The Revd Alexander Cory: From Fareham Vicar to Archdeacon

The Revd Alexander Cory served as Vicar of Fareham from 1928 to 1938, leading St Peter & St Paul through the difficult inter-war years.

Cory was born on 19 March 1890 into a clerical family. He was educated at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Keble College, Oxford, and Ripon College Cuddesdon before being ordained in 1914. His first curacy was at Portsea, placing him immediately within the Portsmouth area. During the First World War he also served as a temporary Chaplain to the Forces.

After the war he became Rector of Burton Overy in Leicestershire and then Vicar of St Mary’s, Far Cotton, Northamptonshire. In 1928 he returned to Hampshire to become Vicar of Fareham, where he remained for ten years.

His arrival came at a time when Fareham was changing visibly. Aerial photographs taken in 1928 show a town still centred on its historic High Street, market, railway and quay, but increasingly connected with the modern transport and commercial life of southern Hampshire.

Cory also had a particular interest in church bells. At a 1929 meeting of the Winchester and Portsmouth Diocesan Guild of Church Bell Ringers in Fareham, he welcomed the ringers and described himself as a ringer. He expressed the hope that the church tower and bells might be restored so that Fareham could develop a strong local band of ringers.

His decade as vicar also coincided with the Great Depression and the uneasy international climate of the 1930s. Britain was still living with the human consequences of the First World War while economic hardship affected many communities. At the same time, political tensions in Europe were steadily increasing.

For a parish church, those years meant ministry among families carrying memories of wartime loss while facing unemployment, economic uncertainty and the possibility of another conflict.

Cory left Fareham in 1938 to become incumbent at Hayling Island. In 1946 he became Vicar of All Saints, Ryde, and in 1952 was appointed Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight. He remained archdeacon until 1961 and died on 7 April 1973.

Alexander Cory’s ministry at St Peter & St Paul therefore formed one stage in a long clerical career that began during the First World War and eventually led to senior leadership in the Diocese of Portsmouth.

His years in Fareham also place the parish firmly within the inter-war story of the town: a community remembering one war while moving, unknowingly, towards another.