Friends

Established in 1931, the Friends of Winchester Cathedral is an independent charity set up specifically to:

• Assist Chapter to maintain the Cathedral
• Help stimulate interest in the Cathedral
• Preserve and beautify the Cathedral, its music and history

Set up by Dean Selwyn, our first grant of £100 paid for new kneelers and cushions for the choir stalls. Since then we have given over £12.5 million to the Cathedral in present day values.

Over 90 years, we have provided substantial support in a number of ways including:

• Repairs to stonework, stained glass windows, the organ and the roof
• Providing a cherry picker, an altar frontal, vestments, kneelers and a piano
• Funding the magnificent Fleury building extension through a grant for £819,000

More recently, the Friends have funded the provision of high quality video and sound equipment to enable the live-streaming of Cathedral services, the restoration of the stone arch of the Dean Garnier garden gate and the purchase of the Cathedral electric truck and a new ‘cherry’ picker

Annual Grants
We provide in the region of £80,000 each year in regular grants to the Cathedral. This year we have provided grants for:

• The Girls Choristers. We pay the expenses of the Girls Choristers each year, plus the costs for each of them to learn a musical instrument.
• Two scholarships for boy choristers
• The maintenance of the trees in the Close
• Cathedral Flowers. We pay for the flowers in the Cathedral throughout the year.
• The Cathedral Christmas tree. The Friends provide the funding for the large Christmas tree at the west end of the Cathedral each year.

You can either join online here

Or download a membership form and return it to the Friends’ Office by post. The Friends’ office is at 2 The Close, Winchester SO23 9LS

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Privacy Notice

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Data Retention Policy

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Complaints Policy

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Safeguarding Policy

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Accounts Year Ending 31 March 2025

Please book tickets for Friends events by ringing the office on 01962 857245 or email friends@winchester-cathedral.org.uk

Tickets are £13. Attendance by Zoom is by donation.

Cathedral Flowers Demonstration

Wednesday 30 September, Paul Woodhouse Suite, 11am – 12.30pm or 2.30pm-4pm

At this event, the Cathedral’s flower arrangers will demonstrate how they create the stunning displays which illuminate all the important events of the Christian calendar in the Cathedral as well as the weekly services. They will also talk about how Cathedral flower arranging is becoming more
sustainable. The flower arrangements created during the demonstrations will be the prizes in raffles which will be the finales of both the morning and afternoon events.

Cathedral Gardens and Grounds – Patrick Green, Head Gardener, Winchester Cathedral

Tuesday 20 October, 2.30pm in the Pavilion and on Zoom

At this event Patrick Green, the Cathedral’s Head Gardener, will talk about his background and horticultural life. He will explain key projects at Winchester such as tree surveys and how his team are gardening with a changing mindset of life on the Urban Edge with biodiversity front and centre. The Cathedral gardeners are pretty good at growing grass and they will share their trade secrets and explain how it’s not quite as magical as you might think. The talk will also explore how the Cathedral’s gardens are being cared for in a more eco-friendly way including the creation of a plant nursery and the re-development of the Lower Deanery gardens into a Biodiversity hotspot.

This talk will be followed by tea and biscuits.

‘Three Choirs and a Reformation: English Cathedrals under the Tudors’, Dr Richard Fisher, University of Bristol

Wednesday 11 November, 2.30pm in the Pavilion and on Zoom

In this illustrated talk, Dr Richard Fisher explains how the nineteen cathedrals of medieval England were administered and funded, including their curious division into two very distinct organisational groups. Henry VIII is infamous for his dissolution of the monasteries, but not so well known for creating six new dioceses, bishops and their requisite cathedrals from abbeys spared destruction. Yet which did he choose to save and why? Using examples from the West of England, focusing on the cathedrals at Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester, the story is told of how our cathedrals survived the Reformation and contributed to the distinctive worship of the emergent Anglican Church.

This talk will be followed by tea and biscuits.

’The Black Death of 1348/9 and its long term effects’ by Cindy Wood, Friends’ Trustee and former University of Winchester history lecturer

Thursday 3 December, 7pm, Zoom only

The Black Death arrived in Europe in 1347 and its spread killed between thirty and fifty per cent of the population. This talk will explore the event itself and also the impact on society over the next 200 years, as the plague returned regularly and affected not only population numbers but also attitudes to death, marriage, feudalism and more.

8.30am Eucharist, Lady Chapel
The service will be followed by coffee and pastries in the Undercroft. All are welcome to attend.

10am & 11.15am – The ‘Funded by the Friends’ tour
Over the Friends’ 95 year history, the Friends have paid for many items in the Cathedral (altar frontals, hymn books, live streaming kit) and the repair, restoration and conservation of roofs, windows, the organ and many other things.. This tour will explore some of the most significant and most unusual projects.

10am & 11.15am – The ‘Riddle of the Bones’ tour
Explore this royal house of Kings and Saints. Walk the site of the Anglo-Saxon Old Minster and follow the stories of the kings and saints whose bones now rest in the modern Cathedral’s mortuary chests.

9.30am – 12 noon Coffee in the Undercroft
Please do drop in to meet up with Friends during the morning of Friends’ Day.

2pm AGM in the Cathedral Pavilion
To be chaired by The Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen, Lord Bishop of Winchester and followed by afternoon tea.

4.30pm Friends’ Festal Evensong, Cathedral Quire.
Our preacher this year will be The Very Reverend Christopher Palmer, Dean of Winchester

In 2026, the Friends’ coffee mornings will be held on Friday 19 June, Friday 17 July, Friday 18 September, Friday 16 October, Friday 20 November and Friday 11 December in the Undercroft from 10.30am.  The December coffee morning will be a special Christmas event. Do come along and meet Friends, new and old.

Please book our talks by contacting the office on 01962 857245 or by emailing friends@winchester-cathedral.org.uk

If you would like to view past talks, you can view them on You Tube or Zoom:

• Johanna Strong, PhD student, University of Winchester – “Mary I of England – how ‘Bloody’ was she?”
• Jane Hands, Lay Canon, and Dr Tim Hands, Headmaster of Winchester College – “Cathedral and College: breaching the wall – from Wykeham to Wesley and beyond“
• David Farthing, Cathedral Guide – “The Winchester Diver: Behind The Scenes”
• Tom Watson, Friends’ Trustee – “Edward the Martyr: the murder mystery king”
• Chris Dobbs, Head of Interpretation at the Mary Rose, Bruce Parker and Margaret and Nick Braddock – “The raising of the Mary Rose by individuals who were involved in the story”
• Jeannie Berridge, Cathedral Guide – “The Great Screen – Magnificence, Mayhem and Mystery”
• Tom Watson, Friends’ trustee – “The history of the formation of the Friends”
• Cindy Wood, Friends’ trustee – “The Chantry Chapels at St George’s Chapel, Windsor”
• Rosey Smith – Winchester Cathedral Literary Links
• Andy Trenier – a Precentor’s Tale
• Derek Whitfield – Relief, Rejoicing & Remembrance in Winchester
• Cindy Wood – Cage Chantries in the southern Cathedrals of England
• Bruce Parker – 60 Years in Broadcasting
• Barry Shurlock – History of the Hampshire Chronicle
• Alys Blakeway – Charlotte Yonge’s life
• Rosey Smith – Cathedral Sculpture
• Cindy Wood – Medieval Parish Churches

If you enjoyed any of these talks, maybe you would like to make a donation the Friends are welcome via this link.

The March 2026 edition of Record Extra features an article about the Cathedral memorial to Sir John Clobery. The memorial, in the Retroquire, was commissioned by his widow in 1691. Sir John Clobery was a soldier and MP for Winchester, and he also played an important role in the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

The memorial tablet for Lt-Col Edward Henry Le Marchant, Hampshire Regiment, has the stark epitaph of “Shot by a fanatic”. Cathedral guide Josephine Ronayne Mustoe tells the story of a clergyman’s son from Gloucestershire who was assassinated at Peshawar in the North West Frontier of India (now Pakistan) in 1899.

Almost all members of the Cathedral congregation will have stood on the ledger stone of Thomas Gumble, an argumentative and difficult canon from the latter part of the 17th century. His fractious relations with the Dean and fellow canons gained the epithet of “The Gumble Affair”. Tom Watson reports on his troubled time in Winchester.

Although Bishop Peter des Roches (1205-1238) is renowned as a ‘warrior-bishop’, close to him in the Cathedral’s retrochoir is another bishop who was twice involved in combat, once as Bishop of Winchester. This is Bishop Peter Mews (1684-1706) whose memorial is in the Guardian Angels Chapel. Tom Watson explores his military and episcopal life which has details and questions that are difficult to validate.

The story of the destruction of St Swithun’s shrine in 1538 is well-known but forgotten is the reliquary of St Philip the Apostle which was also held by the Cathedral. Over more than fifty years from 1538 to 1593, this relic of the apostle’s foot made its way, often clandestinely, from Winchester to Philip II of Spain’s great relic collection at the Escorial monastery-palace near Madrid. Tom Watson uses recent research to confirm that it was accepted by the Spanish king after being brought from the English recusant community at Bruges. The article is completed with a section about St Philip the apostle.

In celebration of the conservation of the Cathedral’s Tournai font, Record Extra’s editors (Cindy Wood and Tom Watson) tell the story of these black “marble” fonts which came to England in the twelfth century. The Cathedral font is one of seven still in existence and has been called ‘the most famous’.

Winchester Cathedral has nine ‘incunabula’ – books that were printed before or by 1500. In this report written specially for Record Extra, Richard Foster, Fellows’ Librarian at Winchester College, analyses these nine literary treasures.

The cult of St Swithun was instituted at the Old Minster in 971 and developed into one of the most popular cults of early medieval England. Tom Watson explains the context of the cult and explores how it was developed, mainly in the southern half of England.

In May, the University of Stavanger in western Norway announced that archaeologists had found remnants of a long-lost reliquary of St Swithun at the cathedral of the same name in Stavanger. With the assistance of the university’s Museum of Archaeology, a Special Report has been prepared on the finds, and the historic link between Winchester and Stavanger.

The Irish Huguenot author Melesina Trench (1768-1827) was buried in the Cathedral Guardian Angel chapel and is memorialised on a tablet in the North Transept but is now known as the source of the name for the Cathedral’s recently arrived female peregrine, Mel. This article tells her life in brief and how she showed her talons as a diarist and author.

“Who read what and when” in the Morley Library over the centuries? is the question answered by Dr Andrew Thomson’s article on the library’s borrowers’ book, which is still on display. It follows his article, Bishop Morley and his Library in Record Extra (October 2022).

The Cathedral’s Curator & Librarian, Eleanor Swire, reports on the progress being made by her and three volunteers on cataloguing the Morley Library. She gives insights on what is being found beyond the basic cataloguing, which offers intriguing stories of the Library, individual books and their readers.

Now that the Cathedral’s 1851 Willis organ is back to full strength, Tom Watson and Paul Tanner report on the history of the bellows and blowers that have powered the Cathedral’s organs since the tenth century. Also included are photos and detailed drawings of the last manual bellows which is out of sight at the triforium level of the North Transept.

“What’s the difference between a Minster and a Cathedral?” is a question often asked of Cathedral Guides and Kings & Scribes’ stewards. This Editors’ Note traces the relationship back to the Latin ‘monasterium’ and takes readers forward to the recent naming of modern minsters.

The Rev Edmund Pyle was noted letter-writer in the mid-eighteenth century, with an acute and witty turn of phrase. This Editors’ Note discusses Winchester’s social life in the Deanery garden during 1756 when troops from the German state of Hesse were in an encampment at Badger Farm north of the city.

In the Cathedral nave’s south aisle, a solo marble angel stands in a memorial to the almost forgotten Bishop George Pretyman Tomline (1820-27). Although his name is barely readable on the stone plinth, the Bishop was a close confidant and political adviser to William Pitt the Younger, the precocious late eighteenth century Prime Minister who was appointed at the age of twenty-four.