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 £70,000 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

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 31st March 2024

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.

‘Elizabeth Knight: Landowner, Political Activist and Jane Austen’s Inspiration?’ by Dr Alison Daniell, Thursday 25 September, 7pm in the Cathedral Pavilion and 7.30pm on Zoom

Eighteenth-century scholar and specialist in women’s history Elizabeth Knight of Chawton was nothing if not fiercely independent. Retaining full control of her many estates, she outlived two husbands, potentially manipulated an election result and set up the entail that eventually resulted in an expensive out-of-court settlement for Jane Austen’s brother Edward. This talk will introduce you to an extraordinary woman who deftly navigated the legal restrictions placed on wives – and who may just have been the inspiration for one of Austen’s most formidable characters: Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

This talk will start with a drinks reception.

‘When the French captured Winchester twice’ by Professor Tom Watson, historian and Record Extra co-editor, Tuesday 14 October, 2.30pm in the Cathedral Pavilion and on Zoom

In 1216 and 1217, Winchester twice fell to the army of Prince Louis of France (later Louis VIII) during the Magna Carta War. Louis was proclaimed King of England by barons, but wasn’t crowned. Tom Watson tells the dramatic story of how English barons invited a French prince to be King of England, and the role of Winchester and its warrior-bishop, Peter des Roches, in defeating the invaders.

This talk will be followed by tea and biscuits.

Oliver Jessop, Winchester Cathedral archaeologist, Tuesday 25 November, 2.30pm in the Cathedral Pavilion and on Zoom

As a recognised expert on the survey and analysis of buildings and historic landscapes, Oliver will report on his first year at Winchester as the Cathedral’s archaeologist and tell us something about his background and what made him choose archaeology as a profession. Before Winchester, Oliver acted as the heritage and archaeological consultant at Chatsworth and was involved in conservation projects at Woburn Abbey, Blenheim Palace and Wells Cathedral and he is also the Consultant Archaeologist to St Paul’s Cathedral.
At the end of this talk Alison Evans, the Cathedral’s Chief Operating Officer will do a short update about projects at the Cathedral.

This talk will be followed by tea and biscuits

Happily (N)ever After?: Mary I and Philip of Spain in Winchester, by Dr Johanna Strong, Wednesday 3 December, 7pm, Zoom only

The last royal wedding to take place at Winchester Cathedral was that of Mary I and Prince Philip, the future Philip II of Spain on 25 July 1554. It was a momentous day for the couple, for their realms, and for their future legacy in England, but how is this reflected in Winchester today? Dr Johanna Strong will explain the significance of this royal marriage to Winchester and to England and explore the ways in which this marriage is remembered, from Winchester College’s celebrations at the time, to the elaborate décor now at the Westgate Museum, to the Cathedral’s own remembrances of England’s first crowned queen regnant.

The Friends’ coffee mornings will be held on Friday 27 June, Friday 18 July, Friday 19 September, Friday 17 October, Friday 21 November and 12 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.

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.

The statue of Bishop Brownlow North at prayer is very visible in the Cathedral’s South Presbytery Aisle but, despite long service in Winchester from 1781 until his death in 1820, the bishop’s reputation is clouded by claims of nepotism rather than service to his diocese. Dick Selwood, who has extensively researched Bishop North, uses the Diocesan Visitation of 1810 to survey the bishop’s life and career and to investigate the way the Church of England operated during the late Georgian period. He finds the bishop knew little about the manning of the Winchester diocese and very seldom came to the city and its Cathedral, preferring to spend time at Farnham Castle where he indulged his lover of botany.

Barry Shurlock tells the story of Canon Arthur Goodman and Florence R. Goodman who made important contributions to historical research and resources on Winchester Cathedral and the Winchester area in the late 1920s and 1930s. Canon Goodman, who was Cathedral Librarian and founding editor of the Friends’ Winchester Cathedral Record in 1932, is best known for his work on the Cathedral’s charters and rolls while Florence Remington Goodman, a highly qualified historian, undertook her own original research which she sought to bring to a wider audience. It is as a result of Barry’s research for the Celebrating Hampshire Historians project of the Hampshire Field Club that this article, which re-evaluates these two somewhat forgotten historians, allows the Goodmans to be appreciated again.

Cindy Wood has researched Cardinal Henry Beaufort’s chantry chapel in the cathedral’s Retroquire and his effigy which was remade after the Restoration in 1660. The current Beaufort effigy is very likely to be considerably different from the original, and there were other changes made to the chapel during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth.

To find a French Huguenot memorialised in the cathedral is a surprise to many. Tom Watson has found that Jean Serres led an extraordinary life including decades as a galley slave in the Mediterranean before he was allowed to leave France and eventually come to Winchester where he lived out a long and faithful life.

Somehow, in both 1141 and 1216-17, Winchester Cathedral survived two wars without evident damage. In this article, Tom Watson tells of the French invasion of England in 1216 when rebellious barons invited a French prince and his army to help dethrone King John. Twice Winchester was besieged and then captured by the French forces, with severe damage to the castle and the city, but the cathedral seems to have escaped the damage and pillaging. (There is an Editors’ Note on the 1141 Siege of Winchester in the March 2023 edition of Record Extra).

This article is a biographical vignette on Prince Louis, leader of the French invaders, who was later nicknamed as ‘Le Lion’ (The Lion). He came to the French throne in 1223 as Louis VIII.

As 2023 is the bicentennial of the birth of the author Charlotte Mary Yonge, this edition of Record Extra has two articles on Hampshire’s ‘other’ famous woman writer who had numerous best-selling novels in the Victorian era but who is less well-known now.

Hilary Clare has contributed an extended essay on the life of the novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge who lived her life mostly in Hampshire around Otterbourne, with close association to Rev John Keble at Hursley and a long attachment to Winchester Cathedral. Yonge, a very prolific writer, was equal in popularity to Charles Dickens in the mid-Victorian period, with her novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) a best-seller. She was also associated later in life with Mary Sumner who founded the Mothers’ Union, whose journal Charlotte Yonge edited.

Although Charlotte Yonge was buried in Otterbourne, she is commemorated in the Cathedral’s Lady Chapel in a wooden reredos designed by Charles Eamer Kempe. Roger Ottewill tells the story of how the Victorian author came to be memorialised.

Much has been written about the damage to Winchester and the Cathedral during the English Civil Wars, but 500 years earlier, there was conflict within the city between Empress Matilda and the troops of Bishop Henry of Blois, while forces supporting King Stephen laid siege to the city itself. The Cathedral escaped damage but much of the city was set on fire or looted by the besiegers when they broke in through the gates.

In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth associated a legendary Romano-British saint, Amphibalus from St Albans, with Winchester. Later writers have claimed that Amphibalus preceded Swithun as one of the Cathedral’s patrons. This Editors’ Note explores the myth of Amphibalus.

James G. Clark’s much-praised The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History is reviewed. It is a blockbuster in terms of its purview of the Dissolution period and its aftermath, with many challenges to historical orthodoxy.

The lead article is about Bishop George Morley (1662-84) and the library that he gave to the Cathedral, written by expert Morley historian Andrew Thomson. It includes new analysis of the library’s 1682 catalogue and the lending book which is chained to a desk in the library.

The editors of Winchester Cathedral Record from 1932 to 2022 are analysed, with special emphasis on three early editors, Canon A.W. (Arthur) Goodman (1932), G.H. (George) Blore and H.S. (Harry) Altham. Blore (1935-1945) and Altham (1945-1965), who edited the Record for over thirty years and set its scholarly style as well as contributing their own articles.

For this edition, two books have been reviewed – both on great European cathedrals. They are Simon Jenkins’ Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals and Emma Wells’ Heaven on Earth – The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Great Cathedrals. Of course, Winchester Cathedral features in both books.

It was largely through the influence of Cathedral organist Samuel Sebastian Wesley that the ‘Father’ Willis organ from the 1851 Great Exhibition came to Winchester. Wesley was the finest organist of his time and a renowned composer, but also a very difficult character who fell out with Deans & Chapters wherever he worked. Professor Tom Watson’s article introduces Samuel Sebastian Wesley and his career.

Friends’ member Patrick Daniell spotted the connection between Winchester and Waterford on a recent visit. From his notes and other research, the story of this little-known bishop who came from St Swithun’s Priory back to his homeland is told.

An audible feature of the Kings & Scribes Triforium exhibition is the reading in Old English of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’ reports on the coronation of Edward the Confessor at the Old Minster in 1043. This Editors’ Note sets the context for the period.

Professor Tom Licence’s history of Edward the Confessor presents the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings as a far stronger and more astute monarch than the traditional pallid saintly image. Published in late 2020, it covers the political landscape of eleventh century England before the Normans invaded.

Cathedral guide Stephen Jones and Tom Watson tell the story of Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester (1869-73), and his memorial in the Cathedral’s south transept. He was the son of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce MP and one of the major personalities of the Church in mid-Victorian England.

A new feature in Record Extra is Editor’s Notes, short articles on Cathedral topics and book reviews prepared by the joint editors, Dr Cindy Wood and Professor Tom Watson. In this edition, there are three articles and a book review:

St Birinus, the apostle to the West Saxons, is now largely forgotten but in the early thirteenth century the presence of his relics in the Cathedral was contested by the Augustinian monks of Dorchester Abbey.

The Duke of Connaught, third son of Queen Victoria, was the first Cathedral Friends’ patron in 1931. Recently, the 80^th anniversary of his death in 1942 was commemorated at the Cathedral.

Leading medieval historian Nicholas Orme’s recent Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021) is a highly recommended, very readable social history of daily church-going across the Middle Ages.

Bishop Godfrey De Lucy, Agatha and their three sons: clerical relationships in the thirteenth century

Cathedral guide Anna Withers tells the little-known story of Agatha, the “wife” of Bishop Godfrey de Lucy (1189 -1204), and their three sons. Their time together was in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reforms which enforced chastity in the Church.

Captain Henry Pearson, RN and the Great Samoan Hurricane

Ian Glenday, also a Cathedral Guide, and Tom Watson investigate the North Transept plaque commemorating Captain Henry Pearson, RN and find a late Victorian naval hero who came to Winchester in retirement.