Fully staffed up with a team of members of the church, one of whom very much reminded us of a star of ITV3 and one of whom doubled as a trusty at Polesden Lacey. Tea and cake was on offer, cake not at all bad considering that it had been bought in. Also a selection of second hand books for which they wanted next to nothing and from which I selected a handsome catalogue of an exhibition of the work of Aelbert Cuyp back in 2002. A painter whom I now know a lot more about than I did; clearly time for a closer inspection of the National Gallery's holdings of same.
The flashy but cold interior of the church reminded me very much of St. Mildred's at Whippingham, visited a couple of years ago and noticed at reference 2. One thing they had in common was gothic revival with a rich sponsor, so money no object and plenty must have been splashed out on the detailing of the interior. The church was said to be one of the very few parish churches in this country with a dome over the crossing - although St. Mildred's managed a high lantern. Furthermore, the sponsor of this church, Cubitt, was one of the builders of the big house, Osborne House, for which St. Mildred's was rebuilt. But we failed to find any real connection there, with Cubitt not being down as the rebuilder. Maybe further investigation would turn something up.
One bit of trim was painted organ pipes. Another was the sort of electric candles that flicker, mostly enclosed in glass tubes to stop them blowing out - but not in the case of the candles visible in the snap above. The sort of glass tubes that can be seen in the televised version of the Christmas Carol Service at King's College Chapel in Cambridge, or in several of the pictures of same turned up by bing. I can't remember whether the candles there are still real, but I fancy that they might have been when I was a child.
There was a suggestion that the church did all right for weddings, being both pretty and a much better size for the average wedding that some of the larger churches in the area - but it was hard to see how they kept afloat, given the poor attendance in places with a lot more chimney pots than could be seen near this one.
Various handsome conifers outside. Also a number of quite recent headstones for members of the Royal family, presumably the same family as that of the Royal in the photograph in the nave of the attendance at a harvest lunch in 1930 for thirty or so estate workers with more than twenty years service. A photograph which included three Cubitts, that is to say the Lord Ashcombe of the day, the one who took the title after that and the one after that. Not the sort of lunch that you could photograph today.
Quite a lot of pensioner couples like ourselves about the place, quite a lot of them tooled up for walking on the North Downs way. From one couple we learned that we have missed the fancy restaurant in Reigate, just closed. My one chance to see a TV chef, Tony Tobin, in the flesh and I blew it!
Back home we have a poke around, and we find that a large parcel of land, just to the south of Polesden Lacey, was once the property of Osbert Sitwell's grandfather, possibly accounting, at least in part, for his regular visitor status at Polesden Lacey, just a mile or so up the road, in its glory days. The grandfather, a noble lord who got through pots of money, a habit he passed on to his daughter, Osbert Sitwell's mother, sold it on to Cubitt the builder, by then rich, and keen on becoming landed gentry, part of which was paying for this church at Ranmore. In due course, the house he built was demolished, after which some of the land went to the National Trust and the rest of it became what is now Denbies, an upmarket version of Chessington Garden Centre, which also grows grapes and makes wine. Probably the same as Cubitt's the builder that I knew in my youth, now part of Tarmac. But it is hard to be sure, because bing turns up lots of builders called Cubitt.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/church-commons.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/whippingham-2.html.
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