Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Saving the Cathedral’s glass
Canterbury Cathedral is famous for its wealth of beautiful stained glass, both that which had survived from the medieval period, but also the imaginative windows from more recent times.
The survival of so much precious glass from the medieval period can be described as almost miraculous, given the negative forces it sometimes faced.
In the period of the Commonwealth, Puritan zealots such as Richard Culmer, also known as ‘Blue Dick’, took it upon themselves to smash as much ‘Popish’ glass as they saw fit. In Dick’s own words, he saw it as his mission to “rain down Becket’s glassy bones”.
The next largest threat to our precious stock of stained glass came from the Second World War. In the mid-1930s, if war came, it was widely anticipated that aerial bombing of towns and cities would be part of it.
Consequently, as soon as the Munich Crisis hit, in 1938, most of the stained glass in the Cathedral was removed and placed in storage within the confines of St Gabriel’s Chapel, in the western crypt. Plain glass or panelled blanks were put in their place. Such preparations proved to be very timely, in the small hours of June 1, 1942, when a number of high-explosive bombs fell on the precincts. The resultant blast blew in many of the windows, as the first picture makes dramatically clear. Note the barrage balloon, which is probably the one stationed at the Simon Langton Schools at the Whitefriars. The precious panels of stained glass were not finally restored in their rightful places until the early 1950s.
In the second photo, the Cathedral’s 100-year-old master glazier, Samuel Caldwell, and his assistant, holds up the last panel to be restored, in the south west transept’s main window.