Ancient and Modern (Thursday Doors)

Lots of great doors in Norwich including the wonderful ladies lavs in the Castle. (I expect the gents is just as good.)

Work on the Cathedral began the year 1096 and but the chapel dedicated St Catherine of Alexandria is a later 14th-century addition. This beautiful etched glass door to the chapel is by Sally Scott 1989.

Above the door is a line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

“At the still point of the turning world.”

A medieval chapel in a Norman Cathedral with a modern door with words by a 20th-century poet – Eliot – worrying away at time, stillness, movement and what lies in the cracks between them.

Scott’s sunflower nods knowingly to another part of Burnt Norton:

“Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis…?”

And the glass itself carries a mash-up of more Eliot, spliced and rearranged with cheerful disregard for the purists:

“Reach out to the silence
at the still point of the turning world…
Love is itself unmoving,
only the cause and end of movement.”

You can read the actual poem here.  This is how it begins:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Shot at Dawn

My second door leads back into the cathedral from the gravesite of Edith Cavell, the Norfolk vicar’s daughter executed by firing squad in 1915.

Cavell is remembered for treating wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination during the First World War and for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape German-occupied Belgium.

Arrested and court-martialled under German military law, she was sentenced to death. Despite international pleas for clemency, the German authorities refused to commute the sentence, and she was shot. The execution provoked worldwide condemnation and extensive press coverage.

On the night before her death, she said, “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” 

The Church of England commemorates her in its Calendar of Saints on October 12th. Her final words to the German Lutheran prison chaplain, Paul Le Seur, were recorded as: “Ask Father Gahan to tell my loved ones later on that my soul, as I believe, is safe, and that I am glad to die for my country.”

Cavell, aged 49 at the time of her execution, was already respected as a pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium. In 1907 she was recruited as matron of the country’s first secular nursing school in Brussels. By 1910 she had founded the professional journal L’infirmière and was training nurses for hospitals, schools, and kindergartens across Belgium.

When war broke out in 1914, Cavell was visiting her mother in England. She returned immediately to Brussels, where her clinic was soon converted into a Red Cross hospital.

There are more doors in this melodramatic painting by George Bellows.

Three Edith Cavell factoids

• The French singer Édith Piaf, born two months after Cavell’s execution, is sometimes said to have been named after her. The name Edith originates from the Old English Eadgyth, combining ead (“wealth, prosperity”) and gyth (“war, battle”). It is also alleged that the name “Édith,” previously rare in France, became more common after 1915. This is not strongly supported by the statistics: the name peaked in popularity in the 1950s, suggesting that Piaf herself may have boosted its use.

• A stone memorial to Cavell in Paris was one of two statues Adolf Hitler ordered destroyed during his 1940 visit to the city (the other was of the French general Charles Mangin).

• A blue plaque in West Runton, Norfolk, outside Cumberland Cottage, reads: “Edith Cavell 1865–1915 Nursing Pioneer Spent Holidays Here 1908–1914.”

Here’s the trailer for the 1939 film with Anna Neagle starring at Edith Cavell. I remember watching the film as a child on TV one Saturday evening. It’s been nicely restored.

This is a beautiful choral piece is a poignant illustration of Cavell’s final moments before her death: Standing As I Do Before God with soloist Cecilia McDowall’s and Tenebrae conducted by Nigel Short.

`The Scarlet Flower’ (Concertante for Flugel Horn and String Orchestra) by Nigel Clarke is written as an epitaph and memorial to Edith Cavell, inspired by her selfless acts of humanitarianism and bravery. The work is a musical portrait of her last hours before being executed by firing squad on 12 October 1915. Sébastien Rousseau (Flugel Horn) with Longbow led by Peter Sheppard Skaerved perform this short extract.

For more Thursday Doors – and about #ThursdayDoors – visit Dan Antion, who has lots of doors every week, To join in see. How to participate.