THE ENGLISH TRADITION
Outsiders:
a profile of Stephen Dykes Bower,
enemy of Modern architecture
THE visitor to Stephen Dykes Bower's Essex home is received in some style. The architect himself meets the London train at Newport Station in his old Rolls-Royce the happy suggestion of his accountant 20 years ago — and drives sedately back to Quendon Court in this noble and reassur- ingly secure vehicle. Dykes Bower has lived at Quendon for almost half a century and still runs this fine, severe Georgian house largely singlehanded. He seems as untroubled by age as by the changing architectural fashions of the 20th century. It is all a most impressive performance for a man now in his 82nd year.
Stephen Dykes Bower might have appeared in our earlier series of 'Survivors'. He is considered here as an Outsider, which may seem surprising as, with his assured, correct old-fashioned courtesy, with his family connections and having been Surveyor to Westminster Abbey, he might seem quintessentially a man of the old English establishment. But he is not. He is an outsider in his chosen profession, a man who has undeviatingly pursued a single, unfashionable course, and not only by remaining loyal to English traditions, uninfluenced by the dominant orthodoxy of the Modern movement, but also by confining himself to a narrower, more unfashionable field: that of church architecture and design. His work has been condemned by the ignorant when not merely dismissed as reactionary and while so many of his generation who did so veil' well out of disastrously rehousing the working classes and other public projects have been showered with knighthoods, Dykes Bower has not received the honours that many think he deserves. One reason for this may be that Dykes Bower does not suffer fools gladly. He has all the absolute self-confidence and un- bending conviction of the great Victorians, for whom he has historical and imaginative understanding. In his eloquent and lectures — not the least of his accomplishments — Dykes Bower has de- fended the reputation, in particular, of Sit Gilbert Scott. This sympathy for the Vic- torians may well be a reflection of his own background which seems supremely Vic- torian. His Leeds forbears were disting- uished both academically and musically while his father, Ernest Dykes Bower, was both an ophthalmic surgeon at the Gloucester Royal Infirmary and a fine pianist. In 1898 he had married the formid- able daughter of the Archdeacon 01, Gloucester. The result was four sons, all c)'• whom remained unmarried. Two became doctors while Stephen's younger brother., John, became the celebrated church musi- cian. Sir John Dykes Bower was Organ's' at St Paul's Cathedral when his brother Was designing the new high altar and baldacchi- no there after the war. Stephen Dykes Bower's own passion for music is expressed in his particular interest in the design of organ cases. But, having been educated at Cheltenham College and Merton College, Oxford — where he was organ scholar — he decided to study architecture at the AA in London. Dykes Bower qualified before the real impact of Le Corbusier and Continental Modernism made itself felt in the architectural schools and he always remained hostile to it, arguing that the existing indigenous de- velopments in English architecture needed help, not smothering. Even so, in his passion for order and neatness which, unusually for an architect, is carried through into his domestic arrangements, Stephen Dykes Bower may have more in common with his modernist contempor- aries than he is prepared to admit. But churches were his love, although he has, unfortunately, only had the chance to build three from scratch. One, at Hockerill outside Bishop's Stortford, dates from before the war. That at Cambridge, in Gothic, was dismissed by Pevsner as 'reac- tionary to a degree almost unbelievable in 1957-8 (chancel) and 1963-4 (nave)'. The best is at Newbury, a brick church of the 1950s which sums up many of the most interesting early-20th-century ideas in English church design. Because of the war, Dykes Bower's talents were largely channelled into church restoration and reconstruction. It is Lon- don's shame that none of the badly dam- aged Wren churches was restored authenti- cally, but Dykes Bower's reconstruction of S. t Vedast, Foster Lane, is deeply impress- ive in its own terms. Similar sympathy for Wren's classicism is shown in the work in St Paul's, designed in conjunction with Godfrey Allen. Dykes Bower's careful furnishings are to be found in many cathed- rals, but one in particular testifies to his subtle respect for English church architecture. This is Bury St Edmunds, the Perpendicular church which Dykes Bower began to enlarge in 1960 to make it suitable for its new cathedral status. Where many architects would simply have shown off in the approved Pevsnerian style of 'our day and age', Dykes Bower carefully de- loped a restrained Perpendicular Gothic manner in proper materials. Sadly, it re- mains unfinished. A change of dean and archdeacon together with modish Angli- can enthusiasm for spending money on guns for African freedom fighters rather than on bricks and mortar, brought work to a halt in 1970. It could and should be resumed.
In 1951, Dykes Bower achieved the highest ambition of any church architect urhen. he was appointed Surveyor to the Fabric ric of Westminster Abbey. It is a building he loves and knows intimately, respecting and understanding all the works there above carried out by his predecessors, all by Sir Gilbert Scott, whose contribution he praised when it was cus- tomary to denigrate it. Dykes Bower has also left his mark on the Abbey, although it is. one which is often dismissed by those no fail to understand the building. He was responsible for the colouring which so enhances the Abbey's ceremonial role and which appears so subtle in comparison with the garish and inaccurate colour which has more recently disfigured other cathedrals.
And he was responsible for the design of the Waterford glass chandeliers which are a gift of the Guinness family. Perhaps it is fortunate, however, that other ideas could not be carried through, such as the marble cosmati work floor which he proposed to put throughout the nave: a scheme in the arrogant tradition of J. L. Pearson.
If Dykes Bower is at pains to praise Scott and Pearson at the expense of Lethaby and the 'anti-scrape' school of restoration, it may well be because of the great row over the Abbey's roof timbers which did much to isolate Dykes Bower professionally. The full story of how the decision to replace mediaeval timbers was made and how the resulting conservation controversy was used to denigrate Dykes Bower by his ideological enemies has yet to be told, but it seems certain that he took the responsi- bility for a decision actually made by the Surveyor to the Abbey's Roofs. The result was an implacable feud conducted by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings which reflects little credit on that usually admirable body, and a blinkered undervaluation of Dykes Bower's achieve- ment at Westiminster.
However, for all Dykes Bower's defence of Sir Gilbert Scott, it is the late Victorian church architects whose work he under- stands most intimately and to whom he is in many respects the heir — architects whose refined Late Gothic idiom is still less regarded and less fashionable than the aggressive creations of the stars of the `High' Victorian period. These are, above all, G. F. Bodley and the younger Gilbert Scott. Dykes Bower fought hard to restore Scott's masterpiece, St Agnes, Kenning- ton, to perfection after the war, until thwarted by the defeatist philistinism of the Diocese of Southwark. He then took the abandoned furniture from Kennington to Portsmouth and used it to sublime effect in his peculiarly ethereal reconstruction of the Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea, which is worth going miles to see. As for Bodley, the greatest of Victorian church designers, Dykes Bower remains the only architect still to be trusted with one of his buildings. He has lovingly restored the stencilled decoration in two of Bodley's best churches: St John's, Tue Brook, Liverpool, and St Augustine's, Pendle- bury, Manchester. Who else would have bothered?
Such buildings were among the finest of Anglo-Catholic mission churches. They were built in desperately poor areas of Victorian cities; they remain, often proud but forlorn, in poor inner city areas. They are the visible centres of the sort of tough parishes which the Church of England's authorities affect to care so deeply about but, in truth, are usually anxious to close down. There is nothing irrelevant, nothing `arty', nothing self-indulgent about such buildings; nor is there about Stephen Dykes Bower's concern for them. Such buildings have a power to be living symbols of the presence of religion in the modern world, but they are symbols which the modern Church, with its obsession with rationalisation, with efficiency, with 'com- munity', seems too often unable to exploit.
What can be achieved is shown by two churches in Salford which Dykes Bower has recently restored and embellished: Christ Church and St Paul's. St Paul's is possibly one of the most encouraging parishes in the Church of England. It was a run-down, indifferent Victorian building set in the middle of a nightmarish new estate of tower blocks when Canon David Wyatt was made vicar. The authorities proposed a new church. Canon Wyatt disagreed and saw the value of the existing building as a symbol of continuity amidst massive change. Fortunately, he found Dykes Bower to support him. Out of this rotting sow's ear, Dykes Bower created a church of simple, effective beauty. So loved is the building locally that it is left open during the day — something almost unheard of these days — and is unvandal- ised. Next door Dykes Bower designed a simple new wing of brick and timber as a clergy house and church hall. This was thrice refused planning permission because it was not 'modern' enough. That, of course, is precisely its merit. With limited means, Dykes Bower created a spiritual oasis in the centre of the doctrinaire, concrete totalitarian squalor of the 1960s. The greatest compliment paid him was when his new wing was mistaken for the work of Temple Moore of c. 1910.
All this was achieved by an architect well over the conventional retirement age. He undertakes such jobs, with the associated travelling, entirely because he cares about them and is anxious to help the few, very few, Anglican clergymen who he thinks have the right ideas. Still working, design- ing redecoration schemes, or organ cases, or new candlesticks to suit a church by, say, Butterfield, Stephen Dykes Bower often waives his fees to make sure things are done properly. This firm, honourable and admirable man has an unfashionable belief in the power of architecture and beauty to bring ordinary people to God.
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