PLEIN AIRS AND GRACESPLEIN AIRS AND

‘. . . the life of a man who is a fountain GEORGE COLLINGRIDGE OF LIFE AND TIMES THE of energies and enthusiasms, and an

Australian who must be remembered.’

Tom Keneally Plein Airs and Graces examines the extraordinary life of George Collingridge, a landscape painter of the late nineteenth century, just ahead of the Australian impressionists. When he emigrated from France to Australia

he grew passionate about the possibilities of his new country, and worked tirelessly to contribute to it. He was a great advocate of the twin ideals of art and industry – progress, as he saw it.

ISBN 978-1-74305-095-8

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE COLLINGRIDGE

Cover design by 9 781743 050958 ADRIAN MITCHELL Stacey Zass, Page 12 Wakefield Press

Plein Airs and Graces

Adrian Mitchell has had a long career at the University of Sydney, where he is now an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English. Among many projects, he edited Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920 together with Brian Elliott, and with Leonie Kramer edited the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature. He is the author of Drawing the Crow, a book of essays about what it meant to be South Australian in the 50s and 60s, and of Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier. George Collingridge in old age. Photograph, Collingridge family collection. Plein Airs and Graces The life and times of George Collingridge

Adrian Mitchell Wakefield Press 1 The Parade West Kent Town South Australia 5067 www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2012

Copyright © Adrian Mitchell, 2012

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Edited by Penelope Curtin Cover design by Stacey Zass Typeset by Wakefield Press Printed and bound by Hyde Park Press, Adelaide

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Mitchell, Adrian, 1941– . Title: Plein airs and graces: the life and times of George Collingridge / Adrian Mitchell. ISBN: 978 1 74305 095 8 (pbk.). Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Collingridge, George, 1847–1931. Artists – Australia – 19th century – Biography. Authors, Australian – 19th century – Biography. French – Australia – Biography. Dewey Number: 759.994092 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Old Man’s Valley 1

2 Godington 7

3 French Impressions 22

4 The Promised Land 48

5 The Hermitage 62

6 The Woodpecker 74

7 Oil and Water: The landscapes 88

8 Carte Blanche 108

9 Jave la Grande 135

10 The Academy 158

11 Mirror Images 173

Bibliography 195

Notes 203

Index 223

Acknowledgements

Best to get this out into the open, right up front. This book is my wife’s idea. She has been badgering me for years to write a book about George Collingridge, to acknowledge his remarkable life as well as his contribution to the making of Australian cultural history – a pioneer in every sense other than the familiar one, in fiction and in fact, of chasing cattle around the outback. George was never one for running with the conventions. Neither, truth to tell, is my wife. Now I hope she is satisfied. I would like to think George is satisfied too. This book is for both of them, but for Maureen especially. George Collingridge’s name is all but forgotten these days, yet in his time he was quite a public figure, busy in fostering the art community in Sydney, promoting progress associations, developing his hypotheses about the early European discovery of Australia and conducting classes in painting, in French conversation, in Esperanto and ceaselessly writing thumping letters to the editors of the newspapers, mainly in Sydney but occasionally in the other colonies too. He was not easy to overlook then, and he made his mark. But what he stood for has been steadily overtaken, if not largely set aside. His granddaughters, though, Winsome and Edith Collingridge, have been valiant in keeping their grandfather’s story alive. They have been steadfast keepers of the flame. This work benefits from that perseverance, from their kind hospitality, and from their generosity in allowing me to view their holdings of his work. I thank them for their permis- sion to reproduce images and graphic material. So likewise I am grateful for the enthusiasm of Chris Pond, a great-grandson, who assisted with archival material and maintained a supportive interest in my progress. I am indebted to others too who have their own more indirect connection with the George Collingridge story. Special thanks go to Mrs E.P. List of Neve’s Croft of Godington in for her local history and for information readily provided; to Rev. Father John Burns, Holy Trinity Church, , also in Oxfordshire; to Annie Crowe, current owner of Capo di Monte on Berowra Creek and another enthusiast; to Wendy Escott and Simon Bryan, who provided the pleasure craft on the day of the excursion there and who also have an ongoing interest in this history; and to Jill Harvey for sharing her recollections of Collingridge Point. I was given ready assistance in matters of local history by Penny Graham; Neil Chippendale, Local Studies Coordinator at Hornsby Shire Library; Geoff Potter, Local Studies Librarian, Gosford Public Library; and members of the Hornsby Historical Association, Elizabeth Roberts and Ralph Hawkins in particular. My thanks to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for permission to reproduce the

vii Plein Airs and Graces

J.S. Watkins portrait of George Collingridge, and especially to Tracey Keough for assistance in arranging this; to the Library Council of New South Wales for permission to reprint George Collingridge’s facsimile of the Descaliers map of Jave la Grande held in the Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, and in particular to Elise Edmonds and Maggie Patton, Map Librarians at the State Library of New South Wales, for timely assistance; and to Hornsby Library for permission to reprint pictures in their possession. I am especially grateful to Nicholas Keyzer, who photographed the paintings and sketches included here, battled with domestic crises of various kinds as he worked his magic on them, and found himself growing more and more taken with the Collingridge project. My thanks also to the team at Wakefield, especially to Michael Bollen for so readily accepting the typescript; and to Penelope Curtin for reading it more care- fully than I had, for catching patches of inconsequential thought and purposeless expression; and for politely prising my fingers off the semicolon key, though not always with the success she might have hoped for. Early in this undertaking I had very productive conversations with John Spencer, Librarian, Schaeffer Fine Arts Library; Professor Virginia Spate; the late Dr Noel Rowe; and Professor Ivan Barko, all of the University of Sydney. The University of Sydney made available a small period of leave to begin the research for this project. Some parts of this book are more or less recognisable from earlier appearances, in papers presented at the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association conference at the University of New South Wales in February, 2007 (and published in the proceedings, 2008), and at the conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand at the University of Sydney in 2008; and in an article published in Explorations in December 2008.

viii 1 Old Man’s Valley

At the northern fringe of Sydney, just beyond what is called the Upper North Shore, and on the high ridge between two large deep creeks that open out into the Hawkesbury River, is a community known as Hornsby. Now one of the consoli- dating suburban hubs, for a good many years it managed to preserve something of the feel, and look, of a country village. George Collingridge, a local landscape painter, art teacher, woodblock engraver, multilingual historical cartographer, activist in local matters, editor and author, was one of the early settlers in this part of the world, one of the first to discover and appreciate the picturesque attractions of the close-by Hawkesbury River. Tucked in just below the ridge is a deep valley, Old Man Valley, named it has been said, for the kangaroos there. The earliest documentation shows the original lease was for a farm to be known as Old Man’s Valley, the modified name coming into common use some time later. These days the locals have once more taken to calling it Old Man’s Valley; that seems somehow more proprietorial, suggesting a kind of ancestral presence, a connection to the sense of the past, which is still a felt presence all through the area. Little is disturbed down there. Even the road down into it seems to have been there a long time, the verges overgrown. The breezes that whip and toss the thinner branches of the eucalypts on the ridge line and the upper slopes do not reach down into the valley. Mist hangs about until mid-morning. Dewdrops map out the dainty webs of spiders. In the late afternoon, the damp starts to rise again, and mists emerge out of thin air. At some stage the sun, always slow to rise above the crest, shines through the drooping leaves and heavy vapour, and just briefly you might catch the whole underside of the tree canopy scintillating. Right at the bottom of the valley, where the lyrebirds flicker in and out from under the fern trees, is a creek, a tributary of Berowra Creek. Native fish gather in shady pools below a waterfall. Small birds – whistlers, yellow robins, blue wrens – skitter busily about the edges of natural clearings. The magic of Old Man’s Valley is that it shows itself only in glimpses. Sunsets are hidden by another high ridge at the far end of the valley; in fact, much of this country is an ancient plateau eroded into twisting channels that

1 2 Plein Airs and Graces deepen into gorges. Long shadows are cast hereabouts. At night, when the cloud cover drifts away, the temperature plummets, and the bluish moonlight is as cold and sharp as a stiletto. In amongst the tall timber the clumps of foliage look like ink smudges. The colours of the forest are mostly cool, although when the sun is directly above the foliage changes to something close to the familiar yellow-green of willows, or the monotonous drab olive that the first settlers complained of. That was of little interest to George Collingridge: at either end of the day or in overcast weather he found a range of either very dark greens, terre verte, or blue-greens – the colours familiar from his training in France. A prolific painter, he was not fond of the high-toned summer skies favoured by the emerging school of Australian impressionists. At about the time of Federation, or just after, Arthur Streeton’s elderly father lived on the lip of this valley, and on a visit one Christmas Streeton painted there, in the middle of the day. Collingridge preferred a cooler register, though he too had a Christmas epiphany. In the valley, when it rains, the planes and depths of colouring begin to merge towards one dark mass; the sombreness of the under-canopy becomes the whole. Trunks, branches, twigs become more distinctive in the wet, a charcoal tracery, and then the structure of the trees becomes more visible; but that was not Collingridge’s interest either. He was not a Hans Heysen, he was more interested in effect. He had learned directly from Corot, and transposed what he had learned of land- scape painting in mid-nineteenth-century France to the region around Hornsby, Berowra, Brisbane Water and the Hawkesbury, again and again defined by and against water. Water, lakes, rivers, primordial seas fascinated him. In the 1890s, when George Collingridge de Tourcey took up residence in Hornsby, there were six houses in the valley. Now there are none. It had been settled by a clan of Higginses, who started out felling and sawing by hand the thick stands of blackbutt, blue gum and cedar, and carting off the timbers to the building sites about Parramatta. In the clearings they planted fruit trees, which were protected from the brisker weather up on the ridge above, and sustained by a patch of rich volcanic soil. Theirs was a quiet life, the sides of the valley steep enough for the Higginses to keep pretty much to themselves on their picturesque orchards. They had all that they wanted there in the valley, even their own ceme- tery. Hardy, self-reliant men and women, they established themselves by dint of their own labour and they were content with their lot. The view down into the valley from above was a delight. It was a landscape that presented itself to the artist’s eye. Here, the two values that George Collingridge held most dear – art and settlement – were on tranquil display. Here, he could find something like those hints and traces of the Golden Age that had sustained the development of art in mid-nineteenth-century France, intimations of an idyllic life: in part the manifesta- tions of a simple and contented existence, and in part, the proximity to that which had been here from the beginning, ancient, primal. Old Man’s Valley 3

In the Old World, that had been a dream of the enduring, of the bucolic and pastoral, and rootedness in the earth; the rêverie. Here in the New World, at a far remove from the political turmoil of Europe, was the realisation of that vision, the peaceable life envisioned by idealists and artists alike. Here, almost at Collingridge’s doorstep, was what the poets and painters, the philosophers and political reformists had all been aspiring towards, a little touch of paradise, such as a man may make for himself. The valley was pretty as a picture, a landscape picture which composed itself, as Collingridge’s old mentor, Corot, used to require. It was of course just one version of other such pictures that presented themselves throughout the region, among the winding bays of the Hawkesbury and the deep creeks which flow into it, and the broadwaters of the central coast beyond it. As the disconsolate poet Henry Kendall started to appreciate in his own way a decade earlier, this region was good for a man’s soul. Here in the valley was visibly the form of progress that warmed Collingridge’s heart, the kind of progress which proclaimed itself through the manifest evidence of its placid wellbeing. There was no heavy accumulation of history here; the immediate present was all. He allowed himself a certain wry reflection about that, noting that what is not recorded must fall into oblivion, and that even writing fails to protect early Australian history. An old settler in that romantic and secluded glen in Hornsby known as ‘The Old Man’s Valley’ had written an account of the early days of the settlement in which the exploits of divers bushrangers were placed on record. This document, whatever may have been its value, is irretrievably lost. It was valued by its owner, a grandson of the early settler, and placed accordingly in a leathern bag and hung up out of harm’s reach. Out of the way places are the resorts of rats and mice and white ants, and in this instance the white ants did the damage.1

That little cautionary tale has, as the French say, un certain charme. It also captures very neatly Collingridge’s own attitude to the way of life. He was one to find bemusement rather than disappointment; yet, as the pages which follow show, it would have been quite understandable if, toward the end of his long life, he had surrendered to the bafflement of ill fortune. The valley has stayed in local memory as an alluring place. On the upper level, facing the western ridge, were the Sun Rocks, where adventurous children used to scramble about, including the prototype of Ginger Meggs, and from which the sunsets are indeed spectacular. These are the rocks where, that Christmas, Arthur Streeton painted, and where he and his brothers also scrambled about. Down in the valley were of course the temptations of the orchards. The valley’s attractions were widespread: My father … spent much of his youth down in Old Man Valley shooting and trap- ping rabbits. On one occasion Dad and his mate were in the Valley sitting waiting 4 Plein Airs and Graces

to get a shot at a fox that had been raiding the chook yards in the area. A stranger walked up along the track and suggested that they were wasting their time by just sitting. He showed them how to whistle up a fox by using two fingers in the mouth. Both boys were most impressed. Even more so when they found that the stranger was none other than Henry Lawson, the famous Australian author.2 Within the next decade and a half, Hornsby changed. There had been no particular need for a village until the convergence of the two railway lines up from Sydney, the Northern line and the North Shore line, and then the building of a bridge over the Hawkesbury to enable rail traffic to continue up to Newcastle. With the trains – the engines of progress – came the real estate developers. Hornsby was a desirable distance away from the city, closer to Sydney than the Blue Mountains but with much the same clean fresh air and a more moderate climate. In no time at all businessmen began building their ‘country’ houses, and from the university the newly expanded professoriate began to find the location attractive too. A sprinkling of painters made their homes in the general vicinity, as did visionaries, and engi- neers. What had once been a community of orchardists began to diversify, with George Collingridge instrumental in influencing some of the development which came with that activity. He began an intermittent local newspaper called Progress, in which he celebrated not the fortunes to be made by grasping developers, but the good fortune to be gained by those who chose to live in the area. O.H.K. Spate, the only scholar to write appraisingly and analytically on Collingridge’s achievements and significance and whose reconstituted essay on George Collingridge became the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, missed the point when he dismissed Collingridge’s enthusiasm as ‘realtor-type boosting of new suburbs on the North Shore line’.3 Collingridge had a rather more sensitive and civilised appreciation of his new home. He had arrived in Sydney just before the international exhibition in the Garden Palace. He had been at the previous exhibition in Paris, the city in which he had grown up and where he met, trained with and was influenced by a number of eminent figures. Indeed, his was a most remarkable life, and what the following chapters show is just how many points of intersection he had with the men and some women of moment in his times, in what, rather surprisingly, he called the two most civilised countries in the world, France and Australia. Yet in spite of those points of contact, he was not so much a force to be reckoned with in his own right, as a closely involved witness to the convulsions and rebellions in Paris and Rome, and the zig-zag tracery by which New South Wales gradually estab- lished itself, and through which an émigré became an ardent patriot of the new world, finding here, albeit transformed, the paradise he had hoped for when he left Europe. His life story is a model of cultural acclimatisation. In choosing to settle in Hornsby, he was in some sense repeating the experiences of his earlier life. When his parents and siblings briefly relocated from Oxfordshire to , they lived Old Man’s Valley 5 in a Hornsby-like village on the outskirts of the great wen, still in touch with fields and meadows, but with rapid development following the building of an important rail line. In Paris, the Collingridges again lived at first in a semi-rural community, though within short order a new omnibus service was started, to carry the residents into the city. Although George Collingridge lived a while in some of the great cities of Europe – not only London and Paris, but also Rome and Madrid – his clear preference was for somewhere closer to the domain of nature, somewhere picturesque, somewhere to paint. But there was nothing retiring about him. He was always hugely busy, always following some new enthusiasm. It is in this connection that Old Man’s Valley epitomised what he valued. There, in a close-knit little huddle of cottages, contented, industrious and self-sufficient families lived in harmony with their peaceful surroundings. Loosely reminiscent of what he had seen in the countryside of Italy, this was what he saw along the valley of the Parramatta River and across the upper North Shore: orchards and dairies in bush clearings everywhere, the produce being carried into the busy central markets. These early settlers were growing their own history, growing the intimate understanding that constitutes locality. That was the kind of progress he endorsed. As so often happens, agriculture gave way to commerce and industry. In his Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright points out that even in ancient times cities destroyed themselves by building on their best land. The Sumerians and ancient Egyptians provide a cautionary example which modern civilisation still steadfastly refuses to observe.4 A quarry was opened up in Old Man’s Valley, to excavate blue metal for road-making and, over time, as it got bigger and bigger, the original settlers were driven out. The quarry spoil – an apt term – was gradually dumped across what had been rich orchard country. All that was left was the Higgins’s cemetery. That was not the kind of development Collingridge believed in. He was likewise scathing about the endless schemes to build a bridge over Sydney Harbour. The bridge was not opened until the year after his death. Aptly, if ironically, at the bottom of the valley, on the edge of the fishponds, are deep grooves worn into the rock, where the original inhabitants had sharp- ened stone axe heads, leaving their own marks on the ancient rocks. There is history here if you dig around, and a long provenance if you know where to look. Collingridge was interested in that early prehistory. He sketched aboriginal rock carvings along Berowra Creek and sent photographs to an eminent anthropologist in Paris. During the Depression, just after Collingridge’s death, men working for the dole built stone steps down into the valley, and in their own more independent moments carved or pecked figures (and initials and facetious comments) into the rock faces. Art and industry again. Collingridge would have recognised the antiquity of the impulse. He understood the continuity of his own woodblock engravings from the ancient clay impressions of the Chaldeans, the earliest kind of written record. He spent much of his life assembling the preserved record of 6 Plein Airs and Graces antiquity in its relation to his adopted country; but he also displayed much of that continuity in himself, in his own accumulated training and experience. As will be seen, George Collingridge led an extraordinarily rich and colourful life, although he was modest enough about it. He was present at momentous events, and met and worked with remarkable people, leading figures in both European and Australian cultural history. Through the story of George Collingridge de Tourcey, we reacquaint ourselves with the diversity and richness of our own cultural heritage, and have him to thank for delivering it to us. 2 Godington

The north-east of Oxfordshire is still much as it has long been, a quiet out-of- the-way agricultural region, where large fields lie fallow for long months under the watery pallid light, until the great purling clouds clear to dreamy summer skies and the next crop ripens to a rich burnished gold. For much of the year, this is windswept country. Occasional squalls of sharply cold rain spatter across the farms, and the fat roly-poly sheep keep their heads down. This district protrudes as a tongue into neighbouring . The same farming cycle has been carried on in these quintessentially English fields and meadows for count- less generations. The remnants of a Roman villa not too far away attest to that – it is a place of settlement. Its interests are closely tied to the land. Hereabouts is peaceful country, which has managed to avoid most of the political and mili- tary disturbances marked on the map as close by. The baying from a kennel of hounds belonging to the Hunt carries across the low valleys, reminding of a different set of pursuits, again time-honoured, if that is the appropriate phrase. It is fairly flat, mostly treeless upland, with fewer hedgerows than elsewhere in the county, ideally constituted for galloping across. The breeze comes up over the shoulder of the vale, carrying the distant sooking call of rooks across the clumpy fields, the panic flap of a woodpigeon’s wings, the solitary moan of a cow. The peeping call of the hunting horn, the baying of the pack and the thud of the horses’ hooves carry far in the thin air. The Bicester Hunt has long been famous not only in its activity but in defending that field sport; it traces its origins as a fox-hunting pack back to 1800. The Victoria History of the Counties of , the acknowl- edged authority on county histories, records – apparently without any intended irony by the juxtaposition – that the parish has ‘been well known for generations as an outpost of Roman Catholicism. In more recent times its coverts have been renowned in connexion with the Bicester Hunt’.1 Riding to hounds is rarely popular with farmers, and certainly not with foxes. There no longer seems to be much in the way of cover for Reynard, and given the long history of the Hunt, it is not as though there could be an abnormally large

7 8 Plein Airs and Graces population left, Catholic, Royalist or brushtail, to chase down across the fields. This has been a corner of the county where the gentry were long accustomed to overriding, literally, the interests of the tenants, and yet equally, the countryside has been long protected by the lords of the manor – for centuries, from Tudor times up until the commencement of Queen Victoria’s rule, the Fermor family owned virtually the entirety of the parish. Arabella, the celebrated heroine of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, was one of these Fermors. Godington is at the very end of a small road, right at the furthest edge of this country, at the bottom of what is really more of a lane, and easy to imagine as no more than a track, dropping down from a top road and rolling fields to a fast- flowing brook that loops around in a large horseshoe. Or maybe Godington is at the beginning of that road. It depends on your starting point. In either case, it is somewhat out of the way, hidden by the fall of land from what little traffic might be passing. Here and there remnants of stone walls get on with their crumbling. The hedges at the top are ragged, unkempt, and puddles of water lie in the verges. On one side is open meadow, tilled land with more puddles of water lying in the wheel tracks across the fields, and down along the river flats the water has made large shallow ponds, with long green fronds of succulent grass trailing across the surface. On the other side is a single row of houses, all rather recent. They have been built on the site of an older file of cottages, and while they mark progress of a sort they are without charm. Behind them, as further up, the fields look very exposed – bleak, windy country. But down in the little valley is excellent pasturage. Wisps of woodfire smoke drift up from the cottage chimneys, and the welcoming smell carries across the vale. Damp leaves rotting in the ditches and under the hedges add to its rich mix. It was here that George Collingridge’s father, William, had his farm of more than two hundred acres. At the far end of the byway is a small church and an impressive farmhouse, Moat Farm, and another cottage set back from the road. The brook – actually the Birne, but known to the locals simply as ‘the brook’ – is the limit of everything. On the far side is Buckinghamshire, quite another world when it was enough of a venture to walk from one parish to the next. Pussy willow and silver poplar crowd along the banks with blackthorn, hawthorn and blackberry brambles, and all sorts of undergrowth which, come warmer weather, will spring into flower. A great place for birds. An even better place for small boys. And on occasion, for gypsies. And that is it. It has never been a busy place. Not all that long ago in local terms, early last century, there was a gate across the road leading into Godington.2 That may have been to encourage incurious travellers to keep to their proper path; or it may have been a declaration of privacy. Godington has had no shop and no public house – these are in the next village, , several miles away and over the main road from Bicester to Buckingham. The Butcher’s Arms is all dark beams across the low ceiling in the seventeenth-century manner and prints of the tally-ho kind in the nineteenth-century manner and game pie on the menu. The Godington 9 conversation is about whether you should call or whistle your hunting dogs. Just beyond Fringford is another village, and another pub, at Hethe, on the far side of the old Roman road, in a separate parish. Godington has effectively been a group of three farms, with the attendant workers’ cottages, and their local church. From time to time there has been some schooling, but not a schoolhouse. According to one county-wide survey, Godington is already identified as a deserted village. Which might be a surprise to those who continue to live their quiet lives there.3 At the centre of any English village is its church. Godington’s church, Holy Trinity, reaches back to something like 1160; pre-Reformation records track the history of its patronage through various grants and deeds, but there are no surviving records of the post-Reformation church until late in the seventeenth century, by which time it was reported as in a state of disrepair. By the end of the eighteenth century the building was in danger of collapse, and in 1792 a new church, the parish by now long established as Anglican of course, was built ‘at the expense of William Fermor, the Roman Catholic lord of the manor, who employed a co-religionist as builder’.4 Evidently the roof was not entirely up to specifications, as by the mid-nineteenth century it was causing trouble. At about the same time, in the midst of the aesthetic excitement of the Gothic revival, pointed windows were installed in place of the ‘old shabby ones’, bright and diamond-paned, and a new altar with delicately painted panels – angels each with an antique musical instru- ment, each with a mantle of the kind of pattern that the pre-Raphaelites would make popular, each standing on a flat greenish cloud, Botticelli green, looking more like a lily pad than anything ethereal. The old pews were replaced with open seats, probably an indication of declining wealth, a resistance to pew rent rather than a progressive egalitarianism. With undecorated walls, a tiled central aisle of a simple set of geometrical shapes, and an unfussy pulpit, the church feels like a chapel, somewhat puritanical in the New England manner, or French Catholic. One wonders where William Fermor got his plans, or who guided his taste. The churchyard is more than ankle deep in thick wet grass and banks of early snowdrops, growing over old lichen-covered tombstones and memorial stones used as a pathway (lead thou me on – to what end?) and growing up over most of those which have managed to stay more or less upright, all like a rather startling moral allegory. Given the historical illegality of Catholic interments in Anglican grave- yards, it is a testament to the quiet accommodations the village had been making that there are a number of Roman Catholic gravestones in the churchyard.5 One striking curiosity presents itself. Right at the church entrance, just one step inside the heavy timber door, is an elaborately engraved memorial to James Benskyn. When the church was rebuilt, some of the old memorials and monu- mental inscriptions from the previous church were relocated there, and right at the threshold is the testament to the decayed mortal remnants of Benskyn – rector at Godington through the somewhat tense times, in religious matters, of the end of the Elizabethan era through to the beginning of the Civil War – cut in a bold hand 10 Plein Airs and Graces and deeply inscribed, floating from Latin to English, adventurous with its use of capital letters, and even more remarkably, inscribing some of the letters – with no apparent consistency, no logic – in a mirror image of themselves:

Hic jacet corporum Jacobus Benskyn deceased May ye 23 in ye year of our Lord 1643. What fascinates is not the message from beyond the grave, but from the engraver: the cutting fast and loose with standard conventions, mixing fonts as well as languages, and turning the letters about almost at whim. Their muddle is entirely characteristic of the seventeenth century; the quirkiness an oblique riposte to the triumphalist literalist convictions of the Puritanical regime which was to follow Benskyn’s sloughing off. Instead, the quizzical mind is invited to recon- sider the message as it were inside out. It is all the more engaging, not for being in the arrogant modern sense primitive, but for being truthfully reminiscent of the struggling artisan, intermediary between the life that was and the life that is to come. The irregular lettering, like an irregular life, formed on observable lines but swelling and diminishing as proved expedient to the stonemason, testifies to the honest difficulty in representing what has been. Unpolished and unremarkable testimony to a modest if devoted life, it tells us as much, if not more, of those who remained to honour the simple, difficult gesture. It chimes more resonantly than the one remaining bell, the other two having been sold off to defray the expenses of the mid-century renovations. When you open the church door, that is exactly where the light falls. That is the strongest visual memory you take away with you. That is what you might remember if you were a small boy with a precocious memory playing about here, and were to become an engraver, say a woodblock engraver, in a later life. On 29 October 1847, George Alphonse Collingridge de Tourcey was born at Manor House, Godington. It is not clear exactly where that was, meaning, Manor House no longer exists. The likeliest spot is part-way down the track, close to a pond which in the Middle Ages could have held the Friday’s fare for the commu- nity. George Collingridge was christened that same day at the end property, Moat Farm; not in the intervening church, Holy Trinity Church, with its old circular baptismal font, a relic from its medieval origin. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the tenant at Moat Farm had had a Roman Catholic chapel built in under his roof, and had installed a priest:

It is said that mass used to be said at Moat Farm, where a branch of the Collingridge family lived. The chapel in the roof, served in the 18th and 19th centuries by a priest from Hethe, was only dismantled in about 1900.6 Baptisms were commonly recorded in the parish register as an official record, so that George’s baptism in Moat Farm is interestingly independent of that practice. It signifies a Catholic ceremony, with the priest from Hethe, some five miles or so