Brightlingsea All Saints

We went to see the Brightlingsea Christmas Tree Festival in the town's All Saints church.  This is the ninth time they've held the festival, and the first time I've been.  Last year the weather was lousy, and some years I've been working, and one way and another we never got round to it.

The Christmas trees were about the mixture of traditional and conceptual that you'd expect, and I wasn't too fussed about them, though I don't mind that sort of thing as long as it's presented as a harmless community activity and not cluttering up the Tate.  You could vote for your favourite tree (we didn't) and there was a stall selling Christmas decorations, where I bought a star made out of rose hips for our tree for 75p.  There were refreshments, and a little girl playing carol tunes on a piano, and lots of people exuded happy Christmas vibes, and the event was in aid of the hospice.  It was a nice thing to go to.

The main reason I wanted to go, apart from supporting the local community, was to get inside All Saints.  When we passed it on a walk once it was locked, and I'm not sure how often it's open.  You can appreciate much of the beauty of the church from the outside.  Simon Jenkins gives it one star, and says the tower is one of the finest in the county.  It is very fine, built of knapped flint in the Perp style, and visible from miles around.  The attraction inside is the frieze of Victorian tiles commemorating Brightlingsea parishoners lost at sea.  There are 213 of them, 15cm square, running as a dado around the walls.  They get an entry in my Tile Gazetteer (yes, I do possess such a thing.  I bought it at the Tile Museum at the Ironbridge gorge museums complex, and have been known to take it on holiday with me) of more than half a page.

Starting at random near the base of the tower, and dodging around a woman who was intent on photographing the Christmas trees, it became apparent that there must have been a very bad storm on 6 March 1883.  Six men were lost with the smack Recruit, and six more on the Conquest.  The lugger Misrotte was lost with five men, and there was a tile to someone washed overboard from another boat.  Most losses seemed to have involved entire crews.  Six drowned in the North Sea with the smack Glance in January 1891.  When the Gemina was lost off Dover with her crew of four, the Master was aged 55 and the youngest victim 15.  He shared a surname with one of the other crew members, suggesting a double loss for one family.

We couldn't see some of the tiles, because they were hidden behind Christmas trees.  Sidney Conrad Siebert, aged 30, perished in the wreck of SS Titanic.  There were tiles for yachtsmen who'd drowned, people who'd died and been buried at sea, and Brightlingsea sailors lost on the opposite coast of England and the far side of the world.  From 1914 onwards tiles start appearing for sailors killed in the Great War.  Eventually we came to a poster that explained that the tiles were the inspiration of the vicar, the Reverend Arthur Pertwee.  Nineteen people in total were lost in the storm of March 1883, which was the disaster that triggered him into action.  He researched earlier losses from the parish, and others kept the tradition up after him.  As well as commemorating the dead, he assisted the living by climbing the Perp tower to light a lamp on dark nights, to act as a beacon for the sailors.

The Christmas tree festival is on today and tomorrow from 10.0am until 6.00pm and is worth a visit, and worth getting there early because this morning it was heaving by the time we left.  You can see pictures of the tiles on this website, and the Systems Administrator and I thought we would try and find a time when the church was open to have a detailed look at them without Christmas trees in the way.

Addendum  They were giving away copies of the East Anglian Daily Times last night at Colchester station.  Most of page 3 was taken up with a story about how the council is considering closing the public lavatories at Lavenham to save money.  As I read the story I felt myself coming all over Philip Larkin (I'd skip this bit if you aren't interested in poetry).

Homage to Babergh District Council

Next year we are to shut the public loos
for lack of money, and it is all right.
Old boys who need to crap, or take a pee,
Must cross their legs and cut back on the tea.
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working.  And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
Their bursting bladders are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The incontinent toddlers only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a county
That shut its public loos for lack of money.
The guildhall will be standing in the same
Timber-framed street, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope is to cut the deficit.

2011

troubled times for the church

The parish magazine arrived today, with a flier about the restoration fund for the church.  The church has been known for months to be in a bad way, since part of the ceiling fell in and the rest was judged to be unsafe, and Sunday services have been held in the village hall since the accident.  What we hadn't known, until we got the leaflet about the appeal, is that the tower needs substantial work as well, and the estimated cost of repairs has been put at £120,000.

The church serves two parishes.  The church in our parish was deconsecrated and turned into a dwelling back in the 1970s, though the churchyard is still open and kept in a rather delightful state of controlled decay by the council.  In late winter it is a sheet of snowdrops.  The building makes a stylish house.  Our village is extremely spread out (there is a theory that this is characteristic of settlements on light and easily cultivatable soil) and the former church is not at all close to about 99% of the houses in the parish, and is small with no car parking facilities whatsoever.  I presume that is one reason why it was selected for the chop when the parishes were merged.  The merged parishes, as well as sharing the remaining church, share the vicar with a third local parish, as is normal nowadays.

Now £120,000 is a substantial amount of money to find.  It equates to around £75 for every man, woman and child living in the two parishes.  If the appeal can raise some funds locally, the organisers will then be eligible to apply for grants, but there is no guarantee that they will be successful.  A couple of people organised an accordian concert a couple of months back to raise money, but you need an awful lot of concerts, and jumble sales, and sponsored walks, and quiz nights, and coffee mornings, and sponsored hair-growing or head-shaving, and all the other fund raising staples of provincial England, to make much of a dent in £120,000, or even £60,000.  The two parishes are middling sorts of places, not deprived but without many rich households, and there aren't many big local businesses to tap.  And goodness knows how much per head £120,000 equates to for those people who actually go to church.  Most don't.

The painful question is whether society needs so many churches, and can afford to keep them up, or at least is willing to find the money to do so.  What exactly are churches for, in an era of declining church attendance?  We are not practising Anglicans, and have never been to a service in our church in the 18 years we've lived in the parish, nor are we likely to do so if they ever manage to get it back in commission.  We're not originally from the area, so none of our families were married or christened there, and none of our relatives lie buried in the churchyard.  It has no resonance for us at all, except as an historic building.

Unfortunately it isn't a very distinguished church.  Much of it dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it is Grade II* listed, so I shouldn't be too sniffy about it, but it doesn't make it into Simon Jenkins' Thousand Best Churches, or get a mention in my County Guide to English Churches.  The flint tower is nice, but it's not an outstanding building, and it doesn't occupy a key commanding position in the landscape, being set back from the road, outside the main body of the village, and behind some farm buildings (admittedly compared to the age of the church they should be viewed as temporary structures).

There are so many church buildings that need funds for repairs.  A couple of years ago, English Heritage estimated that six cathedrals needed a total of £60m spent on them over the next decade, which includes Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Salisbury, Winchester and Chichester.  The pot of money available from English Heritage for cathedrals is shrinking as government funding declines.  The Church of England is struggling to balance the need to maintain its historic buildings with the cost of providing clergy wages and pensions and carrying out the actual work of the church.  Which is more urgent, to conserve York and Lincoln, which are great world-class buildings that make my heart sing when I enter them, or to repair my village church?

I'm afraid our church missed a trick in not reinventing itself for more secular times.  When we arrived in the village, knowing nobody and quite keen to fit in, subject to the rigours of commuting, we did not get a welcome from the vicar, or an invitation to a monthly meal where we might have met people from our new community, or any other kind of church led social introduction and inclusion.  If we didn't want to go to church services, the church didn't want us.  Indeed, all we got was a fair amount of grief from our new neighbours who wanted us to construct a separate access road to our property, at considerable expense, so that we would not drive past their house.  They were, you guessed it, leading lights of the local church.

The fund raising letter that came with the parish magazine ends optimistically, saying that any monies left in the fund after work on the ceiling and tower will be used on other repairs needed.  In the circumstances I'm afraid it might have been more apt to say what would happen to funds raised should the appeal never reach its target, and work on the ceiling and tower not take place.

a trip to the other side of Essex

I went to Clavering for lunch today.  This came about as I was meeting an old university friend who lives in north London, and suggested we could have a break from what had become our normal routine of meeting in the west end during her lunch hour.  It turned out that, despite being an entrenched townie, what she would like to do would be to have lunch in an English country pub.

The Systems Administrator and I don't do pub lunches very often.  In fact, we only do them when we are on holiday.  The rest of the time we are too busy to interupt the flow of the day going out to lunch.  Plus, an awful lot of pubs offer food nowadays, and a lot of the time it is considerably less good than we could make at home, for an amount of money that would keep us in ingredients for lunch for the best part of the whole week.  We try to avoid pubs that look as though they are doing bad food cheaply, though we have made some wrong calls, or found ourselves in places where that seemed to be the only option.  There are also pubs that do bad food for moderate amounts of money, OK food for middling prices, lunches that are OK but frankly expensive, and occasionally good food for quite a lot of money.  Rarely is food excellent and moderately priced, and as for good and cheap, it don't exist.

Today's pub was chosen in rather a rush, since my friend had recently returned from holiday visiting family in the States to a mountain of work, and I had staggered home from Day Three in the Plant Centre to find my laptop was doing a monster update and had a Hal-like attitude to my using the internet that evening (I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that).  The Cricketers at Clavering featured in my (2006) pub food guide and my friend's more up to date (2010) one, and it looked easy to find starting from either Colchester or London N1.  It is also famous for being run by Jamie Oliver's parents, and is where young Jamie started his career.  The name above the door is still Trevor Oliver, and the pub merits brown tourist signs from the point where you leave (or in my case cross) the M11.  On that basis, although we hadn't booked a table in advance, I took the precaution of booking one in person as soon as I arrived.  This turned out to be the correct call, as by the time my friend arrived they were fully booked.  That's good going for a Friday in August.  The S.A. and I went to a Suffolk pub with a foodie reputation last August (it was our wedding anniversary) and there were only two or three other tables occupied.

The Cricketers at Clavering has a lot of beams, most of which I think are structural, and a cheerful attitude, with large wine glasses set on the tables and purple cushions, that's more posh Essex than rural Herefordshire.  The staff were jolly and kindly, if quite keen to rush us through ordering and then clearing the plates, and the food was pretty nice and quite expensive.  I ate mackeral salad with beetroot and horseradish, since the S.A. detests mackeral so I might as well eat it when I'm out, and I'm a sucker for beetroot and horseradish (it's my Polish roots).  My friend had a large piece of sea bass she said was good.  Her daugher and daugher's friend had smoked salmon sandwiches which came with chips on the side, and I had some of those as well, as the girls said we could, and were loads of them.  The grownups had cherry pie which was a bit too sweet, and the girls refused pudding (such self control).  As half the party were driving and the other half were under-age we were on soft drinks.  This is one of the reasons why the S.A. and I tend to only bother with pubs when we are on holiday and not about to get into a car, since one of the real pleasures of a pub visit is cask ale, well kept.  Anyway, I hadn't seen my friend for a while, and it was a good lunch, and a perfectly nice pub, though I wouldn't drive fifty miles to get to it unless I were meeting somebody.

The rest of the party headed back to town after lunch.  I think they had another visit to make on the way home, and were keen to return to the more respectable parts of London N1 before any Friday evening riots kicked off.  I went to have a look at the church, on the basis that I don't visit that side of the county very often, and I wanted to make the most of it.  Clavering church doesn't get a mention in Simon Jenkins' book of churches, but sounded worth a look from my preliminary web search, and merits a brief mention in my County Guide to English Churches (Jones and Tricker, 1992, Countryside Books).

The church is tucked down a small side road with absolutely no parking whatsoever.  Goodness knows what they do for weddings.  I backed up just in time, and parked in a residential street off the main road, but there didn't seem to be a car park anywhere near the church, or even a field you could use.  The church backs on to farmland, and feels peaceful and secluded.  In these times of theft and vandalism it is rather wonderful that it remains open, since there was nobody else there throughout my visit.  There has been a church on the site since Saxon times, but the present structure was built in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Perpendicular style.  I think the Victorians had a bit of a go at it, but it still has the original roof, and doesn't look obviously mucked about with.  It is small but charming, the outside mostly flint, with a low tower.  The interior is fine, plain, and somehow manages to look bigger than the outside.  Having read up on it in advance, and armed with my book, I knew to note the thirteenth century Purbeck marble font (octagonal, very plainly decorated with arches), the Elizabethan pulpit (wooden, carved with flowers) and the fifteenth century screen (rather worm eaten).

Neither the book nor the websites I consulted made any mention of the carved figures along the roof.  They have bare heads with shoulder length curly hair, wear tunics that are long at the back and short at the front and what look like leggings, textured to resemble either feathers or chain mail.  The light wasn't very good by then and I couldn't honestly see.  They seemed to have bare feet.  Maybe they are angels.  Perhaps they originally had wings, which have been lost or removed for safety purposes?  There is some fifteenth century stained glass along the north aisle, fragmentary now, and carefully protected from any yobbish stone throwing by panels mounted outside the windows.

There are some splendid monuments.  Margaret, wife of Haynes Barlie by whom he had issue fower sonnes and nyne daughters, six of them dyed in theire infancy the last was still borne, herself died five days after the birth and after nearly sisteen years of marriage, in 1653.  Fourteen pregnancies in sixteen years, it's scarcely surprising.  Her monument shows a round faced woman with ringlets each side of her head, below which she kneels opposite her husband, their six surviving children kneeling behind them, and behind them seven skulls, five smaller ones with the women and two larger behind the men.  All the kneeling figures have one hand clasped to their breast, except for the surviving son who is holding what looks like a large bap.  Next to Margaret's monument is one to Mary, second wife of Haynes Barley Esq. by whom he had a very plentiful fortune but no issue.  She too has a round face and ringlets, and died in 1658.  Haynes Barlee himself seems to have survived until 1696 when he died at the age of 90, having taken a third wife Mary, who produced four more sons, according to a monument erected in 1747.

There is supposed to be the remains of a pre Conquest motte and bailey castle (one of only four in England) by the church, but I must admit I didn't see it.  I did like the garden tap and three galvanised watering cans on a little stand by the entrance to the churchyard, for people to tend the flowers on the graves.