Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton CollegeNevill, Ralph
History
Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton College
Nevill, Ralph
Eton College
From first to last the so-called restoration cost over £20,000,
£5000 of which was contributed by Mr. Wilder. In reality it was no
restoration at all--merely a terrible act of vandalism, only exceeded
in lack of taste by the alterations carried out at the sister college
of Winchester some thirty years later, when all the priceless woodwork
was removed from the chapel. Within recent years this was sold for an
enormous sum, and is now at Hursley Park, not many miles away from the
College which it once adorned.
Besides the tearing down of the fine old panelling and the partial
destruction of ancient frescoes, in all probability a quantity of other
interesting old work was destroyed at the orgy of iconoclasm in 1847.
The only object of those in power at Eton at that time seems to have
been to destroy everything which recalled the past. They gloried in the
havoc they wrought within the Chapel, and in their “restoring fervour”
actually went so far as to tear up the black and white marble pavement.
It is to be hoped that some day this may be replaced. Would that some
portion of the fine old woodwork might be recovered and once again find
a place in the sacred edifice where for close upon a hundred and fifty
years it met the eyes of generations of Etonians!
In place of the stately old noblemen’s seats put up in 1700, Deeson
designed seventy oak stalls with carved canopies of modern Gothic
design. Each canopy seems to have cost £42, which, considering that the
artistic value of the stalls is exactly nil, is a large sum. It would
be interesting to know what the value of the noblemen’s stalls which
Deeson tore down would be at the present time!
Entering the Chapel through the screen, the first of the canopied
stalls on the right is that occupied by the Provost, that on the
left by the Vice-Provost. The second stall on the right was given by
the Fellows of King’s College, the third by Winchester College, and
the fourth by the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford,
like Eton connected with the memory of Waynflete. The Headmaster’s
stall is the seventeenth on the right, distinguished by the words
_Magister Informator_. Exactly opposite is the seat of the Lower master
(_Ostiarius_), who, however, usually attends Lower Chapel. A number
of the stalls given by Etonians or Etonian families have tablets with
inscriptions. Next but two to the Lower master, for instance, is a
stall given by the Cust family, of whom some eight generations have
been educated at Eton. Beneath the seat is to be found the genealogy
of all the Custs who have been at the school. The twenty-sixth stall
on either side are those of the chaplains (_Capellani Conductitii_),
known as “Conducts” at Eton. The last stall but one on the left was
given by James Rattee, the contractor for the stalls, and the one
opposite by Deeson, the architect, who no doubt thought that his
imitation Gothic was vastly superior to the stately work which he
treated with such contempt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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