TRUE PRINCIPLES vol.2 no.4
Special Commemorative Issue

1) Pugin's Tabernacle in Southwark Cathedral

Alexandra Wedgwood investigates the history of an outstanding and much-debated Pugin item.

This beautiful object has been exhibited in two immensely influential places, the Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and also in the Victorian Church Art exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum from November 1971 to January 1972. Two major questions about it remain unsolved: first, did Pugin design it for his own church of St. Augustine, Ramsgate, and, secondly, how did it get to its present home in Southwark Cathedral?...

Alexandra Wedgwood

2) Ambonoclasm Redeemed

'Some cleave, some pierce, some shout, and with one great crash it totters and falls' as Pugin wrote of a much earlier Rood screen. Happily, the consequences for his great screen at St Chad's, Birmingham have not been so dire — although it was a near thing — as Gavin Stamp's account describes.

3) A Pugin Drawing?

An unusual drawing prompts Rosemary Hill to ponder questions of attribution and to seek comment.

The pen and ink drawing of two sections through a chantry chapel that appears here as Fig 1 has, so far as I am aware, never been published before. It is unsigned, there is no watermark in the paper and there was no clue to its origins when it was brought to my attention some eighteen months ago beyond a pencilled note in an unidentified hand that read, laconically enough, 'by Pugin'. Is it? If so, when might it have been made and for what purpose?

In this bumper edition of True Principles it seems worth setting out my thoughts in the hope of eliciting suggestions from other Society members...

Rosemary Hill

4) August Martin, 'the only man that makes Gothic living'

Antoine Jacobs recounts the life of German Revivalist artist, August Martin, and solves a long-standing mystery in the Pugin Chantry, Ramsgate, a chantry particularly significant to us in this issue.

5) Pugin: A Godly Man?

James (Jim) Thunder, a great great grandson of Augustus Pugin and Jane Knill, has presented us with an original and thought-provoking theme indeed — should Pugin be canonized? Because this is a long article, and this is a tightly packed issue, we are just giving you a taster of what is to come from James in our next number.

James (Jim) Thunder

6) 'The Good Style at the Antipodes'

Margaret Belcher explains how Pugin and his ideals influenced architecture and society in New Zealand.

7) No 'maimed rites': the Funeral Obsequies of the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury

For elaboration and expenditure there was clearly no comparison between the funerals of Ophelia — see Roderick O'Donnell's quote from Hamlet above — and that of the Earl of Shrewsbury, which he describes here.

Roderick O'Donnell

8) Mrs Jane Pugin and some London Relations

Michael Egan is the bearer of new information about Jane Pugin and Catholic society in the Greenwich area, and also describes the close interconnections between the Knills, the Pugins and the Powells. For a fine painting of Jane, see our back cover.

Michael Egan

9) Hardman's Stained Glass and the Transfer from Pugin to Powell

Stanley Shepherd looks at a period of transition at the firm of Hardman & Co.

10) St Peter's Chapel, Alton Towers

How Pugin waved a magic wand over the Earl of Shrewsbury's early nineteenth-century Gothick chapel in Staffordshire is the subject of Michael Fisher's article for this issue of True Principles.

11) It All Melts Away: AWN Pugin in Oxford

Timothy Brittain- Catlin looks at some A.W.N.P. proposals in Oxford, and wonders just how much of a functionalist Pugin really was.

12) The Right Thing at the Antipodes

Brian Andrews considers the approach to Puginian Gothic in Australia, finally focussing on an outstandingly 'pure' example of Pugin's work in Tasmania.

13) As I Was Going To St Ives

A report by John Purkis on the curious and somewhat puzzling history of an A.W.Pugin church, which began its life in Cambridge. Comment from members who know this church, or who intend to go and see it, would be welcome.

14) Society Sorties

The Pugin Society in Catholic and Gothic Brugge: 25󈟬 October 2001

Report by John Irving on the Society's first foray to the continent.