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THE REFECTORY ~ BISHOPSCOURT KIRK MICHAEL
PLANNING STATEMENT ADDENDUM
Figure 1. A rediscovered photograph of the interior of the Refectory after it ceased to be a school for local children and became the dining room of the Bishop Wilson Theological College. It appears to be contemporary with the other photographs filed, all of which are c. 1910-1911 during the episcopate of Bishop Drury.
RK/6296 November 2023
On the 15th of June 2023 planning approval was granted for major alterations to the Refectory at Bishopscourt as part of applications 22/01295/GB and 22/01310/CON. An extensive planning statement was submitted with that application, detailing the history of the building as it was then understood. New information and research has changed our understanding of the building’s history and made necessary this requested amendment to the approved proposals. All of these amendments relate to the interior of the Refectory and the arrangement of its doors and windows – there are no proposed amendments in this application affecting the landscape, trees, vehicle access or public services.
The Refectory is a Registered Building (NGC/MB RB No. 23, 26th September 1983) and the chronology of its development is still understood as having been built with the Bishopscourt Chapel as part of a broad programme of alterations at Bishopscourt from 1854 to 1860. The Refectory’s gothic language, stone masonry and window details are comparable to those on the Chapel and West Wing, making use of shallow, rustic tudor arches and trefoil lancet windows. Pale granite - hammered ashlar - was used for the quoins, the buttress and gable copings, plinth moulding and door and window surrounds. The majority of the masonry is dark grey Manx stone of a rough but ordered appearance: split-faced stone is laid in courses, each course a different height to its neighbours and the length of the stones irregular. Manx stone is also used to form rough arches above the ashlar window surrounds and gable vents.
Evidence in the Lambeth Palace Library has shown that the Refectory was built as a model school from 1856-1857, seemingly under the guidance of Bishop Powys’ niece Georgina Gore Currie, who would have been about twenty-five years old when the project started. (She was thirty years old at the time of the 1861 census and is likely to have been born in 1831.) She was the niece of the bishop’s wife Percy Gore Currie and the daughter of Blackwood Gore Currie (1803-1836) and Laura Gossett. The Curries of East Horsley Park, Surrey, were a London banking family.
The school opened and closed several times between the 1870s and the 1882, as noted in the Isle of Man Times. From 1874 to 1943 the Bishop Wilson Theological College was housed in the west wing at Bishopscourt and in 1891 the ordinands began to dine at the school (no doubt alleviating the bishop’s wife and her staff of an onerous duty) whence the building came to be known as the Refectory – it is from this first change of use that the new information relates, its condition at the time obscured after 1943 when the Refectory became a private house and was radically altered. The photographs seemingly all date from 1910 and 1911 and formed a single collection, although not all are definitely labelled.
Figure 2. Bishopscourt c.1911.
The photograph labelled c.1911 of Bishop Drury and his family and personnel outside Bishopscourt captures an interesting moment when the theological College was perhaps at its most flourishing. Those present include, left to right:
Mrs Thomas Drury (née Catherine Beatrice Dumergue, born in Douglas to an affluent Anglo-French family returned from India.)
Alfred Cunningham, Chauffeur (Noted in the census as living in a dwelling at Bishopscourt with his wife and child in 1911. All three Cunninghams were born on the Island.)
Canon Simpson, a visitor (The Rev. Canon James Gilliland Simpson, future Dean of Peterborough but in 1911 a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and a noted Anglican author.)
The Right Rev. Thomas Wortley Drury, Bishop of Sodor and Man (Born on the Isle of Man.)
The Rev. Reginald Lakeman Collins, Principal of the Bishop Wilson Theological College (Listed in the census as living in the West Wing of Bishopscourt, where his study and bedroom were on the Ground Floor.)
Two of the Drurys’ five daughters – perhaps Mary and Frances, who were listed in the 1911 Census as unmarried daughters living at home.
The Rev. Disney Charles Woodhouse, then Resident Lecturer of the Bishop Wilson Theological College (Listed as living with two of the older ordinands in what appears to be Clare Cottage next to the Kitchen Garden.)
Collins and Woodhouse appeared to have run the College and acted as the Bishop’s domestic chaplains (with Collins officially listed thus in 1909.)
Figure 3. The Staff and Students of the Bishop Wilson Theological College photographed outside the Chapel at Bishopscourt. Seemingly this dates from 1911, the names of the ordinands and staff broadly matching the census for that year.
Twenty ordinands, two staff and the bishop appear in this photograph. The 1911 Census lists the following:
Principal Collins and seven ordinands living in the Hostel – seemingly the West Wing of Bishopscourt.
The Rev. Disney Woodhouse and two more ordinands living in a separate dwelling at Bishopscourt, seemingly on the Ballaugh side of the parish boundary.
Three ordinands living in Ridley Cottage, a short walk towards Kirk Michael from the Refectory.
Six ordinands, each living alone, in and around Kirk Michael and the White House. Additionally, the following College servants are listed:
At The Lodge – next to the Refectory – John Thomas Barron and his wife Ann Elizabeth Barron, noted as the College’s butler and cook-housekeeper. There five children lived with them in the four rooms of the Lodge, which included the kitchen where it is assumed meals served in the Refectory were prepared and cooked.
On a farm with his family at Ballahowin there lived sixteen year old John W. Killey, listed as the College’s, his chief duty presumably being helping Mr Barron serve meals at the Refectory.
Studying the information above and the photograph of the refectory c.1911 it is worth noting the following about how it was used:
Lunch is laid (on account of the tablecloth instead of the Edwardian placemats normal in the evening) for what appears to be nineteen. It may be assumed that all the ordinands lunched at Bishopscourt, and that perhaps all (but at least the thirteen who lived at Bishopscourt and in Ridley Cottage) were also at the Refectory for breakfast and dinner. That they had all their meals together seems likely, on account of it being the practice of Anglican theological colleges (then as now) to require all their students to gather with the clergy in the Chapel to say morning and evening prayer. In bad weather this would have meant a 2km walk back to Kirk Michael in the wet and the dark, unless the bishop lent his car or a carriage. It is certain that the ordinands’ meals were presided over daily by the principal Collins and resident lecturer Woodhouse – Collins at least having no Kitchen and neither having staff to himself – and occasionally by the bishop, who with his wife and daughters had their own kitchen, cook and maids.
Therefore Mrs Barron at the Lodge next door was preparing meals for at least nineteen and sometimes twenty-three people every day. It can be assumed that the ordinands were given tea twice a day, too – either at the Refectory, in the College Lecture Room (this would have been inconvenient if they had spent half the day there) or perhaps occasionally by Mrs Drury, whose obituary notes that at Ridley Hall she was a supportive and maternal figure to the ordinands her husband had in his care. Although the Drury family only had maids to serve their meals – an arrangement which at the time would have been seen as less than satisfactory in a rich upper middle class or aristocratic household – presumably it was felt that propriety required the (mostly unmarried and young) ordinands to be waited upon by a butler and a footman rather than by young maids with no mistress responsible for them. It may have also been an imitation of grander arrangements at the Cambridge Colleges in which Drury, Collins and Woodhouse had been formed. Mr Barron and John Killey would have had no ordinands to wait upon in the holidays – presumably they had a holiday themselves, or helped at the Palace.
It is seemingly summer, because there are flowers on the tables and one of the four castiron stoves is not in use and has a pot-plant on top of it. There is a curtain just visible on the right, implying that the long north-south section of the Refectory was divided from its rear section on the west. There is enough space in the long section for everyone to dine, and anecdotally there were at some point bookshelves in the Refectory which were moved to the Palace when the Theological College closed. These may be out of shot, behind the photographer, or else behind the curtain, and there was room at the Refectory for ordinands to read and relax – which there was seemingly not in the West Wing, with only the Lecture Room and the Principal’s Sitting Room. Perhaps tea was served in the curtained off section. It may also be that there was some for of pantry or servery out of shot, on account of the small size of the Lodge next door and the great amount of constant cooking required of Mrs Barron in that small building. It may be assumed that when they were heated, the four refectory stoves may have been used to keep plates and food warm, to heat water for tea and perhaps for easy baking. No other local people are listed as working for the College, so it may be assumed that Mrs Barron also did the washing up, perhaps with help from her two younger daughters (the eldest was school teacher.) The curtain dividing the space explains why, when it was a school, the building was described in local newspapers as ‘a room.’
Figure 4. The College staff and ordinands dressed for Hockey outside the front door of the Refectory, c. 1911. Both the Principal (Collins, second from left, middle row) and the Lecturer (Woodhouse, far right middle row) as well as the Bishop’s nephew (Thompson, far left, middle row) are participating.
It may be reasonable to understand the Refectory as being the only space at Bishopscourt – other than their own bedrooms – which belonged to the Ordinands. The Chapel and Palace were the Bishop’s and Mrs Drury’s; the ground floor of the West Wing was given over to their lecture room and the principal’s rooms; the Bishop Wilson Library was seemingly kept as a relic and theological library but it is unlikely it would have been suitable for everyday use by the ordinands given its proximity to the bishop’s own rooms and the value of its contents. One might include Collins and Woodhouse in this ownership: they were the same age or younger than a number of the students they were in charge of, their youth being a secondary factor when considering their Cambridge educations. Collins’s relationship with the bishop went back at least to when he had been at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, when the Drurys were in charge of it. Collins had been made deacon and priest under Drury’s watch, and Woodhouse was priested in Cambridge shortly afterwards. When Drury was translated to Ripon, Collins settled in Bishop Denton Thompson before rejoining Bishop Drury as his chaplain, and was a mourner at Mrs Drury’s funeral. Woodhouse succeeded Collins as principal, but he left Bishopscourt to take up a chaplaincy in the army. He was with the Royal Sussex Regiment at the Battle of the Somme and died of dysentery at Boulogne in 1916.
Figure 5. Refectory Interior c.1911, and remnants of its original decoration in 2023.
Opening-up works at the Refectory have revealed that the upper walls appear to have originally been painted a dusty blue. The lower walls were seemingly painted dark brown, matching the stained oak beams and ceiling with its unusually wide sarking board laid vertically instead of horizontally, with the joins hidden by the rafters. There is a remnant of cream paint on lime render on the ground floor, which may post-date the brown and blue scheme. There are no remnants of historical mouldings but from photographs they appears to be painted cream or lead white. All of the fragments found are being colour-matched.
The proposed amendments to the approved scheme include:
It is hoped that these amendments will have the restored Refectory more closely resemble its original appearance and plan form, while still making possible its continued use as a dwelling in retaining space for a bedroom and bath room on the mezzanine.
Figure 7. The approved removal of modern partition walls better shows the original space of the Rfecetory and has revealed the bricked-up arches and more of roof structure.
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