Harry Stammers

Powell & Sons

Harry Stammers was born on 13 October 1902 in Limehouse, London. At school he was said to have excelled in drawing and music. In 1917 he obtained an apprenticeship with Powell & Sons (Whitefriars) Ltd, joining their stained glass division as an apprentice draughtsman. This afforded Stammers the opportunity to attend evening classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art for several years. At Powell’s he worked alongside James Humphries Hogan, the firm’s chief window designer and a leading figure in early twentieth-century British stained glass.^[2]

In 1930 Stammers married Grace Delamere. The couple had two sons, James and Richard.^[1]

Stammers remained at Powell & Sons until 1943, neither seeking nor receiving any significant independent recognition of his work despite rising within the business. The catalyst for his departure from the firm was pragmatic rather than professional. Due to the threat to London from enemy bombing, his sons had both been evacuated to Devon at the beginning of the Second World War. When an opportunity arose in 1943 for Stammers to take up a position of draughtsman with J. Wippell & Co. in Exeter, his decision to move was primarily taken in order to be closer to his sons.^[3][1]

Exeter and independence

The move to Wippell & Co. did nothing to satiate Stammers' desire for more artistic and professional freedom that had grown over a number of years. Even prior to his departure from Powell & Sons, his dissatisfaction with what he regarded as a formulaic and conservative approach to design, relying on stock patterns and traditional idioms, had become ingrained.^[4]

In 1945, Stammers resigned from Wippell & Co. in order to establish his own stained glass studio in Exeter and seek opportunities to express a more personal and contemporary idiom through his own independent work. Among his first commissions was a window for the Church of St Mary the Less in Cambridge. The opportunity arose thanks to Eric Milner-White, then Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who had been impressed by a design Stammers had submitted to the Royal Academy of Arts. When the Ely Diocesan Advisory Committee sought Milner-White's advice on selecting an artist, he recommended Stammers.^[3][1]

Studio in York

The relationship with Milner-White would prove to be a pivotal one in Stammers' independent career. In 1947 Milner-White - who by then had been appointed Dean of York Minster - invited Stammers to establish a glass-painting studio and school in York, reviving a craft that had been associated with the city prior to the Reformation. Milner-White arranged a flat and studio space at Gray’s Court and provided Stammers with a kiln. Stammers soon invited Harry Harvey, whom he had met at Wippell’s & Co., to join him as assistant.^[5][1]

Stammers lived and worked in York until 1960, which would prove to be the most productive period of his career. Undoubtedly, he benefited from the increased availability of commissions that resulted from the largescale renewal of church buildings in the years following the Second World War, including a number of windows commissioned as individual war memorials, including examples at St Helen's Church in Skipwith (1947) and St Mary's Church, Hemingbrough (1949). Stammers also developed productive working relationships with the architects W. H. Randoll Blacking and George Pace, both of whom provided commissions for newly built or restored churches on which they had been enlisted as architect.^[6][1]

It was during Stammers time in York that he won commissions for seven different Anglican cathedrals. His first, at Salisbury Cathedral, is a memorial window to members of the Glider Pilot Regiment killed in the Second World War, installed in 1950. He followed this with a memorial window at Lichfield Cathedral, dedicated to the Staffordshire Yeomanry, completed in 1951. In 1952 Stammers was invited by Blacking to design a painted reredos to be installed in the refurbished Lady Chapel at Hereford Cathedral. At Lincoln Cathedral, he was commissioned to provide four individual windows for the Royal Air Force Memorial Chapel, completing the first in 1953, with the remaining windows following in 1954, 1958 and 1966 - the last being made at Stammers' Bradwell studio after he relocated.^[1]

Of the four commissions undertaken by Stammers for York Minister, only one was a window. In 1955 Stammers provided painted designs for both the astronomical clock given in memory of airmen stationed in Yorkshire who died in the Second World War, and a design for the memorial to physicians and surgeons of York. He would provide a similar design for the memorial to the architects, masons and builders of the minsters of York in 1958. His only work in glass in York Minster is a 1957 panel depicting the Instruments of the Passion, inserted into a window with older glass surrounding.^[1]

For Glasgow Cathedral's Blackadder aisle, Stammers provided four windows in 1956 and a further four in 1960, in addition to two regimental memorial windows in the nave, dated 1956 and 1958. At Canterbury Cathedral, Stammers designed and made a five-light window depicting five of Canterbury's early archbishops, which was installed in 1959.^[1]

Stammers completed his only overseas commission in 1960 for the Anglican Cathedral in Seoul, South Korea; an oculus in the upper western façade depicting St George slaying the dragon.^[1]

Move to Bradwell

In 1960 Stammers left York and moved his studio to Bradwell, one of the villages incorporated into the new town of Milton Keynes. It was here that he produced some of his most well-known works, including large commissions for the Church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol and the Church of St Mark in Broomhill, Sheffield. At St Mary Redcliffe, Stammers was responsible for the entire cycle of five windows in the Lady Chapel, installed between 1960 and 1965, which together tell the story of the Life of the Virgin. The central east-facing window, depicting the Nativity and the Pietà, was the last to be installed. It is flanked to the north by the Annunciation and Presentation windows, and to the south by representations of Pentecost and Jesus at the Temple.^[1][7]

At Broomhill, a church ruined during the Sheffield Blitz and rebuilt by George Pace from 1961 to 1963, Stammers' monumental east window is set within a rectangular concrete frame notable for its thick, branch-like window bars, draws on the traditional hymn Te Deum laudamus, and depicts the image of Christ in Majesty to the centre, interwoven among a multitude of saints, worshippers, animals and plants.^[8]

Stammers' 1963 window at the Church of St Martin le Grand in York is among his most original. It commemorates the destruction of this and other churches in the 1942 bombing of York, the form of the red flames taking hold of the buildings, and the rising smoke above, resulting in one of his most abstract works.^[1][9]

Final years

Stammers’ would continue working at his Bradwell studio and accepting commissions up until his death on 21 August 1969 aged 66. He was buried in the churchyard of St Lawrence's Church in Bradwell, for which he had provided four windows in 1966, unusually of an entirely abstract design, save for one of them including some reset Victorian glass. His widow Grace was buried in the same plot following her death in 1977.^[1]