CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 84, 10 April 1937, Page 9 (Supplement)

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.

Restoration Work By Friends.

HISTORIC MEMORIALS IN NOBLE FANE.

THE Friends of Canterbury Cathedral will open their annual festival this

year with a service of arts and «rafta in the cathedral itself on June 82. The celebrations end a week later, cm June 19, the actual festival day, with a eervice that-wilL.be of interest fco the whole Empire,, writes a correspondent in the London "Observer."

A wall-stone will be formally presented to the Cathedral, and beside it will" be placed a list of 92 cathedrals in .ill parts of the British Empire in which ■limilar stones from Canterbury have fteen placed during the past few years.

The Church of England overseas is aow world-wide, with dioceses in every continent, and it can fairly - claim that fihe description which Pope Urban 11. applied to Archbishop Ana elm—"the Patriarch, the Apostolicus or Pope of a second world"—is literally true of his successors to-day, 800 years afterwards. The If other Church. Christ Churah, Canterbury, remains tflie Mother Church of this vast organisation. The iULe# cathedral in Em■and, its walls 'tee it once g pageant and memorial In stone and bronze and marble of a thousand years, of history, and nnder the guidance of the Dean and Chapter it is the privilege of the Friends •f Canterbury Cathedral to ensure that this great treasure house of the nation Is kept in the splendour and beauty proper to its fame.

lins association of Friends was founded 19 years ago by Dr. Bell, now Bishop of Chichester, to bind together, all who loved Canterbury Cathedral and desired to take some part, however •mall, in preserving it for posterity. Since then several similar societies have keen formed in other cathedral cities, with similar objects, bnt the pioneer association in Canterbury retains its primacy, and now has individual and •orporate members in all parts of the world. The King is the first Friend on the foil, and there are over 4700 active Friends in the society. Damaged by Gale. An antumn gale blew in a large window in the clerestory of the eastern ehoir of Canterbury Cathedral, end it is being replaced at a cost of £140. The splendid medieval tomb of the Black Prince has been cleaned and transformed to shining gold for £107. The Royal window of Edward IV. (which when complete will contain portraits »f that monarch, his Queen, and their sons and daughters) is being replaced With the original j;la*s at a cost of £509.

These are relatively small items; the care of the fabric itself involves considerably larger expenditure. The repair of the roof of the Great Cloister, for example, has cost £2300, and the Corona £4400; while the restoration of Christ Church Gateway—that splendid entrance through which Henry VIII. and Francis I. of France once passed in full panoply of State—has involved an expenditure of nearly £10/100.

Only those who can remember the Gateway and Cathedral as they were in Dean Farrar's time 30 years ago can realise how well the money has, been spent, and how much has been done to restore the great church to the full beauty of its prime-, when pilgrims thronged to the tomb of St. Thomas and paid homage to the pictures of St. Dunetan, tempted of the devil, and St. Alphege being martyred by the Danes. Tombs to be Repaired. The paintings of these three heroic archbishops, who are all buried in the cathedral, are to be restored by Dr. W. Tristram—the large, representation of St. Thomas is, in fact, already on . enough,' the cathedral appears to tiaVe no memorial t#*two 'other archbishops, who also lost their lives—the unfortunate Cranmer and the unhappy- Laud. But the fine tombs, of the great medieval prelates —Courtenay, who persecuted the Lollards and rebuked Richard II.; Archbishop Peckham, and others, have been restored, and the magnificent monument to Henry TV. l —the only King of England buried in the cathedral —will be repaired by the time that the Coronation visitors begin to arrive.

Finally, there remain the modern memorials. Here are the flags of H.M.S. Kent and H.M.S. Canterbury, which came through the battles of the Falkland Islands and Jutland. Over against these, ita vivid blue almost dazzling even in the winter sunshine, are the ensigns of the Royal Air Force, presented only a few months ago.

These are the symbols of the England of to-day; away in a. far corner is the sacred spot where stood the altar of the first church in Canterbury, centuries before Britain became England. There Christian men worshipped in the time of Constantine, a hundred years before the Roman legions from London and Lincoln and the north marched through the streets of Canterbury on their recall home by the dying Empire.

Nothing now remains of this but a memory, but from the site of that first church in Kent to the chair of St. Augustine, where the Archbishops of Canterbury of to-day welcome the bishops of the whole Church of England overseas in

conference assembled, the great cathedral commemorates almost every aspect ef our history. And it is the beneficent work of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral to maintain its memorials and its fabric iatact for oorselrsa, ear kinsmen, and for posterity.