OTHER NEWS

St. Pancras Old Church –links with Dorset

If you are waiting for a train at St. Pancras and you have time to kill, as we had recently, we recommend you look at the nearby St. Pancras Old Church. The current churchyard is quite small but, for those who do not know it, has some surprising and fascinating features. Here are a few you would come across.

The tree growing over a large pile of stacked gravestones it is known as the ‘Hardy Tree’. In the late 1800s, much of the original graveyard was converted to a goods yard as part of the expansion of the nearby railway. Thomas Hardy was employed by the architect as an overseer for managing the disinterment of the human remains.

There is a stone memorial to Mary Wollestonecraft, the campaigner for women’s rights, who died in 1797, just ten days after giving birth to a certain future authoress, Mary Shelley. (With the disruption of the railway, the family removed her and her husband’s actual remains to Bournemouth.)

There is also a magnificent mausoleum designed by Sir John Sloane, the celebrated architect of many well-known buildings, including the Bank of England.

The mausoleum was erected in 1816 after his wife Elizabeth’s death and entombs his wife and son as well as Sloane himself. It was interesting to read that the central domed structure influenced Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design of the K2 and subsequent telephone kiosks. The mausoleum is one of only two Grade 1 listed monuments in London (the other being Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate). And don’t forget to visit the church itself!

Ian Wood

Stanchester Quire

Stanchester Quire is a community choir which I set up some 27 years ago. We draw members from Somerset, Dorset and Devon. The essence of a community choir is that there is no audition, no requirement to read music and no experience is necessary, just a desire to sing with other people. Our choir is unique in that we specialise in songs from the southwest of England.

Our next practice season starts on Monday 5 September. We meet at 7.30pm in the David Hall in South

Petherton and we warmly welcome new members. It may seem a long way off, but we will be learning and rehearsing songs for our programme of Christmas concerts. The music is exciting with strong rhythms and lovely harmonies. Some of it dates from the C.17th and is the sort of music that was sung in village churches across the southwest.

If you’d like more information, please get in touch.

Eddie Upton

07813 089002 upton.eddie@gmail.com

Yetminster Group of Artists at Chetnole Mill

Dorset Art Weeks 2022 Venue 8

We would like to thank all those who supported our exhibition at Chetnole Mill. Thanks to everyone's generosity, we hope to send more than £1000 to the Save the Children Fund for the Refugee Crisis. Final accounts will show in the September magazine as donations are still coming.

Bee Grant Peterkin and Melita Frances Moule

Eccentric Vicars! (2)

Most people will have heard of Spoonerisms (transposing the first letters of words in a phrase, e.g. a well boiled icicle) but not everyone may know how the term ‘spoonerism’ came about.

Well, you might have guessed from the title of this piece that an eccentric vicar was involved. The vicar in question was William Spooner and, once again, we are indebted to Fergus Butler-Gallie’s book ‘A Field Guide to the English Clergy’ for the information. William was born in London in 1844 and had an interesting condition which, although he turned out to be a brilliant scholar (excelling in Greek literature and philosophy), caused his mind to muddle things up. Despite this, he was made Dean of New College, Oxford, eventually becoming the Warden; it was here that he once formed a poor opinion of a lazy student, stating that he had, ’tasted two worms’! Muddling up words became an endearing trait and caused much amusement in Oxford. For instance, having been ordained in in 1875, he is reported to have announced the hymn ‘Kinkering Congs their Titles Take,’ and referring to Jesus as a ‘shoving leopard’. It wasn’t only words that got muddled up though; once at a college dinner the salt cellar got knocked over, spilling salt across the tablecloth. William, without giving it too much thought, immediately poured the red contents of his wineglass over it. The well-known remedy for spilt red wine is salt, but it doesn’t necessarily work in reverse! Some of the stories of his sayings may be apocryphal and we can’t be absolutely sure if he actually did propose a toast at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee to the ‘Queer old Dean,’ but he did apparently muddle people up and once asked an old college member, “Was it you who was killed in the Great War, or was it your brother?” William died in 1930 at the ripe old age of 86 and having been part of New College life for over 60 years; the College commissioned a large portrait of him Spooner as caricatured which still hangs proudly in the Hall today. by Spy (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, April 1898 Geoff Goater 53