The lost decoration of the chapel

 The Georgian chapel in the Charterhouse was designed to be somewhat austere.  The walls are plain, although they have become encrusted with memorials over the years.  The windows are of plain glass.  The showy chandeliers which light it date from the late 20th century.  The other major addition has been the organ in 1901.  Any other decoration depends on the tastes of the Master of the time.  Since its building in 1780 the chapel has been renovated or restored several times, the major restoration occurring in the 1940s following damage during the war.  Each time the aim has been to put it back as far as possible to its original condition.  The new heating system is invisible and the sound system unobtrusive.  It is, after all, a listed building.  

So what are we to make of this plaque?  It is dated 1901 and it is fixed to the side of the organ, close to the east window.  It describes the new stained glass, consisting of heraldic panels.  But there are no such panels.  So what happened?  

A former Master was of the opinion that there never was a stained glass window; that the plaque was put up prematurely and the new window was never installed.  I accepted that but now I know it to be untrue.  We have no pictures of the chapel from the early 20th century to prove it, but a more probable explanation is that the window was shattered during the deterioration of the building which took place in the aftermath of the evacuation in 1941.  It took 7 years to restore the Charterhouse and get the residents back in.  There is a photograph dating from the later 1940s, taken by those assessing the damage.

The window has been boarded up.  It isn't clear what the rectangular patch in the centre is.  The whole window could have been removed for safe-keeping, but no one has heard of it since so this is very unlikely.  

And yesterday I came across the evidence that the stained glass was indeed installed and was certainly there in 1926.  The Hull Daily Mail published a lengthy piece on the Charterhouse, including a kind of "secret shopper" account of a service in the chapel.

I'm not sure what a "severly [sic] heraldic window" is, but the description is clear enough.  So the conclusion has to be that it was destroyed during, or in the aftermath of, the war.

The colourful window would have been partly a fiction anyway.  There are no "original arms of the de la Pole family" distinct from the arms of William and Michael.  The simple device with its its three leopards' heads was the same for all three.  The arms of the Charterhouse, shown at the top of the plaque, were designed by the 1780 Corporation but not registered with the College of Heralds.

There remains a question in my mind.  The glass of the east window looks old.  It has that rippled effect which characterises glass that was not made my modern factories and has been in situ long enough to have "flowed" slightly.

There is another puzzle about past chapel decorations.  

This letter to the Hull Daily Mail by the Master, Rev Arthur Chignell, appeared two years before the description of the chapel above.  The chapel is being painted under the supervision of the principal of the Art School, and the men are busy on "a frieze of angel faces".  There are plans for the spandrels adjoining the pulpit (which is certainly not "time of Charles II" as the piece says) and around the doorway.  Chignell knew that the trustees would not stump up the money for all this and so was seeking contributions from the public.

It sounds inappropriate, tasteless, even tacky.  There is no mention of such decoration in the 1926 description; and we can see from the 1940s photo that it didn't happen.  Perhaps he couldn't raise the cash.  Perhaps the trustees vetoed the idea.  We can only be grateful.