St Mark's Church
The Rectories
The present Rectory (St Mark’s House, numbered 5 on the image below), built in 1963, is known to be at least the fourth in the village and there may have been others. It stands in the old walled kitchen garden of its immediate predecessor (3), now a private house.
This predecessor, which Pevsner says is by P C Hardwick, was built in 1870, a year after Arthur Clutterbuck came to the parish, and in June that year during the construction one of the workmen, Mr Scott, was seriously injured when a block of stone fell from the top of the building onto his head. The Rector took him to Dr Cox at Theale and then to the Royal Berkshire hospital. It was reported that “Under good treatment he should be fit to resume work in a few months time”. An annual rent of 13/4d was apparently payable by the Rector to a Mrs Charlotte Starky of Battle House, Bromham, Wiltshire, though it is not clear why. Whatever right existed was inherited in 1896 by Charlotte Starkey’s daughter, Constance Willmott, who gifted it to the benefice in 1908.
The land on which the Victorian Rectory was built was exchanged under the enclosure award for a piece of land opposite the east front of Englefield House and immediately behind the church “being the site of the Rectory house” (number 1) then in the ownership of Edward Berens, the Rector. The Tomkins engraving of about 1790 shows a building immediately behind the church so this must have been that Rectory, and probably the one said to have been let during the 1700s at a rent of £35 a year. The map of 1829 shows no building on the site so the exchange was probably made some years earlier and the house demolished. A house already stood on the new land acquired by Berens, about where Rectory Cottage now is (2), so this will have been the Rectory occupied by the Rev Francis Eyre in 1844.
A new Parsonage was built in the 1880s (now 8 and 9 in The Street, number 4 on the image) and the Rector, the Reverend Arthur Heigham, a batchelor, moved into it early in 1891. The Victorian Rectory then was rented-out as a family home to Mr L E Bligh for a few years.
In 1896 Mr Heigham’s successor, the Reverend H Savill-Young, moved into the Parsonage for the first few weeks but then settled back into the Rectory. The last Rector to live in the Victorian Rectory was the Reverend George Ashburner, the incumbent from 1947 until 1960, and his successor Godfrey Bower was the first occupant of the current Rectory (St Marks’ House). The Victorian Rectory was then let to Major Black and his family and remains a private dwelling today.
