MY FAVOURITE PURITAN

by

Christopher Howell

One man more than any other changed the face and condition of the churches of East Anglia. His name was William Dowsing, a local Suffolk man who did well for himself under Puritanism. In 1643 he was appointed as the Earl of Manchester’s visitor of churches, and his ‘visits’ tended to be very memorable. His job was to seek out popish adornments and graven images, and destroy them. His advantages were that he knew the area well, had a firm uncomplicated religious faith and was indefatigable to the point of obsession. He was a true iconoclast.

We see the results of his fastidiousness throughout the area – stained-glass windows reconstituted from broken fragments, blinded saints, the lead shot in the faces of wooden angels, the blank stones where church brasses were once attached. And there is much we can never see – crosses destroyed, tombs dug up, altars lowered, carvings burnt.

Naturally, he did not operate alone. He had a crew of men, or rather, I suspect boys. One tends to think of religious zealots as grand old men with granite-like convictions, and certainly Dowsing was in his forties, but my guess is that his men were much younger than him, that they were driven by testosterone rather than zeal, and the image I carry with me of iconoclasm is less of religious disciples than of football supporters. Dowsing’s religious confidence gave licence to their instincts.

There are days when I find it almost possible to think of Dowsing as a good man, a moral man, someone who set free his demons in a good cause, who released his appetite for destruction in order to combat what he saw as a greater evil. He had an urge for blankness, for purity. He was a hater of fanciness, of corrupt opulence. But there are other days when he just seems to be a philistine, a boot boy, a vandal.

And it occurs to me that the spirit of William Dowsing is always with us; those dark, destructive, indecent but all too human impulses that we tell ourselves are buried so deeply and yet which are so easily relocated. True belief is only one of the things that can help us find them.

And perhaps today true belief is not even necessary. We can destroy ourselves and our works without any recourse to ideology. Someone nicks the lead off the roof, steals the church plate, the developers build sewers through the churchyard. It’s just what happens, the natural way of things. Naturally that which lives must die. That which is constructed must crumble. Man’s built creations are likely to last much longer than any man, but in the end circumstances conspire to destroy all our works. Even if the vandals and developers don’t get us then the elements will.

Some years ago I was in a ramshackle town in the California desert, a decent and honest enough place, cheerful in its way, not especially dirty, not desperately poor. It had a small shopping mall and a motel and a couple of so-so diners.

I was aware, as I often have been in parts of the United States, that the buildings all looked much the same. Form and function didn’t match. The supermarket could be mistaken for the car parts warehouse, the karate school looked much like the thrift store; and I realized that this similarity of construction had, first of all, something to do with a similarity of age. All the town was built at pretty much the same time. There was no sign of the blending together of contrasting styles and historical periods. There was no building in the town that was more than twenty years old. Not only that, it appeared that nothing in the town would ever be more than twenty years old. The buildings simply weren’t meant to last longer than that. There would never be any point restoring or refurbishing these buildings. When they were done with they would simply be torn down and other, equally insubstantial, buildings put up in their place.

I realized that, as a European, as a professed fan of culture and architecture, I probably ought to find that prospect quite appalling, and yet I didn’t. I found it somehow optimistic, confident, liberating. This was not a place with complicated planning regulations, with rival interest groups to be satisfied or appeased. A man might be free here to build and invent much as he wished, and if he failed, it didn’t matter. His mistakes would soon be gone. It was no worse than making a sandcastle. The tide of passing time would soon roll in and wash away all his errors.

The town had a church. It looked beautifully simple, partly in imitation of a European church in that it had a steepled tower and expanses of Gothic windows, and yet it still seemed very typical of the area. It appeared to be made of white wooden clapboards, a clean, honest material, but when I inspected more closely I discovered that the clapboards were in fact made of thin aluminium. There was also a plain wooden cross, some fifteen feet high, set in the churchyard, tucked in behind a white picket fence.

And I wondered, perversely perhaps, just what William Dowsing would have made of this town. It was certainly a place of simplicity, if not of absolute blankness and, although he might have objected to the modestly garish motel and gas station signs, it seemed to be a place largely without graven images.

But I had arrived in the town in daylight and as it got dark my impression changed. I had not been observant enough. The simple wooden cross in the churchyard turned out to have neon tubes embedded in its limbs, and at night they were illuminated like a fairground attraction that could be seen for miles around. Personally I found this appealing, even touching, in a tacky sort of way, but I knew that William Dowsing would have been moved to a frenzy of destructiveness. I thought of the thrill he would have experienced from smashing the glass of the neon tubes, a thrill that would surely be not too dissimilar from smashing church windows, but imagine the extra excitement of electricity, of sparks showering down, of gas escaping, perhaps there would even be small explosions and fire. I decided that William Dowsing would have liked this town.

And he would surely have liked other elements of modern architecture. He wouldn’t have been too happy with Pugin or William Morris, but he’d have had no argument with van der Rohe or Gropius. He would have appreciated the International Style. He would have understood Brutalism and Minimalism. He would have understood the vogue for industrial grey carpet, for metal shelving and exposed ducting. He would certainly have understood Abstract Expressionism.

Sometimes I envisage sending teams of modern-day William Dowsings to every house in the country, and letting them unleash their iconoclasm on each and every cosy English domestic interior. Down from the walls would come every picture of cute animals and English landscapes, every calendar, every bedroom poster. Down would come the wallpaper. Depictions of flowers, fruit and foliage would be excised from every surface: from plates and cups and saucers, from bowls and mugs and bread bins, from curtains and sofas and cushions and tea towels and counterpanes. All the visual clutter would go: the postcards from relatives, the get-wellsoon cards, the amusing biscuit tins showing teddy bears or the Houses of Parliament. Framed family snapshots would be cleared from mantelpieces. Out would go cutesy fridge magnets, the kids’ paintings, porcelain dogs, amusing seaside souvenirs, decorative plates, portraits of the queen, even, God knows, depictions of God himself. And, of course, the ultimate thing that would have to go would be televisions. Imagine the thrill an iconoclast like William Dowsing might have had from putting his puritanical boot through a 24-inch television screen.