The Pollens, an English Catholic artistic dynasty

Catholicism in England since Emancipation in 1829 has thrown up a number of dynasties specialising in architecture and the wider arts. Among these should undoubtedly be numbered the Pollens.

The Pollen family was originally from Lincolnshire. Edward Pollen, who died in 1636, became a London merchant, and successive Pollens represented Andover in the House of Commons. Edward Pollen’s great-grandson, John Pollen, was created 1st Baronet of Redenham (Hampshire) in 1795.

The latter’s grandson, John Hungerford Pollen (1820-1902), was educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford; he was a Fellow of Merton College from 1842 to 1852. His architectural interests developed at a fairly young age. In 1842 he carried out restoration work at Wells Cathedral, where his uncle was Dean, and in 1850 he was responsible for the fine chapel ceiling of Merton College Chapel.

Pollen was swept up in the enthusiasm of the Oxford Movement and took Anglican orders. From 1847 to 1852 he was closely associated with St Saviour’s Church, Ellerby Road, Leeds. Many of the clergymen associated with it “seceded” to Rome, and Pollen himself was “inhibited” in December 1851 by Charles Longley, Bishop of Ripon, for his “extreme” sacramental views. In October 1852 Pollen was received into the Catholic Church.

Pollen decided not to seek ordination, instead devoting his life to architecture and art. In 1855 he married Maria Margaret La Primaudaye, whose father had been Manning’s Anglican chaplain at Lavington before also converting to Catholicism. They went on to have 10 children, of whom three became priests and one a nun. His son Fr John Hungerford Pollen SJ assembled and published numerous 16th-century recusant records, of great value to modern scholars.

In the same year Pollen père accepted the invitation of John Henry Newman to become Professor of Fine Arts at the Catholic University in Dublin. He was responsible for building the University Church of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom on St Stephen’s Green in a Byzantine Revival style. The atrium leads into the ante-church, nave and sanctuary. The interior is richly decorated with a baldacchino over the altar. The semi-dome above the sanctuary was inspired by the apse of San Clemente in Rome. There is an arcaded gallery with screens and an elaborate pulpit. The walls are decorated with marble.

In 1857 Pollen returned to London where he fell in with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, with whom he decorated the hall of the Oxford Union Society.

In 1858-61 Pollen added an aisle and an apse to the existing church of the Birmingham Oratory in Edgbaston. When the church was rebuilt in the early 20th century by E Doran Webb, part of the original Pollen work survived as the former St Philip’s Chapel (now the Newman shrine). The Chapel of St Charles Borromeo also has a marble altar by Pollen from the old church.

Not a lot of ecclesiastical work by Pollen survives. One that does is the Little Oratory, the private chapel of the Fathers, within the London Oratory House on London’s Brompton Road. The elaborate scheme included a new altar, apsidal sanctuary, longitudinal stalls and ceiling decoration. This has all recently been restored at the expense of the late Della Howard.

Pollen did secular architectural work as well, for example for the 8th Marquis of Lothian at Blickling and the 19th Earl of Shrewsbury (the husband of his first cousin Theresa Cockerell) at Alton Towers.

From 1863 to 1876 he was Curator at the Art and Industrial Departments of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). He lectured and wrote on art. In the latter year he became private secretary to the convert 1st Marquis of Ripon, who was Viceroy of India between 1880 and 84. He recommended JF Bentley to Cardinal Vaughan as the architect of Westminster Cathedral.

Pollen died suddenly in North Kensington in December 1902, and was buried in the family vault in Kensal Green Cemetery. One of his grandsons was the religious sculptor Arthur Joseph Lawrence Pollen (1899-1968); he was educated at Downside and married the Hon Daphne Baring, the painter daughter of the 3rd Lord Revelstoke. His work can be found at Westminster Cathedral, Farm Street and Worth Abbey. Her best known work is her group portrait of the 40 English and Welsh Martyrs now at Stonor Park.

Arthur and Daphne Pollen had two artistic sons. The first of these was the architect Francis Pollen (1926-1987). After Ampleforth and Downside, he started his formal architectural training at the Cambridge University School of Architecture in October 1948. He married Thérèse Sheridan (subsequently Viscountess Sidmouth) at Westminster Cathedral in July 1950; they had five children.

Francis Pollen’s first commission was to design a chapel for a community of Carmelite nuns at Presteigne, which he did in a simple Italianate style, displaying a remarkable command of three-dimensional form. The Carmelites left in 1988 and it used now as the parish church of the Assumption of Our Lady and St Thérèse.

Pollen next worked with Lionel Brett, subsequently Lord Esher, to gain experience. In 1956 he set up a partnership with Philip Jebb, which ran to 1958. They were both traditionally minded in architecture, although they had great admiration for Le Corbusier. Pollen’s second ecclesiastical work was the convent Chapel of Jesus and Mary in Park Avenue, Willesden Green (1953-6). In 1959 he entered into a partnership with the now modernist Lionel Brett, lasting until the early 1970s. Most of their work was for offices, schools, universities, homes and monastic buildings – including the library at Downside Abbey.

With regard to churches, the looming Second Vatican Council caused a more modernist line to be taken in the building of new churches. Pollen’s Our Lady Help of Christians, Hurst Green, Sussex (1959) was a polygon attached to a brick semi-circle. The church closed in 2008. St John Bosco, Woodley, Reading (1967) had a brought-forward altar with a glazed lantern over it, and a three sided fan shaped arrangement. His 1970 work at Pugin’s church of St Peter, Marlow provided a large fan-shaped extension with bare brick walls, and a sanctuary with a large picture of Our Lord.

Pollen’s ecclesiastical magnum opus was undoubtedly the Abbey Church of Our Lady, Help of Christians at Worth in Sussex. The monastery was founded in 1933 as a priory of Downside, becoming an independent abbey in 1957. The church, which synthesises modernity and tradition, was built in the period 1965 to 1975. The narthex has a feeling of Sussex vernacular but the great round interior space, its materials and use of light are undoubtedly modern. The central altar is situated under a brick circular lantern. There is a series of flanking chapels.

Francis Pollen died on November 4, 1987.

The second artistic son was Patrick Pollen (1928-2010). Educated at Ampleforth and the Slade School of Fine Art, he moved to Dublin to work in stained glass with Evie Hone, whose last protégé he became. He completed a number of stained glass commissions, mainly but not exclusively in Ireland. His major English work is the 1958 martyrs’ window at Farm Street.

The artistic bent of the Pollens has taken a literary form in the current generation in that Francis Pollen’s daughter, the Countess of Oxford & Asquith, has (as Clare Asquith) written on literary Catholicism in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. She is currently working on a biography of St Robert Southwell SJ, the Elizabethan martyr.

This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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