Stained Glass and Tears

Care and Craft: 'Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.'

My great, great, grandfather’s windows.

Around two years ago, a very elderly aunt said to me: ‘Your grandmother was given a gold sovereign by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Morris.’

I burst into tears on the spot.

Now on the surface of it, this might sound like an odd reaction for a sixty-something-year-old man, and I must admit that those tears took me completely by surprise. But I think my tears are at the very heart of why Care and Craft is so very important to not only me, but to so many other people.

To explain, I’ll start with a bit of backstory.

I have always had a deep love for anything King Arthur and especially for the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. We both have a deep love for King Arthur, and I believe that my initial interest in King Arthur goes back to my childhood, to Disney Time and to one Disney film in particular, ‘The Sword in the Stone.’

I also have one other very strong memory from this time and that is one of jealousy. I was very jealous of my best friend who went off on holiday to California and Disneyland. This was around 1970 when I was seven years old.

The Sword in the Stone and the Disneyland castle were those first seeds that sparked my lifelong interest in King Arthur and the legends of the Round Table.

Fast forward through the next fifty years.

At school I was only ever any good at writing and drawing. Other than that I was an academic dead end.

School led to art college which led to a career in design.

Professionally I worked on art and design all day long, but I kept up the writing in my free time; diaries, notes, short stories and an attempt at a novel or two.

Meanwhile, every so often, fragments of the family story would emerge: ‘Of course you get your artistic temperament from great-grandfather Ted. He used to make stained glass windows, you know.’ And that was about as far as the conversation ever went.

Then came the gold sovereign bombshell from my aunt and the tears. On the back of this, she asked me to find out more. ‘Vincent dear, you use computers. Have a look into it would you. From what I can gather you can trace relatives on the computer now.’

So I looked into it.

Great-grandfather Ted was my my grandmother’s father on my mother’s side. As I dug deeper into the story, I discovered that my grandmother did indeed get given a gold sovereign, but unfortunately not from William Morris. He died in 1896, four years before she was born.

The gold sovereign had come from her grandfather Robert, and he had owned and run a stained glass company in Marylebone, London.

My great-great-grandfather Robert was a stained glass window artist and he undertook work for Morris and Company, but more than that, his sisters lived above the very first Morris & Company shop at 449 Oxford Street. These are my great-great-aunts and they both also worked for Morris and Co as cloth stainers. Both he and William Morris were born in the same year, 1834, and Robert knew William Morris well.

The very first Morris and Co shop - 1877

This is the William Morris connection.

So why, did the gold sovereign story move me to tears?

One word: connection.

I didn’t know it, but subconsciously I was desperate to be connected to those Victorian artists and craftsmen, and their very romantic take on the legends of King Arthur.

I believe that whatever we create, be it a painting, something written, knitted, constructed or composed, no matter what it is, that act of creation allows us to express what it is to be human in a way that nothing else can.

That is why this Substack exists.

Postscript.

My great grandfather Edward.

What of my great-great-grandfather Robert and his stained glass windows?

My family has no historical connection with this part of the country, Sussex, other than moving to the area in the late 1960s. I have spent most of my life here and never given the area much thought, other than how much I love the place, not least because I have my very own castle just around the corner; Arundel Castle. Actually it belongs to the Duke of Norfolk, but I think of it as mine just the same.

I moved to my present house and village around ten years ago, again no connection to the area, my family on both sides are all Londoners.

When I got asked by my aunt to try and find out more about my relatives and stained glass, the only evidence I could find (and it is well documented across multiple sources) is that there is only one existing example of great-great-grandfather Robert’s windows left.

Those windows are in a small parish church. And then came the second bombshell. That church is a short walk around the corner from my house, a church whose existence I was unaware of until I researched my family history.

No one in my family knew the windows were there. No one knew they had survived at all and I had been living not ten minutes away from them for the last ten years, completely unaware of their existence.

Care and Craft sometimes calls to us in ways that we cannot begin to imagine.