THE congregation of St Mary’s, Market Weston, in Suffolk, has, over four years, raised the £100,000 needed to restore 12 of the church’s windows. The sum includes £30,000 raised by a single parishioner, Gerry Smith, a home baker and keen gardener, who is approaching the age of 90.
The project had been “little by little, one window at a time”, one of the churchwardens, Richard Chatham, said this week.
The windows had to be propped up after the corrosion of the structural iron bars and the splitting of the mullions. The church had received an initial grant from the Taylor Pilot project, which was spent on resolving pointing, gutter, and soakaway issues, and meant that the work could begin. Grants also came from the Alfred Williams Charitable Trust and Suffolk Historic Churches.
The rest would have to be fund-raised.
Mr Chatham said that the modest grants had been a catalyst for the fund-raising that followed. “We could never have looked to the bigger, national grant bodies for the outright £100,000 needed, because we would have had to come up with a matching £50,000.”
A local appeal raised an initial £10,000 “and gradually it rolled on from there”, he said. There have been fêtes and two legacies, as well as Mr Smith’s baking.
Mr Smith had never baked until he was in his eighties, after his wife died. He started making sausage rolls to take into a care home to celebrate his sister Marjorie’s 100th birthday. They “turned out to be very nice”, he said.
Richard ChathamBulbs in bloom outside St Mary’s
A stall at the garden fête confirmed their popularity, and the Victoria sponges he went on to make were equally popular.
Mr Smith began to batch-bake. He put a freezer at the end of his drive from which people could buy cakes, rolls, and cheese straws, and these were also available at village coffee mornings. A throwaway remark from his brother had elicited the information that their Aunt Alice had been a cook to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, which they thought perhaps accounted for the baking pedigree.
When he was not baking, Mr Smith was in the greenhouse making up 150 hanging baskets to sell over a single year. And, when he was not in the greenhouse, he was in the churchyard — which he has been helping to tend since he was 65 — planting thousands of the bulbs that are currently in bloom ready for the celebratory church open day on 15 March.
“There are people walking about the churchyard now, looking at the windows and the flowers, and that’s lovely,” he said on Monday. “You always have to have something to look forward to. I love getting up in the morning.”
