Edinburgh’s Café Royal
The Victorian stained glass in the Café Royal dazzled me – and the Everly Brothers
Many are the minutes – even hours – that I have sat in contemplative wonder, looking at the fragments of the first stained-glass window in the country, if not the world, dating from 670 AD.
The window is hard by the centre of Sunderland, within the walls of St Peter’s Church, Monkwearmouth, County Durham, one of the most important Anglo-saxon churches in the country. If you dwell on what was subsequently to be produced with this glowingly translucent art, you are quite floored with delight.
With stained glass being associated most generally with the Church for well over 1,000 years, I find it particularly appealing in a secular light. What about the shock-a-second sight of the excellent and elegant crowd of Victorian notables and sportsmen, portrayed in both stained glass and tiled tableaux, at the Café Royal in Edinburgh.
There are two bars – the Oyster and the Royal Circle – both replete with quite exhaustingly distinguished decoration. The more I think of them, the more I marvel at their brilliant survival – by a whisker, I may say, in that in the 1960s they were doomed to be replaced by Woolworths. Objections were rife and rampant, eliciting an enraged petition of some 8,700 signatures, and the building was saved.
Staring at you from on high at the Café Royal, among the life-size stained-glass figures who march forth while illuminating your splendid situation, the cricketer and rugby player have particular grace. The mustachioed, brown-coated angler is at work, assembling his bait with beautifully elegant fingers. The pink-coated huntsman stands with his whip at the ready, while the tam-o’shantered huntsman, who has just felled a stag, is inspecting his gun.
These characters were all created by Ballantine and Gardiner, an Edinburgh firm of glass-stainers. Its founder, James Ballantine, had been one of the first artists to revive the art of glass-painting. In 1845, he published Stained Glass, Showing Its Applicability to Every Style of Architecture.
Also greatly enhancing the Café Royal – founded, incidentally, in 1863 as a showroom for gas and sanitary fittings – is a wealth of Royal Doulton’s ceramic tiled portraits, all lit by gilded chandeliers. HURRAY! They were created to celebrate many of Scotland’s greatest innovators. Here is Robert Stephenson, ‘father of the railways’, in his workshop. Gleaming with distinction, they were designed by John Eyre and painted by Katherine Sturgeon and W J Nunn.
All produced by Doulton, they were already famed nationwide, from the moment they went on show at the 1886 Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, held on Edinburgh’s meadows. Seven more renowned figures of the day shine forth: Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Robert Stephenson (for calico printing), William Caxton, George Stephenson, James Watt and Robert Peel.
I have a strangely happy memory of Edinburgh’s Café Royal; of making a film there for the BBC about the Great North Road. Delighting in showing off the sights from London to Edinburgh, we decided, as a grand finale, to finish our journey with, of all people, the Everly Brothers. Decades earlier, I had met them on the Flying Scotsman, along with Buddy Holly’s Crickets, when we had played and sung the night away in a first-class sleeping car! Of all happy coincidences, the Everlys were to be in Edinburgh that same night.
Thus it was that Phil and Don Everly, the famed duo from Nashville, Tennessee, were there to delight in the Victorian stained-glass windows of Edinburgh. As I’ve been writing this, Don Everly has, sadly, died, at 84. Phil died in 2014, aged 74.
While we are in the Scottish capital, we must rest a while longer to admire the mournfully beautiful stained-glass window that once enhanced the Cottars Howff – Scots for a favourite meeting place – the public house at 21 Rose Street. Now permanently closed, with the great window gone, it must be written about before it is forgotten.
It was enormous, in three sections, showing a sorry scene from the Crimean War: an ashen-faced Black Watch soldier is breathing his last, in the arms of a heavily mustachioed and busby-wearing comrade. Sporrans flourished, they are surrounded by tartan-kilted allies in brilliantly accurate, red uniforms. Side panels showed the names of the battles in which their regiments fought.
There are secular subjects in ecclesiastical settings, too, such as the delicate little 16th-century dancing wren, about to catch a spider in a cobweb, in York Minster’s Zouche Chapel.
Then there is the unique portrayal of Queen Victoria wearing specs and in a wheelchair, in a window in St Mary’s Church, Hook, Yorkshire. Surrounded by medics and dignitaries, she is in hospital, presenting daffodils to soldiers wounded in the Boer War. A wan recipient lies in bed.
A beautiful series of windows of the Gloucestershire countryside was designed to commemorate the life of the composer and poet Ivor Gurney, in Gloucester Cathedral.
Sandwiched between medieval fragments and plain-glass Gothicry, the windows glow through morning, noon and night, alive with the romance of his poems about his beloved county.
Commissioned in 1913, they have
many a poetic figure roaming by, enjoying Gurney’s favourite aspects of the place.
The First World War comes to poignant life in stained-glass windows all over the country. Horses heave forth great guns in Radley College Chapel, Oxfordshire, while uniformed soldiers kneel to receive Holy Communion at Coldharbour, Surrey, against the backdrop of ravaged landscape beyond the bombed walls of the church.
The National Inventory of War Memorials in London’s Imperial War Museum lists 3,000 stained-glass memorials. Some 1,800 relating to the First World War are mostly in churches.
A window in St George’s Church, Windmill Hill, Enfield, has the mournful sight of a dead soldier with his hand lightly laid on the foot of a crucified Christ, whose head is amidst the clouds. Both figures are swirled about with waves of green and purple, as if in a vision.
The wonder of stained glass being ‘alive’, via the simple virtue of the ever changing weather outside, along with the complex mixture of emotions evoked by war, gives glass war memorials a most particular poignancy.