Crier Profile Continued...
Though A Glass Darkly - From a BBC Radio Programme, Part II
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 a lot of press cuttings here, his press cuttings: there are stories that villagers would even kick his dog, and it's obvious he was very disliked!
Comments from villagers here:
"Thank God it's not like that now. There was a lot of controversy about the war memorial being put in the church..."
"Fisher was very anti-Non-Conformist. Non-Conformists have always been powerful in this part of the country...this is Cromwell country, and I think this goes back...they were stronger than Church of England in a lot of our Fenland villages...I think the Eastern Counties were pretty solid for Cromwell apart from places like Colchester..."
Peter Cormack of the William Morris gallery again:
We have scrapbooks from Charles Allix, and records on permanent loan from the
parish church at Swaffham Prior...surviving Churchwardens' minutes, local
parish history...Allix compiled his scrapbooks over his life. They seem to be
full of machines: he seems to have been obsessed by aeronautics, records of
airships making long-distance flights, people in Cambridgeshire making their
own flying machines, he lovingly cut them out and stuck them into his
scrapbook. There are cuttings from the Morning Post and one from the Daily
sketch called "The Tank Text", which are about the Swaffham Prior
windows:
"Many sins against good taste have been committed in the name of war memorials, but few perhaps are more flagrant than that which has occurred at Swaffham Prior, Cambridge, which has taken the phrase "war memorials" literally...there is one hope: the windows are painted, not stained glass, which here and there already show signs that they will not last many centuries."
In fact the writer is quite wrong, Peter Cormack adds: the windows were painted as medieval windows were, and will indeed last, although they will fade.
There seem to be three main players in the story of these windows. The squire, who commissioned them and paid for at least two out of the three; there is the Vicar, presiding over a fairly High Church service, and there is the village. Memories of Allix remain:
The squire, if he was in the village, men were expected to tip their hats: and ladies were expected to curtsey a little bit...
He was a spendthrift: he spent an enormous amount of money converting the grounds around the big house to look like the Lake District, with lakes, and raised mounds and trees planted, and water running, because his wife liked the Lake District...
I think my grandfather must have worn a frock coat on occasions because I can remember when he sat down he pulled the tails out each side, so as not to sit on them and crush them...I suppose in a way he didn't have enough to do...in those days, managing your estate didn't take up all your time, and I suppose that's why he was so interested in the church and doing the windows...
He used to wear a little skull cap; he was very thin, he was a tall man, but there wasn't much of him. His wife, she used to come to church as well. The old fellow used to read the lesson. Very soft-spoken. He died in 1921...
Many people who come here say how many trees there are. Well, many of those are due to Charles Peter Allix who was there in Victorian times...
Another voice explains the long-standing grudges over land in this area:
There's a Californian Redwood tree in there he brought back from California when he went on a trip there. They were a Hugenot family, and they had French ideas. His ancestor came from Normandy, from Alencon, in the late 17th century to take up a position in the church in Ely: he was driven out of France when the Hugenots were persecuted. Swaffham Prior was a possession of Ely, and I think thatŐs how he came by his land. A farmer a Bottisham tells me his family were farming there in the time of the Enclosure in the 19th century. The way the church men took land at the time of the Enclosure and got it in great lumps, the best land, away from the smaller owners, was shocking: it antagonised people and made them Non-Conformist, they were so disgusted with the church men, who somehow acquired the principal Manor and the land at the time of Enclosure.
The presenter picks up here: So, with the Allixes comfortably ensconced at Swaffham Prior House, the whole family intent on their creation of stained glass windows:
The billiard room table was covered in cuttings from newspapers or magazines or anything he thought would fit into his scheme of what he'd got into his mind's eye...and I think people from the village came up and were asked if they had any ideas on the subject: certainly the family were asked and they had little snippets, and they spent mealtimes with the bible looking up texts and things that would be suitable for these windows...
According to the written reminiscences of his daughter Isabella M Young the great work of squire Allix's life was the restoration of St Mary's church, abandoned since it was struck by lightning in the 18th century. Worried by the decline of the Church of England in the village, and the rising Non-Conformism, he bought the medieval ruin and started on the restoration in the 1870s. Allix was resisted by the incumbent vicar, Thomas Preston, a popular, Low Church man who was quite content with the modern church of St Cyriac's next door. Allix apparently could not bear a Low Church service raised funds to restore the Chancel of St Mary's and fitted furnishings that Thomas Preston is said to have stigmatised as "Roman Catholic". Indeed, Parson Preston made himself so unpleasant that the furnishings had to be removed. When he died in 1897 Allix was careful to bring in a successor, Reverend Laurence Fisher, who shared his High Church views; and to whom he would eventually give the restored church of St Mary's. Fisher was still there 20 years later to dedicate the memorial windows. But Allix's daughter remarked that he was of a difficult disposition also, though in a different manner than Preston. I wonder what the villagers made of him?
A well-spoken lady recalls:
Bob Sheldrick: He was a big round-faced man, bald-headed, but with the hair round his head -dark hair: he used to wear a different hat for every occasion, in his garden he would wear a little hat like a schoolboy's hat with a button on the top, peaked: when he used to go to Sunday school- he was our Sunday school master, he used to wear a mortar board; when he used to go to church he would wear one of these type cardinal hats, and when he went to meet the Bishop he would wear a top hat.
The presenter asks: And you don't remember him as a kind man?
What?
The Reverend.
The Reverend. Bob Sheldrick seems taken by surprise at the question.
There is a pause. He had his...pets. And I er, think that's what upset a lot of people in the village. He used to entertain a lot of boys down there; some of them used to bath him...
Another voice: He was homosexual, heterosexual, and all rolled up in one! When the men were out at work he used to see if he could get their wives, the boys of the choir, and so on. On the other hand, he played the part of the village patriarch. Everything was organised by Fisher, and so on.
And another: My father had nothing to do with him. My father, and a man named Charles Cook, who was the NSPCC inspector at Cambridge said that if he hadn't died when he did, they were bringing out a summons against him, for his activity, whatever he got up to with youngsters in this village.
He was a member of the cricket team. He made nets for the practice.
I didn't realise about the...I realised about the maid...and his son says the lady's voice(there is a discussion here about who Fisher left his bed and his bicycle to, and the school he paid for the son to go to; and to the physique which was indicative of Fisher's progeny: all which, as a non-libel lawyer, this writer is hesitant to put to paper!)
Fisher was an enormous man. And he also had a gateway put through there to get Mrs ******* - she was a victim.
The presenter senses the discussion is becoming too hot for radio! He interjects hurriedly:
So Fisher was, was obviously a man, a man of, of parts in those days, he was somebody who did what he wanted.
Well, yes and no (laughs). There was a lot of opposition to him. I mean, people in the village didn't lie down under his autocratic rule. You probably know that there's a Fore Street and a High Street and a back path, and he was seen coming along the back way path one day in a very dishevelled state and I think with a black eye, and he'd been to see a certain widow in the village and the sons had given a good hiding! (On the tape at this point suppressed mirth is just audible from the other participants in the discussion here) Grandfather had put up in the garden of Ivy Farm, it was a walled garden, in the corner, he put a cross up, with an old fish hanging on it, and the caption "The Lord loveth truth and justice".
So, behind the stained glass, we've found all is not as it seems. We have a classically patriarchal squire of Hugenot descent who has rebuilt the church himself and now wants to crown his achievement with some memorial windows. We have a scandalously remembered vicar, who appears to have exploited his weaker parishioners but who is also remembered as a good cricketer, and something of a benefactor too; and a village on whom these two seem to impose their intentions, good or otherwise, is a largely Non-Conformist place whose twenty-three dead are remembered not on the village green but in this privately restored High Anglican church.
Let's go back to the third window. It seems to be a representation of the promised land, biblical references, figures bringing back the pole with the grapes, is the end of the Exodus, the chi ldren coming out of their torment...but you see all the agriculture, these horse-drawn carts: something out of Swaffham Prior, 1902. This isn't just something out of Heaven: this is the last of England. The returning heroes would find a land fit for them, and that land was not much different from the idyllic notion of Britain before the war. This is how England would be: a land that was fruitful, harmonious, and above all, full of people. A working landscape where people would have a place.
PS A bottle of reasonable plonk to the person who can tell me why the screen in the Church, (and therefore the position of the pews & aisle carpet also) is several inches off centre, both to the stone arch and the parquet floor. It's niggled every time I've set eyes on it for approaching nine years. To see it, look at the balance of the panels at the top, also at the straight lines of parquet on the floor which define the aisle.