Blues and the chapel pianist

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I think it was 1969 when I bought "King of the Delta Blues Singers" by Robert Johnson, a collection of acoustic blues recorded in the 1930s. And it was probably two years later, in 1971, that I bought the newly issued "King of the Delta Blues Singers Vol. II". These were 33rpm L.P.s with paintings of Robert Johnson on the front. The first album showed him from above. The second had an illustration of him playing his guitar in front of a microphone that was positioned in the corner of the living room of a house. Comprehensive cover notes (of a kind that died with the advent of the CD) said that, despite his wonderful song-writing ability and great guitar playing, he was incurably shy and reticent about recording and would only perform without making eye contact with anyone.

I was reminded of this illustration recently when we visited Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire. This stately home is in the care of the National Trust and features, among many splendours, a private chapel with interesting trompe l'oeil paintings. When we visited it we were entertained by a pianist who was sitting at his instrument facing the wall at one end of the chapel. I don't think he suffered from the performance terrors that afflicted Robert Johnson because between pieces he was chatting to visitors. However, it did look odd and it appeared somewhat unkind that he should be so positioned. Perhaps it was his choice to avoid the distractions of the steady stream of visitors.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f4.9
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Newly painted

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I've heard it argued that the white marble, limestone (and whitewash) of Mediterranean buildings, as well as reducing the impact of the sun, enhance the architecture of the buildings of ancient Greece and Roman; that the styles that arose, the ornament that developed and the massing that was adopted, came about, in part, because of the way the bright Mediterranean sun is able to throw such forms into sharp relief against their attendant shadows. Those who hold such views often advance in support of their argument the suggestion that the Gothic style developed in less brightly lit Northern Europe because it was more suited to the lower levels of sunlight. I've never found these arguments very convincing. Venetian Gothic, for example, looks just as sharp as Classical architecture under bright sunlight. Were Gothic cathedrals painted white they would look sharper still.

Moreover, Classical styles in Northern Europe, when seen under clear blue skies, show similar qualities to Mediterranean examples. I thought this a couple of days ago when I passed the Classically-styled Methodist church in Bourne, Lincolnshire. It was newly painted white and positively shone in the sunlight, the shadows of its pilasters, pediment and architrave looking like they were drawn with a ruler. Quite a contrast, in fact, to the surrounding, unadorned, bricks and mortar.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 23mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
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Private schools and song thrushes

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The other day I walked past the scene shown in this photograph and fell to thinking. My first thought centred on the song thrush that was singing its heart out from the top of a roadside tree even though it was ten minutes to eleven in the evening. Was this, I wondered, due to the fact that light remained in the sky or was it because of the street lights' illumination? Perhaps it was the combination of the two light sources that prompted its nocturnal canticle.

My second thought was one of despair. How long, I wondered, will our country have to suffer the dead weight of private education delivered by our so-called public schools? Is there no political party prepared to look at the clear evidence that private education not only impedes our country's economic progress through the values that it imparts, is one of the main causes of inequality that affects the rich every bit as much as the poor, and is a form of schooling that doesn't even deliver the educational goods that it professes to offer? One would imagine that a socialist party would give some thought to the issue, but no. You'd also think that parties of the right that espouse market values and a "survival of the fittest" culture would have no truck with a school system that produces students with inflated examination qualifications (see the link between average quality of university degree achieved by pupils of state and public schools with the same school examination grades), or that promotes advancement through socio-economic selection and networks rather than ability. But no, our private public schools continue to flog their wares to the well-heeled, the buyers and sellers profit, and the country continues to suffer from their self-interest.

The domed chapel shown in silhouette was completed in 1901. It serves Giggleswick School, "a co-educational boarding and day school", that charges fees to educate pupils. It is one of the many private educational establishments that I think our country would do well to dispense with for the better education and prosperity of all.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
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Focal Length: 37.1mm (100mm - 35mm equiv.)
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Prisons, Victorians and leaks

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I'ts often said that you can judge the level of civilization of a society by the way in which it treats animals. There's some truth in this. However, I think how prisoners are treated is a better indicator. One of the difficult things for a democracy to do is achieve an effective balance between deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation. Too often politicians, anxious for re-election, ignore what works and veer towards the populism of harsh retribution. There are cases where this kind of approach is necessary, but when it is used as a broad brush throughout the penal system it invariably fails. Prisoner numbers soar, gaols become schools of crime, re-offending rates are high and the cost of so many locked up people results in early release schemes to keep budgets under control. Supporters of this approach characterise prison education, training and supervision within the community as "soft" and ineffective: it isn't, and should be an integral part of any penal system that aims to keep society safe and reduce offending.

I was thinking about this when I visited the historic old prison in Lincoln Castle recently. This building was begun in 1785. Half of it remains, the rest having been knocked down to make way for a newer block of 1847-8 built on the more costly American "Separate" system with prisoners kept apart in individual cells. Prisoners were confined to their cells for 22 hours a day, working on menial tasks for at least 12 of those. Misbehaviour was punished by having to turn a crank or screw for hours on end, receiving food only when the machine's counter reached the required number of turns. When the prisoners were allowed out of their cells for exercise or to attend chapel they were made to wear a mask so that they couldn't recognise each other. In the chapel each seat had doors at either side so that conversation and sight of those nearby was impossible.

Reading about the harsh, probably illegal, and certainly inhumane treatment of the U.S. soldier who is alleged to have given classified information to Wikileaks it seemed to me that some politicians in our supposedly enlightened democracies (and I include the UK in that group) pine for the systems and treatment that their Victorian predecessors sanctioned. Thankfully, as we saw this week, we still have public officials who are prepared to stand up and describe this latter day barbarism for what it is.

My photograph of the cell shows the spartan nature of the Victorian accomodation (the loudspeakers played a commentary for visitors). The other two images show the chapel: the first was taken from the pulpit where the chaplain would have stood to preach, the second from the prisoners' point of view looking towards the pulpit. In both shots hooded models represent the prisoners.

photographs and text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
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South Chapel, St Lawrence, Evesham

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Today's photograph shows the south chapel of the church of St Lawrence in Evesham, Worcestershire. It was built in the early 1500s as a chantry, and today holds the building's font. It is a beautiful, well-lit space, with a fine fan-vaulted roof. The building is no longer in regular use and is in the care of The Churches Conservation Trust. It forms one of an interesting group of three medieval buildings in the centre of Evesham - the other two being the parish church of All Saints and the bell tower of the former abbey. The piece that follows tells something of the history of St Lawrence, and is a transcription of the text on a plaque in its porch.

"The first church built on this site was consecrated by the Bishop of St Asaph in 1295. No feature of this building remains except possibly the crucifixion panel on the north external wall of this porch. It was replaced by the existing Perpendicular building in 1470 and formed part of the conventual buildings of Evesham Abbey which was then the fifth richest in England. The church was erected for the use of the multitude of pilgrims who piously came to worship at the Abbey shrines throughout many years of storm and calm alike. Many diseases being prevalent in these times made it necessary to isolate them from the townsfolk, who exclusively used the adjoining parish Church of All Saints.The bodily needs of the pilgrims were catered for at the Abbey Almonry nearby which is still standing. The church had become sadly dilapidated and in 1730 an extensive and as it proved, disastrous reconstruction took place because owing to faulty construction and poor materials, the new roof collapsed before 1800. The church remained in ruins until 1837 when it was restored and reopened for divine worship in its present form. In 1957 a further minor restoration took place."

photograph and text (c) T.Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
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Methodist Church, Bourne

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Non-Conformist chapels and churches come in a greater variety of forms than their Church of England counterparts. The earliest seventeenth century examples, such as the Friends (Quaker) Meeting House, Settle, North Yorkshire, (1678) are basically converted houses. Others such as the Methodist chapel at Walsingham, Norfolk (1791) are simple brick boxes with a porch attached, semi-circular headed windows and a single galleried room inside. Others, especially in the nineteenth century seem to vie with nearby C of E building, adopting a Gothic persona of pointed windows, stained glass, tracery, buttresses, towers and spires (though usually unconvincingly): a United Reformed Church building that I know in the Lancashire village of Elswick could easily be mistaken for the local Church of England parish church. Then there are the large circular, octagonal or other odd shaped buildings with multiple annexes, that put the visitor in mind of a court room or theatre, such as North Shore Methodist church, Blackpool (early 1900s), or the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster (1912).

The other day, during a trip to Bourne I came upon a Methodist church building of 1839 designed by the architect Thomas Pilkington. It was set back from the road and fronted by flat, green lawns and a path. All the nearby buildings were red brick, so the clean, white facade impressed itself upon the passerby, with its simplicity and purity. Perhaps that was the intention. However, behind this elegant face the same red brick that is used by the neighbouring buildings prevails. During the nineteenth century Non-Conformist churches flirted with classical forms to a greater extent than did the established church, and here Pilkington uses giant Doric pilasters and a triangular pediment to give an impression of the facade of a Greek or Roman temple. Many churchmen thought classical architecture pagan, and spurned it for that reason, but not this group of Methodists in Bourne. In fact, the building is recorded as having acroteria angularia on the two flat plinths at each side of the pediment, and undoubtedly had an acroterion on the similar surface at the apex, so the full panoply of classical architecture was obviously applied.

With this photograph a black and white conversion made more of the composition than did colour. I particularly liked the way it emphasised the building, giving it an ethereal look, and how it gave greater prominence to the outline of the gate in the foreground.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
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The bridge chapel, St Ives

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Today's photograph shows the old bridge over the River Great Ouse at St Ives, Huntingdonshire*. It is one of only four bridges in England that still have their complete medieval chapels (the others are at Rotherham, Wakefield and Bradford-on-Avon). This crossing was built in the 1420s, replacing a wooden bridge that dated from around 1100, which itself superseded the shallow ford on the gravel river bed - the original method of getting from one bank to the other. Traffic used the single lane of this ancient bridge until 1980 when a new crossing was built on the town by-pass road further downstream.

Bridges have long had religious associations. In Britain many Bronze and Iron Age artefacts have been found deliberately placed in rivers next to fragments of wooden structures that may well have been bridges. The remains of a Roman bridge has altars dedicated to Neptune and Oceanus nearby. In the medieval period chapels were often built at one end of a bridge, or actually on the bridge. This continued the old association, but was also because the church frequently funded the construction of a crossing and then collected a toll to pay for its upkeep. Travellers would receive a blessing from a priest at the chapel after they made their payment. A few bridge chapels (such as that at Wakefield) were chantries, funded by a private individual, where mass was said daily for the salvation of their souls. During its lifetime the chapel at St Ives also saw use as a private residence, an inn and a doctor's surgery (though never a prison, the fate of some bridge chapels).

St Ives' bridge is unusual in having two newer, rounded arches to the left (as we look at it), and original fifteenth century pointed arches to the right. This came about because in 1645, during the Civil War, Cromwell's Republican army pulled down two arches and replaced them with a drawbridge in case of Royalist attack. The arches were rebuilt in 1716 to a design that reflected the fashion and constructional theories of the time. I visited this location on a late September morning of bright sunshine, and couldn't resist using the mute swans as foreground interest, despite the difficulty that their bright, white plumage presented in terms of metering the scene.

* For a number of reasons I tend to use the historic county names and boundaries that preceded the local government reorganisation of 1974. Consequently I assign St Ives to Huntingdonshire rather than Cambridgeshire in which it now resides for administrative purposes. For more information on this see the Association of British Counties.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On