THE congregation of St Mary’s, Market Weston, in Suffolk, has, over 4 years, raised the £100,000 needed to revive 12 of the church’s windows. The sum includes £30,000 raised by a single parishioner, Gerry Smith, a house baker and keen gardener, who’s approaching the age of 90.
The project had been “little by little, one window at a time”, considered one of the churchwardens, Richard Chatham, said this week.
The windows needed to be propped up after the corrosion of the structural iron bars and the splitting of the mullions. The church had received an initial grant from the Taylor Pilot project, which was spent on resolving pointing, gutter, and soakaway issues, and meant that the work could begin. Grants also got here from the Alfred Williams Charitable Trust and Suffolk Historic Churches.
The rest would need to be fund-raised.
Mr Chatham said that the modest grants had been a catalyst for the fund-raising that followed. “We could never have looked to the larger, national grant bodies for the outright £100,000 needed, because we’d have needed to give you an identical £50,000.”
A neighborhood appeal raised an initial £10,000 “and regularly it rolled on from there”, he said. There have been fêtes and two legacies, in addition to Mr Smith’s baking.
Mr Smith had never baked until he was in his eighties, after his wife died. He began making sausage rolls to take right into a care home to have a good time his sister Marjorie’s one hundredth birthday. They “turned out to be very nice”, he said.
Richard ChathamBulbs in bloom outside St Mary’s
A stall on the garden fête confirmed their popularity, and the Victoria sponges he went on to make were equally popular.
Mr Smith began to batch-bake. He put a freezer at the top of his drive from which individuals could buy cakes, rolls, and cheese straws, and these were also available at village coffee mornings. A throwaway remark from his brother had elicited the knowledge that their Aunt Alice had been a cook to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, which they thought perhaps accounted for the baking pedigree.
When he was not baking, Mr Smith was within the greenhouse making up 150 hanging baskets to sell over a single 12 months. And, when he was not within the greenhouse, he was within the churchyard — which he has been helping to tend since he was 65 — planting hundreds of the bulbs which can be currently in bloom ready for the celebratory church open day on 15 March.
“There are people walking concerning the churchyard now, taking a look at the windows and the flowers, and that’s lovely,” he said on Monday. “You all the time need to have something to look ahead to. I like getting up within the morning.”
