The College

Morden College is a charity founded in 1695 which now provides a range of types of care for older people and which is administered from the College itself at Blackheath in London. It is a charity founded in the Christian spirit of unconditional love and care of the needy. Its criteria for support make interesting reading. (The following is quoted directly from the College website).

“Applicants to the Charity either for accommodation or financial support must fulfil the following criteria:

They must have in their working lives held a position of responsibility in a profession, commerce, trade or vocation or have been the partner of someone who has held a position of responsibility in a profession, commerce, trade or vocation.

They will not be in paid employment and must be at or over the UK state pension age.

They will be in need by reason of financial hardship (Morden College welcomes applications from the poorest in our society), disability, infirmity or other disadvantage; which we shall judge on a case by case basis”

In 1995 the entry qualification read as follows:

Applicants should be

“men and women of good character who have either been engaged in a trade, business or profession as principals or reached a position of authority or seniority in employment, and who through accident, misfortune, disability or infirmity have been prevented from continuing to follow their former calling and are in reduced material circumstances….”

When the College was founded it was for

“…poor Merchants…and such as have lost their Estates by accidents, dangers and Perrills of the Seas or by any other accidents ways or means in their honest endeavours to get their living by means of Merchandizing.”

That thread of providing for people who have striven hard to be self-supporting but through ill fortune find themselves unable to do so reaches from the founding of the College to the present day. Who was Sir Joh Morden, and what directed his philanthropic demeanour?

The Man

Born John Morden in London in 1623 to a family of relatively modest means he grew up to be a singularly successful merchant trading initially from Turkey into the East Indies, amassing considerable wealth as he went. He returned to London in 1660, the year which witnessed the end of the Commonwealth governed by the Cromwells, Oliver and Richard, and the restoration of the Monarchy in the shape of King Charles II. This was also a time of great expansion of European trade to the east into India and beyond. The Restoration provided a stimulus to this commercial upsurge and the two chartered trading companies at the centre of this, The Levant, or Turkey Company, and the East India Company prospered.

John Morden of necessity would have been very much involved with these mercantile organisations and he strengthened his influence within them through his marriage in 1662 to Susan Brand of Edwardstone. Susan was the daughter of Joseph Brand, JP, living in Edwardstone, and her brother-in-law was Sir Samuel Barnardiston whose family was influential in the Levant trade. Sir Samuel was made Deputy Governor of the East India Company and in 1667 John Morden was appointed to the board of the Levant Company and by 1670 held a similar position in the East India Company.

For most of the decade since his return from Turkey, John Morden had lived in London, from where the trading companies operated, but in 1669 he bought a substantial estate in Blackheath not much more than a stone’s throw from Greenwich where King Charles II held Court in the Queen’s House. Perhaps the destruction wrought in London by the Plague and the Great Fire encouraged him to look beyond the city, but the presence of the Court was probably significant for a man of his ambition. Whatever the case his fortune remained unchecked and in 1688, just a few months prior to King James II fleeing the country, he appointed John Morden as a Baronet to be Sir John Morden. By 1691 he was Commissioner of Excise for King William III, and between 1695 and 1696 he was the Whig Member of Parliament for Colchester.

A Philanthropic Endeavour

Now nearly 70, and without children to whom he and Susan could bequeath their considerable wealth, it would seem he began to turn towards charitable works. He took the post of Treasurer to Bromley College, a foundation supporting widows of the clergy, in 1693, relinquishing this two years later to found his own College on land within his estate. The building of this College must have involved considerable expense; a figure of £10,000 is mentioned in one reference. Designed, it would seem, by Sir Christopher Wren, it stands today as a near matchless example of late seventeenth century collegiate architecture. Along with the building and land was the trust fund which provided for the upkeep of the foundation, and the provision of 40 shillings per annum as personal expenditure for the 40 occupants it could accommodate. Sir John predeceased his wife in 1708, and his will makes permanent provision for the College in the form of what is now known as Sir John Morden’s Charity, and leaves most of the residue of his estate to Dame Susan, and on her death all that is left passes to the College trust.

These are well established verifiable facts, but there is another intriguing story of an incident in John Morden’s mercantile career, which may be founded on fact, but for which there is no documentary evidence. It is said that on deciding to return to England from Turkey in 1660 he invested the most part of his personal wealth in the venture of three ships trading to the east to return to England with valuable cargoes. This way his fortune would follow him home and set him up a wealthy man in London. He returned ahead of the ships and waited. And wait he did, for the ships failed to arrive in the Thames even after a generous amount of time to allow for poor weather, in fact one account suggests they were lost for several years and had been given up as sunk. John Morden now had to accept that he would have to start from scratch and for a time would be dependent upon the charity of others for his living. More or less penniless John Morden experienced a life unknown to him before.

But his fortune held, in more ways than one. Quite literally out of the blue one day his ships entered the Thames Haven and sailed round Greenwich Reach to dock perhaps somewhere along the busy south bank of the River. They had been blown hundreds of miles south from their course into the southern oceans and had struggled to navigate their way out of more or less uncharted waters. Their arrival must have caused something of a stir along the wharfs and quays of the City port, a stir that would buoy up John Morden and reinstate him as a preeminent merchant. John Morden really was the man whose ships had come in!

It is a good story and there is no reason to doubt that it could be true, even if the exact circumstances have been lost as the tale develops its own life through the regular retelling. As an experience it is not difficult to appreciate the impact it would have had on John Morden, and within a philanthropic disposition it could well be the inspiration for those stipulations he wrote into the founding principles of his charity. Why else would his qualification for entitlement be so specific?

Dame Susan’s story and Edwardstone

Dame Susan was not without her own personal wealth, and she individually set up a charitable trust, now known as Dame Susan’s Charity, for the purposes of supporting the work of the Church of England including but not limited to providing for the upkeep of church buildings. It also meets the costs of the upkeep of the College Chapel. These two charities are now tied together in the current charity, simply known as Morden College.

Mention of Dame Susan and her charity brings us to the relevance of this account to the church of St Mary the Virgin here at Edwardstone. As will have been noted, Dame Susan Morden was originally Susan Brand of Edwardstone. She was the great niece of Benjamin Brand, Lord of the Manor of Edwardstone, and she lived at Edwardstone Hall during her childhood and worshipped at this church. Her portrait, a copy of the original which is in the Dining Room of Morden College, hangs on the south wall of the nave. But for two chance events in the 1960’s, that might be all that there was to the connection between Morden College and this Church. However, the inscription on a plaque explaining the presence of a Tenor Bell from the Edwardstone peal, which stands on a plinth in the garden of Morden College adjacent to the Chapel, says otherwise.

“This Tenor Bell was given on permanent loan to Morden College in 1987…The bell, made in about 1712….was replaced in 1986 by the Trustees of Morden College as a token of the close ties that exist between the College and the people of Edwardstone.”

And, as if to reinforce this relationship, the replacement Tenor Bell, cast in 1986 and paid for by Dame Susan’s Charity, bears the inscription “The Morden College Bell”.

Between 1966 and 1968 collaboration between the Archivist of Morden College, members of the Society of Genealogists, and the Vicar of Edwardstone at the time, Reverend Brian Bird, resulted in the production of a brochure on Dame Susan and the Brands of Edwardstone for the Trustees of the College. This was chance number one. Chance number two was that the Chairman of the Trustees, Sir Cullum Welch was a regimental colleague of one of the Churchwardens of Edwardstone, Major General Cosmo Nevill. This established a social connection which was reinforced by invitations being extended to the Nevills to attend the College open days. Following this Edwardstone became regularly represented at the annual College Founders Day celebrations. With the installation of Richard Titford as the incumbent of Edwardstone in 1983, his enthusiasm for the link saw to the start of the tradition whereby residents of the College are invited to the Harvest Festival celebrations in the Church at which the Morden Chaplain preaches. Beyond this, two other outings for Morden residents occurred each year, one in the summer and one to coincide with the Christmas Fayre.

Over the years Dame Susan’s Charity has been a major benefactor to the Church, meeting or contributing to the costs of significant fabric repair, as well as one off projects such as the £17,500 gifted to meet the cost of the refurbishment of the organ to mark the tercentenary of the founding of the College.

The Future

Close ties indeed; ties between these two communities rooted in a Christian faith, and mediated by the faithfulness of the present day trustees to the guiding spirit of the founders, which exist to this day. In 2014 one of the residents of the College, a skilled woodcarver, donated a unique piece of work for installation in the new Children’s corner, which has been created in the space under the tower. Let us hope these ties and the institutions are able to come together in 2095 and celebrate the quadricentenary of John and Susan Morden’s generous act of charity.