Over the past year an exceptionally committed group of parishioners, under the aegis of the Stella Maris Restoration Group, have begun research into the stained glass windows of Our Lady & St Michael’s church. Anyone visiting the church is immediately struck by the beauty of these windows. Their significance, it seemed, warranted a deeper understanding; It was felt that the annual Heritage Open Days (14-15 September) would provide an opportunity to focus upon the windows and tell their stories. The little group of researchers have trawled through the parish journals, logbook and newspaper clippings, and drawn up factsheets for each of the 60 individual windows in the church but it seemed that there was also something to be said as to how the windows related to each other and how they came to be. Each of the windows indeed tells a different story and reflects something of the parish’s story.  

The Development of the Church

The late nineteenth century, following on from the Irish migrations, was a prodigious time in which Catholics were re-discovering a new sense of confidence, building new schools and churches, and coming out from the shadows to which they had been consigned. The newly-constructed Our Lady & St Michael’s church was little different from any other church at this time in the sense that it did not arrive on the scene as a flat-packed product that could be hastily assembled. Rather, the building of the church took on an organic aspect, growing little by little, as funds allowed.

When the Church of Our Lady & St Michael’s church was built in 1876, the church was but a shell. It was still missing most of the furnishings that are instantly recognisable today and make the church so special. The enormous expense of constructing the church with the architectural services of one of Britain’s most renowned designers, E. W. Pugin, left very little in the bank for fitting the church out in all its glory.  Fundraising events multiplied through the subsequent years to clear the outstanding debts and the priests continued to impress upon the People of God their responsibility to adorn the House of God, to lend a sense of awe and wonder to the divine liturgy that was celebrated in this holy place.  It was only in 1906 that the fantastic pipe organ, designed by Arthur Hill of London, was built with the support of the Carnegie Foundation.  Other later additions after this time included the side altars installed by the Powell Pugin/Hardman workshops, the Mouseman Choir Stalls, the decorative vine stencilling on the sanctuary walls, additional pews in the nave, stations of the cross, the altar rails and the pulpit. What is now the baptistry and the priest’s sacristy were later additions still, and there were even plans to build a freestanding belfry tower alongside the church.

No more is the organic growth of the church clearer than when one considers the windows. Apart from some of the stained glass windows on either side of the nave of the church given by some donors from the outset, it would be another fifteen years before the main stained glass window above the High Altar was fitted by public subscription to mark Abbot Clifton’s Golden Jubilee and another thirty years after that until all the stained glass windows that we have today were completed. If you were a visitor to the church at the turn of the twentieth century, many of the windows were still filled with latticed lead frames and clear glass. Gradually this clear glass was replaced with stained glass, with the costs covered by individual families, parish confraternities such as the ‘Children of Mary’ and by public subscriptions, in most cases to commemorate the deceased.[1]

There is an account of the arrival of a batch of these windows in the logbook of the parish and it rejoices in the arrival and installation of the windows. The windows were not fashion accessories but expressions of faith, duly blessed, linking the living and dead, Heaven and Earth. The account in 1922 reads: ‘New sanctuary windows [of Moses and Elijah donated by the McCrickard and McMullen families together with the south transept windows] have arrived in six large boxes, work should begin next Wednesday’. Three weeks later, the log records,

‘President Abbot General Abbot Smith blessed the new windows. Order of service as follows: Procession up the nave, vesting during Tierce at the Throne. Solemn blessing of windows – Anthem of Consecration of the Church Office. Hymn “Urbs Jerusalem”, Psalm Lauda Jerusalem, prayer from Ritual. Pontifical High Mass, no sermon, Proper to Ambrosial Chant, Mass Ordinary: Ebner in two parts… In the evening, Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Children of Mary leading the congregation; all the Choir men being in their cowls in the stalls. Abbot Smith preached. The “O Salutaris”, written by Fr Standish for the occasion in four free imitative contrapuntal parts. Motet: “Ave Maria” sung by the Children of Mary, “Tantum Ergo” Mr R W Oberhoffer, Regina Caeli at end’. [2]

The presence of the Abbot General and Mr Oberhoffer, the organist from York Minster, must have made for a splendid occasion, doubtless with all stops pulled out!

The Manufacturing Families

Our Lady & St Michael’s church was at the heart of a parish run by the Benedictine fathers of Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire. When it came to commissioning stained glass windows, the monks had particular connections with two of the leading stained glass manufacturers of the time, the Barnett and Hardman families. Francis Barnett (1814-80) was born in York (not far from Ampleforth) and trained at his father’s studio in York, John Barnett & Sons. It appears that the company disbanded in 1853, but by 1859 Francis and his brother, Mark, re-located to Scotland and started up a studio based in Leith called the Edinburgh & Leith Stained Glass Works. One of the Benedictine monks at Workington in the early twentieth century was of this same family and it was clear that there was a close collaboration between the Barnett business and the Benedictine monks.[3] The first windows in the nave were commissioned by William and Mary Anne Collingridge Barnett in 1876, and likewise the Lady Chapel window is dedicated to Francis and Anne Barnett who died in 1880 and 1892 respectively. The other great stain glass works of the time were run by the John Hardman of Birmingham. The company began manufacturing stained glass in 1844 at the urging of Auguste Welby Pugin and John Hardman’s nephew, John Hardman Powell (1827-95) married Pugin’s daughter, and claimed to be Pugin’s only pupil. Powell became the chief designer for Hardman and the company sprung to prominence, displaying its wares at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Hardman & Powell collaborated with Pugin’s son, E. W. Pugin, and together they became a force to reckon with in all matters relating to ecclesiastical buildings. It was only natural that the architect of Our Lady & St Michael’s church should bring in his wake the Hardman family  and many of the windows at Banklands were made and installed by this firm.

The East Window, a vision of Heaven

When you enter Our Lady & St Michael’s church, the vast expanse of the church with its soaring pillars, arches, and roof, lead one’s eyes forward and upwards, to ponder the great East window which presents a vision of Heaven. The window was installed in August 1891 by Barnett’s of Leith, purchased with funds from Abbot Clifton’s Golden Jubilee presentation, only 3 months before Abbot Clifton’s death.[4] The summit of the window reveals the Trinity, the Father and the Son, and the love between them, the Holy Spirit, depicted in the form of a dove, and the Godhead is surrounded by cherubim and seraphim, the angels closest to God. Directly beneath them are the patrons of the church, Our Lady Star of the Sea and St Michael the Archangel. St Michael has had an association with Workington since the seventh century when the first church near the town’s harbourside was built and dedicated to him. On either side of Mary and the Archangel, are 24 saints, men and women from every age of the Church’s history: holy men and women from the Gospels, martyrs, confessors, virgins, popes, bishops and kings, founders of religious orders, and mystics and missionaries. And beneath these saints there are yet more angels who cry out anthems of praise and honour taken from a medieval hymn, addressed to Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven and Earth. This is a vision of Heaven and it is there to raise people’s minds and hearts, for the celebration of the Eucharist which takes place on the altar beneath, is the place where Heaven and Earth meet, where the Word becomes Flesh once again.

The National Window

If the sanctuary area of the church represents the Head, where Christ is present, the arms of the church (the transepts) expand outwards towards the world. The window of the north-facing transept is often called the ‘National Window’, representing the four patrons saints of the Kingdom, installed by Hardman’s in 1924. At the centre is the victorious Risen Christ in all His glory, and around him are the four patron saints of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and above them in the rose window is the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove) surrounded by the Royal Standard and the four emblems of the different nations: the rose, the leek, the thistle and the shamrock. This window was installed in the aftermath of the First World War, and after the divisions of war, the window places Christ at the centre, bringing peace and unity amongst the nations of the United Kingdom and Ireland which gained its independence three years earlier.

The Mary Window

The south-facing transept is a display of the people’s love for Mary Star of the Sea to whom the church is dedicated. John Hardman writes in the parish journal that it is by her that ‘storm-driven wanderers find a safe harbour’ and how the emblem of Our Lady, the fleur-de-lys, acts like ‘the needle of the compass’, providing orientation for our lives. In the centre of the rose window ‘Our Lady crowned and with a sceptre in her hand and carrying her Divine child appears as the star in the centre of the wheel window at the top; in the openings between the spokes of the wheel window at top; in the openings between the spokes of the wheel amid roses and lilies, are the emblems of some of her titles’, taken from the Litany of Mary, ‘Mystical Rose’, ‘House of Gold’, ‘Tower of Ivory’, ‘Gate of Heaven’, and ‘Ark of the Covenant’.  The figures represented in the lancet windows all represent people associated with Mary in her life: St Joachim and Anna (her parents), Elizabeth her cousin and John the Baptist, Joseph her spouse, and the Beloved Disciple who was given to Mary as he stood faithfully at the foot of the cross (Jn. 19:26-27).[5]

The Side Chapel Windows

Between the transepts and the sanctuary area, are two side chapels with their own altars. The one on the left is the Lady chapel. Above the altar is a window installed by Barnett’s in 1912 and restored in 2023, representing Mary enthroned on a boat at sea, surrounded by a starry night, a play on the ‘Mary Star of the Sea’ theme. The other window in the side chapel was installed a few months later and paid for by an anonymous donor. It includes the images of five female saints, abbesses of monastic foundations, Saints Alkelda, Hein, Hilda, Ebba and Ethelberga, together with the coat of arms of Jervaulx Abbey, a Cistercian abbey in North Yorkshire which was destroyed at the time of the Reformation in 1539. The parish logbook describes the unveiling of the window and its blessing and how ‘Fr Barnett of Warwick Bridge sang the Mass and Fr Standish preached on the responsibility of priests and people towards the House of God’.[6]  Fortunately some of the fifteenth-century alabaster reliefs from this Jervaulx were secreted away and passed through the generations and into the safekeeping of the monks of Ampleforth and were installed in Workington. During the medieval times the carving of alabaster was a boom business in Nottingham and the depiction of biblical scenes became a must-have feature of many churches and cathedrals.[7] The surviving ones that we have represent the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost, and provide a tangible link to old Catholic England and the Benedictine heritage which lives on.[8]

The other side chapel is dedicated to the Sacred Heart. The stained glass depiction of the Crucifixion was created by Barnett’s of Leith in 1890, and the reredos of the altar is decorated with angels holding the ‘arma christi’, symbols associated with the Passion.[9] The Passion window, installed in 1891, is dedicated to Abbot Clifton’s parents, John Clifton of Lytham Hall and Maria Trafford, of the de Trafford family who were one of the prominent old Catholic families in the north of England at the time. The three windows to the side are dedicated to John and Maria’s family. At the top of the window is the Clifton family’s coat of arms, and beneath are three English saints: Saint John of Beverley, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and St Edmund of Abingdon, the patron saints of the three Clifton siblings, John, Cuthbert and Edmund.

Throughout the whole church, you will notice that the choice of saints being represented in the individual stained glass windows in the nave, the main body of the church, is not random. If you look at the dedication at the bottom of the window, the saint being represented matches the name of the person for whom the window was dedicated. This was a very Catholic expression of the faith: baptismal names were saints names, and a person’s individual saint was an intercessor in Heaven and an inspiration for one’s earthly life. One of the windows paid by public subscription and installed in 1909 by Hardman’s, for example, is dedicated to memory of Henry McAleer who died in 1907, the first Catholic Mayor of Workington, and a sure sign of the progress of the Catholic community in the aftermath of the Catholic Emancipation laws. The window bearing his name is that of St Henry, who was a King of Bavaria in the early eleventh century and he used his authority to help the poor and enact just laws and build up the common good, something which I am sure was not lost on Henry McAleer in his tenure as an Alderman of the town and Mayor, a role of great local significance.[10]

The Narthex Windows

Finally, if one returns to the area of the church called the Narthex (at the entrance of the church), there are a number of saints, but four of them are related to each other in that they are English Martyrs, the gift of Henry Davey to the parish. Henry Davey was an engine train driver and lived in Stainburn. In 1886, the Holy See beatified the first of the martyrs of the troubled period of the Reformation. Amongst the more famous were John Fisher Chancellor of Cambridge and Bishop of Rochester, Thomas More Lord Chancellor of the Realm, Margaret Pole of Plantagenet stock, and Oliver Plunkett Primate of Ireland. These windows, installed in 1926, were an expression of local pride in English saints and the devotion towards these saints reflects the growing confidence of the Catholic population across the country after three centuries of repression and persecution.

Everyone is welcome to come and join us for the Heritage Open Days on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 September, at 2pm. Lizzie Plasom Scott who works in the stained glass business will give a short talk on the Saturday to introduce this artform, and then there will be guided tours and refreshments.

[1] For example, Mr Smith commissioned a stained glass window of St Agnes to be made by Hardman & Powell for his late wife, Agnes Smith. See Parish Logbook, p. 39 (27 April 1914).

[2] Parish Logbook, pp. 60-61 (17 April and 7 May 1922).

[3] Fr Barnett OSB served at Warwick Bridge and at Workington, and died in 1922. Parish Logbook, p. 61 (8 June 1922). Fr Stephen Dawes OSB, one of the priests serving Workington, wrought the designs of the sanctuary windows of Saint Peter and Paul. Barnett’s then faithfully carried out the design for the cost of £75. See Parish Logbook, p. 40 (17 September 1916).

[4] Parish Logbook, p. 15 (August 1891, 28 November 1891).

[5] Parish Journal, June 1922.

[6] Parish Logbook, p. 37 (25 August 1912)

[7] Cf. Wikipedia, Nottingham Alabaster. There are significant collections of these reliefs at the British Museum and at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

[8] Parish Logbook, p. 15 (December 1890)

[9] Cf. Wikipedia, Arma Christi. Arma Christi (“weapons of Christ”), or the instruments of the passion, are the objects associated with the Passion of Jesus Christ in Christian symbolism and art.

[10] Parish Logbook p.30 (11 July 1909)

By Fr Philip Conner