Fitting Memorials

As soon as I could hold a pen I was taught copperplate script by my splendidly bossy elder sister, who was determined to pre-empt any teacher’s pernicious influence. I can still remember the thrill of achieving an infant version of that delicate balance between broad sweep and fine line, of swooping between upper and lower registers, creating delicious patterns on the page that actually meant something. From that promising start my handwriting has deteriorated steadily over the decades, but friends say they still see some trace of its origins, and one legacy of that early tuition is my lifelong love of lettering. As teenagers we biked around East Anglian churches with tubes of paper and blocks of wax crayon poking out of our baskets, alighting to tease out vigorous impressions of ancient brasses in dusty naves, the curlicues of their script imperfectly ghosting through the paper, and I have haunted country graveyards with their slanting stones and lichened legends ever since.

Imagine my pleasure then when, on a recent visit to Blair Castlein Perthshire, I came across two elegant inscriptions from Milton’s Paradise Lost on Purbeck stone standing sentinel either side of a gateway; inside, dotted around the walled Hercules Garden, stood further beautifully executed examples of lettered stone bearing their lines of consolation or celebration: Julian of Norwich’s elegaic ‘All shall be well’ picking up the light from the morning sun in its jagged runnel of gold; Charlotte Howarth’s wry ‘Remember Me’ raising a rueful smile from passers-by. Here is just a selection of the Art and Memory Collection originally commissioned by the Memorial Arts Charity (now renamed The Lettering and Commemorative Arts Trust, or lcat), which is scattered across various sites in Britain as a reminder of how beautiful and varied memorial art can be. It is all the inspiration of Harriet Frazer who, in the 1980s, frustrated in her search for a memorial for her stepdaughter Sophie Behrens, founded Memorials by Artists, dedicated to revitalizing the art of stone letter-cutting and thereby providing an eloquent channel for the articulation of memory and grief. So I set out to Suffolk to find out more about this remarkable venture. Arriving at Snape Priory, I was directed down a drive through woodland which shelters more standing stones, to a Victorian country house with a pastoral view over Suffolk cornfields, where I was greeted warmly by Harriet and her husband Simon. Harriet is the daughter of Heywood and Anne Hill, founder-proprietors of the eponymous bookshop in Mayfair and sometime employers of Nancy Mitford, among others. It was Anne Hill’s mother Dorothy Cranbrook who bought Snape Priory in 1926, and the house seems delightfully arrested in time, with faded paintwork and a dashing portrait by Oliver Messel of the young Heywood Hill hanging in the hall. The charity is run from converted outbuildings, from which Harriet and her tiny staff manage an ever-spreading network of creative collaborations involving seventy craftsmen (and women), one that is gently transforming the landscape of commemoration. It all started simply: ‘The idea came so suddenly,’ she admits, ‘I can remember the very spot on the road.’ Her stepdaughter’s death was the catalyst; she found herself fruitlessly battling churchyard rules and regulations in an effort to create a memorial that would do Sophie’s young life justice – and even when she found a sculptor to help, they were prevented by sheer bureaucracy from using the lines of poetry that they wanted. Two years of dogged persistence paid off eventually in achieving a uniquely beautiful headstone for Sophie, and everything stemmed from there. As always when you look into a hitherto unexplored subject, it turns out to be infinitely more complex than you had ever imagined. I had been under the illusion that letter-carvers use and adapt existing fonts, but even a brief walk round the grounds of Snape Priory showed how mistaken I was. No two memorials look remotely the same. There is an endless variety – not just of stone (or wood) and shape, but of form and flow and heft and weight in the letters employed. Each letter-carver seems to reinvent the wheel, responding intuitively to the sense and sensibility of the words that he is bringing to life with his chisel. And even if an existing letterform is loosely followed, no two letters are ever the same: for all the precision and accuracy of the carver, minute variations will creep in to distinguish one from another. Harriet’s garden serves a practical purpose, too: potential clients often visit Snape Priory to wander around and see what’s possible, to give them ideas and to judge what they do and don’t like, before taking the plunge. There are also the questions of how to locate a sympathetic carver; how to decide on the type of stone or wood; what text to choose; how to navigate your way through the church’s regulations, if a graveyard is in your sights – on all of which lcat advises. Indeed the crux of their work is introducing client to carver for what will be a critical collaboration, for deep feelings are involved in commissioning any memorial, and nerves can get very frayed if things go wrong. Do they ever go wrong, I wonder. ‘Well, they can,’ Harriet admits. ‘There was an awful time when I was rung up on holiday by a distraught and very-much-alive client who had just taken delivery of a stone with both her name and that of her recently deceased husband inscribed on it. Needless to say there had been a misunderstanding, and hers was supposed to go on later. She was furious, and the whole stone had to be redone without her name – at some expense to the artist . . .’ Luckily, such misadventures are rare. And where do all these letter-carvers learn their craft? It’s incredibly skilled work, tough, arduous and often solitary, and not an obvious road to riches. The earlier generation of craftsmen is slowly dwindling, and Harriet is determined to maintain and renew the tradition by raising funds for two-year apprenticeships, as well as running short courses in letter-carving all over the country. Initially it was difficult to find professional carvers willing and able to afford an apprentice, so they are given a grant towards expenses, as is the student. Six of these have now finished their training and have set out on their own. Among them is Stuart Buckle, who trained with the Norfolk-based letter artist Gary Breeze before going it alone five years ago. His commissions have ranged from standing stones at Eton College and a memorial on London’s Horse Guards’ Parade to a commemoration for the victims of the Bali bombing, garden plaques and headstones for pets. It’s an uncertain life, pulling out all the stops at one moment to meet a deadline, scraping around for work the next, but he seems happy with what it offers: independence, variety, the sense of creating something that will last ‘much, much longer than you will, and might even outlive you by centuries’. The intrinsic satisfaction of fashioning a thing of beauty with patience and skill more than compensates for the loneliness of the job. Carving, ultimately, can be a meditative pursuit: the close focus on words and feelings and their transformation into physical form demands expertise laced with empathy, an imaginative mind and a deft and steady hand. And the result is an object of beauty that stops us in our tracks and effectively earths us, cutting through the busyness of our lives to remind us of evanescence, of love and loss, perhaps of hope and renewal, too.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 34 © Ariane Bankes 2012