The Firs, Rainhill, Lancashire - Via 7 Gray's Inn Square, London W.1.
April 9th 1907

Dear Madam

I am delighted to hear from Mrs Coxon that there is someone on the spot who takes a keen interest in getting really good and suitable fittings for the new church of the Annunciation.

Bad and trumpey articles will absolutely ruin the church, as my idea from the beginning has been to make the fittings play an important part in the architectural effect.

Plain plaster walls with richly coloured pictures in specially designed frames painted and gilded produce a very good effect, but it is absolutely essential that the pictures and statues should be really good and rich in effect, the richness being far more effective and pleasing by contrast with simple surroundings, if tawdry things are put in as Fr. Hornyhold seems to wish, the church assumes a poverty stricken air at once, instead of the simplicity of the church looking obviously intentional in order to produce a dignified effect, it will look as if lack of funds had made the plainness compulsory.

I have got a nice Madonna in slight relief and coloured for which I have designed a frame, this is being made and will be sent down as soon as it is ready. I have ordered a nice set of stations so that we shall have something to show people what sort of fittings are intended, and I am sure they will like the effect when they see them. The artistic taste of the Catholic priests is appalling and I am most anxious to have a Catholic church in which everything is genuine and good, and not tawdry and ostentatious.

Mrs Coxon tells me that you like the candlesticks I had sent down the other day, I am delighted to hear this, they were sent down for the sake of some photos I was having taken of the church. They are very suitable in design but a little too small, I can get the same thing specially made to a larger size and I am getting an estimate and will let you hear as soon as possible.

I have a drawing of the reredos which I think might be framed and hung in the church to show people what is intended, this might encourage people to subscribe towards it.

With regard to Fr. Hornyhold I think the best plan at present is to order the things we have money for and then when they are complete and ready to hang up in the church, approach

Fr. Hornyhold for his kind permission to be allowed to put them up. He will then feel it is too late to object, and if we approach him with apparent humility, he will be pleased and will no doubt be agreeable, especially if it were done personally by me and not by writing.

I shall be in Bournemouth next Monday arriving about 12.45 and if we could talk over matters with Fr. Triggs it might be a good thing. Will you be in on that day?
Believe me

Yours faithfully

G Gilbert Scott

(7 Gray's Inn Square, London W.C.)
December 20th 1916

Dear Fr. Triggs

I have received from Mrs Coxon a photograph of a statue it is proposed to put up in the church.
I know it is a somewhat delicate matter to refuse a gift, but in this case the statue is so atrocious that every endeavour should be made to keep it out of the church.

Would you mind letting the donor know that the photograph submitted to me with a view of getting my opinion as to whether the statue was the right style and character for this particular church - great care having been taken in the past to get the whole church harmonious down to its smallest accessories - and that I had expressed a very strong opinion that whatever the merits of the statue may be as a statue (it has none but that does not matter!) it was totally wrong as regards style and character for this particular church.

I am sorry to trouble you, but I hope you will succeed in keeping it out. I hope you keep well.

With kind regards and every good wish for Xmas.

Yours sincerely

G Gilbert Scott

April 5th 1960

3 Rothesay Drive, Highcliffe-on-Sea, Christchurch Hants)
Dear Father Moore,

This is a letter of apology really, as I am annoyed to hear that a person called Miss Doyle, a tenant of Miss Margaret Mayo, of the Corpus Christi Parish, has, without my consent, actually had the impudence to approach either yourself or one of the Fathers, with reference to a picture which my late dear Mother gave Father Triggs S.J. for the Church.

The real history of this might interest you, although as I say I gave authority to nobody to refer to the subject.

(May I beg you to excuse mistakes as I cannot see anything owing to cataract in both eyes, so I just guess.)

When my Grandfather, the late General Meyrick in whose memory Mother built the Church, was a young subaltern in the Crimean War, he was disturbed, like many others, at the looting. He took possession of one lovely picture or triptych obviously looted from a Church. He gave it to his captain asking that it be returned to the Czar.

Some two years later, a special messenger arrives at his London home, with a personal letter of thanks from the Czar and the picture as a gift.

This lovely thing became a great family treasure, and some seventy years later, it was left to my Mother, and was in our home for many years, until Mother built the Church, and she thought, as it was a Religious subject (St Mary Magdalene) that it should go to the Church, so she gave it to Father Triggs, for over the Confessional but some time later she noticed it was not in the Church.

Father Triggs said the subject (rather grimly painted) was not very popular, and he said he would find some other place for it. As far as I know, it never was put in the Church, but was in the keeping of Miss Knox.

I gave no permission for you to be bothered, please believe this. It was so long ago that Mother gave it, it is almost lost in obscurity.

I hope all goes well with the work. It will look nice when finished I am sure.

With kind wishes

Yours sincerely, Winefride Hornbuckle.

Chingri Khal,
Sleepers Hill,
Winchester.

22nd October 1995

I only know of the early history of the Triptych of Madonna and Child at The Church of the Annunciation, Bournemouth from what I have been told, in the main by my mother. The money for the building of the Annunciation Church was given by a Miss Knox.

As originally built to the design of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott the church did not have a Lady Chapel to the north of the Sanctuary as there is today. Miss Knox wanted the church to have at least some shrine to Our Lady, and bought the Triptych in Italy, perhaps having gone to Italy in search of what she thought was appropriate.

From, or soon after, the opening of the Church, the triptych was hung on a wall close by some of the seats for the congregation.

From 1911, my mother, then Dorothy Hobbs, lived with her mother, brother and sister at Chingri Khal, 23, Queen's Park Avenue (her father being in India and returning home only infrequently).

The Annunciation was her nearest church, although being a chapel of ease, served from the Sacred Heart, in Bournemouth, was not strictly speaking her parish church.

She and her family would regularly be sitting in seats close to the triptych. She was about 14 when they came to Chingri Khal and she 'fell in love' with this picture.

In 1929 she married and became Dorothy Tucker and moved to Hereford House, Hinton Road, close to the Sacred Heart, which became her parish church in every sense. However her mother continued to live in Queen's Park Avenue and so she never lost touch with that part of Bournemouth.

The war gave rise to an additional reason for the tie with the area because of the need to register with retailers for certain foods. Knowing so many as she did in Charminster Road, she had every cause for being in that part of the town even after the death of her mother in 1943 and the subsequent sale of Chingri Khal. She would from time to time pay a visit to the Blessed Sacrament in the Annunciation.

And so it was that in 1947 or 1948 she went into the church - at that time still in the form in which Scott had designed it - and noticed to her surprise that the triptych was no longer on the wall. Bournemouth was still a Jesuit parish at that time and it so happened that the priest in charge was in the church about his business. I believe he was a Father Turner SJ. A conversation took place along these lines:

Oh, Father, whatever has happened to that picture of Our Lady?

I've taken in down. I don't think it goes in this church at all."
"I used to sit under it for many years and always loved it as a most beautiful work of art."
"
Well, I am throwing it out. It is in the Sacristy at the moment, you are welcome to take it if you want it.

So she put it in her car and brought it to Hereford House. Neither my father nor I viewed this addition to the furniture with much enthusiasm. He because he was not a Catholic and regarded an outward show of Catholicism with a degree of distaste. I, because I felt that, however beautiful, it did not suit the domestic situation.

My mother, however, remained adamant and so the triptych was hung in the drawing room at Hereford House from then until she moved to our home in Winchester in 1986.

Needless to say the triptych came too, and was hung in the drawing room made for her here. The only concession over the years to it being in a domestic rather than an ecclesiastical setting was the removal of the side panels - although these were preserved. At some time before she moved from Bournemouth some repainting was done to the frame (but not to the side panels).

Almost from the time she acquired it, I had in mind that our family must be regarded as h holding that triptych in trust for the church. I doubt if Father Turner had had any right to remove it from the Annunciation in the first place, and certainly not to give it away to a parishioner, however devout.

Accordingly, when my mother died in 1990, aged nearly 93, one of my first thoughts was to put this matter right.

I have to admit to having offered it back to Canon Nicholas France for hanging in St.Peter's, Winchester, which has been our parish church since 1957, when my wife and I were married.

By that time, our occasions for going to the Sacred Heart were very infrequent, - and the Annunciation never saw us at all. Canon France very properly declined. The Lady Chapel in Winchester is already fully furnished and there would have been no place for the triptych in it.

It was then obvious - as really it had been throughout - that I should offer it back to the Annunciation. My wife and I took it back to the Annunciation, where it was kindly and gratefully accepted by Father Dunphy, then parish priest, on the eve of All Saints, 1990.

It was a great delight to see in the summer of 1995 that it is still hanging in the church for which it had been bought probably some 90 years before. I hope it will continue somewhere within the Annunciation for many years to come.

His Honour Judge H.J.Martin Tucker, Q.C.