Christian England St. Mary’s Church, Huntingfield
Christina Linton finds this small Suffolk church holds a marvellous secret . . .
THE best time to visit St Mary’s Church is on a dull day when all is quiet. The small flint and stone building in Huntingfield in mid Suffolk appears to be a typical modest village church. Go in, and its simple whitewashed walls and robust wooden pews give little away.
But slip a pound into the meter opposite the door and a set of spotlights blaze up and the church explodes into a mass of colour and pattern. Suffolk’s Sistine Chapel, it has been called, and the sheer exuberance of the painted and gilded wooden ceiling is extraordinary.
What is amazing about this ceiling, though, apart from its visual glory, is that this magnificent riot of gilded biblical verse, apostles, angels, saints and the symbols of Christ’s passion was painted not by a team of trained craftsmen, but by one woman.
Mildred Holland, the rector’s wife, did this work single-handed. An amateur artist, she started painting the ceiling in the chancel when she was forty-seven and, taking a break in the middle, she finally finished when she was sixty and thought to be riddled with arthritis and no longer able to climb her ladder up to the roof.
Looking at the detail in the richly decorated ceiling, it’s difficult to imagine that it didn’t take three times as long to paint it.
David Burrows is church Treasurer and married to church warden Linda Berry.
“This is a unique church,” he explains. “No other church has anything like it and it draws many fascinated visitors each year.”
Indeed, on a dull Thursday in mid-september two women were there from the US, along with a family from the
UK looking to trace an ancestor, and a couple who had taken a day off from apple-picking in nearby Debenham.
Mildred Holland arrived with her husband William at the rectory in the autumn of 1848 after William had waited for eight years to take up his post as vicar of Huntingfield and Crookley.
He came from a wealthy family of Lincolnshire potato farmers and his trust fund would have paid for his “living” at the church. This had been arranged with the diocese of Norwich, and the Hollands had to wait for the incumbent rector to give up his post – which he eventually did by dying aged ninety, having been rector at Huntingfield for 68 years.
The Hollands didn’t bide their time while they waited for the post to become vacant in the UK, though. The newlyweds, who were distant cousins, went on an extended eight-year honeymoon of Europe, Russia, Morocco and Asia Minor.
“Think of the wonderful places that they would have been to. I’m fairly sure she would have been influenced by Russian and Greek Orthodoxy and Classic Italian,” David says.
It was 11 years before Mildred began her decoration of the roof. During that time, William, possessed of a considerable inheritance, is thought to have replaced the
thatched and rotting roof with tiles and wood in a hammer-beam construction, the hammer beams ending in carved angels.
He also bought the church pews, with their elegantly carved ends featuring lions, collared greyhounds and the four beasts of the Evangelists, among various saints. The windows, too, were renewed – the stained-glass arched window over the altar donated by Lady Huntingfield in memory of her husband, Joshua, who had died in 1844.
As William’s generosity is to be richly praised, so should his willingness to defy the convention of the time be celebrated.
Allowing his wife – that silent pillar of the community who should be modestly visiting the sick and the needy – to scale ladders and boards in trousers and painstakingly decorate every last inch of ceiling would have given rise to gossip and grumbling, and almost certainly ridicule, even if she was doing it for the greater glory of the Lord.
Mildred started painting the chancel roof in September 1859, finishing in April 1860. In essence this was the easier part of the roof, split into 12 large panels in which Mildred painted angels carrying either a scroll with the words of the canticle: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel”, or the emblems of the Passion: the cross, the hammer and nails, the scourge, the lance, the crown of thorns and the reed.
While her mentor, in the shape of architect Edward Blackburne FSA – an expert on medieval decoration who had supervised the renovations at a nearby church in Southwold – had perhaps been her sounding board, and tradesmen provided the scaffolding and prepared the ceiling for painting, she didn’t get any hands-on help with the work.
Through the winter she would have worked at a vertiginous height in freezing conditions by candlelight as the daylight faded early.
“There was no formal teaching of art for girls growing up in that time. Not only was Mildred a great natural artist, she also had other extraordinary talents,” David says. “She showed herself to be brilliant at logistics and planning. She was also a fantastic calligrapher – we’ve had signwriters and calligraphers who have visited the church and have said how accomplished she was.
“Finally, she was a brilliant gilder and got through 250 books of real gold leaf, painstakingly applied with egg white and lifted into place using a single badger’s hair. She quite literally designed everything you see.”
The roof was unveiled and a write-up appeared in “The Engineer’s And Architect’s Journal” for Easter 1860. It noted the general improvements to the arches, stone columns and windows and a new pavement in “black and red Staffordshire tiles”, as well as Mildred’s
decoration. “The roof and ceiling also is being very handsomely and appropriately illuminated in gold and colour by the hands of Mrs Holland, the talented wife of the rector . . . This portion of the work promises to be a very attractive and successful application of colour to the internal decoration of the church.”
The nave was then painted between 1863 and 1866, with the church closed and the villagers walking to nearby Crookley for worship.
William made a note in 1866: “Scaffolding finally down, September 1st”, and his final accounts show that between 1859 and 1882 he spent a total of £2,034.10s on the restoration of the church. This included £16.7s.6d for 225 books of gold leaf plus £72 for colours, which would have been mineral paints ordered from a specialist in London.
The angels which line the church on both sides and offer crowns and banners were thought to have been put there for Mildred to paint, having been carved locally by Will Spall.
“They are just too perfect to have been medieval,” Linda explains.
Mildred lived another 12 years, dying at the age of seventy-two in 1878. William remarried three years later and, deciding that there was nothing to mark who had painted this extraordinary ceiling, he commissioned the impressive brass eagle lectern in the chancel, inscribed with her name.
He then set about commissioning a grander tribute to Mildred in the form of a spectacular carved wooden font cover.
Inspired by the famous font cover in the Church at Ufford, 20 miles away, the cover is not just a thing of great beauty, but also a feat of Victorian engineering, as it is telescopic.
William remained at the church until 1892 and is now buried in the graveyard with his wife to the west of the entrance gates.
In 2005 a Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the ceiling to be cleaned and conserved and this spectacular masterpiece was spruced up over a five-week period, restoring the colours to the vibrancy of Mildred’s time as well as whitewashing the church walls.
“I’ve been the church warden here for six years. I come in and out the whole time and I’m always finding something new in the roof,” Linda says.
Christmas is a particularly atmospheric time at Huntingfield as an evening service of carols takes place under candlelight, but visit at any time of year and you are guaranteed a treat.
St Mary’s, The Street, Huntingfield, Halesworth IP19 0PR