No . 135
The Trusty Servant
Wykeham ’ s Windows
A shortened version of this article was delivered by the Director of Win Coll Soc in Chapel during Common Time :
My housemaster Colin Badcock was a legend . If you go into Cloisters , you can read a tablet that says :
“ Colin Francis Badcock 1925 – 2017 Scholar , Don , Housemaster , Fellow ”. He was also a classicist , a rower , an entertainer and a benefactor . He helped found the OW Rowing club and named it Icena , the Latin name for Itchen . As a benefactor , he left the College one of the largest legacies it has ever received , eclipsing William Stanley Goddard and George Ridding .
Colin is better known for his many cultural legacies , often the result of collaboration with Ronnie Hamilton , a fellow OW and member of Common Room . Together they founded The Trusty Servant in 1956 . They collaborated over The Masque , the famous entertainment performed
The key to the Chapel saints , taken from Pendlebury at the opening of New Hall in 1961 and most importantly for this morning , in 1959 they published Pendlebury and the Plaster Saints .
Pendlebury is a fictional Wykehamist in VI Book , who has time to dawdle in Chapel and who is befriended by Saint Alban . Alban is the statue to the right of the altar , in the uniform of a Roman soldier and he comes to life in front of Pendlebury . Under the tutelage of the animated Saint , Pendlebury is introduced , during repeated visits , to the other saints in Chapel , both in the reredos and those in the stained-glass windows you see on either side of you .
The book is just the right length that if you read one of its short chapters each night at Preces you could fill a term . In fact , as Ronnie Hamilton was then Housemaster in Trant ’ s , the Trantites were subjected to the entire draft manuscript during Common Time 1958 .
Although the statues in the reredos were later additions , [ The current statues were installed in 1877 , following Butterfield ’ s restoration of the reredos in 1866 . Whether the modern statues are faithful replacements of what had gone before remains unclear ] all the glass was personally commissioned by William of Wykeham . As was common at the time , he populated the easterly windows with the Apostles ( Matthias , replaced Judas Iscariot who , if you remember , got the sack ) while above them are 12 of the Old Testament prophets , such as Isaiah and Daniel .
The other four nave windows house 22 saints chosen not by custom but by Wykeham himself and it ’ s reasonable to think that these 22 had some special meaning to Wykeham in his devotions or influence on his life . In each window he placed the exhortation : “ Pray for William of Wykeham , Bishop of Winchester , Founder of this college ”. He did not go so far as to include himself but he has elevated 11 saints who had been English bishops , archbishops or abbots plus a further three churchmen . Perhaps to give Richard II an inferred future position among the saints , three saintly pre-Conquest English kings ( Edmund , Oswald and Edward the Confessor ) are shown along with St Christopher and St George . George was the recentlyadopted patron saint of England , popularised by Wykeham ’ s first royal master Edward III . Tactfully or otherwise , St George is placed next to Edward the Confessor , the Patron Saint he usurped .
The remaining windows are taken up by three female saints : Mary Magdalene , St Anne , shown teaching her young daughter Mary to read and then Mary in her own right , visible only to the organist in the organ loft . Wykeham ’ s reverence for Mary should be no secret to any of you . Both the colleges he founded are dedicated to her and she dominates the East Window .
The Jesse Window deserves a whole sermon to itself but for those who have forgotten , it ties together two well-known extracts from the Bible . The more alert of you will recognise this from the Book of Isaiah , a text included in Advent services ‘ and there shall come forth a rod from the root of Jesse ’. The characters connected by that branch are listed in the first chapter of Matthew ’ s Gospel in which Jesus ’ s genealogy is set out from
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