November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

This is a rare opportunity to enjoy a rich feast of design and technique from the past 100 years. Altar plate by C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, and by the leading early-20th-century silversmiths Henry Wilson and Harold Stabler are included, as is work from the prolific Omar Ramsden. Leslie Durbin’s post-war expressive modelling of St Michael for a staffhead (Fig. 1) is in that Arts and Crafts tradition. All of these are working objects, not museum pieces, and can normally be glimpsed only at a distance, gleaming on the altar or flashing past the pews in procession. The largest exhibit is a six-foot-tall, gem-studded processional cross designed by the architect G.F. Bodley and made by Hardman of Birmingham, the leading manufacturer of Gothic revival metalwork. It was commissioned in 1882 for E.W. Benson when he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Silver from many centuries makes this a dazzling journey through the history of pre-Reformation and Protestant worship, with a side glance at some rarely-seen recusant plate from the Petre family. However, nonconformist silver is not included. When Elizabeth’s bishops demanded new cups for communion, each region developed its own form, well represented here. New objects arrived, notably domestic beer flagons to bring the wine needed when communion was celebrated in large urban parishes (St Martin-in-the-Fields in London had several thousand Easter communicants in 1616), alms basins for poor relief, basins for baptism, and so on.