Annie & Bernard Walke

As a result of briefly scanning an exhibition catalogue while on holiday in Cornwall, I've discovered the following fascinating story of the artist Annie Walke and husband, the Anglo-Catholic clergyman, Bernard Walke.

Annie Walke was born in London and studied at Chelsea School of Art and at the London School of Art. She first came to Cornwall with her husband when he was curate in Polruan. Bernard, known to his friends as ‘Ber’, became Vicar of St Hilary near Marazion in 1912. He had previously worked in the East End of London and been curate of another parish in western Cornwall, an area where the Church of England had never really replaced the old Roman Catholic Church in the affections of Cornish-speaking people to whom English had come at the Reformation as an unfamiliar new language to supplant the church Latin they were used to. Thus those who had not later converted to Wesleyan Methodism tended to be Anglo-Catholic, and sympathetic to Bernard Walke’s strong feeling for ritual, drama and art.

Walke was happiest in the company of artists and ordinary working people. He persuaded such Newlyn artists as Harold Knight, Norman and Alethea Garstin, Gladys Hynes, Ernest and Dod Procter and others to decorate the church. Annie painted a picture of St Joan of Arc which formed the reredos to an Altar to St Joan. Pictures on the chancel stalls were painted by Knight, Hynes, the Procters and Annie Walke and depict scenes from the lives of Cornish Saints. The pictures on the priest's stalls represent, on the south St Hilery, and on the north the dedication of the church by the Abbot and monks of St Michael's Mount. The pictures on the pulpit are the work of Ernest Procter and represent legends connected with St Neot, St Kevin and St Mawes. The reredos in the Lady Chapel represents the house of the Visitation and the picture of the event was painted by Ernest Proctor. A large crucifix on the north wall is the work of Phyllis Yglesias, a memorial to Canon F. Rogers of Truro Cathedral who died in the parish in 1928. West of the crucifix is a reredos painted by Roger Fry. In the south west corner of the church is a reredos, painted by Ernest Procter, of an Altar of the Dead, built in memory of Gerard Collier who during world was one sought to find a way of peace for the world.

Walke studied the speech of the working people of the parish - farmers, tin-miners, fishermen, the postman - and wrote religious plays in local dialect for local people to perform in the church. St Hilary gained nation-wide fame when he wrote and directed a Christmas Play Bethlehem. Through his friendship with media man, Filson Young, broadcasts were made of this and others, in the tradition of medieval Mystery Plays, all written and devised by Walke and performed by the people of St Hilary. Bethlehem went on the air for the first time on 22 December 1926.

It was a milestone in regional broadcasting. Reith took the unusual step of telephoning the vicarage at St Hilary afterwards to say that he had been listening with Ramsay MacDonald (leader of the Labour party) and that both had been deeply moved. This was in the early days of broadcasting and Walke was able to put over a lot of Catholic teaching as listeners all over the country were charmed by these Cornish voices proclaiming Christ’s life. These became a feature of broadcasting in the 1920s and 30s, but unfortunately there had to be a tragic end.

The fame of St Hilary drew a nasty reaction. Various people with a grudge were determined to destroy this beautiful little shrine to Catholic devotion in Cornwall, where his wife and their artistic friends had painted murals and altarpieces and pictures. Complaints were made, court action taken, and finally the Protestant element broke into the church with axes, crowbars and hammers, smashing and defiling everything they could lay their hands on. Walke was only just able to retrieve the Blessed Sacrament and take it to his home to prevent the ultimate sacrilege. This was in 1932 and he was absolutely shattered.

Walke described these events in his memoir, Twenty Years at St Hilary, published originally in 1935. It is a tribute to its value that it now has a third re-issue, putting it in the category of a classic. Michael Farrer, President of the Anglo-Catholic History Society, writes that "it is the autobiographical memoir of a remarkable and fascinating priest, who began as a curate at Polruan near Fowey and moved to St Hilary, Marazion, near Penzance in 1912. He wrote this memoir while in a sanatorium, being treated for tuberculosis. He shows no real bitterness in his book, and through all his struggles, he comes over as a happy man. One is left with the sense of a character it would have been a delight to have known."

The Royal Cornwall Museum's collection includes work by Cornish artists and artists living in Cornwall, particularly from the Newlyn and St Ives Schools. These include large works by Annie Walke.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jack Clemo - The Broadening Spring.

Sociality & spirituality - reassociating the Arts & the Church (1)

The life of Bishop George Bell is shortly to be celebrated at a Chichester-based conference marking the 50th Anniversary of his death. Entitled Art, Politics and Church: Celebrating George Bell the conference highlights the three major concerns of his ministry. These concerns came together in his drive to re-associate the Church and the Arts, which he viewed as “an effective protection against barbarism, whether the barbarism was Nazism, materialism or any other threat to civilization.”

A.N. Wilson has written that there were artistic giants in the Anglican Church in the first half of the twentieth century and this was certainly true of the artists with whom Bell had contact. As Dean of Canterbury, where he initiated a revival of religious drama, he was involved in commissioning works by T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Gustav Holst, John Masefield, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. While, as Bishop of Chichester, he initiated the use of modern works of art to invigorate and beautify the cathedral leading over time to the commissioning of works by Marc Chagall, Cecil Collins, Hans Feibusch, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, among others. Bell’s approach to re-associating the Arts could be summed up as structures, statements, sociality and spirituality.

Bell commissioned drama, music and visual art, put structures in place (e.g. the Sussex Churches Art Council and its ‘Pictures in Churches Loan Scheme’) to support a wider commissioning of artists, placed his trust in the vision of artists when they encountered opposition and he was called on to adjudicate on commissions and strongly supported the appointment of Walter Hussey as Dean of Chichester Cathedral to take forward the commissioning programme he had initiated there. Sociality was demonstrated through the meetings of artists and clergy that he organized (which involved, among others, Eliot, Feibusch, Henry Moore, Piper, Sayers and Williams) and his personal and pastoral care for émigré-artists such as Feibusch, who with Bell’s support became the pre-eminent twentieth century Church muralist in the UK.

The end result, in Bell’s view, was spirituality. He stated, in his enthronement address, “Whether it be music or painting or drama, sculpture or architecture or any other form of art, there is an instinctive sympathy between all of these and the worship of God.” Artists, he argued, could help the Church consider “our conception alike of the character of Christian worship and of the forms in which the Christian teaching may be proclaimed.”

Bell was not an arts theoretician but in his enthronement address and in his introduction to the catalogue for ‘Pictures in Churches Loan Scheme’ pleaded for the Church to trust contemporary artists and allow them to paint in their natural idiom. The 1944 meeting he organized to re-awaken the relationship between contemporary artists and the Church stated that the Church should use artists fearlessly and that artists need not necessarily be a Christian in order to be used by the Church.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gustav Holst - This Have I Done For My True Love.

There were giants in those days (1)

It is said that, ‘Of the making of lists there is no end’ and, as it hasn’t done any harm to Nick Hornby’s career, I shall begin with three lists myself. Lists that group together a number of the significant British-based artists in the first half of the twentieth-century.

List one includes C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Lewis is the link person within this group: he, Tolkien and Williams met weekly in Oxford from 1939 to 1945 through the meetings of The Inklings; Sayers corresponded and met with both Lewis and Williams; Lewis and Sayers both developed a role as ‘popular theologians’; while Lewis, Sayers and Tolkien each contributed essays to what became the posthumous volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

The second list or grouping revolves around T. S. Eliot and includes Christopher Fry, David Jones, Sayers and Williams: Eliot published and wrote introductions to the work of Jones and Williams; Eliot, Sayers and Williams shared a common love of, and wrote on, the work of Dante; Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams all wrote drama for the Canterbury Festival; Eliot, Fry and Williams were part of the Verse Drama movement; while, Jones and Williams shared a love of the Arthurian legends – Jones critiquing Williams’ work in The Arthurian Torso.

The final list or group has Eric Gill at its centre and includes, Desmond Chute, Philip Hagreen, Edward Johnston, Jones and Hilary Pepler. Gill, later followed by Johnston and Pepler, moved to Ditchling, Surrey in 1907 and this move led directly to the formation by Chute, Gill and Pepler of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in 1920. The Guild was a community of artists and craftspeople living, working and worshipping as Dominican Tertiaries. Jones joined the community in 1921 and then, in 1924, moved with Gill and Hagreen to Caldey in Wales as part of an attempt to establish a similar Guild there.

The links that I have briefly outlined are sufficient to establish that we have here three distinct groups – formed around Eliot, Gill and Lewis – plus a significant amount of overlap and linkage in personnel, ideas and forms between the groups – with Jones, Sayers and Williams emerging as the principal individuals linking the three groups.

Within their own time some of these groupings and links were recognised. Kenneth Pickering has noted that Sayers “was particularly conscious that she was one of a group of Christian writers who were under attack from both radical Christian and agnostic critics”. She wrote of indignation being “reserved for a small group of Anglicans, such as Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis … and, of course, T. S. Eliot …”.

George Bell, as Dean of Canterbury and then as Bishop of Chichester, initiated the Canterbury Festival where, as we have heard, plays by Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams, among others, were commissioned and performed. Bell also held several conferences on art and the church and again Eliot, Sayers and Williams were involved.

Accordingly, A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Lewis, suggests that there were giants in the Church of England in those days and cites Eliot, Lewis, and Sayers as examples.

However, it was not only in the Anglican Church that artistic giants existed. The group gathered around Gill, together with Tolkien, were all part of the Roman Catholic Church and there too a similar pattern can be seen. Kathleen Raine, for example, has stated that Gill and Jones were part of “a remarkable flowering of Catholic culture”.

Finally, the links between this group and the Anglican grouping have been noted by Gregory Wolfe who includes Eliot, Gill and Jones in his list of Religious Humanists from this period.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King.