Salisbury Cathedral’s greatest stonemason
SIR – One of the more remarkable stonemasons at Salisbury Cathedral (Features, April 17) was William Osmond.
Appointed in 1818, aged only 28,
he worked into his seventies. As well as producing sculptural monuments at the cathedral and in many churches beyond, he sired 16 children. He is buried with five of them in the Cloister Garth and memorialised by a tablet on the cloister wall – as is his eldest son, who was also a cathedral mason.
As talented in music as in the craft of masonry, he became a lay vicar and once “played the fiddle while seven couples of his children danced”. A claim that his daring younger brother once climbed the cathedral spire, sat astride its weather vane and turned himself round on it sounds apocryphal, however.
Peter Saunders
Salisbury, Wiltshire