Patrick Comerford
During my visits to Buckingham this week, I visited Saint Bernardine’s Church, the Roman Catholic Parish Church on Chandos Road, almost opposite the Royal Latin School and close to the Chandos Road campus and the Medical School of the University of Buckingham, which is spread across three sites.
At first sight, the church looks like a large 1970s suburban house, squeezed between the other, older buildings on Chandos Road. I almost passed the church by, as there is little about its outside appearance to indicate that this is a church, apart from the entrance doors. To the left of the entrance is a garage door, the wall to the right is faced in stone, and above is a prominent mansard-type slate roof with four dormer windows, lighting ancillary rooms over the entrance lobby.
But the church is a treasure trove of post-Vatican II ecclesiastical architecture, designed by George Mathers and includes some of the finest of 1970s church art and fittings, including doors and an altar by Angela Godfrey, dalle de verre windows by Dom Charles Norris, striking Stations of the Cross by Martin Hughes, and a crucifix by Stephen Foster.
The story of Saint Bernardine’s Church goes back almost a century and a half to 1892 when a Belgian Franciscan friar, Father Thaddeus Hermans, arrived in Buckingham on the Feast of the Ascension to open a college for men wishing to become Franciscans.
He rented a cottage in Elm Street, where he said the first Mass, before moving to 9 Chandos Road, which as laid out in 1853 to link Buckingham railway station with the town centre, and there he set up his first chapel. He later obtained a permanent site on London Road and by the end of 1895 he had built a Franciscan school and college.
The college was placed under the patronage of Saint Bernardine, a Franciscan saint, and so the parish of Saint Bernardine grew up around the college. Few Catholics were living near Buckingham at the time, but in 1900 the registers record 12 Baptisms. The college chapel was blessed and opened for public worship in 1912.
Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444) was born at Massa Maritima near Siena in Tuscany into the noble degli Albizzeschi family. While studying in Siena in 1400 he offered to help in the hospital to deal with many plague victims. He joined the Franciscans on his 22nd birthday in September 1402, and was ordained a priest in 1404. For 12 years he led a deeply spiritual life.
A sermon he preached during a visit to Milan marked the beginning of his missionary life throughout Italy, sometimes preaching many times a day. His success was said to be remarkable, and ‘Bonfires of the Vanities’ were held at places where he preached, with people throwing mirrors, high-heeled shoes, perfumes, locks of false hair, cards, dice, chess pieces and other frivolities to be burned.
However, he was also of a strict, moral temper, preached fiery sermons against many classes of people, characterised some women as ‘witches’, and called for ‘sodomites’ to be ostracised or removed from the human community.
Bernardino is regarded today as being a major protagonist of Christian antisemitism. In Orvieto in 1472, he blamed the poverty of local Christians on Jewish usury, and his calls for Jews to be banished and isolated from their wider communities led to segregation. His listeners often used his words to reinforce actions against Jews, and his preaching left a legacy of resentment on the part of Jews.
Yet Pope Pius II called him a second Paul. At different times, he turned the offer to become bishop of Siena, of Ferrara, and of Urbino He led the revival of discipline among the Franciscans and from 1438 to 1442 he was Vicar-General of the order. He was canonised in 1450 and his feast day is 20 May.
As the Catholic parish in Buckingham expanded after World War II, the friars opened Mass centres in many neighbouring towns and villages, including Brackley. But circumstances changed, the college closed in 1968, and the buildings were sold to Buckingham County Council. The friars continued to use the chapel until the parish could build its own church, and eventually the decision was taken to build onto the new friary on Chandos Road where the friars had set up their first chapel.
The new church was designed by the architect George AJ Mathers (1919-2015) of Williams and Mathers, Cheltenham, and was built by Pollard and Sons, Buckingham. Mathers is best-known for his Grade II listed Marychurch in Old Hatfield, Hertfordshire.
George Mathers was born in 1919 in London. His father was a postal worker. He studied architecture at the Northern Polytechnic, now the University of North London, and during his student years he became a Roman Catholic and a pacifist. As a conscientious objector he was expelled from the polytechnic and jailed in Wormwood Scrubs. There he met Paul Mauger, a Quaker architect, a prison visitor who had been a conscientious objector in World War I. Mauger offered him a job, but Mathers was jailed for a second time for his pacifism before joining Mauger on a permanent basis, eventually becoming a partner.
Maters began working for Paul Mauger designing council housing and other public buildings. His career as a church architect began when he was asked to design a convent chapel in 1957. He set up his own practice in mid-Hertfordshire with Barrie Thomas in 1960, and was commissioned to design Saint Bartholomew’s Church, St Albans (1963), and the circular Marychurch, Old Hatfield (1970).
Saint Bartholomew’s Church, St Albans, was the first church in the Diocese of Westminster built in the round, shortly before the liturgical reforms of Vatican II. There, Mathers brought in the sculptor Angela Godfrey, who had recently graduated from King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne, to design the altar.
Perhaps the most notable church by Mathers is the round Marychurch in Old Hatfield, which was grade II listed in 2013 – a rare achievement for a living architect. Here again Mathers worked with several notable artists, including Dom Charles Norris and Dom Paulinus Angold, who contributed the dalle de verre glass, and Angela Godfrey, who designed the welded steel screen and font.
Mathers lived for much of his life in Ware, Hertfordshire, before moving to Cheltenham. He retired when he was 94 and died aged 96 in 2015.
Mathers worked closely on Saint Bernardine’s Church, Buckingham, once again with Angela Godfrey and Dom Charles Norris, and with the Cheltenham artist Martin Hughes.
The front door is made from resin and filled with sand to give it a more solid feel. The altar front is of a similar design. Both were designed by Mathers and were made by Angela Godfrey.
Angela Godfrey, whose first commission after graduating had been from Mathers for the altar in Saint Bartholomew’s Church, St Albans, also worked with Richard Hurley (1932–2011), one of the leading church architects in Ireland interpreting the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms, reordering churches in Hoddesdon, Harrow Weald, Maidstone, and Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary. She designed the bishop’s throne and Paschal candle for Saint Mel’s Cathedral, Longford, when it was rebuilt by Hurley. Her prize-winning ‘Gilpin’s Bell’ (1994) is a large street sculpture in Edmonton.
Her entrance doors at Saint Bernardine’s include a high-relief grip representation of the IHS monogram with rays, traditionally associated with images of Saint Bernardine.
From the low entrance lobby of the church, the levels drop down into the main space, consisting of a single space, with a raised clerestory on the south side lighting the south wall and a long monopitch roof down to the north side. The boarded roof is supported by thick laminated raking trusses, which in turn is carried on laminated posts towards the low north side.
The north and east walls are plastered and painted, and the north wall is faced in painted concrete blocks. At the west end, a door leads into the sacristy and presbytery and some of the former external exposed stonework of the presbytery is retained as a feature.
The furnishings of the church include a reredos or crucifix and tabernacle surround on the east wall by Stephen Foster. The reredos replaced a painted Crucifixion, possibly by Martin Hughes, who painted the dramatic mural Stations of the Cross on the north wall.
On the south wall under the eaves are panels of coloured dalle de verre glass, from the workshop of Dom Charles Norris at Buckfast Abbey, Devon.
Martin Hughes, then a young artist, painted the Stations of the Cross on the north wall. He first painted miniatures and from these he took photographic slides that he then projected onto the wall. This allowed him to quickly and accurately reproduce the Stations of the Cross.
Hughes lived in Cheltenham for most of his life, and in the 1970s and 1980s, he combined commissions producing a series of murals for churches throughout England with creating the album cover for Traffic’s ‘When the Eagle flies’. He worked in a variety of mediums, including acrylic, pastel, charcoal, pen and ink, and emulsion. His commissions included shops, restaurants, hair salons and night clubs, as well as fresco and paint effects in people’s homes. The characters in his work included fictional fantasy figures, mystic and ethereal, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare’s plays.
Hughes may also have painted a Crucifixion above the High Altar that was influenced by Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’ and that has since been replaced.
Around the same time as he was working in Buckingham, Hughes also worked in 1974 in the new Sacred Heart Church in Northampton, also designed by Mathers. There Hughes completed the Stations of the Cross there in only four weeks, sometimes working through the night and even sleeping in the church.
Hughes was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015 and died in June 2015. His daughter Naomi Hughes described him as ‘a free spirit’, saying: ‘Murals were his thing and walls were his canvas.’
Dom Charles Norris (1909-2004), then a 75-year-old Benedictine monk, made the dalle de verre stained glass windows on the south wall. Dom Charles was born Louis Charles Norris and studied at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. He entered Buckfast Abbey in 1930 and began to work as a stained glass artist in 1933. He worked with a team of monks to rebuild the abbey, including the east window in dalle de verre.
Pierre Fourmaintraux is said to have brought the dalle de verre technique to Britain before joining James Powell and Sons, later Whitefriars Glass Studio, in 1956. He trained Dom Charles Norris in this technique, and Norris became one of its most prolific British proponents.
In addition to his work at Buckfast Abbey, Dom Charles also had an association with the workshop at Prinknash Abbey and with Aylesford Priory in Kent. From 1949, Aylesford Priory was a creative hub, attracting artists such as Adam Kossowski, Philip Lindsey Clark, Michael Clark, and Dom Charles Norris.
Father Christopher Ulyatt OFM, the then Parish Priest in Buckingham, and Colonel Bill Sharpe, an active parishioner, oversaw building the new church designed by Mathers. Bishop Charles Grant of Northampton blessed the new church on 26 October 1974. Father Christopher had died two weeks earlier and never got to enjoy the end results of his labours.
The building project created a substantial debt. However, a later parish priest, Father Phelan Daniel O’Leary OFM, worked to clear the debt and the church was consecrated in August 1982. The parish formally became part of the Diocese of Northampton in 1989.
Many of the internal features and furnishings in Saint Bernardine’s Church came from the earlier college chapel in Buckingham, including statues of Saint Anthony, Saint Francis and Saint Bernardine, the font, the church bell, the organ and the organ pipes, the pews and the octagonal stone font (1946). The statue of Our Lady was donated by a later parish priest, Monsignor John Ryan, in 1993 in memory of Ernie Taylor in recognition of his work in the church.
To celebrate the Millennium, Stephen Foster, a sculptor specialising in wooden carvings, was commissioned to design the Calvary or reredos and the tabernacle. The Calvary depicts Christ ascending from the Cross, closely resembles the original Crucifix of Saint Damiano that inspired life and ministry of Saint Francis of Assisi. The Calvary is made from 10 panels and its design is similar to the triptych in Northampton Cathedral. The Tabernacle surround also reflects features of the Calvary design and is made of wood and decorated in gold leaf.
The wall behind the statue of Our Lady has painted vertical features, suggested by Stephen Foster and similar to those in the design of the Calvary.
The Royal Latin School, facing Saint Bernardine’s Church, moved to Chandos Road in 1907 from the mediaeval Chantry Chapel in Buckingham, which I was discussing last night (5 November 2025). Meanwhile, Buckingham University acquired the former friary and school in 1977. The Franciscan Building on the Verney Park site was converted into residences, a library, language laboratories and tutorial and lecture rooms.
• Father Bosco Gunturu is the Priest-in-Charge of Saint Bernardine’s Church. Sundays Masses are: 5:30 pm (Saturdays, Vigil Mass) and 11 am (Sunday mornings). Weekday Masses are 9:20 (Tuesday to Thursday, and Saturday), 10 am (Fridays) and 7 pm (Wednesdays and Fridays).
