandoned mosque into a church, which throughout Easter Day was attended by nearly 500 worshippers including some whom he had prepared for confirmation. In 1943 he was sent with 7000 fellow prisoners to work on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway, where nearly half the men died and he had to conduct many burial services. In the new camp he created a makeshift church, in which he placed a brass cross made by fellow prisoners when in Changi. After the railway had been completed Eric Cordingly was sent back to Changi, where he and the other starving prisoners struggled to keep faith and hope alive for seventeen more months until the camp was liberated at the end of the war.
During his time as a POW, Eric Cordingly managed to compile, using odd scraps of paper, a collection of diaries. He brought these home but they lay unexamined after he died from cancer in 1976, aged just sixty five. However, after the death of his wife in 2011, their three sons and daughter began to reconstruct that story of his three and a half years as a POW, years which he described as ‘the most meaningful of my life’. His saintly fortitude shines through the modest narrative, fittingly illustrated with original sketches and paintings executed by fellow inmates, which has been published as Down to Bedrock. His daughter Louise, enlisting contributions from surviving prisoners or their descendants, has also compiled a companion volume The Changi Cross, which traces the journey of the cross and its return to the museum in Singapore.
Both books are available on Amazon or via thechangicross.co.uk. There’s also a Facebook site with up-to-date news.