How the honourable Mrs Sandilands tried to block the Berwick Murals

On November 3, 1940, George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, attended a Sunday morning service at St Michael and All Angels church in the secluded village of Berwick, at the foot of the South Downs, lost in the Low Weald between Lewes and Hailsham. He was there to assess whether the church would be suitable for a grand project he had in mind, and that its rector, George Mitchell, would be enthusiastic to get on board.

Imagine the excitement! The pews would have been squashed full that morning to welcome the parish’s special guest. Among the congregation, it must be assumed, was The Honourable Mrs Sandilands, a prominent member of the Parochial Council, and just about every other organisation in the Cuckmere Valley, from the WI to the local am dram society. Nancy Sandilands, without question, was the village’s most energetic inhabitant. A Berwick busybody? Too pejorative: let’s call her a community dynamo.

If there was ever a film made about the Berwick murals, or a Netflix series about the Bloomsbury lot, which isn’t a bad idea, a great scene would be the introduction of Mrs Sandilands to the Bishop before according to the Book of Revelation, was made in memory of the service, by the Reverend Mitchell. The Bishop would be all smiles and courtesy, little knowing that this impeccably dressed, posh-voiced, strong-jawed woman would become the fiercest obstacle to his grand ambitions.

And Bell’s project was highly ambitious. ‘Religion and art’, he wrote, ‘may yet do something together again to transform the spiritual life of Europe… There is a void in the human soul, crying out to be filled. In order to fill it, God has given a Revelation. High among those who are called to interpret that Revelation… is the artist.’ He wanted the internal walls of the churches in his diocese to be decorated with religious artworks, just as they had been in Medieval times, and he planned for this movement, post-war, to spread across the continent and galvanise the spiritual life of its people (and simultaneously alleviate the financial plight of the artistic community). He had already commissioned the German-Jewish émigré artist Hans Feibusch to adorn the walls of St Wilfrid’s Church in Brighton with nativity scenes. Berwick was the next big step, moving up another level. And he’d already lined up a painter to head the project: Duncan Grant, based a few villages down the road at Charleston Farmhouse in Firle, an accomplished muralist, and an artist of some national standing.

Berwick Church was extremely suitable for what the Bishop had in mind. The interior had been extensively renovated in the 1860s by a previous rector, Edward Boys Ellman, and offered large areas of empty wall, with just five stained-glass windows to compete with the new wall paintings. The incumbent rector, George Mitchell, who had been in place only four years, had already ‘upped the candle’ at Berwick, being an Anglo Catholic, with ‘High Church’ leanings, quickly declared himself to be fully behind the scheme. And Duncan Grant could call in a team of willing and able accomplices, such as his live-in lover Vanessa Bell [no relation] and her daughter Angelica.

The Reverend Mitchell was a practical man, a war veteran who had previously taught accounting at Kingston Technical College before taking the cloth. Bishop Bell authorised him to oversee the day-to-day running of the operation. For it to go ahead, the project needed to be carried unanimously by the Parochial Council, of whom there were nine members, with whom Mitchell had previously enjoyed a friendly, harmonious relationship. To help persuade them, the rector asked Duncan Grant to fashion a model of the proposed murals, painted on cardboard, which, on Sunday April 27, was placed in the church for inspection, and thereafter for a week in his fine, gable-ended rectory down the lane. Grant’s rendition of a naked Christ on the cross must have caused quite a stir.

The meeting of the Parochial Council was held on the evening of May 5, a Monday, and after a discussion of the pros and cons a vote was taken. The result was that, of the nine members present, seven approved, one abstained, and one voted against the mural project. That one person was The Hon. Mrs Sandilands. She subsequently penned an Act of Petition against the project, which triggered the need for a Consistory Court Session to decide the matter, to be judged by Kenneth Macmorran, KC and Diocesan Chancellor.

Nancy Sandilands has gone down in history as something of a ‘Woman from Porlock’, a meddlesome figure obstructing artistic progress. But this caricature obscures a far richer legacy. Much has been made of her heading the local jam making society, as if to highlight her lack of serious credentials to oppose such a progressive, worthwhile scheme. But an examination of Mrs Sandilands’ past suggests that quite the opposite is true. She was, in fact, a deeply cultured and accomplished woman.

She was born Nancy Powell, in Lewes, in 1896, the daughter of land agent Herbert Powell, a magistrate, church warden and pillar of the local community. The family lived in Hill Lodge at the top of town, a ten-bedroom mansion (today Grade-II listed and worth north of £3 million) with a cook and two servants, one of whom, according to the 1901 census, was a ‘young lady’s maid’. Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, was a cousin of her father; her paternal grandfather Arthur Powell was the director of the London-based Whitefriars company which produced the stained glass for many of the country’s most prominent churches, commissioning artists such as Henry Holiday, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones (in 1941 the company was still in the family, run by her uncle, Arthur Marriott Powell). Her maternal grandfather was the lawyer Charles Francis Trower, founding member of the Church Union Council. Two uncles were rectors of Sussex churches.

In 1918, aged 22, Nancy, having spent much of the war working as an Auxiliary Nurse in Farnham, treating facial injuries, married an employee of her father, The Honourable Walter Sandilands. Sandilands was the youngest son of James W Sandilands, the 12th Baron of Torphichen, an ancient Scottish title dating back to Medieval times. The couple moved to a f ive-bedroom country house, Five Elms, in Berwick (near the Cricketers’ Arms) where Nancy immersed herself in the cultural life of the village, while rearing three children, born in quick succession, with the help of several governesses. Sadly, Walter Sandilands didn’t turn out to be a good choice of husband, running off with his secretary in 1929, and moving to Hampshire, losing his position as partner in Powell & Sons and becoming a labourer on the Portsmouth docks. She was left with the children, and the title ‘Hon.’ before her name.

She overcame this scandal, and a severe downturn in her f inancial fortunes, taking in a lodger (Erina Blake-Masson, originally from Yorkshire and widow of the village’s former GP), and doubling down on her civic duties. The Hon. Mrs Sandilands was the producer, director and costume designer of the Cuckmere Valley Players, putting on annual plays in Berwick and the surrounding villages, taking on leading acting roles (such as the titular Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in 1932). She had a good voice, performing songs on stage in fundraising concerts. She was the founder, captain and treasurer of the village’s stoolball team (records reveal her to be a poor batter but good catcher), and an ace at whist. She was Vice-Chair of the Women’s Institute. She grew prize carrots and roses, and kept chickens and ducks, selling the eggs in the village teashop, which she ran. At the start of the war, she was voted Chair of the Red Cross Agricultural Group. As a sideline, she wrote and illustrated children’s books. To sum her up as a ‘jam maker’ does her a great disservice.

The Consistory Court Meeting took place in the flint buildings of Berwick School on June 11th, 1941. Mrs Sandilands, Mrs Blake-Masson and a couple of other parishioners raised their voices in objection. The matter was given two columns in the subsequent Sussex Express and County Herald, which led the piece with Mrs Sandilands’ comments ‘that the paintings would spoil the beautiful 13th-century church, that the proposed designs were not in keeping with the architecture and the existing stained-glass windows of the church; that in these critical days when every effort was needed for the war effort, were not the time to spend money on such matters; and if the paintings were allowed, Berwick Church would become a centre of attraction for sightseers’.

One imagines that ‘the existing stained-glass windows’ were a particular sore point. The largest such window, on the east wall of the church, depicting The Resurrection according to the Book of Revelation, was made in memory of the Reverend Boys Ellman, beloved rector of the church for fully 66 years. It was installed by Whitefriars – the company owned by her family for several generations, remember – in 1908. You can imagine she was extremely proud of her familial association with the church she worshipped in.

Bishop Bell, on behalf of the Reverend Mitchell, had hired Brighton lawyer (and local historian) Frank Bentham Stevens to represent his side of the case, and the team had mustered quite a cast to speak on behalf of the murals. Witnesses included director of the National Gallery and head of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee Kenneth Clark, who had travelled directly from Snowdonia, where he had been overseeing the safekeeping of his gallery’s most treasured paintings; Bertram Nichols, the President of the Royal Society of British Artists; Thomas Anthony Fennemore, director of the Central Institute of Art and Design; and Duncan Grant. There must have been some fancy cars parked in the lane that afternoon. Mrs Sandilands mounted a spirited defence, but the odds were stacked against her. The Chancellor granted the faculty, remarking: ‘I am quite satisfied that the matter had been sufficiently widely canvassed in the parish. Mediaeval builders did not consider their churches to be complete until the walls were painted, so here is an opportunity to treat what is considered a 13th-century church in the way it was intended to be used’.

We can only imagine the extent of Nancy Sandilands’ disappointment. To make matters worse, she was billed with the considerable costs the case had incurred, amounting to £39 12s 4d (39 pounds, 12 shillings, and fourpence, the equivalent of around £2,300 in today’s money). ‘This shows that an ordinary layman objector, unless he has means, cannot oppose a scheme brought forward by the Bishop of the diocese’, she wrote in a letter to Bishop Bell, further stating that ‘Mrs [Blake] Masson and I should both strongly oppose any further faculty being asked for in order to provide any addition to the scheme already approved by the Chancellor… we would still hold the same opinion about the erection of mural paintings in Berwick and would be thankful if any unforeseen reason was to prevent the execution of such paintings.’ She and Mrs Blake-Masson continued to canvass opinion in the village against the project.

‘What a troublesome woman she is’ wrote Bishop Bell to the Reverend Mitchell in February 1942, as they discussed whether to offer to pay half of the costs, in order to keep her quiet on the matter. ‘All she can do is make mischief in the parish… I should not be inclined to magnanimity until you are satisfied she will not do this.’ The matter was not settled until November 1942, by which time the Honourable Mrs Nancy Sandilands had become Staff Sergeant Sandilands, having joined the ATS, cooking meals in a training camp in Talavera Camp in Northants, at which point she agreed to make no further fuss, and pay half of the money.

Nancy Sandilands lived in Five Elms in Berwick until 1963, when, having inherited a family property in Lewes, she sold up and moved. Erina Blake-Masson had continued to lodge with her, subsequently moving into the Lewes house with her friend. All that time, the pair continued to play a big part in village life, running the Cuckmere Valley Players, the Berwick Stoolball team and the local WI, with Nancy Sandilands being elected to the Hailsham Rural Council in 1949, with a landslide majority, representing Berwick, Alciston and Selmeston. Remarkably, perhaps, she continued to be a member of the Parochial Council of St Michael and All Angels, where Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s murals, painted on panels and hung on the walls, were eventually erected between 1943 and 1944. The murals survived an explosion when, in August 1944, a shot down Doodlebug, landing in a neighbouring field, blew out many of the side windows, tearing off the nave roof and half the chancel roof. These leaded windows were replaced with plain glass in case the same thing happened again (Berwick was on the flightpath of the VI rockets, known as ‘Doodlebug Alley’) and are still in place today, helping to illuminate the wall paintings.

So was Nancy Sandilands right to oppose the Berwick murals? If you compare the Edwardian elegance of the Whitefriars stained-glass Resurrection scene, with the stylised Modernism of Duncan Grant’s rather fey Calvary on the west wall opposite, or Angelica Bell’s clunky Annunciation on the south wall of the nave, you can see what she meant about incongruity. And she was certainly right about the murals becoming a tourist attraction – they now draw an estimated 10,000 annual visitors, though this could be seen as more of a boon than a burden. Many of them stop off for a meal or a pint in the Cricketer’s Arms afterwards, which may well have helped keep that charming, out-of-the-way pub alive.

Bishop Bell’s grand idea of decorating all the churches in his diocese with modern art was never fulfilled, and I think we can be thankful for that. But I do believe we can be grateful that this particular project was completed: it’s become an important part of the Bloomsbury legend, and, despite elements of the artwork being rather amateurish, much of it is accomplished, particularly Duncan Grant’s Christ in Glory, above the chancel arch, with portraits of Bishop Bell and Rev Mitchell on one side, and three servicemen, based on local figures, on the other.

It’s interesting to speculate whether, in the 20 years she continued to worship at St Michael and All Angels after the Consistory Court case, Mrs Nancy Sandilands came to appreciate – or at least tolerate – the Modernist murals on its walls. A telling footnote: when Vanessa Bell’s pulpit portraits of the three archangels were vandalised in 1962, it is said that Mrs Sandilands quietly contributed funds for Duncan Grant to paint three floral designs in their place.

Words by Alex Leith