After 50 years the Friends of Friendless Churches, founded in 1957, has cause to celebrate. With the minimum of resources it has rescued more than three dozen ancient, beautiful and remote country churches from demolition or collapse.

Better still it was the first to begin this heroic work, before the Churches Conservation Trust or the Chapels Trust. And half the churches it has saved have been in Wales, where since 1999 the Friends has each year received £70,000 from Cadw and £30,000 from the Church in Wales to take on endangered churches. The latest vesting is the little Llanfigael on Anglesey with a complete late Georgian interior.

The purpose of the Friends is to “preserve as found” and indeed preempt the drastic alterations which might follow if untouched interiors were converted into houses. But this has not prevented it from putting its churches to enterprising uses. Matthew Saunders, the secretary, says: “At Papworth St Agnes, the locals have adopted the church as a community centre. It has brought a little hamlet to life. They use the church for wedding feasts and candle-lit harvest suppers.”

In this case the Friends inherited the church stripped of its fittings without even glass in the windows.

At Wickham Bishop in Essex the Friends was approached by Benjamin Finn, a stained-glass artist, who wanted to find a studio that provided him with inspiration. The one addition is a discreet, small furnace. “It was a virtual ruin. Only the font survived, and his presence has put an end to the vandalism,” says Saunders.

Another church complete with Georgian box pews is Manordeifi in Pembrokeshire, which has a coracle in the porch so that visitors might sail back home when the river flooded.

“We preserve these churches for their artistic and historic qualities, but our visitors’ books show that many people find spiritual solace. One touching entry ran: ‘My father died a week ago and here, for the first time, I have felt totally at peace’,” says Saunders.

The Friends was formed by the veteran church campaigner Ivor Bulmer-Thomas. The inaugural meeting in 1957 was held at the House of Commons in a committee room booked by Roy Jenkins, a lifelong friend and supporter. Bulmer-Thomas named the Friends after Le Club de sans Club he had encountered in Paris.

An MP, a government minister and an athlete, Bulmer-Thomas also wrote standard works on Greek mathematics. He played a leading role in the formation of the Historic Churches Preservation Trust in 1952, but cut his ties with it after a row with Archbishop Fisher. Bulmer-Thomas felt that restricting grants to churches in use would increase the number of demolitions and “unseemly conversions”.

Today all the Friends’ churches are well looked after, often by local groups of friends who help to fundraise and open the buildings to visitors. The Friends’ earliest churches include Milland in Sussex, where a 10th-century window has just been uncovered, and Llanbeulan on Anglesey, where the unusually grand and very early medieval font may have originated as an altar, the elaborate 13th-century sedilia at Hodgeston in Pembrokeshire, good enough to have been done by the craftsmen who had worked on the Bishops’ Palace at St David’s. There are Georgian interiors at Bayvil in Pembrokeshire and Ynyscynhaearn in Gwynedd. The Friends looks after Guy Dawber’s Arts and Crafts treasure house, the chapel of St John at Matlock Bath, Henry Wilson’s Brithdir in Gwynedd and Coates Carter’s Llandeloy in Pembrokeshire of 1927 — a late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement where the reredos was made by the architect. Heywood Sumner’s cycle of sgraffiti panels at Llanfair Kilgeddin in Mon-mouthshire has recently been repaired, thanks to a grant from the Pilgrim Trust given in memory of Roy Jenkins.

The Friends’ remit extends to churches others cannot rescue, including private chapels and almshouse chapels as well as parish churches. The latest acquisition (the 39th) is a church at Llancillo on the Herefordshire border with Wales. “There’s no vehicular access and it’s halfway up a hillside with a medieval preaching cross, though it’s hard to see who they could have preached to except the sheep,” says Saunders.

The Friends, which has recently received its first substantial legacy, will spend £80,000 on repairs for which no other grants are available.

The Friends has 2,000 members, who are offered dual membership with the Ancient Monuments Society. “We have the energy and the will,” says Saunders, “but still have to turn down churches for lack of funds, notably one 1840s Gothic Revival church in Dorset which needs £400,000 in repairs.”

Friends of Friendless Churches