Overlooked Britain
Edinburgh’s glass menagerie lucinda lambton The Victorian stained glass in the Café Royal dazzled me – and the Everly Brothers
Ballantine, had been one of the first Many are the minutes – even hours – artists to revive the art of glass-painting. that I have sat in contemplative wonder, In 1845, he published Stained Glass, looking at the fragments of the first Showing Its Applicability to Every Style stained-glass window in the country, if of Architecture. not the world, dating from 670 AD. Also greatly enhancing the Café Royal The window is hard by the centre of Sunderland, within the walls of St Peter’s – founded, incidentally, in 1863 as a showroom for gas and sanitary fittings Church, Monkwearmouth, County – is a wealth of Royal Doulton’s ceramic Durham, one of the most important tiled portraits, all lit by gilded Anglo-Saxon churches in the country. If chandeliers. HURRAY! They were created you dwell on what was subsequently to to celebrate many of Scotland’s greatest be produced with this glowingly innovators. Here is Robert Stephenson, translucent art, you are quite floored ‘father of the railways’, in his workshop. with delight. Gleaming with distinction, they were With stained glass being associated designed by John Eyre and painted by most generally with the Church for well Katherine Sturgeon and W J Nunn. over 1,000 years, I find it particularly appealing in a secular light. What about All produced by Doulton, they were the shock-a-second sight of the excellent already famed nationwide, from the and elegant crowd of Victorian notables moment they went on show at the 1886 and sportsmen, portrayed in both stained Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, glass and tiled tableaux, at the Café Royal held on Edinburgh’s meadows. Seven in Edinburgh. more renowned figures of the day shine There are two bars – the Oyster and forth: Benjamin Franklin, Michael the Royal Circle – both replete with quite Faraday, Robert Stephenson (for calico exhaustingly distinguished decoration. printing), William Caxton, George The more I think of them, the more I Stephenson, James Watt and Robert Peel. marvel at their brilliant survival – by a I have a strangely happy memory of whisker, I may say, in that in the 1960s Edinburgh’s Café Royal; of making a film they were doomed to be replaced by there for the BBC about the Great North Woolworths. Objections were rife and Road. Delighting in showing off the rampant, eliciting an enraged petition of sights from London to Edinburgh, we some 8,700 signatures, and the building decided, as a grand finale, to finish our was saved. journey with, of all people, the Everly Staring at you from on high at the Café Brothers. Decades earlier, I had met Royal, among the life-size stained-glass them on the Flying Scotsman, along with figures who march forth while Buddy Holly’s Crickets, when we had illuminating your splendid situation, the played and sung the night away in a 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 Dream, dream, dream: Lambton and firm of glass-stainers. Its founder, James Phil Everly, Piccadilly Circus, 1960 84 The Oldie October 2021
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
