William Glasby

by Philip Morgan

If you’re in Five Ways you could drop into St Matthias church for a moment and take a look at the stained-glass window of Jesus as a Youth on the north wall. And perhaps, if in a dreamy way you connected with William Glasby the man who made it he might take you on a journey from Lambeth “where houses thick, and sewers, annoy the air.” to rural Henfield via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Atlanta, the Punjab and nearly finishing up in a skip in Henfield.

On 28 December 1863 William Glasby was born to Rebecca the wife of William Henry Glasby a carpet porter. They lived in Church Terrace, Waterloo Road, London

Behind St John’s Church.

On the wrong side of the wall!

Is this where William’s ambition came from? Did he just want to get over the wall and inside the church? His first step over the wall was in October 1876 when at the age of fifteen he became an apprentice at the Whitefriars glassworks of James Powell & Son for six shillings a week. Whitefriars had been producing high quality tableware and stained glass for nearly two hundred years.

But William progressed rapidly and within three years he was listed as a glass painter. His wages went up to 18 shillings a week. By 1890 he was the highest paid painter at the firm earning £3 for a 45-hour week. At that time a manual labourer, earned 16 shillings a week. William was doing well at age 27.

So, what exactly was he doing? He was making stained-glass windows

There are various stages in making a stained-glass window. First a designer will produce a vidimus, which is a detailed painting. If this is approved a full-size cartoon of the design will be drawn. Then the precise colours of coloured glass chosen and any clear glass pieces that are needed are hand painted and fired to fuse the paint and glass. The pieces of glass are then cut to size on the cartoon and fixed in place with lead strip.

Confusingly what is known as stained glass is in fact painted clear glass while actual stained glass is glass coloured during its production by the addition of chemical compounds

Clear glass that needs to be coloured is painted with either vitreous enamel paints which are a mixture of fine glass particles, flux and metallic oxide or with Silver Stain which uses silver compounds such as silver nitrate and colours the glass shades of brown and yellow. Silver stain was used extensively in the Middle Ages and is still used for fine details such as faces.

This is what William was doing. He was now a highly skilled craftsman and a far cry from carrying carpets While it’s not possible to be certain precisely which pieces were worked on by William there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of the stained-glass windows produced at Powell’s from the time he was promoted.Henry Holiday (the design above is one of his) a member of the RA and an associate of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the chief designer at Powell & Sons and used William as his painter whenever possible. When he became fed up with Powell’s execution of his designs, he started his own workshop in 20 Church Row Hampstead and poached William to be his foreman and chief glass painter. William then lived in the house which contained the studio.

He spent the next fifteen years there bringing up his family. He started doing his own designs which were regularly shown at the Royal Academy. The design below was shown and promptly made into a glass panel and then used as a greeting card.

In 1906 Henry Holiday closed his studio in Church Row and moved it to The Glass House, Lettice Road, Fulham, which was a purpose-built studio and workshop where artists working in stained-glass could rent space.

In 1919 Glasby started his own studio. Between 1919 and 1929 he received at least ninety commissions from all over the UK, India, Ceylon, the Caribbean and most importantly America. In the 1920’s he received a huge order from Peach Tree Christian Church, Atlanta that kept the studio busy until and beyond his death and up to the retirement of his two daughters Barbara and Dulcima in 1953.

In 1939 possibly due to William’s ill health the family moved to Horsham where he died in 1941. The remaining family then moved to Henfield in 1946. Constance, William’s wife died in early 1953. Barbara died in October 1961 and Dulcima in March 1975. In her will Dulcima left the vidimuses (detailed paintings) to Lucie Bishop, a well-known local district and parish councillor who managed to salvage a number of them which had been thrown into a skip during the house clearance after Dulcima’s death. Lucie Bishop in turn left them to her friend Dorothy Chalmers who was honorary curator of the Henfield museum. Dorothy in turn left them to her daughter Diana Collins who left them to John her husband. When Covid 19 happened, John pulled them out from the archive box under his desk and with the help of Erika Szyszczak a neighbour departed on the epic task of cataloguing them and putting them into safe storage so preserving them for future generations.

“William Glasby was not a major artist but from humble beginnings and through his own efforts he established a studio that was able to survive a deep depression and a World War and from the testimonials printed on the reverse of his business stationery, satisfied a varied clientele. A fitting epitaph is the testimonial sent to the artist by the rev J.A. Boyes of Aberchider, Scotland. “It is a beautiful window, the colouring so reverent and subdued. We have two others…. Yours is the most liked.” With thanks to John Collins for his support. Information has been drawn from Donald Green, Dennis Hadley and Joan Hadley’s “The Life and Work of William Glasby (1863-1941) The Journal of Stained Glass, vol xxxii (2008), p91 - 106.

For further information please consult William Glasby website (which is still under construction) at: https//lkdscreen2012.wixsite.com/website