VMs: The Glastonbury Chair...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I've excerpted a few choice paragraphs from the obituary of Gordon Browning 
written by Rachel Humphries, published in the UK "Independent" on Sep 16 
2000 here, which I found on ProQuest. I hope you enjoy them!

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

			* * * * *

GORDON BROWNING was the last maker of the Glastonbury chair. A consummate 
worker in wood, he delighted in telling the story of the history of the 
chair he exported around the world.

It was made originally in Britain from a description brought back from Rome 
in 1504 by Abbot Bere to Glastonbury Abbey, and was produced by John 
Arthur, a monk who was the treasurer and carpenter at the abbey. The result 
is thought to have been the first domestic chair seen in Britain. Arthur 
perished on Glastonbury Tor in 1539, hung, drawn and quartered alongside 
his master, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, during the dissolution of the 
monasteries. The Abbot sat on a Glastonbury chair during his trial at 
Wells, where one of the two original surviving examples can still be seen.

The second chair remained in St John's Church in Glastonbury until it found 
its way by an unknown route into the collection of Horace Walpole's Gothic 
pile Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Middlesex. When the contents were sold 
at the beginning of the century, the then vicar of Glastonbury, the Rev 
Lionel Lewis, made an impassioned speech telling the bidders the chair 
belonged in Glastonbury. Nobody bid against him. He took it back to 
Glastonbury and it is still in St John's Church today.

Browning had lived in Glastonbury for 80 years by the time of his death, 
with a brief break during the Second World War, when he was employed making 
aircraft frames in Bristol. His son Clive said, "When my father was asked 
if he had lived all his life in Glastonbury, he loved to say - not yet." 


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