January 2009

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By early September, she felt well enough to resume work on two alternative small-scale coloured designs for the commission she had brought with her, a window for All Saints, Laleham, Surrey (Fig. 1). Once the Parochial Church Council had selected their ‘unanimously approved’ chosen design, depicting St Christopher with Saints Eustace and Cecilia, a Faculty was sought for its installation at the end of October.10 In order to allay her apprehension about leaving the hospital in mid-November, arrangements were made for Geddes to continue treatment by attending weekly consultations with a London psychoanalyst. Meanwhile, the advance fee of £100 for her work on the detailed charcoal and pencil cartoons (Fig. 5), from which she would eventually make cutlines when selecting and painting the glass, would help with such expenses as well as funding studio space and lodgings.11

Although Geddes had hoped to begin work right away on the glass when she left the Maudsley, the necessary Faculty was not finally granted until 25 February 1926, following objections made by a number of parishioners to her unconventional treatment of the saints, their ‘rugged’, even ‘repulsive’ faces, the ‘crude’ lines and the darkness of her design.12 Once these had been addressed, Geddes could proceed with translating her cartoons into glass, which was duly erected as the east window over the altar in December of that year (Fig. 2). Fortunately, in November she had been able to take over the rent of ‘Studio B’ at Lowndes & Drury’s Glass House in Lettice Street, Fulham, ‘perhaps the first premises ever to be especially constructed, since the revival of the crafts in the middle of the [previous] century for artists and craftsmen to work together in a co-operative effort’, when it became vacant after Martin Travers’s tenancy ended.13 This was to be her working base for the next 30 or so years.

The commission for this window came from the family of Percy Goldwin Belfour, a genial, bon-viveur former stockbroker who had lived at Dial House, a few doors away from the church. Geddes’s choice of saints and their attributes is designed to reflect his passions: fly-fishing, vigorous swimming beside the nearby Thames towpath, the ‘all-women’s church choir with whom he had a close “rapport”’14 and playing the organ (principally hymns and carols), which he did voluntarily for 42 years. These activities he refused to give up, despite his doctor’s orders, until, on 4 January 1925, aged 72, he died at the organ after Evensong.

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