Norman ironwork and High Victorian mosaic in Buckland church, Berks/Oxfordshire

Two of my recent posts have brought a lot of new readers to Icknield Indagations. Welcome; I'm glad you're here (if indeed you are). Previously this blog was getting a few dozen page views each day, now it's well over a hundred. (These numbers will seem risible to proper bloggers, but aren't bad for a blog mostly about church architecture.) This increase is gratifying but also a bit stressful. I feel that new readers will be expecting more of the rough and tumble that was Spot the difference. Why I don't like King's College Chapel, Cambridge or the storytelling of The Rev. John Alington, a Victorian eccentric in Letchworth, Herts. On the contrary, I'm afraid: for now at least it's back to the nerdfest of ecclesiastical art (albeit with pretty, if often wonky, pictures). Sorry.

For the best part of three decades (ever since I learnt to drive, in fact) I've been travelling between north Herts and east Berks on more or less the same route: south on the A1(M) or M1, around London on the M25, then west on the M4. It's the only viable way of doing the journey by car. In that time I've become heartily sick of seeing the same sights, most of which aren't particularly attractive in the first place, and of having to endure the traffic on the M25. (Yes, I know I'm part of the problem, but that knowledge is of little help at the time.)

Recently I've moved a bit further north, and my aged and increasingly infirm parents, who I've been visiting, have moved a bit further west, into Wiltshire. This of course means that my journey takes longer, but it also means that, while the south/round a bit/west route is still the most obvious one to take, another is now feasible. It's possible to take a diagonal cross country route without adding hours to my day. The trip is long enough to require a short break, so I've taken to stopping at one place or another in that part of north-west Berks that was subsumed by Oxfordshire for administrative purposes in 1974. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of these stops have involved a church.

Several times I've found myself drawn to Buckland (not to be confused with the Buckland in Herts, about which I shall write one day, nor with several other English Bucklands - the 'buck' element of the name essentially means 'book', which in turn means that the land on which the settlement stands was once the subject of a charter). The village itself is the first attraction, standing on the evocatively-named Golden Ridge above the Thames, and mostly built of the local set-honey-coloured Corallian limestone (also known as Coral rag, as it is full of fossilised coral). There are several major buildings, notably Buckland House (1757), by John Wood, the Younger (architect of the Royal Crescent in Bath), though none are open to the public (a distant glimpse is about the best you'll get). The church, on the other hand, is accessible at all reasonable times; it has much to charm and fascinate, from the 12th to the 20th centuries. Think of me what you like, but my favourite parts are the High Victorian and post-First World War contributions.

The nave is Norman, and although the south doorway is fairly plain - the absence of a carved tympanum is a disappointment - the door retains its 12th century ironwork, a simple but powerful design combining tips like those of arrows with scrolly tendrils. I like the fact that the lower hinge isn't quite the same as the upper one - its top near-semi-circle doesn't match the bottom one, making it clear that the smith who forged it was relying more on feel than compasses.

The north doorway must be of the same date as the south, though its door was replaced by a characterless modern one.

Moving west, the central tower and transepts are 13th century, although the crossing piers and arches date from only 1868-70 (so the tower would have had to have been supported while they were constructed). The capitals are a rather clumsy stiffleaf.

The details of the chancel, especially the ogee-headed recess decorated with ballflowers on the north side, show that it was built in the 14th century.

The tomb recess on the south side must be of about the same date, yet its arch is virtually semi-circular rather than pointed.

A curious feature of the chancel is this triangular niche, which, it is said, contains an urn within which is the heart of William Holcott, (c.1514-75). He was imprisoned by Queen Mary for his adherence to Protestantism, but recanted to escape execution. After the Queen's death he became a (Protestant) lay-preacher.

One puzzle is why the chancel and transept windows (and the west window) have no tracery, just mullions which run straight up to the arch, and from when they date. The date 1787 is prominent on the south transept, so it's tempting to assume that that's when the windows were reconfigured, but by the later 18th century the early Gothic Revival was well underway. (For example, only about 40 miles away Tetbury church had recently been rebuilt in, for its period, a very convincing Gothic style.) I find it hard to believe that such a crudely unGothic alteration would have been thought appropriate then. Much more likely, the mullions are 17th century; there are some similar ones in nearby Uffington, probably dating from c.1678, and more in Ruscombe, near Twyford, Berks, definitely dating from 1638. 

What's more, immediately north of the church is the former Manor House, which was (prettily but not very historically accurately) Gothicised in the 18th century; (Pevsner* tentatively dates the conversion to 1750, and suggests the architect might have been Sanderson Miller). Would whoever was responsible for the church's mullions have built them as they did with the example of the Manor House just yards away?

As I've already implied, the medieval parts of the church are worth seeing, but the High Victorian parts are worth going to see.** The south transept was decorated in 1890-2 by James Powell and Sons, to designs by Henry Holiday (1839-1927). The walls are covered in radiant mosaics and opus sectile. (Opus sectile is a technique similar to mosaic, but the materials are cut into bigger pieces and are often shaped, unlike the small tesserae of mosaics, which are generally roughly square. In the transept the figures are mostly opus sectile and the backgrounds mosaic.) The theme of the decorative scheme is the Benedicite, a canticle exhorting the whole of creation to praise God, and the similar Te Deum. The overall effect is almost overwhelming; some of the human figures (especially the two cutesy little girls - or are they a boy and a girl?) are twee, but the saints and large angels are opulent and imposing, their towering canopies almost more so. The colours, especially the gold, shimmer as they catch the light. Together with the south window (I'll come to that in a moment) it's like being inside a kaleidoscope. 

The floor has its own mosaic, and the roof has stars on a blue background. 

There are also four oil lamps affixed to the stalls, (as far as I can see they've not been converted to take electric bulbs). Their luxuriant Art Nouveau scrolls link them to the Norman door. I assume that they're part of the original fittings of the transept chapel, but can they be by Holiday, or Powell's? Perhaps not.

This gorgeous, lusciously coloured south window in the transept, however, presumably is by Holiday.*** It is integral to the transept chapel's decorative and memorial scheme, commemorating the wife, Clara Jane (d.1888), of the donor, William West, who was a millionaire director of the Great Western Railway. Its theme is the Ascension.

The top section, full of drama and movement, is the best.

The middle, with rather melodramatic gestures, is not as successful.

The bottom, "Suffer the little children to come unto me', avoids the sentimentality that most Victorian artists brought to this subject. The second from left female saint, and the one on the far right, seem to me especially fine.

The east window certainly is by Holiday, in 1919, the best part of three decades later, and when he was 80. Unsurprisingly, the style is different from that of the earlier transept window. Holiday has expertly organised the multitude of figures into a coherent whole.

At the top we see Christ with the Archangel Gabriel on the left and Michael on the right, with a mostly heavenly blue background.

The second tier represents the earth, with much green foliage in the background. I'm not sure exactly who or what the frieze of handsome, dignified figures represent, but the long scroll they carry links them all together beautifully.

The lower tier represents the Liberal Arts and Sciences. The first light has Philosophy (a bearded man, probably Greek, with a scroll) and Poetry (a woman with a lyre). The second Agriculture (a man and a woman with a scythe and a rake) and Science (a seated man with instruments, possibly a microscope and telescope).

The third light has Temporal Power (a seated king and queen with a bishop standing behind them, suggesting that their power comes ultimately from God).

The fourth has Labour (a standing woman with a spindle and a standing man with a hammer) and Art (a seated woman with a sculpture), and the last Music (a standing woman playing the violin) and Mathematics and Astronomy (a seated bearded man with a scroll and a sphere). 

Last in our chronological survey of some of the church's highlights comes the west window, from 1926. It's the only window that Pevsner praises (or comments on at all): he calls it 'excellent'. I wouldn't disagree with that, but I think the two Holiday windows are even better. It's by the firm Burlison and Grylls (though both Burlison (1843-91) and Grylls (1845-1913) were long dead when it was made). 

It shows the Crucifixion in a pastoral setting at the top, with a distant town, stormy clouds and restrained figures.

At the bottom is a Nativity, with a Renaissance architectural setting. 

So there we are - from sometime in the 12th century to 1926, nerdy pleasures galore.

* As usual I'm using "Pevsner" as a generic term for the authors of the various volumes of the Buildings of England series. The 2010 2nd edition of the Berkshire volume, to which I refer, was written by Geoffrey Tyack, Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner. 

** This distinction was first made by Dr Johnson. I mentioned it previously when writing about Welwyn church.

*** Pevsner implicitly ascribes it to Burlison & Grylls. John Betjeman and John Piper (in Murray's Berkshire Architectural Guide (1949)) ascribe it to Clayton and Bell, but this is clearly a mistake. They also criticise the glass in the east and west windows as 'heavy'. The church's guidebook, although it devotes a paragraph to the window, makes no attempt to name the artist. This, I'm sorry to say, is all too often the case with such booklets.

The Rev. John Alington, a Victorian eccentric in Letchworth, Herts

St Mary's, Letchworth, was first built in the 13th cen, but has been much altered since then

St Mary’s church, Letchworth, a couple of miles from the busy (if dull) modern centre of Letchworth Garden City, is a peaceful, tranquil place. It is hard to believe, while strolling around the churchyard, that the quiet, now disturbed only by the distant sound of an occasional passing car, hasn’t lasted forever. But it hasn’t. One hundred and eighty years ago the church and churchyard were rattled by the strange activities of one of Britain’s least known eccentrics.

In 1838 the recently widowed Reverend John Alington (born 1795) moved into Letchworth Hall, immediately next to the church, to take up his newly acquired role as, effectively, Lord of the Manor. He was 43 years old and a very wealthy man, having inherited the estate of John Williamson, his maternal grandfather, a malt dealer and later banker who had accumulated a fortune and property empire in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire through hard work, luck and canniness.

Alington had been ordained as a priest in 1822, but, being rich, had no need to actually do any work. (He was the Rector of Little Barford, Beds, for over 40 years until his death, but never carried out any clerical duties or even lived there for most of the time. Instead, the job was done by a poorly paid curate, a common practice at the time, as any reader of Trollope will know.)

The vicar of Letchworth at the time was the Reverend Samuel Hartopp Knapp, who, naturally enough, was keen to keep on the good side of the newly installed owner of the big house, in practice his immediate boss. Accordingly, he invited Alington to take a service in the church whenever he wanted. We can imagine Knapp’s surprise when it turned out that Alington wanted to take all the services, including the marriages and baptisms, excluding only the funerals, which joyless occasions he was content to let Knapp deal with. The hapless Knapp found himself sidelined and virtually without employment in his own church.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Alington’s approach to the services was highly unorthodox. He galloped through them, rendering them completely unintelligible, and inserted prayers of his own invention whenever the fancy took him. His sermons scandalised the neighbourhood by preaching a doctrine of free love, which must have been shocking in any context in early Victorian England, but a hundred times more so coming from a pulpit. Very soon his behaviour was the talk of the whole of north Hertfordshire, and people of high and low status from all over the area attended his services to see for themselves if the scarcely believable rumours were true. They were.

Knapp had to do something. He wrote to the bishop, and, alarmed by Alington’s heresy, the bishop suspended him so that he was no longer permitted to practise as a clergyman. (But, strangely, he wasn’t stripped of the Rectorship of Little Barford, perhaps because this was in effect a purely nominal post.) Rather surprisingly, instead of just ignoring the bishop’s ruling and carrying on anyway, as you might have expected him to do, he obeyed. He took no more services in the church. His revenge on Knapp and the bishop, however, was inventive and effective.

The more respectable inhabitants of the parish, most of whom had probably absented themselves from Letchworth church while Alington was taking the services, were glad that he had been banished, and returned when Knapp was reinstated. The bulk of the congregation, however, couldn’t afford to do this, since they relied on Alington, directly or indirectly, for their income. He owned everything for many acres around, and those who worked the land couldn’t risk offending him. What’s more, his services were a lot more fun than Knapp’s. They attracted all the local Gypsies, ruffians, crooks, prostitutes and ne’r-do-wells.

All the grave markers postdate Alington, and the churchyard in which he held his services would probably have been clear 

While Knapp’s, probably sparsely attended, services were taking place in the church, Alington would, when the weather was suitable, take his own private congregation into the churchyard. There he would lead them in making as much noise as possible, by singing hymns and bawdy songs and by general rowdiness. Free beer and brandy helped to fuel the fervid atmosphere. If his intention was to disrupt the staid offices taking place in the church and punish Knapp for daring to presume to get the better of him, we can well imagine that he succeeded.

The church on the left, with the Hall in the background, showing how close together the two buildings are

There’s both a relishably comic and a near-sinister side to this. On the one hand, I can’t help being amused by the thought of Alington’s cheerful iconoclasm challenging the social and religious orthodoxies. Almost certainly Alington had no political motives or interest, but 1838 was when the Chartist movement, a mass working class campaign for political reform, was just getting underway. His encouraging the insubordination of the poor of the parish, leading them to openly defy their social superiors, was like giving the whole Establishment a well-deserved (and richly funny) bloody nose.

On the other hand, we have to feel sorry for Knapp – he’d done nothing wrong, and was being harassed and publicly humiliated. Alington was using his wealth, which he’d done nothing to deserve, as a means to his own selfish ends. What’s more, while the Chartists were at pains to present themselves as rational, respectable and peaceful, Alington was creating a mob, a potentially dangerous enterprise.

Letchworth Hall (now Letchworth Hall Hotel) today

How long these directly confrontational counter-services in the churchyard went on doesn’t seem to have been recorded. After a while, and certainly when the weather was inclement, Alington took his ragtag followers into the Hall, and conducted his irreverent ceremonies there, where they continued until his death in 1863.

The room in which the services took place contained two pulpits made from the hollowed out trunks of elm trees which had been blown down in the park, and boards displaying the Ten Commandments. Music was provided by an out of tune piano (nicknamed by Alington ‘Tiddlee Bump’), an organ and two large rather unmusical music boxes. As the congregation gathered, Alington would go from instrument to instrument, playing each in turn, creating a truly unholy row.

Drawing by Samuel Lucas (1805-70), painter from Hitchin, Herts

The service proper (if anything about the services can be called ‘proper’) began with Alington careering up and down the hall on his hobby-horse (a primitive four-wheeled bicycle), whooping and hollering as he did so, and laughing uproariously whenever he fell off (which was often). Then he’d ride more gingerly around, proffering a pound-jar of snuff from which all were welcome to help themselves. (He strongly disapproved of smoking, however.)

The congregation being adequately supplied, for the time being, with bodily comforts, Alington would retire into a cupboard which he used as a vestry. But he would emerge dressed not in priestly robes, but in a leopard-skin (which allegedly he’d shot himself in Africa some years previously). Dressed in this extraordinarily striking, and extraordinary, costume, he would climb into one pulpit and, for the spiritual well-being of those gathered, read some love poems, then cross to the other pulpit and read a short story.

Alington in his leopard-skin, by Samuel Lucas

He was just building up to his coup de theatre. He’d slip away, rush up some hidden stairs and suddenly pop up in the minstrels’ gallery like a jack-in-the-box. From here he’d deliver his sermon. Up to this point I’ve been mostly paraphrasing the account of Alington by Reginald Hine, the historian of Hitchin and the local area, written in 1932 (see the bibliography below), but I can’t possibly improve on his description of the sermon and its aftermath. Even though doing so will ruthlessly expose my prose as flat and mundane in comparison, I’ll allow him to take over:

Alington’s eloquence was of the ‘enthusiastical’ order. His words poured down into the hall as in a cataract. Towering though he did literally and mentally above the heads of the people, he never preached down to them. All that he had learned at Balliol [College, Oxford, where he’d taken holy orders], all the knowledge he had gathered since – the Fathers, the Classics, the Poets, the Divines – were fitly or fantastically compacted and joined together into the impromptu torrent of his speech as he denounced the Established Church that had disestablished him, as he fulminated against Samuel Hartopp Knapp, and as, in his accustomed peroration, he unfolded the marvellous riches, the blissful consolations and the heavenly sanction of human love. I have been told that in the crisis of his sermon he would be beside himself. He would thump the brass-bound green morocco book of Common Prayer which served him for a desk. His crimson face would stream with perspiration; and as a final triumphant gesture – at a clinching point in his crowning argument – he would catch hold of his sandy wig, wave it wildly in the air, and hurl it into the hall.

Dramatically, one feels, the services should have ended there. But, for the congregation, the best was still to come. In a trice, Tufnell [Alington’s bailiff and shepherd] and King [his groom] would clear the forms out of the hall. Some of the gypsies, whom Alington allowed to camp permanently in Drunkards’ Lane and Bantam Close, would take the gallery with their fiddles; and dancing would begin. I have talked with two of those dancers, and as they described the scene to me it made me grieve that Samuel Lucas [the artist] should not have set it,  for ever, upon canvas. One has to imagine it now in the half-light of memory: the whitewashed and panelled hall; the flushed and happy faces of the dancers, seen for a moment as they catch the light from the tallow-dips in the sconces and from the lanthorns swinging from the roof; the ebb and flow of the music, the winding and unwinding of the dance; the mad parson beating time with the tail of his leopard-skin and chanting at the top of his voice; his two acolytes and men of all work serving beer and brandy in the corner. What more could an artist ask for in an English interior!

Too often the so-called services would end in saturnalia, for brandy sets both men and women ablaze. Alington was no stickler for decorum – far from it – but at the first sign of violence he would stop singing, and his men knew what to do. Their master might be a mad parson, but he was also a Justice of the Peace. Brawling in their new-founded church was not to be tolerated for a moment; and swashbucklers and bullies and bruisers were dispatched neck and crop into the heathen night. If King and Tufnell were unable to eject the evildoers, Alington would fetch his gun. ‘He could be pretty outrageous,’ said William Dearmer of Willian, now aged eighty-four, to me, ‘and as it was believed that he would shoot anybody they didn’t wait to see.’

As Hine puts it, Alington ‘was eccentric not only on Sundays but on week-days too.’ He was, at least in theory, a gentleman-farmer, but, being not short of money, had no interest in farming efficiently or profitably – quite the opposite. He rewarded his farm workers with beer regardless of how badly they did their jobs. This was partly because of his feud with Knapp. At the time tithes were still payable to Rectors, either in the form of one tenth of the farm’s produce or the equivalent cash value. So the more Alington’s farmland yielded, the more Knapp would get. Hence Alington was content to produce as little as possible; he began to turn his arable land, which had been growing vegetables, into grassland to avoid having to surrender his potatoes and cabbages to the hated priest. Sheep were moved onto the grass, and Knapp claimed one tenth of their wool. Outraged and determined not to be beaten, he got rid of the sheep and replaced them with bullocks, to make it harder for Knapp to get his share of the produce of the land.

His benevolence towards his workers often took strange forms. In 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, there was concern that visitors to London who had never been there before (probably including most of the inhabitants of Letchworth) would be unable to find their way from Kings Cross (via the newly opened Hitchin station) to the exhibition. He caused to be constructed a timber map of the relevant London streets on his parkland, and tried to teach his employees how to navigate their way through the capital. In the end, however, he declared that they were all too stupid to find their way safely there and back, and refused to let them go.

During the Crimean War (1853-6) he had his workers excavate a scaled-down replica of the fortifications of Sebastapol (a job taking months of hard work), so they could better appreciate the nature of the conflict.  He had a seat made for himself in the branches of an oak tree in the middle of the ‘city’, and would sit for hours with his gun watching for the approach of the ‘enemy’. (Hine implies that he would shoot with live ammunition at anyone who came too close, but surely this must be an exaggeration: Alington’s eccentricities were tolerated, but had he injured or killed anyone, his status wouldn’t have prevented him from being arrested and prosecuted.)

But his grandest educational and engineering project was to make nothing less than a scale model of the lands and seas of the world in a nearby pond. The continents were made, presumably, by piling up soil and stones, and Alington would sail around them in a little boat, perhaps a punt, lecturing his probably bemused labourers on the finer points of the world’s geography. The pond was by the Cambridge to King’s Cross railway line, and passengers in the passing trains were probably equally bemused by Alington’s antics.

Alington's tower today

In addition to these, he carried out more orthodox building projects, in the form of a west wing and a tower extending the originally Jacobean Letchworth Hall. These still survive, probably much altered, in the Hall in its present incarnation as Letchworth Hall Hotel. All (or nearly all) of his more outlandish landscaping schemes will have vanished under housing estates decades ago, however.

The Hall (already a hotel) in a postcard sent in 1907, with the tower on the right

He had had nine children with his first wife, Eliza, who he married in 1822; when she died in 1838 they ranged in age from teenagers to toddlers. We must assume that they lived in Alington’s other house in Little Barford, and were cared for by nannies and governesses. But he did not intend to ignore his own homilies on the pleasures of the flesh, (he had a collection of paintings of female nudes, which he called ‘my naked ladies’, and which he enjoyed exhibiting to his guests of low and high estate), and in 1841, aged forty-six, he married again. His chosen partner (and it was very much the case that he chose her – she seems to have had little say in the matter) was the twenty-one year old Elizabeth Tufnell. She was one of his agricultural labourers, and illiterate her whole life. He plucked her from the fields, and their (childless) marriage seems to have been happy enough. She liked to be called ‘Lady Alington’, a small and harmless eccentricity compared to those of her husband.

Alington reading, sketched by Samuel Lucas

Shooting and drinking were the other corporeal delights that he pursued. (He read, painted, sewed, played chess, the violin and hand-bells too.) He liked to be pulled around his estate sitting backwards on a dung-cart, from where he’d fire at rabbits. He had an exceptionally good head for alcohol, and took delight in drinking his guests under the table, then sending them on their pie-eyed way. He also liked to go into Hitchin and Baldock, the nearest sizeable towns, of an evening while wearing his Sunday best leopard-skin, lurk in the shadows, and then jump out to startle the unsuspecting inhabitants. (Hine’s comment on this is milder than it might have been: he describes it as merely ‘somewhat odd in a magistrate and a member of the Hitchin Board of Guardians’.) One night he had his comeuppance when he trod on the leopard’s tail, fell over and fractured his leg.

George Jeeves of Hitchin once had occasion to go to Letchworth Hall to see Alington on business. He was perturbed to find some servants carrying an open coffin around the garden. He was even more perturbed when Alington’s head popped out of it. ‘You see, Jeeves,’ said Alington, ‘I’m getting ready.’ In fact, when what proved to be his final illness arrived, and death seemed to be impending, his behaviour was irascible rather than stoical. When he was on his death bed in December 1863 a doctor from Hitchin was called to attend on him. He prescribed medicine, which Alington refused to touch until his servant, James King, had tried it for three days. Subsequently the doctor attempted to get Alington to down the no doubt foul-tasting potion; Alington cursed and threw the medicine bottle at the wall with his remaining strength, shattering it, and called for a glass of brandy. This was brought to him; he drained it in one go, fell back with a contented sigh, and promptly died. I’m in no hurry to die, but when I do go, something like that is how I’d like it to happen.

In 1903, forty years after Alington's death, Letchworth Garden City was founded. It soon gained a reputation as a haven for what were then seen as cranky ideas: socialism, vegetarianism, 'rational dress', teetotalism (alcohol was not sold in the town centre until 1958) and various oddball religions. Nowadays, while cherishing its history, it is as mainstream as any other pleasant and prosperous Home Counties medium-sized town, but it should celebrate the life and work of its original crank, the Reverend John Alington.

Alington does have a road named after him, but it's perhaps the shortest named road in the town (linking Muddy Lane with Letchworth Lane) and is really no more than a track

Alington's name is also preserved in the name of a hotel suite

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reginald Hine, Hitchin Worthies, 1932, pp.355-73

This is the account from which all subsequent writings about Alington derive. Hine was born in 1883, twenty years after Alington’s death, so of course had no first hand experience of him, but did talk to many older people who had known him.

Nick Kingsley, Landed Families of Britain and Ireland (website), and in particular http://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2013/11/87-alington-of-little-barford-manor.html. (accessed 10th Jan 2019).

I’ve discovered this extraordinary website only while I was researching this post. Nick Kingsley is attempting to tell the story of every landed family in the British Isles and their country houses. I don’t know how far through the job he has got so far (as he comments himself, if he lives to be a hundred he might just complete the task), but the amount of information he’s assembled so far is simply staggering. If you want to know what became of Alington’s children and grandchildren (at least two of whom lived into the 1960s), for example, this is the place to look. It's also well illustrated.

Letchworth Hall Hotel’s website: https://www.accorhotels.com/gb/hotel-7243-mercure-letchworth-hall-hotel/index.shtml

Beastly Cambridge part II

Bronze horse, by Barry Flanagan, in the grounds of Jesus College.

The cockerel rebus (c.1500) of Bishop Alcock of Ely, founder of Jesus College.

Numerous cockerels in the ceiling of the nave of Jesus chapel, painted by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, 1864-9.

Daniel in the lions' den, by Edward Burne-Jones, 1873-7, Jesus chapel.

Dove by John Hardman, 1861. It brings to mind Eliot's lines from 'Little Gidding': 'The dove descending breaks the air/ With flame of incandescent terror'. 

Boot scrapers in the form of a hare and a pig, at the entrance to Westcott House (founded 1899), Jesus Lane. The animals are probably early 20th century; the pig is quite possibly my favourite object in Cambridge.

Lions lazily guarding the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum. They perhaps date from the 1870s, when the first phase of the museum building was completed.

Great St Mary's church has some good animal carvings on the 1863 pews, including this crowned lion . . .

. . . a lion rampant . . .

. . . a lion couchant . . .

. . . a stag . . .

. . . a greyhound-like dog . . .

. . . and another one . . . 

. . . an eagle . . .

and a horse.

There are several animal corbels in the church, all of them hard to see and hard to take even inadequate photos of. There's one of a fox I'd like to see, but it's inaccessible to the public. This one seems to be of an owl-like bird with a human-lion head.

A monkey, with a damaged nose. Is he holding a dish or banging a small drum?

Is this a goat? A cow? And what's the band with a snail/volute that seems to embrace it?

An embarrassingly poor quality photo of a dove/eagle/parrot.

Another similar.

An eagle (late Victorian?); its stance makes it appear to be looking for trouble. It's at the entrance to a pub in Lensfield Road once called the Spread Eagle, now known as the Snug.

The British Antarctic Survey Sledge Dog Monument outside the Scott Polar Institute, Lensfield Road. Erected in 2009 to commemorate the 1204 dogs used by the members of the Survey from 1945-93.

Should you want more on beastly Cambridge, visit Jo Edkins' website here.

Beastly Cambridge

An animal anthology of carvings in Cambridge.

Crocodile on the wall of the Mond Laboratory on the old Cavendish site. It was commissioned by the Russian scientist Peter Kapitza as a humorous reference to Ernest Rutherford, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory. 'The Crocodile' was apparently Kapitza's nickname for Rutherford; the University's website claims that this was either because Kapitza was afraid of getting his head bitten off by his boss, or because Rutherford's loud voice could always be heard long before he arrived, like the ticking of the alarm clock in the stomach of the crocodile in 'Peter Pan'.

Since the Physics Department's move to the West Cambridge site, the building has been occupied by the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit.

The crocodile was carved into the brick by Eric Gill in 1933. He signed it with his monogram wittily replacing the tongue. We can assume that crocodiles were one species that he didn't try to have sex with. 

Iguanodon and very cuddly-looking ground sloth (which seems to be clutching the palm tree for support, as if under the weather after a night out) on the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Downing Street. They were carved c.1904 by the firm Farmer and Brindley, who also made the numerous animal sculptures that populate the Natural History Museum. In the Earth Sciences Museum is a real iguanodon skeleton (or, more accurately, a cast of a real skeleton).

A mammoth from the Earth Science Museum.

Bears and bison from the Earth Sciences Museum.

Sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, outside the Earth Sciences Museum. It was made of welded sheet metal by Ian Curran, a blacksmith from Doncaster, and was originally commissioned by Clare College as the centrepiece for a May Ball. It was moved to its present position in 2015.

More Cambridge beasts to come . . .