Memories of people and places in the rectory in Askeaton

Memories of Rethymnon in Askeaton … a poster for an exhibition by Frederick J Featham in the Dimito Gallery in the 1980s

Patrick Comerford

After four months in the rectory in Askeaton, I am making the place home, enjoying the gardens, hanging my own prints and photographs, and placing my own collected souvenirs on shelves around the house.

I have moved a large number of books from my study in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, but leaving many more for my predecessor. The bookshelves in the new meeting room in the rectory are now completed, and I am beginning to sort out the books so that they are accessible for the parish and diocesan tasks ahead.

Wassily Kandinsky’s ‘Battle 1910’ … a present from the Tate over 40 years ago

One of the first prints to hang was a copy of Wassily Kandinsky’s Battle 1910, also known as Cossacks. This print came as a present from my foster mother for the first house I moved to in Dublin, after we had both discussed a Kandinsky exhibition in the Tate and I had described his works as music.

That must have been 40 years ago, and the print has faded over the years. But this morning it is hanging on the wall in the dining room in the rectory.

It seems such an appropriate place for this print, as the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) believed abstract paintings could convey spiritual and emotional values simply through the arrangement of colours and lines. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity. Cossacks was made during a transitional period, when the artist retained some representational elements, such as the two Russian cavalrymen in tall orange hats in the foreground of the painting.

Four figures waiting for an opening line (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

There are four figures clustered together who could invite an opening line for a joke about four religious leaders who walk into a bar – a rabbi from Kraków, a Russian bishop and two priests from Crete.

There are icons from Crete, Mount Athos, Thessaloniki and Egypt, and framed prints from Mount Sinai, as well as photographs and prints that have come from places closer to home, including Lichfield and Cambridge.

There are photographs from the Backs or the River Cam in Cambridge that remind me of summer days, and there is a small print of an interesting painting of the Cathedral Close in Lichfield by Mildred Hammond, showing a house I stayed in on many occasions.

Mildred Hammond is a local artist living in Lichfield. She has a passion for texture and colour and explores paint, pen and ink and collage to create charming pictures. She is a member of the Lichfield Society of Aritists and exhibits and sells her work locally.

‘The Close, Lichfield’ … from an original painting by Mildred Hammond

Facing Kandinsky’s print is a print for the first exhibition of paintings I ever visited in Greece, back in the 1980s. This was an exhibition of paintings by FJ Featham, one October in the mid or late 1980s, in the Dimito Gallery, once housed in a shopfront artists’ studio beside the first apartment I stayed in on that first visit to Rethymnon in Crete.

Frederick J Featham was born in Stockton-on-Tees in England, and he has lived and worked in Rethymnon for almost 50 years.

After studying at Cheltenham School of Art and Saint Paul’s College at Bristol University, he taught painting and print-making at Saint Crispin’s Secondary School in Wokingham. Since 1968 he has lived and worked in Rethymno and is married to a Greek woman. He became a Greek citizen in 1981.

His paintings and prints appear in private collections in Greece, Britain, France, Holland, and the US. He has edited, translated and illustrated Greek history books, including a history of Crete by Panos D Giakas and of the Fortezza in Rethymnon by Markos G Youmbakis. In 2007, he was an invited artist 2007 at the Florence Biennale.

‘Art is the supreme form of communication,’ he has written. ‘If I manage to convey to the viewer the excitement I feel when trying to render the miraculous effect of light on a landscape or a still life, then I have succeeded. If not, I have failed. Hence, the ultimate judge is the viewer.’

This viewer is happy to have this memory of Rethymnon and other memories of people and paces hanging on the dining room in the Rectory in Askeaton.

Two reminders of Limerick’s prosperous banking past

The Limerick Savings Bank on Upper Glentworth Street was designed like a Doric Greek temple (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

At the beginning of the 19th century, Limerick’s status as a prosperous mercantile and trading port gave rise to the foundation of many banks over 200 years ago. Today, although there are some remaining hints of these banks scattered through the city, the one significant remaining legacy from that period is building that once housed a bank set up to deal with the collapse of the earlier mercantile banks in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo.

The Sarsfield Credit Union in Glentworth Street was originally built as the Limerick Savings Bank. This temple-like building was designed by Sir Thomas Deane and superintended by the Limerick-based engineer William Henshaw Owen, who was responsible too for designing Matthew Bridge over the Abbey River.

This building is enhanced by its podium on this corner site. Although it has lost all its internal features, the adjacent building retains some joinery and plasterwork.

This building was designed like a Greek temple, with a Doric portico and blank side walls and standing on a platform. Sadly, it does not take full advantage of its corner site, and while it is a distinguished building and it forms a focal point on this streetscape, it is difficult to appreciate the full extent of its design because of the way the corner site has been utilised.

In its design, this is an archaeologically-correct Greek revival temple bank building. The unexpected and delightful details include the carved lions’ heads anthemions above the eaves. It is similar to Owen’s National Roman Museum at Caerleon, near Newport in south Wales – it must have surprised Victorians that a Roman museum was designed to look like a Greek temple.

Beside the bank, the adjacent three-bay two-storey rendered building, with its subtle Greek-inspired lugged door architrave, adds significantly to the architectural context of the bank temple.

The building, designed like prostyle tetrastyle limestone Doric temple, was built in 1839, on a stylobate and raised rusticated podium. Four fluted Doric columns rise from a three-step stylobate and support a plain architrave and frieze with triglyphs and guttae. There are mutules with guttae beneath the cornice to three sides, forming the base of the pediment above. The pediment has an acroterion and a pair of acroteria angularia.

The Egyptian-style central door opening has an architrave surround and double-leaf timber-panelled doors. To the rear is a pair of round-arched window openings. These were once double-height, but they are now filled at mezzanine level to form four openings with uPVC windows.

Set back to the east is a four-bay two-storey over concealed basement building built ca 1830, attached and unified with the bank.

The bank hall was gutted and renovated around 1990 and none of the original interior features have survived from that time, apart from the ceiling plaster cornices, the original doorcases and window surrounds.

The architect Sir Thomas Deane (1792-1871) was born in Cork, the eldest son of Alexander Deane and his wife Elizabeth Sharpe Deane. His father died in 1806, and he was already listed as an architect in Cork in 1809-1810. In 1811, he won his first architectural competition with a design for the Commercial Buildings on the South Mall, Cork.

Government building contracts were an important source of his income until the mid-1840s. In 1845, he was appointed architect for the new Queen’s College in Cork, and the following year he engaged Benjamin Woodward as his assistant.

Thomas Deane played an important part in the life of Cork. He was a member Cork Corporation for many years and the city sheriff in 1815 and 1830, when he was knighted by the Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. He was elected high sheriff in 1852. Deane’s Tory politics affected the list of his clientele, and Whig supporters in Munster tended to give their patronage to the Limerick-based brothers James and George Richard Pain.

In 1851, Deane took his assistant Benjamin Woodward and his son, Thomas Newenham Deane, into partnership. The works of Deane and Woodward included the Museum at Trinity College Dublin. In 1866, Deane was elected president of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and in 1868 he was elected president of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland. He died aged 79 at his house in Longford Terrace, Monkstown, Co Dublin, on 2 October 1871.

The engineer and architect William Henshaw Owen (1813-1853) was born in Wales and began his career in Ireland with the Board of Works. He began working in Limerick in 1836, and oversaw the building of Thomond Bridge (1836-1840) to designs by James Pain and George Richard Pain and the Savings Bank in Glentworth Street. He also designed the Mathew Bridge (1844-1846).

William Owen lived in Thomas Street and later in Mallow Street, Limerick. He died suddenly in San Francisco on 1 June 1853.

The former Bruce’s Bank at No 6 Rutland Street lasted from 1806 to 1820 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

The glorious exterior of the former Savings Bank, despite the fate of its interior, is in sharp contrast to the sad state of the façade of the former Bruce’s Bank at 6 Rutland Street.

This bank was founded in 1806 by George Evans Bruce, who lived at the Hermitage, Castleconnell, and who was High Sheriff of Co Limerick in 1800. The bank closed after financial difficulties in 1820.

Despite the weeds and the derelict house, the doorway offers an insight into Limerick’s prosperous banking sector two centuries ago.

Other banks in Limerick in the early 19th century included Maunsell’s Bank, popularly known as the ‘Bank of Limerick,’ at No 6 Bank Place, and Roches’ Bank at 96 George’s Street (now O’Connell Street).

After the Battle of Waterloo, there was a steady falling off in trade through Limerick Port, and the local merchants and traders were left in such a sorry state that many of the privately-owned banks collapsed in 1820.

Following the collapse of these private banks, a group of prominent businessmen met in a backroom in George’s Street and agreed to forming the Savings Bank. The principal founding figure was John Norris Russell, who chaired a meeting of trustees in April 1820.

The founding principles insisted: ‘The Limerick Savings Bank has been formed for the safe custody and increase of small savings belonging to the Trades People, Mechanics, Servants, Labourers, and other Industrious Persons of either sex, for such sums as they may wish to deposit, in conformity to the provisions of these Rules.’

In time, the new bank moved to larger premises in Upper Cecil Street, and the Earl of Limerick subsequently offered the site for the new building that still stands on Glentworth Street. It was threatend with demolition in the second half of the 20th century, but survioved as the Permanent TSB Bank, and is now the head office of the Sarsfield Credit Union.