Cathedral Church of Christ: from a wooden mission church to the site of a head of state’s wartime wedding

In Lagos, in Nigeria, the Cathedral Church of Christ began as a parish of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). It first met in 1853 at Oko Faji, under the Reverend G. F. Beulah, one of the first missionaries sent to Nigeria by the CMS in London. In 1867 the congregation moved to its present site on the Marina waterfront. The foundation stone of a first wooden building was laid on 29 March 1867 by Sir John Hawley Glover, then acting administrator of Lagos, and the church was dedicated on 10 June 1869 by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop. The present Gothic Revival building was begun, according to Wikipedia, on 1 November 1924, though another source, Punch Nigeria, gives 1929 as the start of work: a discrepancy the sources consulted do not resolve. The foundation stone was laid on 21 April 1925 by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, and the building was finished in 1946. The architect was Bagan (Joshua Bangadogi) Benjamin, a Yoruba returnee from Sierra Leone, one of the so-called «Saro». Most of the materials came from Liverpool, and the white marble of the foundation stone from Newcastle-on-Tyne, while the labour was largely Nigerian. Inside is a pipe organ, built first by the German firm Oberlinger Orgelbau and later rebuilt by the British firm Harrison & Harrison until it reached 64 stops on four manuals. In its present form it was inaugurated on 2 May 2010, and is described as the largest organ in Nigeria. A cenotaph recalls Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, whose remains were moved to the cathedral in 1976, 85 years after his death in 1891, from the Ajele cemetery, which was to be redeveloped. The Anglican diocese of Lagos was established in 1919; the sources differ on the exact date, giving either 10 October or 10 December. The cathedral has been in turn the seat of the Bishop of Lagos, of the Archbishop of the Province of West Africa and, since 2002, of the newly created Anglican Province of Lagos, of which it remains the provincial cathedral. The present Bishop of Lagos is the Most Reverend Ifedola Senasu Gabriel Okupevi, installed on 28 August 2023. Three moments stand out in its history. Queen Elizabeth II visited on 28 January 1956, and left as a gift a chair bearing the British royal arms, still used as the dean’s ceremonial seat. On 2 October 1960 the cathedral held the service of thanksgiving for the independence of Nigeria. And on 19 April 1969 General Yakubu Gowon, then Nigerian head of state during the Biafran civil war, married Victoria Zakari there — a lavish ceremony which, according to some sources, drew criticism at a time of widespread hardship in the country. The cathedral is not among the national monuments officially declared by the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), but it appears on the list of proposed national monuments.