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Mystery remains over restored carving

31 May 2024

mcneilage conservation

The stone relief, restored by McNeilage Conservation for St Lawrence’s, Godmersham

The stone relief, restored by McNeilage Conservation for St Lawrence’s, Godmersham

A FACE from the past which may be an early image of St Thomas the Martyr from Canterbury is to be seen again in St Lawrence’s, Godmersham, in Kent, after several months’ absence for conservation.

Scaffolding was used by the restorers Torquil and Ruth McNeilage to reinstall the Purbeck marble bas-relief, dated to the 12th century, in the chancel, which has been its home since 1933.

Its identity remains a matter for discussion by archaeologists and historians, as it was when it was placed there by the Revd Dr S. Graham Brade-Birks, Vicar from 1930 until 1977, and an Hon. Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, who died in 1982.

A visit by the Dean of Canterbury to mark the work is planned, together with a talk by the historian Tim Tatton-Brown, at a date yet to be finalised.

Soon after it was installed, the bas was dubbed “The Lost Image of Godmersham” by the Church Times artist, Donald Maxwell, who, in one of his “Travels with a Sketch-Book” series of articles (18 March 1936), wrote of Canon Brade-Birks’s “Sherlock Holmes detective work”.

“In the building known as Old Court Lodge in Godmersham was a curious piece of sculpture. It was a relief carving of a figure thought by the archaeologists of the eighteenth century to be a representation of the Prior of Chillenden. Something about this figure arrested the attention of the vicar, who is a biologist as well as an historian.”

Brade-Birks and a friend made a papier-mâché mould of the carving. From this they produced a plaster-of-Paris copy, which they sent to the V&A, pointing out details that suggested that the figure was intended to represent an archbishop. “The upshot of this inquiry elicited the fact that this was undoubtedly a representation of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the earliest known sculpture of the martyr,” Maxwell wrote.

church timesSt Lawrence’s, Godmersham, by Donald Maxwell, from the Church Times of 13 March 1936

James Russell, a former churchwarden of Godmersham, reports that St Lawrence’s is a pilgrim church on the way from Winchester to Canterbury, and also a Jane Austen church. “Her brother lived at Godmersham House, and she writes frequently about the Church.”

This makes the idea that the image is of St Thomas attractive to pilgrims who visit, Mr Russell says. But the confidence of Brade-Birks and Maxwell in that identification is not universally shared, and another candidate is St Thomas’s immediate predecessor, Theobald of Bec (c.1090-1161).

“The professors and experts are divided on whom the plaque depicts, some thinking it is one end of St Thomas’s tomb before translation to his shrine, while Tim and others think it is Theobald, and some Prior Chillenden, the great building Prior of Canterbury, who had strong links to Godmersham Church. Lloyd de Beer came to see it and considered it for his British Museum exhibition on Becket, but at that point, it was rather delicate to move, and there was no proof it depicts Becket.

“The restoration, I am afraid, has taken me much time, but we have discovered the corbel it rested on at Court Lodge — the medieval Prior’s House that was next to the church — in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A large photo of the plaque has been touring Canada in a BM exhibition.”

There are copies of the plaque in Canterbury, he says: one on the shrine of St Thomas, and one in the medieval Eastbridge Hospital, both given by Brade-Birks at his own expense.

“My thanks go to our supporting charities, Churchcare, the Pilgrim Trust, the Ratcliffe Trust, and the Friends of Godmersham Church, in getting the restoration this far,” Mr Russell says.

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