Southwell Minster: England's most mysterious cathedral?

How it's pronounced is the least interesting thing about Southwell. For what it's worth, one of my history teachers came from the town and said Suthull not South-well, so I do too. But just as in Shrewsbury, it doesn't matter.

The video is right: Southwell Minster is one of England's least well-known cathedrals, but it's one of the finest. We don't even get to see it's glory: the medieval stone carving ("The Leaves of Southwell") in the Chapter House. Look below for an example.

And it's a fine little town. I believe that when the Minster became a cathedral in 1884, Southwell was legally a village and so could not become a city. The local football club refuses to be distracted by such technicalities and calls itself Southwell City.

Call for Southwell's importance to Byron to be recognised

From BBC News:

Geoffrey Bond often imagines Lord Byron "looking down" as he sits in what was once the 19th Century poet's former bedroom.

The 85-year-old has lived in Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, for 33 years - where Byron stayed with his mother between 1803 and 1808, before rising to fame in 1812.

While Newstead Abbey is more famously known as Byron's ancestral home, Mr Bond believes his beginnings in Southwell have been overlooked.

Mr Bond has dedicated decades to his fascination and love for Byron and his work and now says he wants Byron's beginnings in the town to get due recognition.

And here is Burgage Manor, one of many fine houses in a town that also boast England's least known cathedral.

Alfred Rawlinson wins Bishop of the Day

Impressive though this headline from the Lancashire Evening Post (Tuesday 27 October 1953) is, it's his Wikipedia entry that has won Alfred Rawlinson, the second ever Bishop of Derby* (1936-59), this new award:

As an outstandingly biblical scholar, Rawlinson’s name appeared for several more senior bishoprics and, although he had the support of successive archbishops, his name was not forwarded to the Crown with the Prime Minister’s recommendation for appointment. The Prime Minister was the key figure in such appointments and Rawlinson was considered for vacancies at London in 1939, Bath and Wells in 1945 and Lincoln and Salisbury in 1946. 

The problem was that although Rawlinson’s academic prowess was greatly admired, his personal relationships, especially with his clergy, caused considerable concern. In 1945, for example, in recommending Rawlinson for Bath and Wells, Archbishop Fisher justified the translation because of Rawlinson’s reputation in Derby. ‘He dislikes his own Diocese and I don’t think they like him’.

* Before 1927, the Diocese of Derby was part of the Diocese of Southwell. 

The glorious medieval leaves of Southwell Minster

Southwell Minster is at once one of England's least known cathedrals and one of its finest.

Its glory is the wonderful medieval stone carving of leaves, green men and more in the chapter house.

This video by Allan Barton gives a brief introduction to both the building and its carvings.

Football Club Name of the Day: Southwell City FC

Bob Hardy, the late Bishop of Lincoln, once described his diocese as "two thousand square miles of bugger all". But it used to be even bigger. In 1837 it reached as far south as Hertfordshire.

In the same year, the Archdeaconry of Nottingham was transferred to Lincoln from York. In 1884 it became a diocese in its own right with Southwell Minster as its cathedral.

But Southwell has never been a city, even though the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica described it as one.

According to the Wikipedia article on city status in the United Kingdom it was not made one in 1884 because it was a village without a borough corporation and therefore could not petition the Queen.

That article is an entertaining rabbit hole, incidentally. You will learn that Rochester lost its city status in the 1990s because it failed to react nimbly enough to the endless local government reorganisations we ow go in for.

But the point of this article is to salute the chutzpah, or whatever its Nottinghamshire equivalent is, of the local football team, which has always played as Southwell City. 

The club's website (sort of) explains:

Southwell City was formed in 1893 and plays its football on the Memorial Ground in the shadow of the magnificent Norman Minister which became a Cathedral just prior to the club’s formation. Hence the name Southwell City, despite the fact that City status has never officially been conferred on the market town.

Good for it!

Is the question of city status closed? Southwell may not have been a borough in the 1880s, but it does have an active town council now. And if it were the smallest city in England, taking the title from Wells, that would surely attract visitors and boost its economy.

If this were an old British film, there would be a meeting of townsfolk about this continued slight and a spirited girl would get up and say "Come on! What are we waiting for?"

A new edition of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Leaves of Southwell

The excellent Five Leaves Books of Nottingham - you'll find their shop in an alley near the Council House - have brought out a new edition of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Leaves of Southwell.

Gillian Darley, who contributed an introduction, writes in the London Review of Books:

Pevsner, whose name is inescapably attached to the Buildings of England, seems to have begun work on this little volume very soon after he was released from internment and had begun to pick up the pieces of academic life in Britain. Although published in 1945, it was probably written in 1942.

The text is a celebration of the naturalistic carvings of Southwell Minster, the work of itinerant craftsmen, whose subtle stylistic differences Pevsner happily puzzles over: ‘The individual craftsman,’ he writes, ‘must have had a considerable amount of personal liberty.’

Read the whole piece to learn how David Attenborough was involved with the original 1945 edition.

Recent discoveries about Vaughan Wilkins

When I gave talks on blogging I suggested that one use of a blog is as a writer's notebook. You can upload as much of your research as you choose and link it all together.

If you are lucky, your readers will help out - for an example see the comments on a post about my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold.

So here are my latest discoveries about the now obscure historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins. If this post is not for you, try my latest Joy of Six or listen to Scott Walker as a 15-year-old.

First I have found a sketch of Vaughan Wilkins in his days as chief sub-editor on the Daily Express by Collie Knox. And pretty fearsome he founds - this is the more attractive part:

Second, I have found on Twitter that Vaughan Wilkins was the great grandson of William Wilkins, the architect of the National Gallery.

Third, the Wilkins family contained clergymen, including Vaughan Wilkins' own father, as well as a famous architect. William Wilkins' younger brother George Wilkins was a canon at Southwell Minster.

So it's interestting that I have recently noticed that his first book, And So - Victoria, contains at least three references to Southwell Minster.

The most substantial of them, from chapter 12, runs:

It was on the road back from their Northern tour that they next heard of her. They had come slowly from Carlisle into Nottinghamshire, where Setoun had an old small house of red brick in the minster town of Southwell. The shadow of a grey tower fell across the high-walled lawn, and the rooms were full of the clangour of bells at noon and eventide - so full that they seemed to hum with the deep music long afterwards, as conch-shells echo with the sea.

Fourth, though my discovery of Vaughan Wilkins stems from And So - Victoria being a Book at Bedtime in the autumn of 1976, I have found that it was dramatised by the BBC back in 1962.

The hero as a boy was played by Martin Stephens, now famous from The Innocents and Village of the Damned.

Backlash against plan to rebrand Southwell Minster

Southwell Minster is a cathedral and one of my very favourite ones. 

It has been a cathedral since the Diocese of Southwell, covering Nottinghamshire and part of South Yorkshire, was carved out of Lincoln in 1884. But it is still called a minster, not a cathedral.

It has never bothered anyone in York that the second most important cathedral in the country is always called York Minster, but in Nottinghamshire they worry about such things.

In 2005 the diocese was rechristened the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham and now it wants to rebrand Southwell Minster.

On Monday an online survey was posted asking people to choose between four new names for it:

• Southwell Minster Cathedral, Nottingham
• Southwell Minster, the Cathedral Church of Nottingham
• Southwell Cathedral, Nottingham
• Southwell Minster Cathedral, serving the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham

The survey disappeared after a few hours and BBC News quotes Dean Nicola Sullivan:

"We should have started with our near community and stakeholders before putting it on the Wild West of social media.

"But the fact that people have these views on it just confirms what I've known since I started here - people really care and want the best for it."

My advancing age make me resistant to change, but even if you see the case for it none of those names will really do. Some are too much of a mouthful, some make it sound as though Southwell is in Nottingham, some do both.

So here's a suggestion. Change the second proposed name to 'Southwell Minster, the Cathedral Church of Nottinghamshire' and adopt that.

The authorities can put it on their letterheads and compliments slips and everyone else can go on calling it Southwell Minster.

A walk along the railway from Farnsfield to Southwell

This is a well-made video of a walk along the abandoned railway between Farnsfield and Southwell in Nottinghamshire.

I once visited Farnsfield to photograph the grave of an obscure writer and I have known and loved Southwell and its cathedral for most of my life.

You can see my own photos of Southwell station and the huge mill beside it on this blog.

I caught the bus from Southwell to Farnsfield, but it looks an attractive walk with some relics of the railway left to enjoy.

And I do agree it would make a great heritage railway, ideally running as far as Rolleston to connect with Nottingham to Lincoln trains.

Meanwhile, they question of how to pronounce 'Southwell' remains unanswered.

The Southwell branch in colour (1956)

A little bit of Nottinghamshire railway goodness, with Caudwell's Mill very much in evidence at Southwell station.

This passenger shuttle from Rolleston Junction lasted until 1959 and goods services until 1964.

A tour of Southwell Minster: Mythical creatures, green men, animals of the forest

While we are all isolating ourselves, videos like this are close to unbearable.

Next year at the Saracen's Head.

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"There is an excellent commitment to show Blake’s work as it originally came to an audience, not just in framed works hanging on a wall." Philip Hensher visits Tate Britain's William Blake exhibition.

Janine Moore admires Southwell Minster.

John Betjeman visits Southwell Minster

This programme was broadcast in the BBC Radio series Choirs and Places where they Sing in 1967.

The first six minutes feature John Betjeman celebrating the town and its minster. This is followed by a performance by the minster choir.

Southwell Minster from above in 1950

Southwell, which dominates its small town, is perhaps England's least known cathedral, but it's certainly one of its most remarkable.

Next to it stand the ruins of the Archbishop of York's palace, with the Edwardian residence for the Bishops of Southwell built among them.

Southwell Methodist Church

I had been to Southwell several times without discovering its Methodist church.

To find it you have to dive down an alley, Prebend Passage, in the centre of town.

I can't find anything about the building's history on its own website, but you can read its Listing on the Historic England site. It dates from 1839.

Vaughan Wilkins' grave in Farnsfield churchyard

There is nothing quite as forgotten as a forgotten writer. Yet as I once blogged:

The historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins must have had a huge following in the 1950s. At one time every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of Fanfare for a Witch. 

For that reason, almost as a joke in fact, I started collecting his other books. Now I even have a couple of signed first editions.

I could have added that one of his books was filmed as Dangerous Exile in 1957 and that everyone wanted to film his first one, And So -Victoria, after its huge success on publication in 1937.

But that idea met with resistance from the Royal Family as it dealt with sex and violence among Queen Victoria's wicked uncles as they battled for the succession to the throne of England.

There is not much detail in Vaughan Wilkins' Wikipedia entry, but I recall reading in a reference book years ago is that he was editing a minor Fleet Street newspaper when he was still in his twenties.

One thing that does make Wikipedia is his place of burial: Farnsfield in Nottinghamshire. And finding that there was a bus there from Southwell yesterday, I knew what I had to do.

Farnsfield is a large and prosperous village - large and prosperous enough to support a range of shops - but its church turned out to have been wholly rebuilt by the Victorians.

Knowing more or less when Wilkins died, I looked for graves from around that date and soon found his.

It gave his place of residence (not his place of birth as Wikipedia wrongly has it) as Duxmere, Ross-on-Wye - Dennis Potter was to move there a few years later.

Anyone who has read Wilkins' books knows that he strongly identified with Wales and the Border. One of those first editions I own is inscribed by Wilkins himself:

'From a frequenter of Tenby to another.'

However, two Wilkins held the living at Farnsfield in the 19th century and there are other connections with the family in the church and on a page about its history.

Perhaps the pull of family was too strong or perhaps, being dead, he did not get much say in the matter.

One other point: if you have two first names and a surname that each have seven letters, it does make for a neat inscription.

Later. I must have been very focused on Wilkins when I wrote this: it looks a fine church.

Southwell Minster: Balm for the soul

My  mother is elderly and frail, which has (though I don't live with her) led me to the catastrophising conclusion that something terrible will happen if I leave Market Harborough.

In am effort to refute that theory I visited Southwell and its minster in Nottinghamshire yesterday and stayed the night.

It appears to have worked, but then Southwell takes me that way. I am not a Christian, but if anywhere makes me wish I was it is Southwell Minster.

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Philip Wilkinson celebrates The Leaves of Southwell.

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Safeguarding the Leaves of Southwell

Southwell Minister in Nottinghamshire is one of England's finest cathedrals and perhaps its least known.

The stone carvings in the Chapter House are its glory. In 1945 they were the subject of a short book by Nikolaus Pevsner with photographs by F.L. Attenborough, the principal of University College, Leicester and father of Sir Dickie and Sir David.

Now The Leaves of Southwell project is seeking to safeguard them for the future:

The fluid carvings of plants, animals and green men found within the Chapter House - known collectively as ‘The Leaves of Southwell’ - are of quite exceptional quality and regarded as the best example of 13th century naturalistic carving in the United Kingdom. An example of global importance currently at risk. Seventy years since Pevsner wrote his booklet, they deserve fresh appreciation. 

They need protection from leaking roofs and lack appropriate heating and environmental controls. In addition, with modern lighting (there is none at present) and an imaginative interpretation scheme, the Leaves of Southwell can be made much more accessible and widely known to future generations. It is our belief that they represent not only wonderful heritage but also an extraordinary resource today.  

We're delighted that the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded us an initial grant of £352,697 to develop the project in a way that will protect, interpret and better present the medieval carvings. 

A further grant of £2.2m to implement our plans is contingent on the success of the development phase. Thanks to generous pledges and gifts we are but £180,000 short of target.

The film above will tell you more about the project and the appeal of the carvings,

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"Before visiting, I’d had no idea that this wonderful building even existed." Flickering Lamps discovers Southwell Minster, one of England's finest - and least known - cathedrals.