THE WYKEHAM JOURNAL 2023
This year Winchester ’ s War Cloister will be a century old . Rudyard Kipling , who liked it very much , felt sure that it would stand unchanged 100 years after its completion , and he was right . ‘ One could see , when one had admired , how it will weather and how it will arrange itself a hundred years hence ,’ Kipling wrote to the cloister ’ s architect , Herbert Baker .
But even a cloister built from flint and stone needs some help to arrange itself . Any visitor to the cloister towards the end of 2023 saw a small team of wellwrapped experts , with their faces inches from the memorials , slowly and carefully repainting the lettering . As the winter light faded in the afternoons these miniaturists lit up small torches strapped to their heads to illuminate the few square inches they were working on .
Most of the cloister has weathered its first century well but the paint has become , as Josephine Walton puts it , ‘ dishevelled ’. Half a century of exposure has taken its toll . The last restoration was done in the 1960s and now needs to be repeated . Josephine is the manager of the team from Sally Strachey Conservation dealing with repainting . They worked out which mix of paint and which method of application would last best . They have then patiently repainted every one of the 785 names and principal coats of arms in the cloister . Her work takes her all over the country and often means a working-week away from home . Before War Cloister Josephine had been working on the conservation of Manchester Town Hall .
There are no colour records from the 1920s and the stripping of the paint in the 1960s was very thorough . ‘ We ’ re reproducing the original as best we know how ,’ said Josephine . ‘ We have reworked historic repairs where lettering has been altered but we have always honoured what was there .’ Those ‘ historic repairs ’ were a handful of corrections made where the 1924 version was adjusted in the light of later information : an officer ’ s rank , say , or the location of a death . One can ’ t help noticing on the stones that a very few parents lumbered their sons with odd middle names . It ’ s hard to believe that Wykehamists of more than a hundred years ago would have liked to have ‘ Umpherston ’ or ‘ Undecimus ’ included in their names any more than they would now .
512 OWs fell in WWI
273 OWs fell in WWII
Last year £ 690,000
was spent on the ancient buildings
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