Crier Profile No. 4 - Through a Glass Darkly
The WWI Memorial Church Windows of Swaffham Prior
(Excepts from Radio 4 documentary broadcast on Sept 14th 1995)
A MEMORIAL, not written on paper, but figured in glass. The once remote village of Swaffham Prior is known for having two churches in one churchyard. In St Mary's, the visitor will find three graphic stained glass windows: awkward, strangely kitsch-looking things, which seem all the more revealing for being in - what even the church leaflet here admits - appalling taste.
These windows tell the story of the first world war as it appeared to the
bereaved village - or more precisely to its squire, one Charles Peter Allix,
who designed them and paid most of the cost. The dedication service was
presided over by the Reverend Laurence Fisher on the nineteenth of December
1919. This was Bob Sheldrick's memory of the event, recorded some years ago
for the BBC:
I was here with my father and mother. We sat over there - the people who made the dedication came round here and we sang the appropriate hymns. The buglers were up on the screen. Two marines: one was Mr Rule, Harry Rule, and the other was a friend of his, Mr Golding.
There were three new stained glass windows, a brass tablet bearing the names of the twenty-three fallen men of the parish, and a stone Celtic cross, placed below the centre window, and which looks as if it might be better placed on a village green, or outside in the churchyard.
The parish magazine describes the service: the cross was unveiled by the warden
CC Ambrose - he was a big local farmer - and a hymn was sung "When I
survey The wondrous Cross" and the vicar read the names of the fallen. The
subject of the two war windows and the peace window windows were then explained
by warden CP Allix and the last post was sounded from the Rood loft by the
buglers, perhaps the most thrilling part of a very moving service. The church
was full - not only with the living, but with the names of the dead. Bob
Sheldrick recalled for the programme one of them: Percy Benstead, who is buried
in Palestine. His grand-daughter took up the story:
My grandfather died just at the end of the first world war of malaria. It was very sad that he went through all the war and then died just before he came home. My mother was born in 1917 and he never saw her, having already gone back to Egypt. He lived down the Fen road, past the station. He was a very good man. On the winter nights he used to go along the river bank and collect up the gipsy children and put them in the barns, to keep them out of the rain.
So here, just after the Great War, with Englishness to the fore, paid for with young lives. Every village has its version of this, a memorial fused in a common act of memory.
But Swaffham Prior's windows really are unusual - brightly violent, they testify to the brutality: they are full of tanks; howitzers, airships, bombing planes, broken bodies being picked up and taken into ambulances...
Peter Cormack of the William Morris gallery was asked to comment on the windows:
They are a combination of a gothic framework, and then inside, very elaborate ornamental niches. There are more sophisticated war memorials with more sophisticated art, but this is fascinating because it is such an explicit tabloid document.
Bob Sheldrick reflected:
Just think, how soon that was done. I mean, the war was over in 1918: they had a meeting and decided who was going to pay for this thing; by 1919 it was designed, assembled, and dedicated.
Squire Allix's hand-written dedication speech survives. He begins by saying "Friends and countrymen, lend me your ears, to quote our great poet Shakespeare" - and it's a long and moving document. But there was something just a little odd about it, because Allix clearly felt obliged to explain why these memorials should have been placed in this particular building.
A clue comes in the position of the Baptist chapel across the road. Another village voice, not identified in the programme, comments:
In those days it was very strict, really, the non-conformists would hardly ever go into the parish church, some wouldn't even go in for a funeral or a wedding. Church people would never go into the chapel. Reverend Fisher, he was very bigoted, he wouldn't never go into the chapel. Thank God it's not like it now. There was a lot of controversy about the war memorial.
I've got the impression he was not a popular man, says the BBC presenter here, with Reverend Fisher's scrapbook to hand. There's lot of press cuttings here...
...To be continued.
Many thanks to our Skye correspondent Ophir Catling for sending us the recording and to Radio 4 (um, in advance) in hopeful anticipation of their kind permission to publish these extracts.
Eds' note: if you participated in this programme or know of others who did, the Crier would be very glad to hear from you.