High altar top now a garden ornament

Visitors to Blandford often stand and stare at a garden ornament only a stone’s throw from the busy Marsh car park by the side of the sleepy River Stour. Many believe it to be a memorial to a departed loved one whilst others think it is just a piece of garden furniture from a by-gone age.

I doubt whether any of these guesses are right. For this is no ordinary piece of garden decoration – it is, I am told, the top of the High Altar from a Roman Catholic Chapel.

The “ornament” belongs to 72 year old Miss Winifred Conyers. She told me: “When the Roman Catholic Church moved from a chapel at Spetisbury to Blandford a lot of its possessions and valuables, including the top of the altarpiece, were stored in a stable belonging to the Lamperd family.”

The Catholics were at that time using a room at the Old Manor House, Blandford, as their chapel and it was said the new church nearing completion was not high enough to take the top of the altarpiece.

Miss Conyers was about that time busy making one or two things for her garden and her close friend, Miss Ethel Lamperd asked her whether she would like the altar top. “I think she offered it to me more in fun and was somewhat surprised when I said yes,” she recalled. “Miss Lamperd had to seek permission to give it to me and it was later erected at the bottom of the garden. Several people were rather indignant about it at the time, I believe, and thought it should have been burnt, but I understand I was allowed to have it as it had not been consecrated.”

That was over 30 years ago and ever since then it had stood at the bottom of Miss Conyers garden as the centrepiece of a rockery, topping several rock pools. It is carved out of oak and stands over four feet high. At one time six angels with outstretched wings adorned pinnacles around its dome. Today two are left.

Miss Conyers father, the late Mr. Arthur Conyers, gun maker and head of Conyers garage, had four pillars and a thatched roof erected around the altarpiece to protect it from the elements.

Dome

Into its dome he cut two small holes hoping that it would make an attractive nesting place for some winged friends – blue tits. “But they never took to it,” said Miss Conyers.

Eighty three year old Father Henry O’Brien, who was Roman Catholic priest at Blandford from 1931 to 1940, lives in retirement in a cottage in the grounds of lovely Buckfast Abbey, Devon. He told me he could not recall the altar top becoming a garden “ornament.” It was Father O’Brien who played a large part in having the Roman Catholic Church built at Blandford in 1934. Before that he conducted services in a “chapel” on the first floor at the Old Manor House.

Marble

He said the altar at the new church was made from marble taken from the former chapel in the convent at Spetisbury. the convent was at one time the home of an order of French Nuns until they were called back to France to teach and nurse.

Mrs Bernard Lees, who lives at Whatcombe, recalls: “The Roman Catholic Chapel used to be in the convent at Spetisbury during the First World War. The French Nuns remained on for a short time after the war when they were called home. They were not allowed to wear their habits home and I remember us helping to provide them with ordinary clothes for the trip. The convent house was later sold and the convent was destroyed by fire. For a time mass was said at the old Manor House, Blandford St. Mary, but I cannot remember anything about what happened to the top of the altar.”

Perhaps some of Blandford’s older inhabitants can recall more of the last years of the convent at Spetisbury?

The altarpiece is in a bad state of repair and no longer has a thatched roof. It has become home to a pair of small birds who have built a nest inside the dome.

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