37. Final Reports
In which beautiful glass is admired...
The rest of the reports from the cathedrals came in like buses, nothing for an hour and then three at once. @AngleofRepose had her notebook open before the breakfast things were fully cleared, and by the middle of the morning she was halfway down the page.
@Magpiecomplex was back from Kent by half past ten with road dust on her and a dish of peanuts in front of her inside a minute. “No mark,” she said. “I’ll say that first, since it’s what you want.”
“Where did you get to?” asked Angle.
“Everywhere, mainly Rochester and Canterbury, but then I heard about All Saints’ church in Tudeley. Twelve windows, each designed by Marc Chagall, and it’s the only church in the world where that’s true.”
Magpie took a peanut apart without looking at it. “The east one is a memorial. A young woman called Sarah d’Avigdor-Goldsmid drowned in a sailing accident off Rye in 1963, aged twenty-one, and her mother and father commissioned it. Chagall came over for the installation in 1967, stood in the church, and said he would create them all. He was still at it fifteen years later. The chancel windows went in the year he died, and he was 98.”
“Did you get up to the leading?” said Angle.
“I did, and I didn’t even have to fly up for it, which is the other thing worth telling you. They’re at eye level. You can walk straight up and put your face to them. He worked the glass right to the end of the making, scratching at it, marking it, so his hands are all over it.” Magpie ate the peanut. “Nothing struck in the lead. Not on any of the twelve. I went round twice.”
Angle wrote Tudeley, Kent, twelve windows, no mark and went back to her tea.
@EmpressaurusKitty arrived with Kitty at noon to report from Oxford. “Christ Church Cathedral. The Latin Chapel, east window. 1859, Burne-Jones, made up by James Powell and Sons. Sixteen panels, the whole life of Saint Frideswide, who is the patron saint of Oxford. No mark anywhere in the lead,” she said. “But, in the last panel Frideswide is on her deathbed, and behind her, in the background, there is a Victorian flush lavatory.”
Gantry put her mug down. “A WHAT?”
“A flush lavatory. I went back twice to be sure and then found a verger and she showed me, too. I took pictures.”
“Why is it there?” asked Girdle.
“Nobody knows. One account says it belonged to whoever paid for the window and was put in as a way of acknowledging the funding. Another says Burne-Jones had seen one at the Great Exhibition a few years before and thought a great deal of it.”
Angle wrote in her notebook, Christ Church, Oxford. No mark. Lavatory in a window. She looked down at her columns. “With Kent and Oxford returning today, nearly everyone has come back, though we’re expecting @AnonyMumAuDHD any minute now.” She turned the page. “@MarieDeGournay is still out. Four days on the telephone to that private trust in Lincolnshire, and when it went on ringing, she went herself.”
“The locked one?” asked Girdle.
“The locked one,” said Angle.
The darkroom door opened at three, and Glossy came out and stood with her back against it, which she had not done before. “It’s all printed,” she said. “Liverpool, Cumbrae, Truro, and the last two rolls. Everything that has come in is up on the wall.”
Angle handed her the film from Oxford and Glossy looked a little shocked, “Just when the queue was finally empty,” she said and returned to the darkroom.
Moments later AnonyMumAuDHD arrived with a roll of film and a sheet of paper she read from rather than trusting to memory. "York Minster. North transept. The Five Sisters window, five lancets, each over sixteen metres high and installed around 1250. Gorgeous Grisaille glass, so it's grey with uncoloured glass in between and it's so beautiful. There is more 13th century grisaille there than anywhere else on earth.
Angle immediately took up her pencil, "Tell us everything."
AnonyMum continued, "They removed the windows during the First World War as a precaution against zeppelins. When they were returned, tiny holes in the glass were discovered, which grew and caused bits of the glass to flake off. The lead also needed repairs. Years of work to restore the windows were needed, and two women, Helen Little and Almyra Gray, asked Yorkshire women for donations to pay for it. In the end over 32,000 women from across Britain and the Empire made donations. It was rededicated on Midsummer's Day in 1925 to the women of the Empire who died in the Great War. There are oak screens beside it with 1,514 women's names on them."
AnonyMum turned the sheet over, "The windows were removed again during World War II and needed more restoration. The rededication service in 1950 was attended by nearly 2,500 people and included a massed choir of 250 singers, plus 100 singers from the Women's Institute and an all-female team of bell-ringers, from the Ladies Guild of Change Ringers. They rang the bells for the service and were the first all-women team ever to ring the Minster's bells.
"And I found the Margrave’s mark! It’s in the lead at the bottom of the centre lantern."
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/37-final-reports