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Chaldon Herring

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893 – 1978 )

During the early years of the 20th century the village of Chaldon Herring attracted a stream of talented people from the artistic and literary worlds: the magnet was Theodore Powys who had given up farming in Norfolk and returned to Dorset to write.

Theodore Powys was a withdrawn melancholy character who, until this point, had not enjoyed great success as a writer but this did not stop a host of young poets, writers and artists warming to him. One after another they were drawn like pilgrims to this remote Dorset parish, some of them making the village their home.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was enchanted by the village and fell under the Powys spell. Born on the 6th of December 1893 in Devon and baptised Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner she was the daughter of schoolmaster, George Townsend Warner and Nora Huddleston Warren. Sylvia was tall and slim in stature and bespectacled.

At the age of 20 she moved to London to study music and was one of the editors of the study Tudor Church Music. Her interest in writing poetry, short stories and novels trumped her interest and undoubted talent for music. In 1926 her first novel ‘Lolly Willowes’ was published, followed by ‘Mr Fortune’s Maggot’ the following year.

It was 1922 when Sylvia made her first journey to Chaldon Herring. Her friend, a former pupil of her father’s, Stephen Tomlin the sculptor, suggested she meet Theodore Powys. It was in his house during 1927 while enjoying huge celebrity as the best selling author of Lolly Willowes that Sylvia was introduced to the poet Valentine Ackland. Ackland, an assumed name, was twelve years her junior but that did not stop the two women starting a love affair that was to last a life time, ending in 1969 when Valentine died from breast cancer.

In 1930 Sylvia bought the cottage opposite ‘The Sailor’s Return’ public house and this is where the lovers lived until 1937, when they moved to a riverside cottage in another little Dorset village, Frome Vauchurch. The Chaldon Cottage was rented out and was destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb during the war.

In 1933 Sylvia and Valentine published a joint book of poems ‘Whether a Dove or Seagull,’ a collection of love poems.  They were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Valentine was a contributor to left-wing papers, including The Daily Worker. It was during the 1930’s that Sylvia’s short stories were first accepted by The New Yorker;  all told the magazine published nearly 150 of her stories.

The couple spent most of their time together in Dorset. They attended the American Writer’s Conference in New York in 1939, returning home shortly after Britain declared war on Germany. Sylvia continued to write during the war publishing an anthology of short stories The Cat’s Cradle Book in 1940 and A Garland of Straw’ in 1943. She was a member of the Women’s Volunteer Service and helped set-up centres for people evacuated from the cities.

Sylvia’s relationship with her mother was a difficult one, they were never close. Her father died in 1916 and her mother remarried. Soon after the war ended her mother’s health deteriorated into senility; as the only child she had to take responsibility for her mother until she died in 1950. During this time her lover, Valentine, had rekindled an earlier affair with an American woman Elizabeth Wade White, returning to Sylvia in 1949. Sylvia continued to write during this unhappy period, notably The Corner That Held Them, published in 1948. After all these tribulations the following years were uneventful. During this period Sylvia wrote several books including a biography of the novelist T.H. White.

In the thirties cross-dressing women and lesbian affairs were viewed as a titillating curiosity. In the years of austerity that followed the war they were viewed rather differently and their left-wing tendencies and lesbian lifestyle resulted in publishers becoming less supportive.

In 1967 Valentine was told she had breast cancer and battled with it for two years, she died in 1969. Sylvia was then in her seventies, a time when there was renewed interest in her writing, especially from the growing feminist movement. In 1973 she published a book of poems by her lover under the title: The Nature of the Moment.

Sylvia Townsend Warner lived out her days with her cats in the little cottage on the banks of the River Frome at Frome Vauchurch. She died there on May Day 1978, Sylvia and Valentine’s ashes are buried in Chaldon Herring’s churchyard.

Elizabeth Muntz

People out walking along a path near the Purbeck coast for a time during the late 1940’s may have been surprised by the regular appearance of a woman in a duffel coat and boots, riding a pony with a spaniel keeping pace beside them. The woman was Elizabeth Muntz, then almost 40, and her rides along the coast path in those years were not simply for pleasure, but to undertake more work on an ambitious piece of craftsmanship: one of many which she would become famous throughout her adopted county and far beyond.

Certainly to many, Elizabeth Muntz would have been regarded as a Dorsetian. For most of her life her home and her base of operations were in Dorset. Several of the splendid sculptures of her life were made for, and reside in Dorset. Muntz lived with her sister, and both women died and were buried in Dorset. Yet this renowned sculptor was born and raised in Toronto, Canada – over three thousand miles from the county in which she made her home so early in her life.

She studied at the Acadamie Grand Chaumier and Boudelle in Paris, as well as in London under Frank Dobson RA. Her work was first shown publicly in 1928, a piece in yellow Mansfield stone, though Muntz also worked in bronze and some other metals. One of her bronze sculptures – a double figurine of a woman and a baby – prompted the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein to remark that it was “decidedly the work of a woman”. But she was an all-rounder of great skill, a polymath of the arts. Small wonder that many architects found in Elizabeth’s work the inspiration for works of their own.

With her sister Isabelle Hope Muntz, a noted historical novelist, Elizabeth settled in East Chaldon (Herring), acquiring two adjoining Elizabethan cottages she knocked into one to accommodate her studio using, it is said, timbers from a Spanish Galleon wrecked during the Armada. She named this cosy retreat Apple Tree Cottage, because at the time of the purchase an apple tree was the only thing to be seen growing in the garden. But possibly her choice of this home was a strategic one, for it was conveniently close to the Portland and Purbeck quarries from which she would obtain the stone for her remarkable sculptures.

Though she never married or had any of her own, Elizabeth Muntz had a lasting affection for children, who were so often the inspiration for her drawings, paintings and sculptures. Once, a seven-year-old local boy sat for her as she produced a series of sketches of him. For a time during her long years at Apple Tree Cottage her studio doubled as a successful summer school for enthusiastic young people to come and learn painting, pottery and sculpture. Flowers, fruits and cheeses also particularly inspired her. Elizabeth even co-authored a story for children called ‘The Dolphin Bottle,’ which she also illustrated.

Other subjects for her sculptures were decidedly more unconventional, yet they nevertheless demonstrated her versatility. One of these was a replica of Margaret Alice, a cutter that used to be seen sailing in Lulworth Cove and Ringstead Bay. She expended four years in producing a replica of a Cotswold Manor called ‘Child Court,’ was then presented to the Heritage Craft Schools and Hospitals for crippled children in Chaley, Sussex.

1936 also saw Muntz holding winter instructional classes on Sculpting at a school in London. But it was around 1949 that she undertook one of her most demanding commissions. Llewylin Powys, the youngest of three literary Dorset brothers, desired to have a memorial in stone set up to him. He invited Elizabeth to his home to produce an extensive series of drawings which would be used as a blueprint for a sculpture carved from a single one-ton block of Portland limestone. Before his death in 1939, Powys had chosen the location for his memorial: a cliff-top vantage point near White Nothe in Purbeck.

Since the Powys memorial had to be sculpted in situ, Elizabeth Muntz had to journey to the site from Chaldon each day to see the work through to completion. Taking her food and drink for the day, and with Rumple, her beloved spaniel alongside, the sculptor rode the three-and-a-half kilometres on Merrylegs her pony for a four-hour shift of hammering and chiselling at White Nothe.

The Powys commission, if not the most portable of Elizabeth’s pieces, is probably the most southerly located. But she undertook several other noted commissions for works in Dorset. These included mural panels in carved stone for Broadwey School near Weymouth, Griffins for the entrance gates to Lulworth Manor and lead candlesticks for Eric Kennington’s effigy of Lawrence of Arabia, which resides in St. Martin’s Church in Wareham. She also produced the Dodington memorial in Purbeck stone for the churchyard in Chaldon Herring.

But probably the most unusual sculpture Muntz ever produced was in remembrance of the only cat ever to be awarded the animals VC. Simon was on-board mascot with the Royal Naval sloop ‘Amethyst’. In 1949 the ship was deployed on the Yangste River when the first bombs dropped by the Chinese Communists struck the vessel. In the attack Simon was wounded, his courage later being recognised through the special honour bestowed upon him. The Muntz memorial to Simon’s fortitude took the form of a plaque for the PDSA centre in Plymouth.

In 1949, close to the time that the ‘Amethyst’ was being bombed, an exhibition of Elizabeth’s work was held in London’s West End. In the post-war phase of her creative life she produced, apart from the Simon memorial, a plaque commemorating the late Sir Oliver Lodge’s father for a village in northern England, and a stone effigy of King Harold which now stands in Waltham Abbey. Other works went on display at King’s College, Cambridge and Manchester and Bristol Art Galleries. There was a major exhibition of Muntz works in Dorchester during the summer of 1971.

In later years also, her sculptures won her peculiar honours and worldwide recognition. She was nominated as the first woman freeman of The Ancient Order of Purbeck Marblers & Stone Cutters and was a founder member (and first woman member) of the Guild of memorial Craftsmen, a body formed to maintain and further the standard of memorial sculpting.

At the end of her productive life Elizabeth Muntz died in East Chaldon on 30th of March 1977 in her 82nd year. Possession of her enormous collection of sketches, drawings, paintings, notes, photographs, manuscripts and family memorabilia went to her sister, Isabelle Hope, who lived on at the cottage. When Hope herself died in 1981 the Muntz collection was entrusted to Catherine Morton, a friend who had by then moved in with her. In February 1988 Catherine bequeathed the entire collection to the County Museum in Dorchester. In her will Elizabeth had left £65,116.

Elizabeth was buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, East Chaldon, where today the graves of her sister and a life-long colleague-companion, Andre Bonnamy, lie nearby. As already mentioned this churchyard is the home of Muntz’s Dodington memorial, though some may consider it could just as well double as a memorial to Elizabeth herself. It is of course not the sole monument to represent Dorset’s legacy of the works of her hand.