Portland Parish Church, Troon, South Ayrshire
Address
Portland Parish Church, 2 St Meddans St, Troon KA10 6JURecommended by
Highlight
East windowArtist, maker and date
Designed by Sidney Meteyard and made by H.H. Martyn & Co., 1920Reason for highlighting
Drawing together the threads of response to the Great War tested every designer. The scale of the slaughter was too enormous to allow for sentimentality – Victorian pieties simply would not do. Nor would the heroic: the trenches, the gas, the Somme, Passchendaele, Ypres defined the conflict in a way different from any previous war. There is realism – here seen in the anxious, pre-occupied soldier, airman and sailors in the bottom lights. And yet, something exalted too – an experience that stands apart from and somehow above the everyday. All this at a time when conventional church-going Christianity – perhaps even belief and faith – was falling out of people’s lives. The Christian virtues are supplanted, therefore, with more secular ones – Justice, Freedom, Motherhood, Compassion. And in the centre, not Christ, but the archangel Michael, warrior in the battle between good and evil, champion of justice, and guardian of the Church. His sword is a potent symbol – for, perhaps uncomfortably to us now, and even though there is no sign of a vanquished Satanic dragon, this is a window giving thanks for Victory.
Artist/maker notes
Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868–1947) was born in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, and became a designer, illustrator, painter, and stained glass designer. He studied at the Birmingham Municipal Central School of Art under Edward Taylor, who promoted the ideals of authenticity in labour and beauty in craft, promoted by John Ruskin and William Morris. He probably met Edward Burne-Jones when the great man visited the Birmingham School in 1885 – Burne-Jones’s influence permeates all of Meteyard’s work.
Meteyard was a member of the Birmingham Group, a rather nebulous and informal collection of artists who often worked together – for example, on the murals at Birmingham Town Hall, and the decoration of the chapel at Madresfield. Meteyard was also a member of the more formally organised Bromsgrove Guild.
Meteyard taught life drawing and design and lettering at the Birmingham School of Art from 1889 to 1933. He exhibited several times at the Royal Academy, but he preferred the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists where he was a member from 1908, and vice-president (1932-4) and secretary (1935-47). He also contributed illustrations to the short lived Yellow Book (1894-97).
Meteyard designed stained glass for Harvey & Ashby of Birmingham, which flourished between c.1905-40, and H.H. Martyn & Co. of Cheltenham. Martyn’s was a well-known firm of sculptors and carvers, which established a stained glass studio in 1919. Meteyard was appointed designer, despite his continuing to work from his Birmingham base.
Windows designed by Meteyard can be found at St Alban the Martyr, Highgate, Birmingham; St. Mary’s, Moseley; Holy Nativity, Knowle, Bristol; St. Winifred, Holbeck; St. Peter’s, Maney, Sutton Coldfield; St. Saviour’s, Scarborough; and Portland Parish Church, Troon.
Sources:
Stained Glass Window Makers of Birmingham School of Art by Roy Albutt (Self-published, 2013)
Obituary of Sidney Meteyard, The Birmingham Post (Monday April 7th, 1947)
Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868-1947) by Nancy Rose Marshall and Stephen Wildman in Yellow Nineties 2.0 (Edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra)
Other comments
The window is said to have been donated by A E Stephen of Alexander Stephen & Sons, Linthouse, shipbuilders on the Clyde. However, as Alexander Edward Stephen died in 1899, this seems impossible. The firm by 1921 was headed by Frederic John Stephens (1863-1932).
The church (1914) is by Clifford & Lunan. The interior woodwork is in white American oak.