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 £10 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

Membership starts at £30 for a single membership or £55 for a joint* membership.

*Joint membership is for two people living at the same address.

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

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Extended Privacy Statement

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Complaints Policy

The Friends of Winchester Cathedral Safeguarding Policy

Please book tickets for Friends events by ringing the office on 01962 857244/5 or email friends@winchester-cathedral.org.uk

Tickets are £12 for Friends and £14 for non-Friends. Attendance by Zoom is by donation.

‘Legal Life’ by Her Honour Judge Angela Morris – Thursday 18 January 2.30pm, Paul Woodhouse Suite & Zoom

Her Honour Judge Angela Morris, The Recorder of Winchester, Resident Judge, Winchester and Salisbury Combined Courts will talk about legal life in Winchester.

The Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen, Bishop of Winchester  – Thursday 25 January, 7pm in the Cathedral quire and on the Cathedral Live Stream.

Bishop Philip will be interviewed about a wide range of Cathedral and diocesan topics by Bruce Parker, currently the Friends’ chairman and a former BBC South Political Editor.

(Booking via the Cathedral Box Office)

‘Behind the Scenes with the Curator’ by Ellie Swire, Cathedral Curator and Librarian – Tuesday 20 February, 2.30pm. Paul Woodhouse Suite & Zoom

The Cathedral is home to a rich and unique collection of historic books and objects. Ellie will share some of the recent findings from the Cathedral’s Inventory project and explain how adding new information to catalogue records can help to support important future research. Ellie will also give an insight into various other aspects of her interesting and varied role.

‘Pilgrimage’ by Canon Gary Philbrick – Tuesday 20 February, 2.30pm, Paul Woodhouse Suite & Zoom

In June 2023, Canon Gary spent three weeks walking some of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. He will reflect on that experience, share some photographs, think about ‘The Camino of Daily Life’, and the Cathedral as a centre for receiving and sending Pilgrims.

The Friends’ coffee mornings will be held on Friday 8 December, 19 January, 16 February and 15 March in the Undercroft from 10.30am.  Do come along and meet Friends, new and old.

Please book our talks by contacting the office on 01962 857244/5 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 Beck – Cathedral Music in Three Movements
• 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.

In June and July 2022, over 200 Friends gathered in the Cathedral to hear about the Friends commitment to support the forthcoming organ restoration project. The Friends raised £130,000 during 2022 to help the Cathedral meet its fundraising target of £1.1m. The Cathedral has nearly completed its fundraising for this project but still needs to raise £25,000.

A recording of the Friends’ receptions can be viewed here

A booklet has been posted to all Friends but a copy of this can be found here

A list of the Stops that are available to sponsor and a response form can be found here

If you would like to donate to the appeal, you can donate online via this link

Alternatively, you can ring the office on 01962 857244/4 to pay by debit/credit card or you can send a cheque made payable to Friends of Winchester Cathedral at 2 The Close, Winchester, SO23 9LS

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.