3. A group of Friends enjoyed a private guided visit on Monday 12 October to William Waldorf Astor, Lord Astor’s former estate office at Two Temple Place. Constructed in 1893-96 to designs by John Loughborough Pearson (also, of course, the architect of St Nicholas, Chiswick), this lavish office building has a grand staircase and a suite of three fine rooms richly decorated throughout with wood panelling, carved figures and reliefs. The hallway has a splendid Italianate floor, based on medieval Cosmati work, of coloured marble inlay.The Great Room overlooking the river has a steeply-pitched hammerbeam roof on whose brackets stand twelve statuettes of characters from one of Astor’s favourite novels, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. In the frieze is a series of gilded busts of miscellaneous celebrated historical figures whom Astor particularly admired; and on the main door is a series of nine gilded reliefs of tragic heroines by George Frampton (best known for the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens). Finally, the room has vividly-coloured stained-glass windows of Sunrise, to the east, and Sunset to the west, by Clayton & Bell, who also designed and made some of the windows in St Nicholas, Chiswick.
4. On Wednesday 25 November, Simon Clarke, Director of the Thames Explorer Trust, gave us a talk entitled ‘Drinking the Thames: the people and the technology that made the Thames safe to drink’. Simon knows the river well, since he lives with his family on the houseboat Resourceful, built in 1931 – the last Thames sailing barge constructed with full sails – and now moored alongside Chiswick Eyot. He introduced the contradiction that while the Thames can be smelly and dirty, polluted by sewage, diesel oil and grease, it may now also be relatively clean – clean enough to maintain 125 species of fish, and to allow the annual swimming race to be held off Chiswick Pier. After 1800 the rapid growth in London’s population resulted in increasingly heavy pollution: by 1830 there were no longer any salmon in the tidal Thames. Strategies for cleaning and purifying water pumped from the river, such as a primitive method of sand filtration, were attempted during the 19th century. But it was not until Louis Pasteur identified the problem as infection by an assortment of bacteria, that it became possible to work towards effective ways of dealing with the impurities. Water extracted from the Thames and treated in our sophisticated infrastructure of purification plants, such as that at Mogden, is now perfectly safe for drinking.
The Friends’ Management Committee
Chairman, and Editor of the Newsletter: Francis Ames-Lewis, 52 Prebend Gardens, London W6.0XU; email: ;tel.: (020)87481259. Minutes and Membership Secretary: Christabel Ames-Lewis;
Treasurer: Malcolm Smith;
Ex-officio Trustees: Fr Simon Brandes, Nicholas Lines, Suzette Llewellyn; Committee members: Adrian Biddell, Mylene Curtis, Richard Ellis, Donald Maxwell, Patricia Sunley, Susan Welsh.
THE FRIENDS OF ST NICHOLAS CHURCH
Registered charity no. 291262
Newsletter 21 : January 2016
Editor: Francis Ames-Lewis
Dates for Winter and Spring 2016: please note them NOW!
THURSDAY 28 JANUARY 2016, at 7.00pm in the church. Local historian Val Bott, who has done extensive research on gardens and gardening in Chiswick over the last three centuries, will give an illustrated talk on ‘Pleasure Gardens Pineapple Stoves: Chiswick House gardeners 1700-1850’. This event is organised in association with the Chiswick House Friends.
SATURDAY 12 MARCH 2016, at 7.30pm in the church. The gifted soprano Charmaine Dooley, who was born and brought up locally and still lives in our parish, will give a song recital, accompanied by pianist Richard Black.Their programme will include German songs, from Schubert to Strauss, and some more light-hearted English songs.
SUNDAY 8 MAY 2016, at 7.00pm in the church, after Choral Evensong at 6.00pm: we hold our Annual Reception, and Annual General Meeting. After the AGM at 7.30pm, Ian Bell, the London Diocesan Organ Advisor and organ consultant to our PCC, will give a short talk outlining the work, which may by then be underway, needed to restore and refurbish the organ, re-siting the pipes and console. It will be recalled that we are committed to providing £30,000 towards the costs of restoring the organ, this being the bequest made to the Friends by Jim Barron who for many years sang in the choir and was a stalwart supporter of music-making in the church.
SUNDAY 19 JUNE 2016, at 7.30pm in the church. Nine instrumentalist members of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra will be joined by Jessica Radcliffe, the orchestra’s chief vocalist, to provide us with a midsummer Sunday evening of jazz.
Financial position, and recent and future projects
On 10 September 2015 the total in the Friends’ accounts stood at £69,100. At the last meeting of the committee we heard that the Gift Aid claim this year will be in the region of £1,000. It will be remembered that we agreed to fund in full the costs of the overhaul of the church lighting, which has principally involved the replacement of the current lighting with LED light-bulbs which have the great advantage of being considerably more long-lasting than ordinary electric lighting, so our installation will greatly reduce the costs of lighting maintenance. We have now repaid the PCC £28,900 for the costs of this work, which has been successfully completed. The new lighting is in some ways more versatile than the previous installation, while providing effective and visually pleasant light in the church interior. We are furthermore very pleased that this Friends’ donation to the church’s development project can be recorded as ‘pump-priming’ or ‘seed-corn’ funding in applications to trusts and foundations for further funds towards the costs of the conversion of the sacristy and choir vestry, with the installation of toilet and kitchen facilities, and for the reconfiguration of theorgan.
Friends’ events, Summer to Autumn 2015
1. On 25 June Annie Lyles spoke on ‘Art and Faith in John Constable’s work’. During his career Constable was commissioned to paint three altarpieces, but it was through his landscape paintings that he most fully expressed his deep and genuine Christian faith. He was a traditional Anglican, brought up in the conservative rural society of East Bergholt in Suffolk. He might have gone into the church, but his major desire was to paint. In 1799 he joined the Royal Academy Schools, where the emphasis was on figure drawing: Constable gained formal instruction in oil painting only from 1816 onwards. He was proud of his Suffolk roots, on which he constantly drew for inspiration: many of his large exhibition paintings were modelled on his experience of the Suffolk landscape, showing his constant aspiration to be true to Nature. Like all his major paintings the 1811 Dedham Vale: Morning shows that Constable’s main means of expressing his faith was his use of landscape to communicate a Wordsworthian natural theology. After his wife died in 1828 his friend Archdeacon John Fisher encouraged him to visit Salisbury. Here he produced many oil sketches working towards the large 1831 exhibition picture of Salisbury Cathedral, from the meadows. This was for Constable the most important painting he ever produced: he never sold it, but continued to repaint it until his death in 1837. The inclusion of a bolt of lightning and the celebrated rainbow has raised the question of symbolism, but they are perhaps Constable’s most considered expression of his personal faith.
2. On Friday 25 September we were treated to a scintillating recital of music for ’cello and piano, performed for us by Jamal Aliyev and Alexandra Gracheva. The concert opened with a beautifully subtle rendering of Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, written early in his career in 1899, for which they were joined by violinist Yume Fujise. The trio brought out the resonant contrasts between warmly lyrical melodies, often echoing Brahms and Wagner, turbulent, faster sections with athletic playing on the cello and especially the piano, and the mysterious, ethereal sounds at the top of the violin’s range that set the scene on a clear moonlit night. In Glazunov’s Minstrel’s Song the mellow sonorities of the cello’s middle range gave Jamal opportunities to explore the expressive tonal richness of his instrument. By contrast, Wieniawsky’s Scherzo Tarantella requires extraordinary physical agility in both rapid bowing and gymnastic shifts in fingering, generating high excitement in a vigorous, show-stopping piece. The second half opened with Schubert’s ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata, which invites less virtuoso and in places more delicate playing: the performers were exquisitely balanced in these beautiful mezza voce passages. The concert closed with Chopin’s Polonaise Brillante, in which once more the contrasts between warm, swaying melodies and intricate bravura runs and chordal passages on both instruments kept the audience on its toes.