The Black Country Dying Museum

Some of you may recall an earlier post where we wondered who had created the lovely St Mary & St Anne window at St Augustine of Hippo near Dudley. Well, one of us had the clever idea of looking at the recently updated Pevsner covering the Black Country which gave us a name and a different take on the iconography of the window…

St Augustine, Holly Hall, received an entry just two lines long in the 1974 Pevsner guide to Staffordshire and this detailed just the architect and date of the building. The 2022 Pevsner volume covering Birmingham and the Black Country, expanded this entry to half-a-page and drew particular attention to the stained glass in the east window of the south chapel. This triple lancet is said to feature scenes from the life of Mary, by G. H. Randle and W. Randle of Kings Norton, and to date from 1914. The window is a memorial to Annie Maria Garratt (1843-1912) and was erected by Julius Garratt, Annie Maria’s son.

The central lancet portrays Mary and the infant Christ, while the lefthand lancet shows the annunciation to Mary, the incident described in the canonical gospels where the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the young Mary and told her that she would give birth to Christ. The more enigmatic righthand lancet shows a second annunciation with an angel, clad in a purple robe and holding a flowering stick, appearing to an older, melancholy woman. The latest Pevsner describes this as the Last Sleep (i.e., death). The artist has reinterpreted a death scene as a form of annunciation, combining two events in the life of Anne, mother of Mary, which were popular in earlier art. The first event is the annunciation to Anne, described in the apocryphal gospels, where an angel appeared to the mature and childless Anne and informed her that she would bear a daughter who would be the mother of Christ. Earlier artists sometimes showed Anne as being highly distressed by this event, a local example being that in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, attributed to Willem de Poorter (1607/08-1648, or after). The second event is the death of Anne, which earlier artists usually interpreted as a deathbed scene featuring the dying Anne being attended by Christ, Mary and Joseph. In the stained glass, the purple robe of the angel can be taken to indicate mourning and the flowering stick can be interpreted as symbolic of Anne’s pregnancy late in life, when she was believed to be infertile. 

The identity of the artists is also enigmatic. Are there other windows by the Randles? The latest Pevsner volume credits a Walter W. Randle with a window depicting St George in St John the Baptist, Halesowen, dating from 1924. Does this refer to one the artists of the St Augustine window? Elsewhere in the Pevsner guide, George Randle, George Randle & Son and G. Randle & Son are described as the architects of four buildings in Handsworth and Smethwick. Were they also the stained glass designers’? If the Randles were architects and stained glass designers, who made the windows?

Bibliography

Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Staffordshire (Penguin Books, London, 1974).

Andy Foster, Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, The Buildings of England: Birmingham and the Black Country (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2022).