VANDALISM AT OXFORD
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Merton College, Oxford, where I had the good fortune to spend two years as an undergraduate on the eve of the Great War, is among other things famous for its stained glass which has, or had, until recently, survived most of the vicissitudes incidental to the furieS of religious- or aesthetic reformers-.
• The chapel—actually the choir -and crossing of a projected churoh -which was never completed—contains the bulk of it. The North and South sides of the chancel and the upper part
• of the Great East window are filled mainly with thirteenth- century glass in wonderful preservation, -while the West win- dow, up to a few years ago, contained a good many fragments, somewhat imperfectly co-ordinated, of a century or two later.
At the end of the seventeenth century the lower lights of the East window were filled with painted glass by one Price—not, perhaps, work of superlative merit compared with the jewel- like beauty of five hundred years earlier, but still admirable in colour and typical of its period. About the same time the chapel was fitted with wood-panelling, pews and screen in the later Restoration manner and paved with black-and-white marble squares. Ackerman's view of the interior, in his well- known series published at the beginning of the last century, shows it in all its unspoilt dignity.
But a few decades later, i.e., about 1850, the college authori- • ties, carried away on the then fashionable, and fatal, wave of " Early English" enthusiasm, tore out the paving and panel- • ling and substituted encaustic tiles and " Ecclesiastical Gothic " woodwork at the same moment as they hacked down • the Grove and erected Butterfield's New Buildings—since decorously reconstructed in keeping with the Elizabethan facade of the " Fellows -Quadrangle." -` - -
The chapel windows then remained intact, but worse has now befallen them. Latterly certain dons, having dabbled in aesthetics, decided that Price's windows were " late " and therefore bad ; these have now been removed and the muddled , fragments from the west window reassembled in their place. This, in itself, is perhaps no crime : but the fact, recently brought to my notice, that the college authorities have dis-. posed of their 200-year-old glass without any attempt to find another place for it in the many remaining empty windows of the chapel, seems to call for the strongest condemnation, and that not only from Mertonians.
Such-high-handed action is a definitely retrograde step and a return to the falsely " purist " attitude of the 'fifties.
" Quis eustodiet ipsos custodes?" indeed.
Now, at the moment when there is, for example, a movement to catalogue and protect the many treasures of the Church scattered far and wide in country parishes, I venture the suggestion that the University authorities of both Oxford and Cambridge should seriously consider whether it is any longer suitable that individual colleges should have undisputed right lightly to alienate any of their historic possessions merely on the ground that they are considered at the moment unfashion- able.—I am, yours, &c.,
ALAN LAWRENCE.
Arthur's, St. James's Street, S.W. 1.
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