As part of my work on the Ports, Past and Present project, I produced a book on the stained glass in Fishguard, which was launched in March 2023. The book includes stained glass from two churches in the town as well as a window by Amber Hiscott in the library, and windows commissioned for the churches in Goodwick, closer to the ferry port, and Manorowen.
All of the stained glass windows were made in the twentieth century, with the earliest windows at Manorowen and Fishguard being made around 1920 by James Powell & Sons, Robert Newbery and Burlison & Grylls. The first windows at the Catholic church and St Peter’s in Goodwick also date from the 1920s, the buildings only dating from the early twentieth century. The low church tradition that had remained dominant under Revd William Rowlands at St Mary’s in Fishguard ensured that stained glass was not added until after his time. Neither candlesticks nor a cross were found on the altar when his successor arrived in 1894, and the first stained glass windows replaced plain glazing that required replacement at the end of the First World War.
The Catholic church has the only known window on the mainland by Dom Theodore Baily, who was a member of the Benedictine community on Caldey Island in the 1920s, and several of his windows can be found there. After the community left for Prinknash in 1928, the Dublin studio of Harry Clarke was called on to make the next window commissioned for the church. The only windows in Wales that have been attributed to Harry Clarke himself were made for All Saints in Penarth in 1928 and 1930, although they were lost in 1941. The window of St Thérèse of Lisieux was made by his studio for Fishguard in about 1929, and another was commissioned from the firm for the church in 1944.
The second window by Clarke’s depicts the Virgin Mary appearing to Bernadette at Lourdes, and is very similar to another window of the same scene in the Church of the Assumption in Wexford. The version at Fishguard is a single light-window while the window in Wexford is arranged over two lights: Mary occupies the right-hand light and Bernadette, with figures in the background, is in the left-hand light. I had initially wondered whether the patron of the window in Fishguard (Mrs M.A. MacDonald of Goodwick) had seen the version in Wexford and then commissioned something similar for her own church, but although the Fishguard window appears in the firm’s order books in 1944, I was unable to find a record of the Wexford window being commissioned. The order books, available on the website of Trinity College Dublin, only seem to go as far as 1951, so the version in Wexford was presumably made in the 1950s after the Fishguard window.
A curious note about the second window made by Clarke’s for the church in Fishguard on the Taking Stock website suggests that it had not been installed. The website referred to correspondence from the studio manager of the firm – and probable designer of the window – William Dowling, to the effect that the window had yet to be delivered to the church in 1973. This correspondence, and the separate survival of a panel depicting the lower part of the same scene that became available for auction in 2015, seemed to imply that the window never reached its intended destination. Nonetheless, as the window can now be found in the church in Fishguard, the panel formerly in the collection of the late David Clarke (1920–2005, son of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931), shows that a second version of the scene was also made as a single-light window.
Copies of Stained Glass in Fishguard can be obtained at St Mary’s Church and local bookshops in Fishguard, or online at my Sulien Books website.
Stained Glass from Welsh Churches 