Overlooked Britain
An ecclesiastical wall painting honouring a robin; what could be more beguilingly unexpected? Yet there it is, tiny and jewel-like, to be found in Dorset, behind the somewhat chaste exterior – with its spectacularly rich interior – of Wimborne St Giles Church.
Many are the characters who, in one way or another, have been connected to this delightful little conceit. Wimborne St Giles was built circa 1514 by Anthony Ashley and thereafter has been under the guidance of his descendants; colourful characters all, including three heroic Earls of Shaftesbury.
In the 1600s, another Anthony was the first to introduce the cabbage to England; to remind us, there are proud carvings of the vegetable on the church monuments. He also clung on for dear life to a huge diamond that he had captured in Cadiz, withstanding the persistent claims of Queen Elizabeth I that it should be hers.
Yet another Anthony Ashley came next, the 3rd Earl, who was the pupil and lifelong friend of John Locke. Considered one of the most important philosophers of his day, this Lord Shaftesbury made his name praising the good of mankind: ‘To love the Publicke, to study universal Good, and to promote the Interest of the whole World, as far as lies within our power, is surely the Height of Goodness’. His grandson Anthony Ashley Cooper was made the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury and was later to find fame as a parliamentarian for the extent of his philanthrophy: advocating school for all, as well as the abolition of child labour, and for his role in the founding of Great Ormond Street Hospital.
He is commemorated by the ‘Eros’ statue in Piccadilly Circus, which was designed to be aiming at Wimborne St
Giles. The current Earl – the 12th, Nicholas Shaftesbury – has done much to restore neighbouring St Giles House, including the addition of a splendid silver copy of ‘Eros’ in the garden, which aims
back towards London. The two statues are, in fact, of Anteros – the god of requited love, as opposed to Eros, god of sensual love and desire.
Lord Shaftesbury inherited in 2005, aged only 25, in tragic circumstances. His father was murdered by his third wife’s brother. And, six months later, his older brother died of a heart attack at only 27.
When the church was rebuilt in 1732, the purity of classicism was decreed to be the order of the day, to be designed by the bringing-a-smile-to-your-lips Bastard brothers, renowned for their West Country buildings. They created a neoclassical tower and nave in greensand ashlar in 1732, and very pretty it is, too. What, though, of the robins? The next architectural step had been taken in 1887, when the church was Gothicised by the noted Victorian architect G F Bodley. In the midst of his work, with the building open to the skies, two robins nested to the south of the high altar. All activity was stopped and, for some weeks, the workmen took care not to disturb the birds, taking up their work again only after the fledglings had flown.
The robin, after all, with the blood of Christ on its breast, from having plucked at the crown of thorns on the road to Calvary, has long been thought of as a sacred bird, and the nesting was seen as a good omen for the rebuilding of the church.
The workmen put the nest in a jar, along with an account of what had happened and built the nest into the wall.
Twenty years later, there was a fire, and Bodley’s pupil, the architect Sir Ninian Comper, was called in to repair the damage and make various additions of his own.
Once again, it happened that two robins nested south of the altar and, once again, it was decided to build their nest into the church walls. It was only then, when concealing the second nest, that they found the first, having known nothing of what had gone before.
Hence the memorial, with this oddest of coincidences being recorded in fancy Gothic script: ‘Here, while the respond to the arcade of AD 1887 was building, a robin nested again during the building of the new arcade after the fire of 1908.’ Judging from the quality of the decoration and from the fact that it is dated 1908, when Comper was working on the church, this memorial must surely be designed by the great architect himself; most particularly as gilding was his forte.
One of the last great Gothic Revivalists, Comper built 15 churches and restored many more with purist, medieval methods. His depth of research made him the designer par excellence of church furnishings as well of stained glass windows, most particularly those of the abbots and kings in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey.
Later, passionately believing that 20th-century church architecture should reach ‘unity by inclusion’, he strove to create a fusion of styles – first tried out at Wimborne St Giles, where influence from the French Renaissance was built into the amalgam of the Gothic and the classical.
He made many a splendid addition to Wimborne St Giles but the wall painting of the robin, with its frame of gilded Jacobethan strapwork around his elaborate Gothic lettering, was the plum in his rich architectural pie.
I fear that, what with one thing and another, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, in his The Buildings of England guide to Dorset, described all the decoration to be ‘Comper at his most wilful’.