HE IS NOT HERE...
First World War memorial Stained Glassand the Fragile Art of Remembrance
NEIL MOAT PhD
01In this centenary year marking the start of one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, I am going to attempt something rather presumptuous for a mere fifty-five year old
•I want to convince you – if not to love – at least the better to appreciate the countless memorial stained glass windows erected throughout this country in the wake of the Great War. [I make no apology that many of my examples are taken from my native North-East]
•Of course, we already know that these memorials are historically important and that some are truly beautiful, even moving works of art…
•but some cautionary tales may leave the more thoughtful amongst you a little uneasy in your seats.
•Indeed, there are some here tonight who might salute the artist of this scene for his unflinching honesty, and yet others who would find such reminders of the futility of wardeeply disturbing and inappropriate, either as a memorial or in its church setting [Michael Healey (1873-1941) of the Dublin-based cooperative An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) for St. Peter’s (C-of-E), Wallsend (Tyne & Wear), 1922].
•Our duty rather, as good art-historians, should be to ask searching questions of these memorials,and rather than interpose our own reflections and concerns, to try, as dispassionately as we might, to understand the function and meaning of these windows…
•and therein lies the chief problem with my subject tonight.
02A great deal has been written on the origins and monuments of the War Memorial Movement, and predominantly on the great civic and public war memorials–
•However, it is worth noting that such memorials were far from being typical of the post-war drive to commemorate the fallen.
•Firstly, they were raised in perpetuity; permanence was ensured by the use of costly materials; granite, Portland stone, marble and bronze –the Leicester Arch ofRemembrance(now Grade-I listed), wasexecuted in Portland stone at a cost well in excess of £25,000; even so, the original concept had to be significantly revised as sufficient funds could not be raisedin time [the architect Edwin Lutyens here rings the changes on themes first explored in the Thiepval Arch and Whitehall cenotaph].
•Secondly, political and religious references were eitherwholly suppressed, or tacitly assumed rather than overtly displayed, the better that such memorials could represent the whole community, of whatever political persuasion or faith, or none – the Leicester memorial alone commemorates twelve thousand fallen drawn from the city and the surrounding county.
•Patriotism and the cult of memory thus became the only virtues such monuments could ordinarily uphold if they were to garner wider public support for their erection.
03The stained glass memorial was very different.
•For a start, stained glass was much the more affordable – in the order of hundreds of pounds as against the thousands and tens of thousands for the great civic memorials.
•Even so, the fragility of the medium seems almost counter-intuitive to its commemorative purpose– and as you can see, this window has taken some knocks.
•The context for such memorials was often – although not invariably – religious, and reflected the concerns of the individual congregations, institutions, prominent patrons or families who commissioned them, rather than the wider community.
•Constraints over content weretherefore much less severe than for the major civic memorials; indeed, the formal inventiveness and variety of imagery to be found in war memorial stained glass is truly astounding.
•This ‘jazzy’ window was designed in 1921 by the Irishman Hubert McGoldrick (1897-1967), of the An Túr Gloine cooperative, for St. Paul’s (C-of-E) church, Askew Road (Low Team), Gateshead.
•It depicts four of the orthodox Christian martial saints (i.e. Martin, George, Michael and Paul the apostle), but otherwise makes no overt reference to the war – that function was taken by the chapel in which the window was placed, dedicated to the fallen of the parish.
•I got to know this window some thirty years ago, just as the church was set to close. The window was saved when the church was demolished, but subsequently sold into private hands – the image is a montage of photos taken when the window was under assessment at York Glazier’s Trust.
•As this was McGoldrick’s only window on the British mainland, you might think it shameful that it should have been lost to public view – surely this could not happen today.
04Churches continue to be threatened daily with closure– in this case All Saint’s (C-of-E), Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, a late work (1910-13) by the architect Gerald Callcott Horsley (1862-1917).
•At the base of the large memorial east window, by the prolific Dundee-born artist James Eadie-Reid (1868-1928), a soldier and sailor, as representatives of the armed forces,enter into the presence of the enthroned Christ, there to receive crowns of victory, ushered in by the four Evangelists acting as psychopomps.
•But that is not all…
•You will notice along the base the top of a large triptych reredos placed on the High altar, also painted by Eadie-Reid as part of the parish war memorial. The triptych depicts members of the armed forces as witnesses of Christ’s passion,who are thus enlistedperpetually in the liturgy of the Mass.
•The memorial is therefore a larger thing than just the window; triptych and window speak to each other. Indeed, we might save the church; we might even save the window and the reredos as separate art-works, but having been bound into the life of the worshipping community, the combined function of window and triptych will be forever lost, if and when the church closes.
05The rate of closures amongst Nonconformist denominations is even higher than for Anglicans and Roman Catholics, and the losses are commensurately greater, even though congregations frequently make heroic efforts, when they abandon their former places of worship, to find new homes for memorials, or to trace surviving relatives or descendents.
•I was alerted to this window – made by the London studio of Arthur J. Dix (1861-1917) – by the historian Andrew Tatham, who was researching memorials to individual members of the 8th Royal Berkshires, preparatory to an exhibition at the Flanders Field Museum at Ypres(Belgium) in September next year.
•The memorial to William George Hobbs(d. 1915)had gone ‘missing’ when Richmond Green United Reformed Church (formerly Presbyterian) was sold for conversion into flats, but had been photographed in situ by English heritage shortly before closure.
06I recognised it has having gone through the ‘Trade’ some years ago, and was able to put Andrew Tatham in touch with the vendor.
•However, the window illustrates a further difficulty with this genre of stained glass –
•The young Lieutenant Hobbs, by trade a solicitor, is pictured patriotically at the far left as St. George (Amor Patria),paired with Fortitude and Wisdom on the right, as witness to Christ’s Second Coming. The chosen text – from Matthew’s Gospel, (Chap.25.34), Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world – would seem to imply that the young man’s deathin action was somehowthe making of him and duly ordained…
•Sentiments indeed not that far from those of Rupert Brooke, in a letter of 1914 to his fellow poet John Drinkwater:
•‘Not a bad place to die, Belgium, 1915[eh?]. I want to kill my Prussian first. Better than coughing out acivilian soul amid bed-clothes and disinfectant and gulping medicines in 1950. The world’ll be tameenough after the war, for those that see it... Come and die. It’ll be great fun...’
07Nor were such thoughts an imposition by the living on the dead, as is so often presumed…
•The Newcastle-born artist Victor Noble Rainbird (1888-1936) was a prizeman of the Royal College of Art under Professors Lethaby and Moira, and of the Royal Academy Schools, butsaw active service with the Northumberland Fusiliers in France.
•Even so, his post-war designs for stained glass – almost wholly for Nonconformist (mostly Methodist) congregations – seems to tap into the same sentimental vein – of battlefield visions of the Risen Christ and His angels – as regular stay-at-home propagandists.
•Indeed, Reed, Millican & Co. – hitherto a Newcastle-based commercial glaziers – felt justified in entering the burgeoning post-war market in memorial stained glass solely on the strengths of Rainbird’s designs for them.
•However, the ongoing closure of chapels has meant that almost all of Rainbird’s war memorial glass has been lost [two examples known to survive areat Allendale (Northumberland) and Papa Stour (Shetland)].
•[I was lucky enough many years ago to see the executed version of the design on the left, dated 1919, for the Thomson Memorial Hall, Sunderland; the location of the designs on the right (from my own collection) have yet to be traced].
•Ourembarrassment at such imagery– combined with the relative inaccessibilityof the windows, mostly locked away in churches and chapels – may well account for the general lack of interest shown by art-historians in the genre.
•And yet, numerically speaking, stained glass is far and away more truly representative of the War Memorial movement, than are the more studied public and civic monuments.
•We need therefore to put our embarrassment – and any latent prejudices – to one side, and seriously grapple with the meaning and function of art such as this.
08And so to return to my earlier observation; why commemorate the fallen in so fragile a medium as stained glass? And the answer is of course that there was an already existing tradition.
•Although the notion of erecting memorial windows was a medieval invention, its revival during the 19thC as a more affordable means for raising a monument becamethechief means of patronage for new stained glass, as indeed it still remains so today.
•Moreover, the quality end of the market was increasingly seen as a legitimate medium in which high-class artists might work, or make entirely theircareers and reputation.
•Thus, the notion of raising a fine memorial window, designed and/or executed by a leading contemporary artist, had becomeperfectly natural by the close of the 19thC.
•Specifically military and regimental memorials in stained glass appeared relatively early on during the revival, although – save for the regimental insignia and battle honours, or the martial subject matter – these were barely distinguishable from other memorials…
•[left]detail (St. Michael) of window to Officers, non-Commissioned Officers and Men of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers who perished during the Indian Mutiny of 1857-9, erected 1861 in St. Nicholas’ church, Newcastle upon Tyne (now the Anglican cathedral).
•Made by Wm. Wailes’ manufactory (Newcastle); Wailes repeated the design virtually verbatim, but without the military insignia, a few years later at Hereford cathedral (to be seen in the north transept chapel), and further non-military versions can also be seen at Barton-le-Street, BarnardCastle and Sedbergh parish churches.
•If the regimental memorial window lacked specificity as a genre, it was nevertheless an important precursor of later developments, being raised to the collective memory of both officers and men who were,more often than not, buried where they had fallen in a foreign land.
•Thus the pattern established by Wailes at Newcastle cathedral was continued, with little deviation, in the regimental memorials to the fallen of the South African campaign (1900-02) and finally [right] the Fifth Northumberland’s commemoration of the 1914-18 war, erected in 1921 and made by the London studio of Percy Bacon & Bros.
09Even so, the figures of Joshua, the young shepherd-boy David – ready to fell the giant Goliath with a single sling-shot –and the archangelic ‘captain of the Lord’s host’ (St. Michael), are perhaps testament to the manly ideals of the officer class and of the English public school system, than of the ordinary soldier.
10And the same might be said of a large number of war memorials raised by members of the aristocracy and landed gentry, as in the Arthurian theme (Sir Galahad and Sir Bors) of this window at St. Cuthbert’s church (C-of-E), Holme Lacey (Herefordshire)
•There is nevertheless a poignant irony here, in that the Australian-born brewing magnate Sir Robert Lucas-Tooth only purchased the Holme Lacy estate in 1909 –
•the window insinuates itself into the former mausoleum church of the Scudamore family by affecting the aristocratic ideals of chivalry, anattempt at continuity sadly purely illusory, as all three of Sir Arthur’s sons were killed during the 1914-18 War.
11Complaint is often made of such memorials, that the endless depictions of armoured knights and warrior angels are somehow a denial of reality – I know because I once complained as much myself.
•But the truth is that artists in stained glass were faced with a particular difficulty not encountered in the more abstract media of stone and bronze – the banality of the modern military uniform. Indeed, what can be done with a figure dressed in what amounts to khaki coloured tubing?
•In this window of 1930-31, the joint artists, George Washington Jack (1855-1931) and Edward Woore (1880-1960), attempted to distract our attention from the ‘effigies’ in khaki by the introduction of large blocks of complimentary colours, blue, tangerine and pink – perhaps none too successfully.
•And even for artists working after the Second World War, as the late Stanley Murray Scott FMGP (1912-1997) related to me in November 1993:
•‘Winged angels have probably not disappeared from the repertoire even now – they offer such scope for colour and pattern and sweeping lines! Never discount the practical creative aspect!’
12Of course, the narrative of self-sacrifice embodied in many war memorial windows avoided commenton the ‘reality’of compulsory military service,ill discipline in the ranks, the conduct of the war effort itself, or indeed any criticism of the social or political order that brought about the conflict.
•This is often held against the genre – but how could it have been otherwise. For the sake of the living, some justification had to be found for the terrible slaughter…
•The window we have just seen was installed in the large suburban church (C-of-E) of St. James and St. Basil, Fenham (Newcastle upon Tyne). The entire building, parish hall, vicarage and memorial garden were the gift of the retired Tyneside shipping magnate, Sir James Knott (1855-1934), who had lost two of his three sons in the 1914-18 war (Major James Leadbitter Knott and Capt. Henry Basil Knott).
•Despite the memorial nature of the gift, the church is a remarkably jolly life-affirming Arts and Crafts masterpiece, begun in 1928 and dedicated in 1932.
•The actual memorial window was hidden away discretely in a side chapel. It seems to suggest that the young officer’s defence of the dispossessed was rooted in the values of honour and fair play learnt at school (Eton College in this instance); the privations and terrors they endured on the Front were for the preservation of life and liberty at home (here Close House, the Knott’s country retreat outside of Newcastle). Few at the time would dissent from upholding such honourable virtues…
13If in Britainthe memorial window wasa thoroughly established genre, be it for individuals or for whole regiments of men, the collective commemoration of so manyordinary citizen-soldiers was something altogether new.
•And for inspiration British artists had to look further afield, to countries and traditions where the notion was already well established.Francewasthe obvious choiceas the closest to home, less so the United States; countries where the ideal of the citizen bearing arms in defence of the democratic nation-state had long been fostered in the wake of Revolution.
•In particular, the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 helped crystallise a particular set of images – centred onthe volunteerfoot soldier cast as universal tragic hero – that were to prove immensely useful to stained glass artists in Britain…
•It is perhaps worth digressing a little to follow the development of such imagery.
•The life-size bronze Gloria Victis by Antonin Mercié (1845-1916), shown to great acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1874, was amongst the first major artworks to capture the public mood of the ThirdRepublic, and the widespread sense of outrage and shame in the aftermath of the French defeat.
•The fallen warrior – his sword broken but still firmly held – is carried off by a winged figure of Victory. Gloria Victis – ‘Victory for the Vanquished’. The allusion to Classical Greek and Renaissance sculptures renders the contemporary historical as both timeless and universal. The citizen’s sacrifice was not in vain; the shedding of their blood will yet bring peace with honour, reinforced by the Christological pose of the warrior as a modern martyr – an allusion constantly reworked by later artists.