City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN M[SS EVIE HONE, the stained-glass artist, known 'over here for east windows of Eton Chapel and St. Michael's, Highgate, died while at Mass last week at Rathfarnham, Dublin, where she lived. She did more than anyone in recent years to lift stained glass out of conscience- less commercialism and wishy-washy artiness. She was a humorous, observant and saintly woman, and her work had an evangelical simplicity and directness about it which must have come from the Church of Ireland, in which she was brought up. To this she added the colour and glamour and fervour of tne Church of Rome, which she joined and for whose Irish buildings, generally so sadly lacking in beauty, she made some rich and glowingly impressive windows. She started life as an artist in oils and I remember one of those thorough German art books of the Twenties which had at the end some reproductions of Die Dubliner Cubisten showing the work of Evie Hone and her friend the late Miss Jellet. Abstract art, with a stress on exciting arrangements of coloured shapes, is an excellent introduction to the craft of stained glass.
TOASTING FORKS AND LIZARDS
We now have in England a school of artists in glass, and I would refer Londoners to Miss Margaret Kaye's recently erected east window of St. Mary's, the Boltons.r At the Royal College of Art in South Kensington they are making the new windows for Coventry Cathedral, and though I'm not very keen about the plan of this building, it is obviously going to be a glorious gallery of stained glass which will make the commercial firms who supply Good Shepherds and St. Georges with toasting forks in their hands and lizards at their feet, decide to employ good artists. I was shocked to see in a recent number of the Church Titnes some pages devoted to modern stained-glass without a single reference to the names of the many stained glass artists with studios of their own, as opposed to church furnishing firms. It was rather as though someone produced a supplement on art and only mentioned commercial artists. Mr. Keith New, who has designed many of the windows for Coventry Cathedral, once gave me a good illustration of the tremendous gulf there now is between artists and commercial gents. Before he became known, he took his designs to a big firm which advertises church windows in the religious press. The head of the firm looked at them, asked him about his years of training at the Royal College of Art in stained glass, and said, 'You will have to unlearn all that if you come here.'
REPRIEVED
I have some hopeful news from Cambridgeshire, where a rural district council, that of Chesterton, has ' actually reprieved three old cottages in the village of Toft which were condemned before the war. The council requisitioned them to house two old couples and a widow and then handed them over to the Cambridgeshire Cottage Improvement Society, which is rethatching them, repairing and laying on water for the existing occupants. The honorary secretary of the Society tells me that it is now no longer necessary for a local council to ask the Justices to quash a demolition order. Section 5 (2) of the Housing Repairs and Rents Act 1954 reads : 'If the works are completed tp the satisfaction of the authority they shall revoke the demolition order without prejudice to any subsequent proceedings under Part 2 of the principal Act.' The Public Health Committee itself can act, and there are many cottages which can even earn an `improvement grant' under the Act. The Cambridgeshire Cottage Improvement , Society raises low-interest capital and employs it in improving condemned cottages and so getting them reprieved. There may be other such societies, and if there are not, they should be formed, especially in counties with beautiful villages, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, Northants, Rutland and anywhere on the Limestone Belt.
DELAPItt ABBEY Just over one mile from the centre of the town of Northampton stands the charming old country house of Delapre Abbey which was built at various dates from the sixteenth century. Except in a small part where there is dry rot, it is in excellent repair. It stands in a large park and has been bought by the town council which now proposes to pull it down. The famous Northamptonshire Records Society has all its archives stored nine miles away at Lamport, and we can only hope that the town and county councils will agree that Delapre Abbey is the obvious place to house them, even if, in order to do so, private enterprise has to raise the money. An historic town and county will thus be benefited. I should add that most counties house their records out of public funds.
THE WOBURN CARP The deer and bison, the rolling acres of Bedfordshire grass landscaped so well with clumps of trees, the spreading house and turreted stables, the sculpture gallery and winding walks —these are some of the sights of Woburn Abbey which the Duke of Bedford is opening to the public this summer. But will he, I wonder, be able to show that part of his private garden which contains one of the most exciting things of all'? It is a round pond with a Chinese temple designed by Henry Holland, and with coloured glass bells hanging from its eaves. When these bells are tinkled, all the carp in the pond rise to the surface and open their mouths for food.
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