MUCH LIKE A SQUARSON
A profile of Henry Thorold,
the finest extant specimen of the English antiquarian clergyman
THE VISITOR to Lincolnshire or Not- tinghamshire is frequently rewarded with the sight of an ancient silver Bentley bowl- ing along in the middle of the road, or parked outside Southwell Minster, a book- shop in Louth, or a forgotten monastic ruin. The inside of this venerable vehicle is like a gentlemen's club, with antique leather upholstery, a scatter of books and papers, and half-written letters lying non- chalantly about. It may also contain the unlikely apparition of an 18th-century clergyman. The features are unmistakably Georgian, the Hanoverian profile, the windswept mane of hair, the ruddy com- plexion (legacy of ancestral port-drinking), all of which seem so familiar because they have been encountered before in the por- traits of Cotes or Hudson. It is very much not the type of face to be found among the crowds in a supermarket or motorway ser- vice-station. Nor is the voice. Once heard this is never forgotten; its sonorous, modu- lated tones being perfectly adapted to the Book of Common Prayer. It belongs to no other than the Revd Henry Thorold, FSA, proprietor of Marston Hall, author of Shell Guides and the finest extant specimen of that recurring English type, the antiquarian clergyman imbued in architectural lore, ecclesiology, heraldry and the classics.
Henry Croyland Thorold was born in 1921 and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He is the son of the Revd Ernest Hayford Thorold, Chaplain General to the Armed Forces and a chaplain suc- cessively to Kings George V, Edward VIII and George VI, till he died in 1940. Because of his father's service in the army the young Henry Thorold moved about a lot, from one magnificent architectural backdrop to another: the Tower of Lon- don, the ancient walled city of Chester, or the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral. Through the chapel at Eton and the cathe- dral at the House he continued to imbibe the majestic aura of mediaeval religious architecture during his formative years, and this contributed much, both to his religious views and his aesthetic outlook. An equally strong influence was the old family home, Marston Hall in Lincolnshire, where youth- ful summer holidays were spent. The Thorolds acquired Marston by marriage in the reign of Edward III. Their great Eliza- bethan house was damaged in the Civil War (the Thorolds were Royalists, of course) and subsequently reduced in size, being used as the agent's house in the 18th century when the Thorold Barts moved up the hill to Syston. Ernest Thorold took on Marston from his cousin Sir James (the 14th Bart) and restored it as a family house
in the 1920s. Some of the furniture and family portraits were transferred there when Syston Hall was demolished circa 1930. Lincolnshire, with its vast empty landscapes, magnificent mediaeval church- es, Tennysonian winds blowing off the Wolds, its general air of `Goneness', also proved a powerful force.
Their branch of the Thorold family has produced clergymen for generations, sever- al having been the rectors of the family liv- ing of Hougham-cum-Marston. Henry, too, followed in this tradition and entered holy orders. He was ordained in the Scottish Episcopal Church, not the Church of Eng- land, during the second world war, and served as a naval chaplain, and chaplain to the Bishop of Brechin. The chance which led to him being ordained outside England has given him considerable independence when it comes to criticising, or at least dis- tancing himself from, some recent trends in the Church of England. After the war, he went to Lancing, the Woodward public school in Sussex with its staggering cathe- dral-scale Gothic chapel, which is among the finest pieces of 20th-century English ecclesiastical architecture. There he became housemaster of Gibbs's House and served as chaplain for nearly 20 years. After his retirement in 1968, he returned to north Oxford for a few years, where he was chaplain at Summerfields, the prep school up the Banbury Road, before returning to live full-time at Marston.
He is often referred to by friends as the `Squarson of Marston' but this is not strict- ly accurate, for though he lives in the Hall, owns part of the village and is patron of the living (and three others in Lin- colnshire) he is not the incumbent and has never been a parish priest. For three or four years now, however, he has himself been conducting services at Marston church during a long- drawn-out vacancy. This state of affairs has arisen because the diocese is attempting to amalgamate the parish with several others and to sell off the rectory. The church bureaucrats, how- ever, miscalculated the strength and inde- pendence of the patron and his unswerving opposition to the lazy utilitarianism and fashionable asset-stripping which he sees as one of the curses of the age. He is a doughty defender of all true values and traditions, a worthy descendant of 18th- century High Tory Anglicanism. At Marston, the church is kept open during daylight hours (almost unique in the east midlands), a sanctuary lamp burns to one side, there is no centralised altar-table ('lit- tle better than butchers' blocks') and Series Three is conspicuous by its absence. In the Thorold Chapel the family monu- ments are clean and cared for, and include one, designed by 'that great architect Fran- cis Johnson FSA', to Henry's mother. For his practical defence of tradition is not confined to religion. When his mother died in 1969 he erected a heraldic hatch- ment over the porch door of Marston Hall, perhaps the only occasion that a hatchment has been hung on a private house in England since the war, if not this century.
Marston Hall itself has been restored and embellished under Henry's care, again with the assistance of Francis Johnson. The principal addition is the Burston Room, the moulded plaster ceiling of which was rescued from Burston (the Devon seat of a recusant branch of the Thorolds of Little Ponton) when threat- ened with demolition, and moved bodily to Lincolnshire in 1972.
Around the Hall, an enchanting formal garden has been laid out with high-hedged enclosures, white trellis obelisks, old roses, and a Gothic gazebo designed in 1968 by John Partridge and decorated internally with murals by Barbara Jones. More recently, a sculpted figure of Bacchus has made his appearance at the other end of the false-perspective vista facing the gaze- bo. Stretching out into the landscape beyond the garden is the Lancing Avenue, a planting of Lombardy poplars given to Henry by the school when he retired, and now well-grown. The garden is regularly opened to the public in the summer, chiefly in aid of the Lincolnshire Historic Churches Trust of which Henry is the chairman and prime mover. It is one of several church committees with which he is associated; others include the Historic Churches Preservation Trust and the Fab- ric Committee of Southwell Minster; he frequently attends matins or evensong at Southwell, finding the atmosphere of that perfect miniature Barchester preferable to mighty Lincoln.
An unhurried, slow and dignified man- ner belies the immense amount of work that Henry crams into a day. In addition to running Marston, conducting church ser- vices, preaching in far-flung places, he is a prolific writer with five of the best Shell Guides to his credit as well as a classic book on English cathedrals. He has just completed Lincolnshire Churches Revisited, the publication of which is eagerly await- `Of course if it gets too much, we've another crippling mortgage we can go to at the weekends.'
ed. He was an old friend of John Betjeman and John Piper and shared their feeling for the picturesque in landscape and architec- ture. Many of John Piper's paintings hang in the rooms at Marston, a modern coun- terpoint to portraits of the Thorolds and their horses. Like Piper and Betjeman, he is a born architectural and topographical writer, with an eye for the rare, the odd, the special and the forlorn. John Piper has written:
Driving about in one of his counties (Lin- colnshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and County Durham) I often think, 'What does Henry say about this Place?' and there, if one looks, is an admirable little prose-poem about it — short, informative and original.
He is a good host (though he loathes cooking), and a succession of friends, young and old, stop off at Marston where they are generously regaled and taken on long tours of the forgotten wonders of Lin- colnshire — an obelisk commemorating the Duke of Wellington, a gilded Bodley altar- piece, a ducal tomb by Rysbrack. Some of these sights are so associated with him as to seem part of a compelling private world, as are their names. For he has a penchant for archaic pronunciation. Afterwards, it some- times comes as a surprise to discover that not everybody pronounces Grantham Grant'm or Boothly Pagnell Boothby Painell. He hates sloppy, flat, modern pro- nunciation and meaningless words. Some- thing 'Centre' on the sign of a second-rate shop in a provincial back street never fails to draw disdainful scorn. 'A leisure centre,' he will say ironically of some desperate modern shack on the edge of an undistin- guished town. 'Heritage' is another word that brings on apoplexy — 'just a politi- cian's word for other people's houses and pictures'. A 'Traditional Heritage Centre' complete with didactic, but historically inaccurate, exhibition and unsightly picnic area represents the quintessence of every- thing he loathes and despises.
So long as you yourself are not the object of his articulate range or withering scorn, Henry Thorold's company is an enhancing experience and his example stimulating. And he is a marvellous raconteur, with a masterly use of the pause. The Thorold story combines an antiquarian point, a sense of reverence for old families, plus a dash of the macabre. Here is an example: Dr Jarvis, the Provost of Sheffield Cathe- dral, restored the splendid Elizabethan monument there to the 6th Earl of Shrews- bury (the warder of Mary Queen of Scots). To the service of rededication she invited the (21st) Earl of Shrewsbury. Showing Lord Shrewsbury his ancestor's tomb, Dr Jarvis pointed out that the little finger on the effigy was carved with three knuckles, and upbraided the incompetence of the Elizabethan sculptor. 'But,' said the 21st Earl, 'we all have three knuckles on our lit- tle fingers' — and displayed his for the Provost to see.
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