[1] Comper's father moved from Sussex to Scotland as a young man in search of work as a schoolmaster with a view to becoming a priest.

The eldest, John-Baptiste Sebastian Comper (1891–1979), became an architect, designing many churches for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Northampton.

[8][9] From 1912, Comper and his wife lived in London at The Priory, Beulah Hill, a house designed by Decimus Burton (1800–81), where he entertained friends such as John Betjeman.

After the studio was destroyed in the Second World War, it was relocated to his garden, in a building previously used by his son, Nicholas Comper (1897–1939), to design aircraft.

[10] After a number of restorations and embellishments of existing buildings, Comper's first completed commission for an entirely new church was St Cyprian's, Clarence Gate, London[11] which sought to put into practice the precepts of the Alcuin Club, with whose liturgical views he remained closely identified.

[25] In 1936–38 he designed St Philip's Church at Cosham near Portsmouth, with a highly original plan with centralised altar; this appealled to the post-First World War generation New Churches Movement because of the primacy of the altar as the focus of the design,[26] although by that date many architects and critics, such as Nikolaus Pevsner, saw his adherence to Gothic forms as dated and anachronistic.

[28] The chapel commemorates Leslie Lindsey and Stewart Mason, her husband of ten days, who were married at Emmanuel Church and perished when the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915.