Work and Play - Grave Stories

I loved the Grandes Dames of Oxford Street. Of course, when I arrived in the city in 1970, I explored Carnaby Street and King’s Road, delighting in the brash, new boutiques with their loud pop music, communal changing rooms, and startlingly rapid turnover of fashions, but it was Oxford Street that captured my heart. The magnificent stately department stores, with their classical and art deco architecture, occupied whole blocks. Though damaged in the war years, they had pieced themselves back together, freshened up, and faced the world with impassive self-assurance. Their ornate entrances bore sculptures above the doors, the window displays rivalled any art gallery, and when you entered the air was heady with the combined scents of the perfume counters.

So confident were these great ladies that they scorned to scrabble after the very commerce which fed them. For they chose to make Saturday their early closing day. Coming from a typical provincial town where Wednesday, dead space in the middle of the week, was early closing day and shops fairly burst with customers on Saturday afternoons, I was astonished. From 1pm on Saturdays until Monday morning, at the very time when potential customers had the freedom to visit and had just received their weekly pay packets, dignified, superior Oxford Street chose to close its doors, and the normally thronged pavements grew quiet.

The very names of these unruffled purveyors of finery filled me with delight: Marshall and Snellgrove; Bourne and Hollingsworth; DH Evans; Selfridges; John Lewis; but the one I loved best was Peter Robinson. This magical store situated on the north-east segment of Oxford Circus, stretching east along Oxford Street and north into Regent Street, lay at the very beating heart of the twentieth century agora. Its eponymous founder, a farmer’s son from Yorkshire, had opened a drapery shop in 1833. In 1840 he established a second store in Regent Street: The Court and General Mourning House Store, aka “Black Peter Robinson’s.” There he kept a coach permanently parked outside with a black clad coachman and two lady fitters, similarly attired, seated inside, ready to speed to the home of any recently bereaved widow.

In 1850 Peter Robinson expanded his Oxford Street drapery to sell ladies’ clothes and accessories. During that decade he promoted one of his drapery assistants to the position of silk buyer and in 1864 offered him a partnership, but John Lewis preferred to open his own Oxford Street premises.

Peter Robinson died in 1874 leaving the Regent Street branch to his eldest son Joseph and the Oxford Street store to his second son, John Peter. The latter bought out his brother in 1895. As fashions and social attitudes changed Black Peter Robinson’s declined while the Oxford street shop flourished. But when John Peter died none of his children wanted to take on the running of their inheritance and it became a limited company, “run by accountants” in the scornful words of Gordon Selfridge.

But Selfridge was unfair, for Peter Robinson’s went from strength to strength; when Burton’s Tailoring, the most successful menswear store of the day, bought up the company in 1946, they not only retained the name but opened more branches alongside their own businesses. And in 1965, in the Oxford Circus basement, they opened Top Shop. This was an inspired move with Top Shop rivalling the upstart boutiques by catering specifically for the under twenty-fives, while the main store continued to serve its older clientele. The buyers employed by Top Shop in the ensuing years were peerless, all with a consummate eye for fashion.

During my first term in London, I bought two long-cherished garments at Top Shop, and I can still recall occasions when I wore them. There was the dark red velvet maxi-dress with the white lace bodice and the pearl buttons on the sleeves. I wore it to formal dinners and twenty-first birthdays, to sit on the hard benches in the gods at Covent Garden, and to rock concerts at the Roundhouse. Then there was the purple hooded maxi-coat with the cream lining whose first outing was to the theatre on my nineteenth birthday, and which enveloped me on a memorable, misty, romantic January night while being “walked home” from a dance at UCH to my student residence. Alas, the coat was later to succumb to an unfortunate encounter with the wheels of a luggage trolley on Euston station.

As a result of these sublime purchases, I ended my first term term with my first overdraft. The solution was obvious, and I spent the Christmas vacation working at Oxford Circus. The hours were long, that early closing day abandoned during this busy time, and evening opening extended. The crowds were intense, the bright shop lights were hot, and I left every evening feeling as though my eyes had been boiled…and I loved every minute of it. The other girls were fun, the supervisors a source of amusement, and the holiday shoppers good tempered.

I was “on jewellery,” and it was the year of the stars and the moons. I guarantee that any girl who walked down Oxford Street that December will remember them: ordinary hair clips with a little diamante star or moon attached to the end. It required but little skill to conceal the clip so that the stars and moons shone out like diamond confetti. Every morning before we arrived sack loads of these desirable items had been delivered. By midmorning we would have sold out, and desperate customers, undaunted by any thoughts of hygiene, were more than eager to remove those with which we had adorned our own hair. When this last source was exhausted, we assuaged their disappointment with the assurance that there would be more deliveries soon, and so there were, supplies arriving at frequent intervals throughout the day. How many thousands of stars and moons must have graced London’s Christmas and New Year parties.

The other must-have artefact that year was a mirror set in a pink plastic sphere, supported on a purple plastic base; Top Shop had widened the meaning of accessories. While girls bought their own stars and moons, boyfriends had clearly understood that the most felicitous Christmas present they could proffer would be a pink and purple mirror. Our jewellery counter stood just inside the store’s main entrance, and anxious young men, coming to a halt in front of us, would try to convey by word and gesture what they sought. Their relief was palpable when, understanding their requests, we pointed them towards the basement. Having no Significant Other that Christmas, I bought my own mirror – at staff discount. It was never a very practical object, its use limited to the tortuous application of mascara and lipstick, but it provided a cheery presence sitting on my desk or a convenient shelf through a succession of student halls and shared flats.

What I did not realise at the time was that my beloved department stores, facing increasing rents and rates, changing consumer tastes, increased labour costs, and competition from chain stores, were already in decline. Most of them would disappear in the coming decades. Marshall and Snellgrove merged with Debenhams when they both faced financial difficulties, rebranding as Debenhams in 1974. Nonetheless it went into liquidation and closed its doors in February 2021, finally broken by the growth of online sales and the impact of Covid. Bourne and Hollingsworth had already closed in 1983. DH Evans, purchased by Harrods in 1954, was rebranded as House of Fraser in 2001 but closed in 2022.

And Peter Robinson? In 1974 the Burton group split Peter Robinson from Top Shop, and the Oxford Street store became known as Top Shop and Peter Robinson. By the end of the seventies the Peter Robinson name had disappeared entirely, with the shop rebranded as Top Shop and Top Man, the latter a branch of Burton’s tailoring. In the 1990s Topshop became all one word, expanded to fill the entire store, and branches peddling fast fashion proliferated in the provinces and abroad. For a time, it was hugely popular, but I had long since ceased to find its clothes exciting or attractive. On the contrary by then I was aware of a certain malaise permeating the formerly vibrant British high streets, hiding behind the facades of cheap and garish outlets trading in dubiously sourced garments. Arcadia bought up the Burton group in 1997, but by 2010 they too had begun shutting stores as online shopping increased, in 2020 they went into administration, and the last of the Topshops, including the Oxford Circus branch, closed their doors.

Nike and Vans occupied the empty building. O Peter Robinson, your beautiful store was filled with trainers. But worse is to come, for now the trainers too have moved on, and, the ultimate indignity, the Swedish flat pack furniture giant, Ikea, is scheduled to move in later this year.

I had not visited Oxford Street for many years, but on a recent trip to town, with an hour to spare, I walked from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch. It was not a cheerful peregrination. Only two of the glorious department stores remain: Selfridges and John Lewis maintain a dignified if somewhat subdued presence at Marble Arch. The rest of the street hosts dreary chain stores and vacant, shuttered store fronts, punctuated by an extraordinary number of souvenir shops offering tourist tat – union jack tea towels, policemen’s helmets, fridge magnets of king Charles, plastic models of tower bridge, – and gaudy American style candy stores. Both the latter are allegedly fronts for the sale of illegal goods and money laundering, and police raids regularly seize counterfeit and unsafe items. And at Oxford Circus I contemplated a sorry shell, once Peter Robinson’s glorious shopping mecca. Boarded up, grubby and unloved, even the beautiful lamps which once graced its exterior shrouded in plastic, it was a pitiful spectacle.

NIKETOWN reads the depressing sign above the entrance to the former Peter Robinson at Oxford Circus.
Boarded up, grubby and unloved, even Nike have now moved on.

VANS claimed the Oxford Street entrance but they too have moved on leaving boarded up windows.

Bourne and Hollingsworth has fared little better…

… it is now the Plaza Shopping Centre, housing O2, Next, Victoria’s secret and Costa Coffee.

Depressing neon strip lights behind the facade on the upper floors, but the letters B and H dating from the store’s remodelling in art deco style in 1928 reveal the building’s pedigree.

I made my way to Highgate Cemetery wondering how Peter Robinson would feel about the demise of the magical world of department stores. When he died, he left over a million pounds in his will, around £113.5 million in today’s money, so it was no surprise to find him, with his wife and youngest son, Walter, in a large family tomb in one of the most expensive locations in Highgate West, between the Circle of Lebanon and the terrace catacombs. Yet it was not a welcoming nor an attractive grave, built of a cold granite and stone, lying close to the cemetery wall, and overshadowed by a gloomy evergreen.

But Peter Robinson died a phenomenally successful Victorian businessman, the grave was probably to his taste, and there is no reason to imagine that the store I knew in the 1970s would have been any more congenial to him than the prospect of another Ikea blighting the land is to me. I suspect he would have been appalled by Top Shop, the stars and moons, the pink and purple plastic mirrors invading his elegant shop. Maybe he is best left with his memory of it as it was in his day, as I am with my memory of it fifty years ago and almost a hundred years after his death: holding fast to its old fashioned, restrained glamour while simultaneously incubating an exotic and beguiling parvenu in its basement.

In Loving Remembrance

of

Peter Robinson

of Womersley House, Crouch Hill,

and of

Oxford Street and Regent Street, London.

I no longer have the red velvet dress and the purple maxi-coat, nor the stars and moons, nor the pink and purple plastic mirror, but at the back of a drawer, I found the mirror’s cousins – ear-rings from Top Shop at Peter Robinson.

The Matthews Family: Past Times in Norton Saint Philip

By Gravedigger

On August 4, 2024

In Children, Work and Play

At the end of my street stands Church Farm House. There is no farm today, but in the late nineteenth century John William Bissie Matthews was the third generation of his family to grow crops and keep livestock on the surrounding fields. John and his wife Emily Etta Matthews lived with their eight children in the four bedroomed house. Attached to the house was a cottage to accommodate farm labourers, and behind, surrounding the yard, were byres, stables, a coach house, a three storey malthouse, wash house and woodshed. Beyond lay kitchen and flower gardens.

Church Farm House and the attached cottage, today a separate residence

Two of the Matthews children, Ida (b.1891) and Gwen (b. 1901), recorded their memories of their childhood and early adulthood on the farm and in the village of Norton Saint Philip.

They attended the village school, which children left at fourteen, or more commonly at twelve when their labour was needed. Their play area was beneath a tree on a small green between the school and the church. Ida remembered the school closing in 1900 to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking. Gwen recalled her misery at being set to knit kettle holders and socks, and to sew aprons which were sold once a year around the village. When their brothers, who had to take the cows to the fields before school, arrived late they were caned. Children coming from the hamlet of Hassage walked two miles each way across fields and along a sunken lane bringing their lunch with them.

The same school building is still in use today for infants and juniors. It has its own playing fields, its gates are firmly locked, and the green where Gwen and Ida played is eroded by the twice daily assault of a crush of cars as parents convey their children between home and school.

The village school, built in 1827. In front is the green, where the Matthews children played under the tree, recovering a little during the summer holidays from the term time assault by cars.

The sunken lane along which the Hassage children walked to school

Monday at Church Farm was washday, when the wife of one of the labourers would light the boiler to heat water from the rainwater tank if it were clean enough or from the well outside the backdoor. She would boil the whites and scrub other washing on a board. After rinsing the laundry by hand in a tin bath she rung the wet clothes through the mangle before hanging them out to dry in the garden. It was a full day’s work.

According to their age the children had their own weekly tasks: milking cows, scouring milk pails, straining the milk through muslin cloth, scrubbing tables, cleaning knives, polishing brass, peeling potatoes.

“On the milestone near our house was “London 108 miles” and I wondered if I would ever get there,” wrote Gwen. It must have seemed a world away to most of the villagers, when even trips into Bath, a mere seven miles away, were rare. John Matthews drove a horse and cart into Bath every Friday taking produce – eggs, cheese, bacon – from the village farms to sell in town. While there he would shop for his neighbours’ needs, including the weekly delivery of newspapers for the rectory. Gwen was charged with delivering the latter and describes a household where the cook, boots, or one of the housemaids would take her to the kitchen for milk and cake.

The milestone which Gwen knew is still in place but either London has come a little closer or she misremembered the exact distance.

When the first motor bus arrived in the village, a double decker with no roof, the children were taken from school to see it. Ida and her friends rode it to the neighbouring village of Hinton Charterhouse…then walked back again. The bus plied between Frome and Bath but lacked the horsepower to convey its passengers up Midford Hill where they had to get out and walk. When they left school, Ida and another sister, Dora (b.1896), were apprentice milliners in department stores in Bath but the bus service was not frequent enough for them to use it, and they lived at the YWCA in Bath during the week, cycling home on Saturday afternoons and returning on Sunday evenings.

That first open top bus in Norton High Street

Yet if there was little contact with the wider world, the village itself throbbed with activity. Though most of the population worked on the land, there was also a corn mill and two sawmills, and Gwen enumerates two cobblers, three bakers, a policeman, a blacksmith, a wagon builder, an undertaker, a butcher, cheese and cider makers, a post office and two grocery shops. Today we count ourselves fortunate to have a Co-op store incorporating a post office counter.

The doctor, who lived in the neighbouring village of Beckington covered five villages on horseback until he acquired the first motor car seen in the area. On call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he held his Norton surgery in Mrs. Millet’s coffee house and shop on the Plain, made house calls, and dispensed his own medicines.

When I first came to the village in 1998, the last vestige of this service survived with a partner from the Beckington practice holding a surgery one morning a week behind the stage in the village hall. There was little question of any confidentiality, but since ailments were discussed freely and loudly in the waiting area this was immaterial. Now there are eleven doctors and a wealth of other staff in Beckington… and requests for telephone consultations may be submitted online.

Most of the village buildings which the sisters describe are still in existence albeit modified to suit new uses. On Sundays the Matthews family would fill their pew in the church, the girls peering round to compare their outfits with those of their neighbours. Externally the church is unchanged but the pews which held the Matthews and other large families are gone, replaced by a flexible, central space to accommodate meetings, concerts, playgroups.

The Old Rectory is now a private residence, with a new extension, “The West Wing.” Today’s rector is housed in a modern bungalow. There is no policeman in the Police House nor any sign of teachers in the Old School House. Manor Farm, once the grandest in the village, boasting a large staff, carriages and shire horses, has been converted into holiday lets, its barns and other outbuildings into private housing.

The Plain. Somewhere here Mrs. Millet had her coffee house and shop, and the doctor held his surgery. Today it is an annex of The George Hotel.

In the church the pews which served the Matthews and other large families have disappeared

The Old Police House, today a private house

The Old School House, today a private house

Outbuildings of Manor Farm, now private housing

The Matthews knew the two pubs which still serve the village. Ida describes how “when sent on an errand we used to hold hands, hold our breath, avert our eyes, and hurry past the Fleur de Lys, an ale house on one side of the road, and the George on the other – in case we saw a drunken man because the casual labourers drank strong cider.”

More attractive to the Matthews children was Tom, the last of the heavy horses kept at the George to haul weighty loads up Bell Hill. A rope ran from the foot of the hill to a bell in the courtyard of the George. When it rang Tom would make his way unaccompanied down the hill, draw up the heavy load and return unescorted to his stable. Those using the service placed the payment of 3d in his pouch.

Recently refurbished the George now offers boutique rooms, fine dining, and a much reduced bar area, but not too many drunken men.

The George Inn, boutique rooms rather than drunken labourers

From the back terrace of the George the view across a field towards the church remains almost unchanged. Until well into the twentieth century cows grazed in the field, but nonetheless Gwen reports the presence of a cricket square. Today the Mead it is used purely for recreation: the cricket square is still there in summer, the bonfire in November, children play on the swings, and dogs chase balls.

View from the terrace of The George across the Mead to the church

Ida recalls gathering Bath asparagus in Wellow Lane and listening to nightingales there in May. There is still Bath asparagus, but even during the Covid lockdown when the village became again a place undisturbed by either cars on the roads or planes in the sky, and when I regularly met hares and deer strolling, almost tame, down the lane, and when the spring birdsong burst from the trees with no competition, I never heard a nightingale. Though I once met an old lady who told me that during her courting days she and her future husband would take blankets and lie in the fields listening to them.

At one of the periodic re-enactments of the Battle of Norton Saint Philip, the last victory for Monmouth’s rebel forces against the king in 1685, Ida was terrified by the noise and the sight of soldiers on horseback with steel helmets, waving their swords as they advanced down Chevers, locally known as Bloody, Lane. Having witnessed a similar re-enactment I can vouch for the irrational fear which even a playacting army can engender as the sound of drums and marching draws closer, and the first troops appear over the hill.

Chevers, aka Bloody, Lane, peaceful on a summer evening, but once the site of a violent battle.

But in 1914 there was no playacting, and the Matthews time at Church Farm was ending. The two oldest brothers, Bertram (b. 1892) and Sydney (b. 1890), had emigrated to Canada but both signed up with the Canadians to fight in the First World War. They were killed within three days of each at Vimy Ridge in 1917. The younger brothers, Cyril (b. 1894) and Leslie (b. 1899) also signed up. Cyril was taken prisoner and Leslie was injured. There were no celebrations at Church Farm when the war ended.

Cyril found his way home: Gwen wrote, “Now when I look back, I think how casual we all were. Cyril came home, just walked in the back door…mother asked how he had got on to which the answer was “Alright”. Years later we learned that he had walked miles across Germany before being picked up.” Leslie was discharged from a hospital in the north with shrapnel in his foot.

Ida had married and moved to Wales before the war began. Dora married and went to live at Row Farm in Laverton in 1920. Cyril became a farm manager in Portishead. Ethel (b.1888), the eldest sibling, who had trained as a teacher, died at home of tuberculosis in 1924. Gwen, only thirteen years old when the war broke out, had driven a lorry with two horses throughout the war years, carrying twenty churns of milk every day from Norton Dairy to Trowbridge for the London train. After the war there was no job for her.

In 1927 John Matthews retired to Wellow with his wife and Gwen. Leslie, the youngest son took over the farm for a few years before moving to another in Woolverton. Gwen married and left Wellow for Oxford in 1936.

There are no farms in the heart of the village now, cars not cows move along the High Street and Church Street. Though as summer turns to autumn the combine harvesters from the outlying farms briefly dominate the roads, processing through the village with a stately, proprietary air. And the Matthews still have a presence in the village. In the churchyard Bertram and Sidney are remembered on the war memorial, while Ethel, her parents, and Dora are buried together. Viewed from where they lie, beside the church and looking across the Mead towards The George, their village is not so much changed.

…remembers Bertram and Sidney Matthews who had emigrated to Canada, together with others from the villlage who fell in the Great War

Ethel, the eldest sister, died of tuberculosis in 1924

John William Bissey Matthews and Emily Etta Matthews

Dora Matthews buried with her parents and sister under her married name

Looking from the Matthews family grave towards the Mead and High Street

See Gwen Harries – Memories of Norton Saint Philip 1902-1930

Ida Matthews – Memories of my early childhood until the age of 15

Thomas Cook and the World’s First Package Tour

By Gravedigger

On May 26, 2024

In Dynasties, Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators, Work and Play

At last, the sun is out, the days are warmer and longer, and the holiday season beckons. Nothing raises my spirits so much as a packed suitcase, and the prospect of a journey. Ideally an eager lover should meet me at an exotic train station or airport, but a local guide with my name spelled out on a handheld sign will do. Indeed, I will happily descend into the bowels of an unknown metro or abandon myself to the hustling taxi drivers who swarm like locusts awaiting disorientated travellers. The destination and the transport do not even have to be glamorous: bags in the back of the car, the bossy lady from Google Maps issuing terse directions as I miss the correct exit from the roundabout for the third time, I will advance on the most unprepossessing of English towns, firm in my conviction that there are at least Ten Interesting Things to See in any previously unexplored location. Hearing me say this, a friend once challenged me with her hometown of Middlesbrough; honestly, it could not have been easier.

No surprise then that one of my heroes is Thomas Cook (1808-1892), the man who established the world’s first package tour. Born in Derbyshire, he moved to Leicester in his twenties and established a business as a bookseller and printer. He joined the Temperance Movement and organised his first excursion in 1841, hiring a train and carriages from the newly established Midlands Counties Railway to transport temperance campaigners from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough. Four hundred and eighty-five people made the round trip of twenty-two miles in third class open tub cars. They paid one shilling each which also covered the cost of a meal and the services of the band which accompanied them. Over the next four summers Thomas Cook coordinated similar expeditions to Nottingham, Derby, Birmingham, and Liverpool for members of Temperance Societies and Sunday Schools.

In 1846, expanding to include trips for the general public, he inaugurated his first tour of Scotland, a little blighted by the absence of restaurant and lavatory facilities on the train. Then followed tours of Wales and Ireland. Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, encouraged him to arrange day trips from Yorkshire and the Midlands to the Great Exhibition in London, and in the course of 1851 he transported 150,000 people to the event in Hyde Park.

Cook opened his Temperance Hall and Hotel in Leicester in 1853. The hotel incorporated his tourism office and his family accommodation. The Temperance Hall offered entertainment to rival the ubiquitous public houses, with concerts, lectures, magic lantern shows and readings, the latter on occasion performed by Charles Dickens.

In 1855 came the first excursion abroad with a “grand circular tour” through Belgium, Germany, and France. Cook negotiated reduced rates and customised schedules with railway companies in return for block bookings. He provided a package of travel, accommodation, and food, personally planning the routes and escorting the trips.

By 1868 Cook had introduced “hotel coupons” which independent travellers could exchange for meals and accommodation at any hotel on “Cook’s List”. In 1874 came “circular notes”, a popular form of traveller’s cheque, the first ones specifically exchangeable for Italian lira at a predetermined rate.

Having brought mass tourism to Italy, for which present day Venice may not thank him, he moved on to America where his “circular tickets” facilitated travel on 4,000 miles of railways.

Cook’s travel office began to sell guidebooks, luggage, telescopes, and suitable footwear for more ambitious expeditions. By 1869 he had hired two steamers to transport his tourists up the Nile. So popular were these tours that the Nile was dubbed “Cook’s Canal.”

His experimental Round the World Tour of 1872 was so successful that it became an annual event. Cook had taken the Grand Tour out of the hands of the very wealthy, opening the world to an ever-widening demographic.

The Cook family grave lies in Welford Road cemetery, Leicester.

It incorporates individual tablets remembering: Cook’s daughter, Annie Elizabeth Cook, who unfortunately died in a bath in 1880 having inhaled poisonous fumes from a water boiler; his wife Marianne Cook, died 1884; and Cook himself who died in 1892.

Annie Elizabeth, Marianne and Thomas Cook

Above the tablets it bears a conventional epitaph from Isaiah 40, 6-8,

“All Flesh is Grass,

The Grass Withereth

The Flower Fadeth

But the Word of our God shall stand Forever.”

But far more arresting is the lichen covered open book at the foot of the upright stone:

Thomas Cook

Pioneer of Travel, Founder of the

World’s Largest Travel Organisation.

First Excursion

Leicester to Loughborough 1841

Round the World 1872

He Brought Travel to the Millions.

Elsewhere in the cemetery is the grave of John Jason Cook who took over the firm from his father.

John Jason Cook, son of Thomas Cook, who took over the family firm

But as the growth of online booking rendered their high street travel agents redundant, and low-cost airlines undercut their prices, Thomas Cook’s agency went into liquidation in 2019 after 178 years of trading. The repatriation of the 155,000 people on Thomas Cook holidays abroad was described by one newspaper, with technical accuracy but more than an element of hyperbole, as “Britain’s biggest peacetime repatriation.”

Yet travel and tourism live on and embracing my suitcase and the spirit of Thomas Cook I am taking a holiday. The blog will be back on 24^th of June. And if you have free time over the summer, Leicester, The Birthplace of Tourism, merits a visit… and it has more than Ten Interesting Things to See.

Watery Tales from Winchester

By Gravedigger

On April 14, 2024

In Clergy, Saints and Martyrs, Executive, Legislative and Judiciary, Work and Play

Saint Swithun

Saint Swithun’s was the first watery tale to attach itself to Winchester Cathedral. The Anglo-Saxon bishop had putatively requested a burial outside the old church, “subject to the feet of passersby and to rain drops pouring from on high.” A century later however his body was transferred indoors, first to the Old Minster and later to the new Norman Cathedral. A heavy rainstorm on the day the body was moved supposedly lasted for forty days, and a popular myth developed that rain on St. Swithun’s Day, 15 July, would presage rain for the next forty days: St. Swithun expressing his displeasure at the move.

Nonetheless his tomb became a popular site of pilgrimage. The monks, required to rush to the church to celebrate every miracle which allegedly occurred, found themselves having to get up several times during the night such was the volume of these preternatural events. He remains the recommended saint for those praying for a drought.

A modern monument to St. Swithun stands on the site of his final shrine which was demolished in 1538 during the English Reformation. At this time his relics disappeared.

Prior to 1476 Swithun’s relics were displayed on a feretory platform behind the high altar and the “Holy Hole,” still visible here, allowed pilgrims to crawl beneath the platform to be closer to the curative powers emanating from the saint’s remains.

King Canute

Most of us remember only one thing about King Canute: the apocryphal aqueous anecdote which has him sitting on his throne beside the sea unsuccessfully commanding the incoming tide to halt. According to his biographers’ sympathies this indicated either humility, as he sought to illustrate the limits of his secular power to his sycophantic courtiers, or extraordinary hubris in thinking he had a god like control over nature. Rival traditions locate this thalassic legend in various places. Bosham in Sussex is one contender.

…the road along the foreshore disappears…

…and the turning for the church requires careful negotiation.

The presence of the grave of Canute’s eight year old daughter in the Bosham church lends credence to the town’s claims.

The remains of Canute’s daughter who drowned in the millstream at Bosham

Canute himself however lies in a colourful mortuary chest in Winchester Cathedral. Around him other chests contain the remains of Saxon Kings whose lands he conquered in 1016. The Saxons may be even closer to the Dane than they would have chosen, for the chests were ransacked and their contents scattered during the English Civil War. It is unlikely that the comingled bones were all replaced in the correct chests.

… their mortuary chests located on the presbytery screens.

William Walker

My third story concerns a diver held in high esteem in Winchester – and this is a true story.

In the early twentieth century Winchester Cathedral was in danger of collapse. The Cathedral was built by the Normans who demolished both the Old and the New Saxon Minsters and replaced their bishops with men more sympathetic to the new regime. In the fourteenth century William of Wykeham deployed his master mason to remodel the Norman nave in Perpendicular Gothic.

But the foundations of this great cathedral were unsound. Constructed on a floating raft of beech trees, which were rotting by the twentieth century, the cathedral was sinking into the peaty soil beneath and listing to the southeast. The walls were bulging, and stone was falling. Cracks in the vaulted ceiling and the walls were variously described as large enough for owls to nest or a small child to crawl into. Trenches were dug under the walls to replace the rotten foundations with concrete, but the high-water table meant that they flooded before any reinforcing could be done. An attempt to pump out the groundwater accelerated the destabilisation of the foundations, and the building sank further. Collapse seemed imminent.

William Walker, a deep-sea diver, trained at Portsmouth dockyard, was called in. Between 1906-1911 he worked for six hours a day, descending into the flooded trenches and diving under the cathedral building. At a depth of six metres, in water rendered septic by the presence of bodies and graves, in complete darkness since the sediment suspended in the water rendered it impenetrable to light, Walker worked by touch. He dug out the rotten foundations and put concrete underneath the walls.

The task required 25,800 bags of cement and 114,900 concrete blocks. Walker’s diving suit weighed 91kg even when it was dry and took so long to put on and off that he removed only the helmet to eat his lunch and smoke his pipe. At the weekend he would cycle home to south London, a round trip of 150 miles.

When Walker had completed his work the groundwater was pumped out without fear of the walls collapsing, and bricklayers were able to restore the damaged walls. The highwater table still causes the Norman crypt to flood in winter, and the waters reach the knees of Anthony Gormley’s life size statue which lives down there, but the shored-up cathedral walls stand firm.

William Walker died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. There is a bust of him in the cathedral and a much more attractive one in the cathedral garden; in both he wears his diver’s suit and in the former he holds his helmet.

Bust of William Walker in the cathedral,

and a far more attractive image in the cathedral garden

Walker is buried in the cemetery at Elmer’s End near his south London home. Ironically, the cross marking his grave became unstable in recent years and has been laid flat. A new slate slab bears an engraving of the diver and recalls his achievement.

The original cross on Walker’s grave became unstable and is laid flat

WILLIAM WALKER

M.V.O.

1869-1918

The diver who with

his own hands saved

Winchester Cathedral

But, like Christopher Wren and St. Paul’s, you can see William Walker’s real memorial if you stand in the nave of Winchester Cathedral and look around you.

Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Category: Work and Play

Mourning Peter Robinson and the magic of stars and moons

The Matthews Family: Past Times in Norton Saint Philip

Thomas Cook and the World’s First Package Tour

Watery Tales from Winchester