A FACE from the past which could also be an early image of St Thomas the Martyr from Canterbury is to be seen again in St Lawrence’s, Godmersham, in Kent, after several months’ absence for conservation.
Scaffolding was utilized by the restorers Torquil and Ruth McNeilage to reinstall the Purbeck marble bas-relief, dated to the twelfth century, within the chancel, which has been its home since 1933.
Its identity stays a matter for discussion by archaeologists and historians, because it was when it was placed there by the Revd Dr S. Graham Brade-Birks, Vicar from 1930 until 1977, and an Hon. Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, who died in 1982.
A visit by the Dean of Canterbury to mark the work is planned, along with a chat by the historian Tim Tatton-Brown, at a date yet to be finalised.
Soon after it was installed, the bas was dubbed “The Lost Image of Godmersham” by the Church Times artist, Donald Maxwell, who, in one in every of his “Travels with a Sketch-Book” series of articles (18 March 1936), wrote of Canon Brade-Birks’s “Sherlock Holmes detective work”.
“In the constructing generally known as Old Court Lodge in Godmersham was a curious piece of sculpture. It was a relief carving of a figure thought by the archaeologists of the eighteenth century to be a representation of the Prior of Chillenden. Something about this figure arrested the eye of the vicar, who’s a biologist in addition to an historian.”
Brade-Birks and a friend made a papier-mâché mould of the carving. From this they produced a plaster-of-Paris copy, which they sent to the V&A, mentioning details that suggested that the figure was intended to represent an archbishop. “The upshot of this inquiry elicited the incontrovertible fact that this was undoubtedly a representation of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the earliest known sculpture of the martyr,” Maxwell wrote.
church timesSt Lawrence’s, Godmersham, by Donald Maxwell, from the Church Times of 13 March 1936
James Russell, a former churchwarden of Godmersham, reports that St Lawrence’s is a pilgrim church on the best way from Winchester to Canterbury, and likewise a Jane Austen church. “Her brother lived at Godmersham House, and he or she writes ceaselessly concerning the Church.”
This makes the concept that the image is of St Thomas attractive to pilgrims who visit, Mr Russell says. But the boldness of Brade-Birks and Maxwell in that identification isn’t universally shared, and one other candidate is St Thomas’s immediate predecessor, Theobald of Bec (c.1090-1161).
“The professors and experts are divided on whom the plaque depicts, some considering it’s one end of St Thomas’s tomb before translation to his shrine, while Tim and others think it’s Theobald, and a few Prior Chillenden, the nice constructing Prior of Canterbury, who had strong links to Godmersham Church. Lloyd de Beer got here to see it and regarded it for his British Museum exhibition on Becket, but at that time, it was quite delicate to maneuver, and there was no proof it depicts Becket.
“The restoration, I’m afraid, has taken me much time, but we have now discovered the corbel it rested on at Court Lodge — the medieval Prior’s House that was next to the church — within the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A big photo of the plaque has been touring Canada in a BM exhibition.”
There are copies of the plaque in Canterbury, he says: one on the shrine of St Thomas, and one within the medieval Eastbridge Hospital, each given by Brade-Birks at his own expense.
“My thanks go to our supporting charities, Churchcare, the Pilgrim Trust, the Ratcliffe Trust, and the Friends of Godmersham Church, in getting the restoration this far,” Mr Russell says.
