May 9, 2024 • 60 mins
Economist Mary Hedges, fundraising manager for the restoration of Christ Church in Ellerslie, discusses the ‘hook’ that enabled their highly successful fundraising campaign for this historic restoration.
The hook: stained glass windows donated by foremost, Victorian stained-glass designer and fabricator Alfred Bell of Clayton and Bell. Mary clearly understood every element of the design report by heritage architects Salmond Reed Architects, to inform their funding application.
This is an exciting adventure of local history, involving Albin Martin, one of the founders of the church and considered ‘The Father of Art’ in Auckland.
The hook: stained glass windows donated by foremost, Victorian stained-glass designer and fabricator Alfred Bell of Clayton and Bell. Mary clearly understood every element of the design report by heritage architects Salmond Reed Architects, to inform their funding application.
This is an exciting adventure of local history, involving Albin Martin, one of the founders of the church and considered ‘The Father of Art’ in Auckland.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:13):
This is Rosalind Darving here on LocalArchitecture now for April, and we're speaking
with Mary Hedges him. Mary.Hello, you are an economist and we're
speaking with you because of your incrediblyin depth involvement in the restoration of both
the windows and I think the churchin terms of Ellesley Christ Church in Auckland
(00:37):
in terms of restoring the windows inthe building, by being the person who
was foremost in the in the fundingapplication process for that for historic restoration.
Is that correct? That's that's correct. Limited capability, but I said I
can write funding applications and so thatwas my role in the whole project.
(00:59):
But like all projects, once youstart with this little pairly defined thing that
you're going to do, your rolealways changes and grows. It grows.
And I was at the church interestingenough on the day that last December when
you had your Nativity session and wewere all enacting in various roles the Nativity
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play and we all met afterwards andI met you, and the church is
very special to Ellieslie and possibly tooNew Zealand as a historic Grade B heritage
building, and you were available tosupport the restoration in terms of providing the
funds for that as an economist,Is that correct? I was an academic
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economist, and in my most recentroles, I was involved in research institutes
and primarily in writing funding applications,and then when we got them, project
managing some of those projects. SoI stopped doing the research and moved into
managing the research or in fact gettingfunds for research. And so when we
(02:04):
were looking for funds to do therestoration of the windows, I thought,
here's something I can contribute, here'san area I've got some expertise them.
And that's really how it all startedfor me. Prior to that, I'd
been very kind of hands off,right, But I really want to understand
this funding process and how much itevolved of you, and at least even
if you were project managing aspects ofit. But what we concerned was here,
(02:29):
specifically for your application, was thesestained glass windows. Well when we
started, we didn't realize really whata treasure we held in the stained glass
windows, and we were They hadhad some protective glass put over them a
number of years ago, and likewith a lot of restoration projects, they
used the best technology they understood atthe time, and so they put the
(02:53):
secondary glass over them to protect them. But of course what that then did
is trapped moisture between the stained glassthe protective glass. The impact of that,
of course was to rot all thewoods, well not all of it,
but to cause quite a lot ofdamage to the wood surrounds to the
windows. So we thought we needto fix it. You know, this
can't go on, and we thoughtwe can't afford it. We're a very
(03:15):
small parish and we thought this isgoing to be a non trivial thumb and
so we fortunately had a wonderful,wonderful people's warden who an ex secondary school
principal, who got on board andstarted to think, well, how can
we do this? And at thesame time we had a vicar who said,
(03:37):
well, I actually think you shouldget these windows a debt. I
think you might have something here,And so we did get them at Deft
And the way it worked out isthe windows became our hook for the whole
project. So while the project dida lot of restoration to the church building
itself, it was the windows thatgave us the hook. And from a
(04:00):
fun perspective, it was the windowswhich gave us that leg up in order
to get funding. And I'll talkmore about that later, but that was
sort of the story, and welearned the story behind the windows and just
how significant they were not only nationallyin the New Zealand scene, but also
internationally. And the story is actuallyjust a beautiful, beautiful story of you
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never know something you might do todaythat can have this impact, you know,
forty years later. If I can, I'm happy to share the story.
That would be wonderful. Yes.When they went to build the church
was they started work on it inthe eighteen seventeen and they finally got the
funding to build this church. Andit was a colonial Gothic design made in
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Cowie and if you drive around thecountry you see all of these little wooden
churches that look remarkably similar from thatera, and it was a pretty standard
design. So they built this lovelychurch and one of the leaders in the
parish at the time was a gentlemanby the name of Alban Martin, and
it turned out he was an artistof some note from the UK before he
(05:12):
brought his family out to New Zealand, and he was one of the early
people in the New Zealand arts sceneas well, and so he had a
very very good reputation as an artist, and so he was one of the
people driving the development of this newparish of our fleet. Now we need
to go back in his history towhere he grew up, which was in
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a village in Somerset. And Ithink a couple of weeks ago you talked
to Aiden who was a part ofthe Martin family. Was it it the
village in Dorset. It's right onthe border actually between a Dorset, Somerset
and Wiltshire. It's right kind ofwhere the okay, but Juk have got
(05:57):
the name of the village, butI don't necessarily is it Silton, Silton?
That's it. At Christmas time wespoke to Aiden Hart, who's the
great great grandson of Alban Martin,and he's based in Shrewsbury. But his
flourishing career is actually liturgical artworks ofevery kind of genre throughout Old Cathedral's contemporary
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cathedrals all over the world. Sohe's carried that artistic practice into his life
and is now specifically as a GreekOrthodox practitioner doing that sort of thing.
That last months in March, wespoke to another economist, so there's a
lovely sort of synergy there Jarles Keating, who bought the tudor manor of Ethelhampton
in Dorset, which was built andwell goes back in terms of the Martin
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family fourteen eighty five. So thisconversation with you is a sort of New
Zealand colonial immigrant response to a buildingthat in the Martin family they inhabited way
back in forteen eighty five. Wow. So we've got all these connections.
And in fact, one of ourcurrent parisianists and who I met you through
is the granddaughter and it yes,And so we've got all these lovely connections,
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and these connections are shown through thesewindows as well. So it turned
out on the estate in Somerset orin Filton, there was one of the
woodkeeper's sons showed some artistic talent,and so Alvin Martin's brother twifted his arm
and said, you know, whydon't you give him some art lessons.
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And so he started giving art lessonsand allowing this boy to have access to
his art books and things and tolearn about the masters. And as Alvin
put it in one of his letters, very quickly the student became the master.
That this child was clearly even byten or eleven twelve with clearly extremely
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talented, and so the two brothersthen they were building a parish church and
they were working with Gilbert Scott,and they twisted his arm to take on
this boy as and apprentice. Andnot long thereafter Alvin was in London.
So he called into visit Scott andyou know, thank him again for taking
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on this child with talents. Hesaid, no, no, no,
you shouldn't be thanking me. Ishould be thanking you. He is extraordinary.
And the person the child, well, he wasn't by then. He
was a teenager, was a gentlemanby the name of Alfred Bell, and
he worked in Scott's design. Hegot his papers and finished his adventure and
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things, and then he hired upwith another person who he also met strange
enough there, Satan, and theyformed a stained and painted glass window company
called Seyton and Bell. And theybecame the preeminent stained and painted glass window
of the Victorian era, and theyhad a royal warrant from Queen's Victoria.
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Their windows are any church of significancebasically, not just in the United Kingdom,
but Canada, Australia there all hadwindows by Clayton and Bell and they
were quite extraordinary. And the Victorianera, of course was the heyday the
stained and painted glass. There beenthe medieval era for stained glass, and
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then after the Reformation it kind offell into disrepute and you tended not to
have stained glass, so you hadthe three three one hundred and fifty years
about three hundred years of very littlestained glass. And then in the Victoria
era it came back in, butit wasn't just stained glass then where they
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changed the color between the leads thelead, but it was painted, so
they act actually painted the glass beforeit was fired. So the painting and
they used lovely metallic paints. It'squite extraordinary and painted it and then with
that painted glass made the stained darkso quite extraordinary windows anyway, and so
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we've got this link between Alban Martinhere and Alislie and Clayton Bell in London.
And so when the church was finishedin eighteen eighty three, Alban Martin
wrote a letter to too Alfred Belland said, we've just built this lovely
little church and we wondered if youhad any off parts or any you know,
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imperfect stained glast, that you couldperhaps stand a shift to finish off
the church and Alfred Bell wrote backand said, well, you know suddenly
the dimensions of the windows, whichthey duly did. And then shortly thereafter,
in September of eighteen eighty four,they receive a letter from Alfred Bell
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that basically said, the Gods ofChrist's Church Allesley is about to be shipped
and we're aiming for it to beto you by Christmas. And so they
and you know the Sims Towls.So not only did he design and send
a complete set of windows for thechurch, and I'll come back to that,
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yes, but they packed them,they shipped them around the world.
They send all of the bars andall of the tithes to install them,
and instructions how to install them,and send them made to measure for this
new church. It's just what anextraordinary gift, What an extraordinary gift.
And to put it into spective,the church cost six hundred pounds to build,
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and the stained glass windows at thetime were valued at twelve hundred pounds.
And here they are in Elleslie,Auckland, Auckland. And it's really
it's a very special second windows fromthe Clayton Bell perspective as well, because
so often windows most places a windowwill be given, you know, our
(12:13):
family will perhaps give a window andmemory of something, or there will be
it'll be a single window. Soour see is very unusual because it's a
complete set of windows, and sothere's a coherence to the story that it
tells, which is extremely unusual forstained glass. In fact, it's the
only feat of Clayton and Bell windowsin the Southern hemisphere. I'm not sure
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how many there are in the North, but very very few because of the
tradition of how stained gard's windows areusually gifted. Yes, that's the third
thing that's very special about them.The second thing is that we also know
that Alfred Bell himself designs them,because so often windows are gifted and the
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family has a very very clear ideaof what they want the window to be,
or the architect has a very clearidea of what the window should be
for where it's going, And sothese stains and painted glass window makers actually
generally had they had some artistics,say, but they didn't have that foundational
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design pa. Yes, there yes, their brief and so we know that
these were actually designed by Alfred Bellhimself and he would have the design from
the architect experience but he'd also havethat painter lea that understanding of art,
so he knew what design was interms of fabricating windows to make them work
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as an image in a shape,but he also had that that that that
painter absolutely and in fact that we'rea little bit further than that. And
it links to some of Aiden's workin iconography as well, because he was
a part of the Cambridge Camden Society, which later became the Ecclesiological Society,
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and they were very much about howdesign and architecture could reflect the gospel,
basically that the building itself should betelling stories and should be you know very
much in that. I mean,if you go to the wonderful Gothic cathedrals
all through Europe, you know thatwhole idea of the Gothic architecture being,
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you know, the high vertical structureto have from earth to heaven. It
was all of that idea. Andso the way he designed these windows was
to tell the story of Jesus's lifein so in our MOLVIDI and we'd call
it a narrative. That word getsbad drag this day is the word narrative.
But we're trying to tell stories.These days about place, aren't we
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in our architecture, we're trying tocatch a place and meaning. And they
were kept during you know, Christ'spresence in the church, et cetera.
Yeah, and more than that,he in his letter explaining the windows on
the way, he said, it'sselective subjects, illustrating the attributes of Christ
and the general manner of his missionon earth, rather than telling just a
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straight narrative of you know, hereof the stories of Jesus's life. Yes,
it was more to capture the differentattributes and the windows, you know,
if you look at them in order, because there is an specific order.
Yes, if you look at themin order, they're not chronological because
they're picking up different attributes in orderrather than the chronology. And he would
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have learned and that would have comea lot from Albourn way back in the
day of understanding about impressionism. Andit's not just this you know, graphic
kind of idea. It's it's impression. It's giving the story, and that
is I think Martin's one of hisgreat his great talents was this impressionism.
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He came he came from a schoolof the impressionists, from Blake and Well
from Turner and all of that.So, yeah, that's interesting and so
so. And there was about aforty year gap from when he had taught
art to Alfred Bell. So whenAlfred Bell think these windows, so you
know, you just he would neverknow. And even for Alvian Martin to
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arrive in New Zealand is kind ofextraordinary, isn't it really? I mean
absolutely, And then to have thatconnection back home, yeah, and there
and there it is, and thennew coming in at this point to get
so we know's new life exactly.And so the vicar we had at the
time suggested we had them assessed byan art historian, which we did,
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and we had Christopher Thompson come into view them, and basically he understood
the importance of what we had.We had no idea. We thought we
had beautiful windows, yes, andwe knew a little bit of the history
that they had been a gift,but we didn't understand their artistic and historical
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significant, as I said, bothnationally and internationally. And when we got
that, it totally changed the wholeaspiration, I guess, of what we
could do. You know, westarted off thinking we had to fix the
sword, and then we thought,no, no, we have to restore
and fix these windows. It's youknow, the windows became the centerpiece of
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a very large piece of work,but they also became the hook for funding,
which is I think, what youreally want me to talk about?
Well, no, I really wantto have I'm really value in this discussion,
this architectural history and this understanding ofthe quality of painted stained glass windows.
This is great information because we arean architecture program and but these things
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don't happen without deep pockets. Well, there's a lovely you know, for
people who are interested in stain glass, there's a lovely museum at the Elie
Cathedral in the UK, Yes whichgoes through all the history of stained and
painted lat yes and it's quite astoundingas you sit in the church at different
times of day, the way thelight comes through these windows. And what
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I find fascinating you I've been therea lots of different times of day is
when the light hits each of thewindows. It's usual, it's nearly always
the Jesus figure that somehow it's brighterthan any of the other figures in the
window. It's quite extraordinary. Idon't know how he did it right one
of the conversations we had with thatwhere he was talking and that though the
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owner was talking about the light inthe morning on his day to day experience.
And we will get to the funding, because that's absolutely why we're here.
But he was talking about how themorning light would flow across the garden
and I was saying, as youget older, you start to value sunlight
on your home, you start tovalue as the day how the light falls
on the garden around your house.And he was describing these Tudor windows in
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Athlehampton and the extraordinary light falling intothe building and how they actually you know,
gave great character to the day today experience of these Tudor windows.
Yeah, it changes the feel ofthat of the space. Yes. And
when you were talking about, youknow, the vertical and the horizontal,
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the height vertical to God, etcetera. That was one of my first
conversations with Aid and Heart when hewas a young he was just you know,
a late teenager, and I wastrying to design a Baptist church one
of my architecture school projects, andhe was describing this verticality idea and this
horizontal idea at the horizontal and theconnection with the vertical and and so you
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mentioned that in terms of how theywere telling the story of about within these
big Victorian churches. Yes, thebig Gossip cathedrals in particular, was their
soaring storing feelings. Yes, yes, so that's where we started. So
we got this review and it changedwhat we were going to do. We
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alwaysknew it was going to be anextensive proposition. If we'd known going in
just how expensive it was going tobe, well, to be totally honest,
I'm not sure we would have started. We were thinking it was going
to cost us about six hundred thousand, which we thought was going to be
a massive stretch, and we didn'tknow how we were going to do it,
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but you know, we were goingto give it our best shots,
and we ended up spending just overa million, not quite one point one.
Yeah, and the funding came in. And the reason we got the
funding was because of the hook ofthe windows. It wasn't because we were
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a church. In fact, severalof the funds we applied to explicitly excluded
churches from applying unless it was onhistoric rounds. Yes, and so we
sort of we sold the story basicallythat these windows are so significant, you
know, we have a responsibility,we actually have a national responsibility to protect
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them. Unfortunately, because of thisearlier work, the protection of the windows
now involves all this carpentry work thatsupports them that they're embedded in. And
of course, in doing in sixteenall of that, we then replaced the
secondary blazing. So the new secondaryblazing a is much more discrete and rah
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than the original, but it alsobreeds, It has face to breed so
that we won't have the same problemagain. But it's like so many restoration
stories, you know, where theydo the best they can at the time
with the knowledge at the time,and it's only later on they realized that
perhaps that wasn't quite the right thing. You know, I'm thinking of one
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of the pillars and the Roslin Chapelfor example, that they thought they'd fixed
with some new concrete and of courseit's destroyed it. Where was that the
Roslin Chapel of the Da Vinci codefame. Oh yes, And you know
they thought this is concrete, youknow, this was the new technology and
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this was going to fix the problem, and actually destroyed it. And they
what made it worse is they can'teven undo it. We could undo our
damage? Is that one they can'tundo the damage? So how much?
I mean how what was the lengthsof time in terms of researching the remedial
work and how what were the bestmaterials and the best construction details and systems
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and well, one of the veryearly things once we had this historical note
and we understood what we were dealingwith again thanks to Pamela Stone who was
the warden. She in the earlytwo thousands we'd had a leaky building and
had to reclad our wool area.And we've used the architects Salmon Reid,
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who are specialists. Here is ahistorical heritage architect their award winning Yeah,
and we've used them. Then shewas seen to use them again, so
they came in and they did basicallya project fan and the scope of works
it. In fact, the veryfirst funding we applied for was to our
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local ward to get money to fundthe feasibility study from Salmine Reed and it
was the best twelve and a halfthousand dollars we ever sent, right right,
because they put everything together in oneplace, They told the story,
they pulled together all of the fundingaspects that we had a scope of works
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of exactly what needed doing and howto do it, and that document,
which was it was about an inchesthick when it was finished, but that
became the foundation of all of thefunding applications. Apart from the people at
Sam and Reid who wrote it,I'm probably the only person who knows page
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number and can quote the thing becauseI lived in the feasibility study. It
felt like forever, but it wasabout two years. Did you so you
understood fully this architectural report Feasibility stay. That's so exciting. Well, I
understood enough to translate it, ishow I would ye, that's very interesting
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that it's it's this. You know, you have the specialists who speak in
their language, and you the peoplewho are going to read these reports who
wants you to hit them between theeyes as to why you should get the
funding and not these other thirty applicationsthat they're also reading, and to do
that translation between In the research arena, we call it translational research, where
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you take the technical things and youtranslate it so that it's dijectible by anybody,
by the public or or by theaudience an actual fact. So you
know, if your audience is thepublic detector. You make it digestible for
them. If it's the public,it's a different way of writing again,
and that's one of the tricks Ithink with all funding applications of who is
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the funder, what are they interestedin? How do you align your projects
to theirs? Because it's going tobe a very very rare occurrence that your
project will exactly align with their goalsand aspirations. Yes, and you really
have to have a deep, deepunderstanding of your own project and of what
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their goals are so that you canmassage your project so it looks like it
fits what they want. Yeah.You know, the fact is you're doing
what you want to do, butyou've massaged it and framed it in a
way that works for them. Sowell, le Leslie church Christ, We're
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very lucky we were fortunate to haveyou because, I mean, you can
do that sort of work. Iknow that I'm not. I'm a sort
of very subjective art type person.It's very hard for me to translate my
work to try and ask for intosome other alternative, into another viewpoint.
But having you there, you havethat professional capacity to do that. Yeah,
(26:52):
the objective ability to translate. Yeah, I think about it like joining
dots, that my role is tojoin the dots. You've got these things
over here, and these things overhere, what joins them together, which
is what you do in design.You're doing the same thing. You have
the breach your requirements, and yousomehow have to make those things fit,
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and so very much the same.One of the tricks I learned when I
was lecturing is, you know,when students had to write esthays, and
in that I continued to do thisright through even when I was writing journal
articles and research and things. Isto give it to somebody who knows nothing
about what you're doing and see ifthey understand it. And if they don't
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understand it, they're asking you questionsyou're not hitting You're not hitting it.
They it should be self explanatory.They shouldn't need to come back to ask
questions. And it's a really goodstarting point. You know, you write
what you think is a really simple, clear explanation of what it is you're
wanting to do. Give it tosomeone who knows nothing about what you want
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to do. Yes, and basicallythe questions they come back to you work
are the very things that you needto respond to and don't get me wrong.
It can be so destroyed because youthink you've written the perfect thing.
You know, you're just you know, you're so in love with what you've
written, you think it's absolutely hitthe nail on the head, and then
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they come back and say, Idon't understand what you're talking about anything.
Oh no, But I don't knowif many people have that. Well,
I guess that's part of the professionalwork, being able to step beyond your
own piece of work and be ableto let it go and be able to
respond to the to the audience againin a way that works with the audience.
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That's the hard things. I guessthat's with architecture. We do in
conceptual design, but then we're constantlyworking with what meets the clients and needs
from an architecture point of view.And I'm in an architecture you've got that
end goal. You know, what'sthe end goal is to have the built.
It's it's not it's nothing until it'sbuilt exactly exactly. And it's the
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thing with this, you know,if you keep your eye on what's my
end goal? And for us,the end goal was to get the funding
to protect and restore these windows.Yes, so you know, if this
is what I have to do inorder to get that, you know what,
it's a small price to pay.I can. I can swallow my
ego for a little while and justdo what I need to do. But
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it is a really good rule ofsome it's to have someone who doesn't know
the project. Yeah. And theother trick to I've sort of alluded to
it already, A weave it thatyou've got to remember the people who will
read these applications, they may haveforty or fifty to read. Now you
imagine you've got forty or fifty applications, let's say they're five thousand words each,
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how excit, and you're going tobe about reading them, and so
you've got to grab that reader's attentionimmediately. You need a hook. Now,
for us, it was the windows, and so in the first sentence,
I sold the windows. You know, we have these internationally significant stained
and painted life windows that need boomboom boom bom yeah, yeah, yeah,
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And the second sentence was what weneeded. And then go on and
explain so often what we do iswe kind of we build the story,
you know, a bit like amystery novel. We're building the anticipation and
dropping all the clues for this grandreveal at the end of who the who
(30:44):
the murderer was or is, whereasyou need to tip that idea on its
head for funding, You've actually gotto hook them in the first paragraph.
And if you haven't done that,they're not going to read the page.
They're never going to get that fart. You're going to say no, and
it's going to go in the noparle immediately. So you've got to hook
them in really early on. Doesthat ability of the skill that you have
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does that come from like a passionateintuition or do you had to have years
of experience to know how to structurethis approach. I had to learn how
to structure the approach. And yes, I had all those terrible moments when
I got, you know, thefeedback that you know, I don't get
the point or something, or youknow, the point came too late.
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You need to say it's sooner.So it was a learning proced and by
the time I got to the youknow, I had been writing funding proposals
as my semi retirement job for anumber for several years, and so I've
really gotten into that mode of samningthe story straight up, whereas you know,
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if you compare that to academic writingfor general publication and things, that's
very much about explaining the process ofwhat you do and building the story and
building the evidence faith in order todraw the logical conclusions from that where's this
You almost have to start at thelogical conclusion and put that in the front.
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So that was something I had tolearn quite early on when I started
in my normal role having to writeSunday and applications, and you know,
the first ones weren't successful. Weare the institute I'm at now, I'll
just do a plug for the NewZealand Policy Institute Research Institute. We're actually
(32:38):
quite successful at getting Sunday. Buteven though we're reasonably successful, I had
never had the success rate that Ihad with my church, Elie Lee's Windows.
Oh gosh, it was extraordinary,can you I mean, for the
listeners, Elleslie Church is really asmall church in a in one of the
(33:04):
outer city suburbs of Auckland or theinner city sub it. I mean,
it's not it's it's a small forinstance, it's a small little church allesleye
Isn't it isn't like the big citykind of experience. It's extraordinary, really,
isn't it. And I mean AlbanMartin retired to Ellesley after having had
his farm originally in Panmua down therein East Tammockey, So yeah, Allesley
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would have been little, growing,growing village, a growing township. And
it's a lovely historic village. Andwhat's interesting, I mean we lived on
the north Shore in Auckland for thirtyfive years and then we moved to Elslie
and we knew nothing about Alleslee whenwe moved, right, But what we
love about it is it still althoughit's in the middle of this huge city,
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it still has that village feel toit. It is still is a
village and incredibly diverse and energetic village. And the church sits on the hill,
just on the fringe of the villageitself, and we kind of look
on the village and it's just it'svery much that sense of the church being
(34:14):
part of the community. Absolutely.But to talk about numbers, you know,
Pam who I've mentioned, used totalk about as we were going through
this process and the fundraising. Sheused to talk about the faithful forty.
I think she's a little bit optimisticit was really more like the Faithful thirty,
but that doesn't have quite the samealliteration as the Faithful forty. And
(34:36):
so we at that stage had avery very small congregation. And so just
you know, the whole concept ofgetting to six hundred thousand dollars from the
small parish was, as I said, extremely daunting. We knew we would
have to apply for funding, butwe just never really understood how much we
(34:59):
were going to have applied for.But we also I don't think anyone in
their wildest dreams, including me,expected us to be that successful at getting
it as we were. It camedown to this hook that we had something
to stell. Yeah, two questions. So I wasn't I didn't It wasn't
(35:22):
aware that Salmon Read Architects came inat the beginning. I just thought,
maybe you've done all your work,You've got all your funding. And then
Salmon Read came in and advised you, you know, did the did the
design work for the building? Butthey were key right from the site that
report had to come first. Itreally did because that well to start with,
(35:43):
that gave us an idea of howmuch we were going to have to
raise. And I can tell youwhen the parish received that report, it
was almost you know, we justhung our heads and we thought, how,
yeah, how on earth are wegoing to do this? But it
says something about that that practice thatthey do that work in such a comprehensive
(36:07):
way, that they look at thewhole thing, not just the design and
the detailing and the construction detailing.They're looking at how you were going to
what the scope of the workers,et cetera exactly. And they also helped
us for the two big funds wherewe got a lot of money from Foundation
North and Lottery. They have obviouslyassisted in a lot of applications for those
(36:31):
funds and they really understood what thesefunds needed, and so they were you
know, even just the format ofthat feasibility report very much gave us the
structure of what we needed. Sofor each part, you know, the
applications were all different, and foreach part of them I would pull on
(36:51):
different parts of the report, butit was just so well laid out and
so clear and really targeted all ofthe aztecs that we knew we needed.
If you started doing a funding applicationwithout that, you would get the first
(37:13):
fit done and then you'd get tothe next burt, and you then have
to scramble around and pull together allof those bits of paper and all of
that supporting documentation. Then you'd getto the next section and it becomes a
very operous process. But whereas byhaving it all there, it meant when
I came to write the applications,I could not quite write them straight through.
(37:35):
You know, they weren't something you'dsit down and do in an hour.
You know, they would take severalweeks of playing with. But I
had everything at my fingertips to beable to do that. And I mean
it's like any building or restoration,look even just decorating, it's preparation,
preparation, preparation. The better youdo your homework, the better you've written
(37:58):
the contract, all of those,yes, the less problems you have on
the track. I can't recommend highlyenough the idea of having this completed feasibility
report, which became the foundation forall of the early applications. And then
it was very easy to update thatbecause each time you of course had to
put in the accounts and how muchfundraising you had already achieved, and so
(38:22):
it was very easy to update thatone page as we got more and more
funds in, and as we gotcommitment of more and more funds, we
could just update that, which ofcourse kept pushing up what we could aim
for. I mean, when wegot the scoat, originally it was going
to be about six hundred thousand dollarsand as I said, we were just
horrified at the thought. So weimmediately dropped a couple of things off because
(38:45):
we knew we couldn't afford them,and then we thought, you know,
by the time we do it,it will still be about six hundred.
As it turned out, having droppedthose things, we still ended up over
a million, because, like withany historic building done what we could to
do some penetration testing beforehand to makesure that we weren't going to be too
(39:06):
shocked by what was found. Butunfortunately, there was still a few shocks
along the way that we then hadto do variations for. But it's the
nature of a beast when you're dealingwith a building that's one hundreds and thirty
four years old when we started thisprocess, and it's just the nature of
the beast. But I will sayone thing, senior based in Wellington,
I will say one thing that wedid actually pass on earthquakes. You didn't
(39:29):
have to do earthquake. You passed. We're at the bottom end, we
still passed. And being up onthe hill, you also you wouldn't have
had any fear about flooding that hada year ago. Correct, The little
church on the hill, I meanthat's so it is iconic of a village
(39:49):
kind of atmosphere. It's exactly iconic, and in fact, for a long
time it was one of the symbolsfor the village. It was, you
know, this church on the villageof a steep so no very cute.
So you had the report, butdid you say that you know, when
you did do the you know youwere sudden to penetrate the building and sort
of open it up. Then youhad some unknowns that you had to deal
(40:14):
with, which became variations, andso were you able to get more funding?
At that point most of the fundingwas pretty much in place. We
basically had to know the diaces wouldn'tlet us start until they knew we could
finish it, and so we prettymuch had all the funding in place.
It hadn't all been paid, butwe'd had confirmation of receipt of it,
(40:36):
and so we had that all inplace, and then we started and then
of course when we found some ofthese things, we frantically applied to some
extra funds that had short timeline,and we also had some additional funds which
we hadn't planned to dip into,I should say, you know, as
we found these things, the firstthing we dipped into was our contingency budget.
(40:57):
When we were trying to from everything to make it the funding we
thought we had. One of thethings we trimmed quite extensively was actually the
contingency fund. In hindsight, weshouldn't have done that. We should have
increased it. Yeah, yeah,yeah, as always, so we very
quickly chooed through the contingency fund.We then had some back up funds from
(41:22):
the parish used to have another churchin Mount Wellington, and when that was
closed, we had some money andthe trust for that that we planned to
not touch because we had other plansfor that money. Well that's all gone.
Basically every account we had that everyform of future maintenance we cleared.
Yeah, by the end of theproject, we were basically living. So
(41:44):
you would have had an incredibly busyand confident treasurer or accounts kind of volunteer
or someone who was administrating the funds. It was very complex because of how
it's set up within the diarity togethera spreadsheet. I'm a number person,
I'm an economist. I like numbers. In the end, I pulled together
(42:05):
a spreadsheet which had all of thedocumentation that we sent to the accounting part
TML, who do the accounting forthe parish. I had the invoices,
the TML statements of our accounts,and all the bank stains. So you'd
like to think that for every itemthere were three tips that they occurred in
all three of these places. Anactual fact, probably twenty percent had three
(42:30):
tips. I eventually got it allto balance for the dollars once I've put
corrections when the wrong jets he hadbeen paid in those But I knew absolutely
where everything went. But what Ifound fascinating is the three forms of cross
checking just didn't the line. Youknow, we had things on the bank
(42:51):
statement that never showed up in theright bank account or were put into the
wrong bank accounts and then moved out, And we did account for it all,
and we and absolutely show you whereevery single penny was. It's wonderful,
and where every single penny came fromas well. A whole narrative in
itself, isn't it the whole account? Absolutely it was. It was quite
(43:14):
honestly a nightmare, and it wasonly in sheer desperation in the end because
Pam asked me, you know,do you know how much the project has
cot? And I said, well, you know, we've had this much
in and we think we raised thismuch, but I've gotten voices for this
much. And so that was whatinspired me to try and make everything come
(43:36):
together. That actually took I thinklonger to get right than writing the funding
applications. At the other end ofit, I mean that whole, wonderful
kind of robust transparency of the financialside of getting a building belt that's also,
you know, if you've got agood if you know even it's complex,
(43:57):
if you know that narrative is allpart of it. Part of the
the memory of the building is thehow it was costed and how wrong some
of our costing was. Yeah,and it didn't help too that we were
we were literally about two weeks fromtaking the scaffolding down when COVID lockdown happened,
my goodness, and so then ofcourse we had the scaffolding for all
(44:20):
this extra time, and that hadfinancial implications obviously. Oh so you had
to keep paying for the scaffolding becausethey couldn't come on site. But at
least, you know, in termsof the bigger kind of sort of thing,
you got the building built pretty muchbefore COVID, Is that correct?
We got most of it done beforeCOVID. And one of the other advantages,
(44:40):
of course, we then weren't allowedin the church because of the gathering
rules, which actually made it easierfor the buildings because they didn't have to
enable us to have accepted during theperiod of this restoration windows and where were
you holding services in the church?Most of it was external. All the
(45:00):
windows they could actually repair all ofthem in situe except for one. And
so this is actually quite a fewstory. They were painting the church back
in nineteen twenty eight, almost onehundred years ago now, so about ninety
years when we started this project,so about ninety two years from when we
(45:22):
started the physical work, and theywere stripping the paint and step the church
on fire, and so we stillgot the lovely smoke stained ceiling. There's
one panel they had to replace.You can still see the smoke in the
high part of this internally internally,and so in the corner that it started
(45:43):
at the window in that one corner, it's the called the Good Shepherd window,
and that was the only window theyhad to take out in order to
fix it because it had so muchdamage from the fire in nineteen twenty eight
and it had never been repaired.There's the footprint of nineteen twenty eight within
the building itself. That foot frontthe correct ago correct. So that was
(46:04):
the only widow that they had totake out and take that to the workshop
and do a lot of repair on. But we'd go to church on a
Sunday and there'd be little tags ofblue masking tape stuck to all of the
windows. You know. Some ofthe windows had had thirty of these little
tags of where things had to bedone to the window. And so it
was quite reassuring going in each weekand seeing some of the tags removed.
(46:29):
Lovely story, and so they tookthat particular window out to repair it.
Joke of all of that is becausethis was set on fire when they were
stripping the paint in nineteen twenty eight. They hadn't stripped the paint ever since
and just painted over the top becausethey were too scared to do anything.
And so a part of our restorationprocess was to strip the paint using non
(46:51):
heat stripping methods, and they foundseventeen layers of paint. My gosh,
it had been painted over and overagain in the last one hundred and thirty
years. Yea seventeen times. Andwe've got a lovely photo of a board
where they scraped it back and youcould actually see all of the layers that's
(47:14):
ononful going back for the original,which was quite exciting then. And then
seven reads sent up derecommended rendering offor the new paint's work, and we
all went, oh no. Itwas a scorier red and quite a yellowy
color. And they see you,these were the original colors. These were
(47:37):
the colors of the early eighteen eighties. You see a lot of the style
of church around the country which arewhite with red roofs. Yes, well,
apparently that was an eighteen nineties colorskin and so the scorier red with
this yellow with the early eighteen eighties. And we all threw our hands up
and said, no, we can'tgo. That's just awful. We can't
(47:59):
do it. Do it? Andthe architects said, well, this was
technically correct, and so there wassome friction. But what we did decide
it was a very pale gray andwe did all admit to that. Well,
actually it makes what we've got lookreally insipid, so that this was
quite a bold statement. And sothere was a lot of pooen and throwing
(48:20):
of no, we hate the colors. And so we painted some big boards
and the recommended colors, and Ithink we got used to it, and
we eventually agreed to the new colors. I don't think we were going to
be allowed to not agree, mindyou. Okay, then, but when
they scraped us back and you couldget that to that original color, it
was the color that architects had recommended. That's really interesting. So they had
(48:45):
recommended it, but once you scrappedback, that was the color there that
they recommended it because of their knowledgethey're historically because of their knowledge of the
paint schemes that the and then thatwas there when you saw it in reality,
that sort of excavation down to thebase color down to the base coat.
So the color of the church it'sa creamy color, is it not,
(49:05):
But it's it's quite a yellowy cream, but scorier red roof and around
the windows and things scory the windows. And that was another piece of fundraising.
We've got Razine Paint gave us thepaint at what I can only describe
as an exceptionally good yes right,yes, yes, And so they contributed
(49:29):
as well. So that wasn't acash sponsorship, but it was in kind
that enabled us to move on andget things done. I know that all
of those little bits together that butyou had to keep track of all those
little bits, didn't you. Ihad a very big file of everything.
Yeah, so that whole file containslike the original scope, I mean,
the idea of your small parish.Even deciding that you were you knew you
(49:53):
had to do it. You hadto restore those windows, I understand,
or was it was it an emotionalchoice? Let look after this church.
We we started out thinking we needto fix the around to these windows.
And that was before we knew whatthe windows were. We knew it needed
some major work. And then whenwe understood what we had and that,
(50:17):
you know, maybe maybe we canaccess some funding, then it kind of
expanded our horizons. The weebit andso basically by this time on. We
finished the project in twenty twenty.We were almost back to brand new.
You know, our long term maintenanceplan now has very little major work on
(50:38):
it. It's got the gutter cleans, that's got the paint work. The
other thing we had to drop outof scope was replacing the roof because we
just couldn't afford it. So weknow that that's coming. But we did
paint the roof at the time forthe new color scheme, and so that
brought us a few years, sowe know that that's coming. But it
did give us this window of afew years where we knew we weren't going
(51:01):
to have to do any expensive remedialwork. Replacing a roof is not overly
a major outgoing, is it really, And it would have been re roofed
some you know in recent times.I would imagine, well it has been
reroofed, but that was done aboutthirty odd years ago, so it is
definitely getting towards the end of itsnatural life. But of course having done
(51:24):
all of this beautiful work too,it's made us really, you know,
I've got a new goal that Iwould want to start fundraising for, and
that's to put a sprinkle system inbecause it's all well and good having smoke
alarms and things, but we can'trebuild it. If we lose these,
they're gone forever. It's much moreimportant to prevent that happening. So my
(51:45):
new goal is to get ourselves ina position that we can start to apply
for funding to put sprintles in toprotect what we now understand that we have,
because we didn't used to know wehad it, Whereas now that we
do, we you know, we'remuch more conscious of I guess the katiarchy
role of guardianship of what we havemoving forward. So you've done this restoration,
(52:10):
and you've garnered the report and thequality of the history of the windows
and the church, you're in abetter position. Well, you're in a
strong position to augment the upgrade ofthe church as it goes on exactly.
So that's sort of the position whereinnow. But you know, we did
(52:30):
we and we had such amazing supportfrom so many organizations, obviously funding that
we applied for, but also individualsand groups who had no direct connection to
the church but heard what we weredoing and became involved in us. So,
(52:51):
yeah, it was an extraordinary experienceto be a part of actually you
know, you think writing funding applicationshow boring, but it was more like
a roller coaster ride. It wasactually incredibly exciting, traumatic at times,
but incredibly exciting. And then youknow, when you got the letter,
(53:12):
you'd almost be too scared to openit, and then you did and you
know, be on the high forthe next application not seem too bad,
and all because of the hook thatyou had, the hook the congregation that
the community church community is still aliveand it's growing and growing. That's wonderful.
It's growing. And again we're nowwe're now able to grow without this
(53:36):
burden of knowing that they need todo these things. It's sort of taken
that stress about how do we dothis away, and even when we come
to do the next thing, weknow that we can do it because we've
done it. And you know,really you are a small, small church
community, and there's a small noteverybody goes to an anime church of course,
(54:00):
in the wider part of Illsley,the wider part of Auckland. So
you've actually looked after a precious cornerof Auckland. You know, an architecture.
We're so conscious of cost. Ofcourse, it cost, it costs
money to build, the client's moneyand the contractors. It's a project some
and so forth. So the storyis the aesthetics of the windows, it's
(54:21):
the housing a church community, it'sthe house in its landscape as part of
Elleslie. But all of that isthat lovely story. And then it's the
building. But also it's the memoryof the contract. It's the memory of
the processing of the funds. That'sall part of restoration project, doesn't it.
Absolutely absolutely, And in fact itcan be a major part because so
(54:43):
many of these restorations just can't occurwithout it. And you know, I
understand it gets to a point ofdo we spend this money to restore what's
there or do we start again,because so often the budgets would not be
a lot different. That's right forus. Once we understood what we had,
it was a no brainer. Sometimeswe say, look, you know
(55:05):
it's gorgeous and everybody loves it,but let's just demolish. Let's just start
again and do something brand new.But in your case that it was a
restoration for and you had salmon redthe wonderful heritage architects there to sort of
start the process. In terms ofthe scope and yeah, yeah, we
were incredibly fortunate that. I mean, it took us two and a half
(55:30):
years to get all of our ducksin a row before we started work.
So that was establishing what we had, giving the feasibility report from Salmon Read
and so that took probably a yearbefore we wrote our first application. We've
written one application to the Auckland Councilto our local board to get the funding
(55:52):
for the feasibility but the rest ofthat time was spent basically organizing what we
needed in order to go forward.And obviously, as I said, we
didn't have to keep up dating itas we've got funds, but that provided
the foundation and it really, youknow, it's like building and building on
(56:14):
rock foundations. You've got to havethat foundation right. You can't be fudging
it and guessing. You've got toreally understand what you're doing. You've almost
got to have got to the endof the project in order to start it.
Mentally, you've got to have gotto the end of the project.
This is where we're going to endup. In order to get there,
(56:35):
we have to do all of thesesteps. And when you have a real
understanding of that, it makes thesefundling applications much simpler because you keep in
the forefront all the time. Theyusually have very tight word limits on them.
It's much harder to go to atight word limit than to have an
open word limit. It really makesyou concentrate, and so it's a concentrate
(57:00):
of what it is you're trying toachieve, why you're trying to achieve it,
and how it fits the funder's goals. They're the three sort of things
you have to keep in the forefrontall the time, all of the nice
to have about why this is sovaluable to the community. You know,
yes, in some funding applications,that's the why you need to do this,
(57:20):
but in others it's irrelevant. AndI think that's another aspect with writing
funding applications is it's very tempting tocut and paste from one to the other.
Oh, this is like that question, I'll cut that answer and put
it in here. But I learnedvery very quickly that you're better to do
each application them as if it's thefirst application, so that you're really able
(57:44):
to focus on that funder and theway they've asked their questions, even the
order they ask the questions gives you'rea really good indication of what matters to
them. For that same reason,they're going to read the first part first,
and they may never read the lackof part. If you haven't excited
them, they're not going to getto the stuff further on. And it's
(58:07):
always the budget that is further on. So that's not their primary concern,
believe or not. Okay, it'sit's always the why the spur of the
job, how does it fit whatwe're wanting to fund? That is always
upfront. And in academia we knowwhen people are doing a thesis and things
(58:28):
we talk about the elevator pitch orthe three minute thesis. You know,
tell us what your project is likein the duration of an elevator, right,
can you lock it down to literallytwo or three sentences? And you
really need to be able to dothat. So for us, it was
the renovation and restoration of these veryspecial stained glass windows. Everything else,
(58:55):
all the carpentry, all of thewoodwork, the painting, the sixen,
the buttresses, everything else was almosta material to that prime goal. In
order to protect these windows, weneed to make sure that their supporting structure
is sound. We need to putthe new protective glazing on and we could
(59:15):
then tell the story about why ithad gotten to this decision later on in
the application where you've got more space. But it's about keeping absolutely forefront that
two or three sentences that really capturesthe whole essence of what your project is
about. I think that's a wonderfulway to end, Mary, lovely,
(59:37):
thank you very much, Thanks,thank you. No, this is rosalind
to Darby here talking with Mary Hedges, a skilled funding application practitioner. What
was the are when you work inNew Zealand Policy Research Institute. We used
to be the New Zealand Work ResearchInstitute at aut but we actually changed down
day in yesterday, so we're nowthe New Zealand Policy Research Institute. Who
(59:58):
also is a is a member ofthe Elleslie Church Christ Church Church community and
was there throughout the whole process atthe time and the end of this lovely,
lovely stained glass window collection in thischurch. Thank you Mary. And
if I could just do a sellif you're if people are ever in orphan
and want to come and see this, you're more than welcome to come and
(01:00:20):
have a look. Absolutely, it'sit's a very important story in this tiny
little well small little church community therein Ellieslie. Thank you Rosale. This
program was made with assistance from NewZealand on Air for radio broadcast and through
the Accessmedia dot m Z website.Thank you New Zealand on Air.
This is Rosalind Darving here on LocalArchitecture now for April, and we're speaking
with Mary Hedges him. Mary.Hello, you are an economist and we're
speaking with you because of your incrediblyin depth involvement in the restoration of both
the windows and I think the churchin terms of Ellesley Christ Church in Auckland
(00:37):
in terms of restoring the windows inthe building, by being the person who
was foremost in the in the fundingapplication process for that for historic restoration.
Is that correct? That's that's correct. Limited capability, but I said I
can write funding applications and so thatwas my role in the whole project.
(00:59):
But like all projects, once youstart with this little pairly defined thing that
you're going to do, your rolealways changes and grows. It grows.
And I was at the church interestingenough on the day that last December when
you had your Nativity session and wewere all enacting in various roles the Nativity
(01:19):
play and we all met afterwards andI met you, and the church is
very special to Ellieslie and possibly tooNew Zealand as a historic Grade B heritage
building, and you were available tosupport the restoration in terms of providing the
funds for that as an economist,Is that correct? I was an academic
(01:41):
economist, and in my most recentroles, I was involved in research institutes
and primarily in writing funding applications,and then when we got them, project
managing some of those projects. SoI stopped doing the research and moved into
managing the research or in fact gettingfunds for research. And so when we
(02:04):
were looking for funds to do therestoration of the windows, I thought,
here's something I can contribute, here'san area I've got some expertise them.
And that's really how it all startedfor me. Prior to that, I'd
been very kind of hands off,right, But I really want to understand
this funding process and how much itevolved of you, and at least even
if you were project managing aspects ofit. But what we concerned was here,
(02:29):
specifically for your application, was thesestained glass windows. Well when we
started, we didn't realize really whata treasure we held in the stained glass
windows, and we were They hadhad some protective glass put over them a
number of years ago, and likewith a lot of restoration projects, they
used the best technology they understood atthe time, and so they put the
(02:53):
secondary glass over them to protect them. But of course what that then did
is trapped moisture between the stained glassthe protective glass. The impact of that,
of course was to rot all thewoods, well not all of it,
but to cause quite a lot ofdamage to the wood surrounds to the
windows. So we thought we needto fix it. You know, this
can't go on, and we thoughtwe can't afford it. We're a very
(03:15):
small parish and we thought this isgoing to be a non trivial thumb and
so we fortunately had a wonderful,wonderful people's warden who an ex secondary school
principal, who got on board andstarted to think, well, how can
we do this? And at thesame time we had a vicar who said,
(03:37):
well, I actually think you shouldget these windows a debt. I
think you might have something here,And so we did get them at Deft
And the way it worked out isthe windows became our hook for the whole
project. So while the project dida lot of restoration to the church building
itself, it was the windows thatgave us the hook. And from a
(04:00):
fun perspective, it was the windowswhich gave us that leg up in order
to get funding. And I'll talkmore about that later, but that was
sort of the story, and welearned the story behind the windows and just
how significant they were not only nationallyin the New Zealand scene, but also
internationally. And the story is actuallyjust a beautiful, beautiful story of you
(04:26):
never know something you might do todaythat can have this impact, you know,
forty years later. If I can, I'm happy to share the story.
That would be wonderful. Yes.When they went to build the church
was they started work on it inthe eighteen seventeen and they finally got the
funding to build this church. Andit was a colonial Gothic design made in
(04:48):
Cowie and if you drive around thecountry you see all of these little wooden
churches that look remarkably similar from thatera, and it was a pretty standard
design. So they built this lovelychurch and one of the leaders in the
parish at the time was a gentlemanby the name of Alban Martin, and
it turned out he was an artistof some note from the UK before he
(05:12):
brought his family out to New Zealand, and he was one of the early
people in the New Zealand arts sceneas well, and so he had a
very very good reputation as an artist, and so he was one of the
people driving the development of this newparish of our fleet. Now we need
to go back in his history towhere he grew up, which was in
(05:34):
a village in Somerset. And Ithink a couple of weeks ago you talked
to Aiden who was a part ofthe Martin family. Was it it the
village in Dorset. It's right onthe border actually between a Dorset, Somerset
and Wiltshire. It's right kind ofwhere the okay, but Juk have got
(05:57):
the name of the village, butI don't necessarily is it Silton, Silton?
That's it. At Christmas time wespoke to Aiden Hart, who's the
great great grandson of Alban Martin,and he's based in Shrewsbury. But his
flourishing career is actually liturgical artworks ofevery kind of genre throughout Old Cathedral's contemporary
(06:19):
cathedrals all over the world. Sohe's carried that artistic practice into his life
and is now specifically as a GreekOrthodox practitioner doing that sort of thing.
That last months in March, wespoke to another economist, so there's a
lovely sort of synergy there Jarles Keating, who bought the tudor manor of Ethelhampton
in Dorset, which was built andwell goes back in terms of the Martin
(06:43):
family fourteen eighty five. So thisconversation with you is a sort of New
Zealand colonial immigrant response to a buildingthat in the Martin family they inhabited way
back in forteen eighty five. Wow. So we've got all these connections.
And in fact, one of ourcurrent parisianists and who I met you through
is the granddaughter and it yes,And so we've got all these lovely connections,
(07:10):
and these connections are shown through thesewindows as well. So it turned
out on the estate in Somerset orin Filton, there was one of the
woodkeeper's sons showed some artistic talent,and so Alvin Martin's brother twifted his arm
and said, you know, whydon't you give him some art lessons.
(07:32):
And so he started giving art lessonsand allowing this boy to have access to
his art books and things and tolearn about the masters. And as Alvin
put it in one of his letters, very quickly the student became the master.
That this child was clearly even byten or eleven twelve with clearly extremely
(07:56):
talented, and so the two brothersthen they were building a parish church and
they were working with Gilbert Scott,and they twisted his arm to take on
this boy as and apprentice. Andnot long thereafter Alvin was in London.
So he called into visit Scott andyou know, thank him again for taking
(08:18):
on this child with talents. Hesaid, no, no, no,
you shouldn't be thanking me. Ishould be thanking you. He is extraordinary.
And the person the child, well, he wasn't by then. He
was a teenager, was a gentlemanby the name of Alfred Bell, and
he worked in Scott's design. Hegot his papers and finished his adventure and
(08:41):
things, and then he hired upwith another person who he also met strange
enough there, Satan, and theyformed a stained and painted glass window company
called Seyton and Bell. And theybecame the preeminent stained and painted glass window
of the Victorian era, and theyhad a royal warrant from Queen's Victoria.
(09:03):
Their windows are any church of significancebasically, not just in the United Kingdom,
but Canada, Australia there all hadwindows by Clayton and Bell and they
were quite extraordinary. And the Victorianera, of course was the heyday the
stained and painted glass. There beenthe medieval era for stained glass, and
(09:30):
then after the Reformation it kind offell into disrepute and you tended not to
have stained glass, so you hadthe three three one hundred and fifty years
about three hundred years of very littlestained glass. And then in the Victoria
era it came back in, butit wasn't just stained glass then where they
(09:52):
changed the color between the leads thelead, but it was painted, so
they act actually painted the glass beforeit was fired. So the painting and
they used lovely metallic paints. It'squite extraordinary and painted it and then with
that painted glass made the stained darkso quite extraordinary windows anyway, and so
(10:18):
we've got this link between Alban Martinhere and Alislie and Clayton Bell in London.
And so when the church was finishedin eighteen eighty three, Alban Martin
wrote a letter to too Alfred Belland said, we've just built this lovely
little church and we wondered if youhad any off parts or any you know,
(10:41):
imperfect stained glast, that you couldperhaps stand a shift to finish off
the church and Alfred Bell wrote backand said, well, you know suddenly
the dimensions of the windows, whichthey duly did. And then shortly thereafter,
in September of eighteen eighty four,they receive a letter from Alfred Bell
(11:05):
that basically said, the Gods ofChrist's Church Allesley is about to be shipped
and we're aiming for it to beto you by Christmas. And so they
and you know the Sims Towls.So not only did he design and send
a complete set of windows for thechurch, and I'll come back to that,
(11:26):
yes, but they packed them,they shipped them around the world.
They send all of the bars andall of the tithes to install them,
and instructions how to install them,and send them made to measure for this
new church. It's just what anextraordinary gift, What an extraordinary gift.
And to put it into spective,the church cost six hundred pounds to build,
(11:50):
and the stained glass windows at thetime were valued at twelve hundred pounds.
And here they are in Elleslie,Auckland, Auckland. And it's really
it's a very special second windows fromthe Clayton Bell perspective as well, because
so often windows most places a windowwill be given, you know, our
(12:13):
family will perhaps give a window andmemory of something, or there will be
it'll be a single window. Soour see is very unusual because it's a
complete set of windows, and sothere's a coherence to the story that it
tells, which is extremely unusual forstained glass. In fact, it's the
only feat of Clayton and Bell windowsin the Southern hemisphere. I'm not sure
(12:35):
how many there are in the North, but very very few because of the
tradition of how stained gard's windows areusually gifted. Yes, that's the third
thing that's very special about them.The second thing is that we also know
that Alfred Bell himself designs them,because so often windows are gifted and the
(13:00):
family has a very very clear ideaof what they want the window to be,
or the architect has a very clearidea of what the window should be
for where it's going, And sothese stains and painted glass window makers actually
generally had they had some artistics,say, but they didn't have that foundational
(13:20):
design pa. Yes, there yes, their brief and so we know that
these were actually designed by Alfred Bellhimself and he would have the design from
the architect experience but he'd also havethat painter lea that understanding of art,
so he knew what design was interms of fabricating windows to make them work
(13:43):
as an image in a shape,but he also had that that that that
painter absolutely and in fact that we'rea little bit further than that. And
it links to some of Aiden's workin iconography as well, because he was
a part of the Cambridge Camden Society, which later became the Ecclesiological Society,
(14:07):
and they were very much about howdesign and architecture could reflect the gospel,
basically that the building itself should betelling stories and should be you know very
much in that. I mean,if you go to the wonderful Gothic cathedrals
all through Europe, you know thatwhole idea of the Gothic architecture being,
(14:31):
you know, the high vertical structureto have from earth to heaven. It
was all of that idea. Andso the way he designed these windows was
to tell the story of Jesus's lifein so in our MOLVIDI and we'd call
it a narrative. That word getsbad drag this day is the word narrative.
But we're trying to tell stories.These days about place, aren't we
(14:54):
in our architecture, we're trying tocatch a place and meaning. And they
were kept during you know, Christ'spresence in the church, et cetera.
Yeah, and more than that,he in his letter explaining the windows on
the way, he said, it'sselective subjects, illustrating the attributes of Christ
and the general manner of his missionon earth, rather than telling just a
(15:18):
straight narrative of you know, hereof the stories of Jesus's life. Yes,
it was more to capture the differentattributes and the windows, you know,
if you look at them in order, because there is an specific order.
Yes, if you look at themin order, they're not chronological because
they're picking up different attributes in orderrather than the chronology. And he would
(15:43):
have learned and that would have comea lot from Albourn way back in the
day of understanding about impressionism. Andit's not just this you know, graphic
kind of idea. It's it's impression. It's giving the story, and that
is I think Martin's one of hisgreat his great talents was this impressionism.
(16:04):
He came he came from a schoolof the impressionists, from Blake and Well
from Turner and all of that.So, yeah, that's interesting and so
so. And there was about aforty year gap from when he had taught
art to Alfred Bell. So whenAlfred Bell think these windows, so you
know, you just he would neverknow. And even for Alvian Martin to
(16:27):
arrive in New Zealand is kind ofextraordinary, isn't it really? I mean
absolutely, And then to have thatconnection back home, yeah, and there
and there it is, and thennew coming in at this point to get
so we know's new life exactly.And so the vicar we had at the
time suggested we had them assessed byan art historian, which we did,
(16:51):
and we had Christopher Thompson come into view them, and basically he understood
the importance of what we had.We had no idea. We thought we
had beautiful windows, yes, andwe knew a little bit of the history
that they had been a gift,but we didn't understand their artistic and historical
(17:14):
significant, as I said, bothnationally and internationally. And when we got
that, it totally changed the wholeaspiration, I guess, of what we
could do. You know, westarted off thinking we had to fix the
sword, and then we thought,no, no, we have to restore
and fix these windows. It's youknow, the windows became the centerpiece of
(17:37):
a very large piece of work,but they also became the hook for funding,
which is I think, what youreally want me to talk about?
Well, no, I really wantto have I'm really value in this discussion,
this architectural history and this understanding ofthe quality of painted stained glass windows.
This is great information because we arean architecture program and but these things
(18:00):
don't happen without deep pockets. Well, there's a lovely you know, for
people who are interested in stain glass, there's a lovely museum at the Elie
Cathedral in the UK, Yes whichgoes through all the history of stained and
painted lat yes and it's quite astoundingas you sit in the church at different
times of day, the way thelight comes through these windows. And what
(18:26):
I find fascinating you I've been therea lots of different times of day is
when the light hits each of thewindows. It's usual, it's nearly always
the Jesus figure that somehow it's brighterthan any of the other figures in the
window. It's quite extraordinary. Idon't know how he did it right one
of the conversations we had with thatwhere he was talking and that though the
(18:51):
owner was talking about the light inthe morning on his day to day experience.
And we will get to the funding, because that's absolutely why we're here.
But he was talking about how themorning light would flow across the garden
and I was saying, as youget older, you start to value sunlight
on your home, you start tovalue as the day how the light falls
on the garden around your house.And he was describing these Tudor windows in
(19:12):
Athlehampton and the extraordinary light falling intothe building and how they actually you know,
gave great character to the day today experience of these Tudor windows.
Yeah, it changes the feel ofthat of the space. Yes. And
when you were talking about, youknow, the vertical and the horizontal,
(19:33):
the height vertical to God, etcetera. That was one of my first
conversations with Aid and Heart when hewas a young he was just you know,
a late teenager, and I wastrying to design a Baptist church one
of my architecture school projects, andhe was describing this verticality idea and this
horizontal idea at the horizontal and theconnection with the vertical and and so you
(19:56):
mentioned that in terms of how theywere telling the story of about within these
big Victorian churches. Yes, thebig Gossip cathedrals in particular, was their
soaring storing feelings. Yes, yes, so that's where we started. So
we got this review and it changedwhat we were going to do. We
(20:18):
alwaysknew it was going to be anextensive proposition. If we'd known going in
just how expensive it was going tobe, well, to be totally honest,
I'm not sure we would have started. We were thinking it was going
to cost us about six hundred thousand, which we thought was going to be
a massive stretch, and we didn'tknow how we were going to do it,
(20:41):
but you know, we were goingto give it our best shots,
and we ended up spending just overa million, not quite one point one.
Yeah, and the funding came in. And the reason we got the
funding was because of the hook ofthe windows. It wasn't because we were
(21:03):
a church. In fact, severalof the funds we applied to explicitly excluded
churches from applying unless it was onhistoric rounds. Yes, and so we
sort of we sold the story basicallythat these windows are so significant, you
know, we have a responsibility,we actually have a national responsibility to protect
(21:29):
them. Unfortunately, because of thisearlier work, the protection of the windows
now involves all this carpentry work thatsupports them that they're embedded in. And
of course, in doing in sixteenall of that, we then replaced the
secondary blazing. So the new secondaryblazing a is much more discrete and rah
(21:52):
than the original, but it alsobreeds, It has face to breed so
that we won't have the same problemagain. But it's like so many restoration
stories, you know, where theydo the best they can at the time
with the knowledge at the time,and it's only later on they realized that
perhaps that wasn't quite the right thing. You know, I'm thinking of one
(22:14):
of the pillars and the Roslin Chapelfor example, that they thought they'd fixed
with some new concrete and of courseit's destroyed it. Where was that the
Roslin Chapel of the Da Vinci codefame. Oh yes, And you know
they thought this is concrete, youknow, this was the new technology and
(22:34):
this was going to fix the problem, and actually destroyed it. And they
what made it worse is they can'teven undo it. We could undo our
damage? Is that one they can'tundo the damage? So how much?
I mean how what was the lengthsof time in terms of researching the remedial
work and how what were the bestmaterials and the best construction details and systems
(22:57):
and well, one of the veryearly things once we had this historical note
and we understood what we were dealingwith again thanks to Pamela Stone who was
the warden. She in the earlytwo thousands we'd had a leaky building and
had to reclad our wool area.And we've used the architects Salmon Reid,
(23:23):
who are specialists. Here is ahistorical heritage architect their award winning Yeah,
and we've used them. Then shewas seen to use them again, so
they came in and they did basicallya project fan and the scope of works
it. In fact, the veryfirst funding we applied for was to our
(23:44):
local ward to get money to fundthe feasibility study from Salmine Reed and it
was the best twelve and a halfthousand dollars we ever sent, right right,
because they put everything together in oneplace, They told the story,
they pulled together all of the fundingaspects that we had a scope of works
(24:10):
of exactly what needed doing and howto do it, and that document,
which was it was about an inchesthick when it was finished, but that
became the foundation of all of thefunding applications. Apart from the people at
Sam and Reid who wrote it,I'm probably the only person who knows page
(24:32):
number and can quote the thing becauseI lived in the feasibility study. It
felt like forever, but it wasabout two years. Did you so you
understood fully this architectural report Feasibility stay. That's so exciting. Well, I
understood enough to translate it, ishow I would ye, that's very interesting
(24:52):
that it's it's this. You know, you have the specialists who speak in
their language, and you the peoplewho are going to read these reports who
wants you to hit them between theeyes as to why you should get the
funding and not these other thirty applicationsthat they're also reading, and to do
that translation between In the research arena, we call it translational research, where
(25:17):
you take the technical things and youtranslate it so that it's dijectible by anybody,
by the public or or by theaudience an actual fact. So you
know, if your audience is thepublic detector. You make it digestible for
them. If it's the public,it's a different way of writing again,
and that's one of the tricks Ithink with all funding applications of who is
(25:41):
the funder, what are they interestedin? How do you align your projects
to theirs? Because it's going tobe a very very rare occurrence that your
project will exactly align with their goalsand aspirations. Yes, and you really
have to have a deep, deepunderstanding of your own project and of what
(26:06):
their goals are so that you canmassage your project so it looks like it
fits what they want. Yeah.You know, the fact is you're doing
what you want to do, butyou've massaged it and framed it in a
way that works for them. Sowell, le Leslie church Christ, We're
(26:27):
very lucky we were fortunate to haveyou because, I mean, you can
do that sort of work. Iknow that I'm not. I'm a sort
of very subjective art type person.It's very hard for me to translate my
work to try and ask for intosome other alternative, into another viewpoint.
But having you there, you havethat professional capacity to do that. Yeah,
(26:52):
the objective ability to translate. Yeah, I think about it like joining
dots, that my role is tojoin the dots. You've got these things
over here, and these things overhere, what joins them together, which
is what you do in design.You're doing the same thing. You have
the breach your requirements, and yousomehow have to make those things fit,
(27:17):
and so very much the same.One of the tricks I learned when I
was lecturing is, you know,when students had to write esthays, and
in that I continued to do thisright through even when I was writing journal
articles and research and things. Isto give it to somebody who knows nothing
about what you're doing and see ifthey understand it. And if they don't
(27:41):
understand it, they're asking you questionsyou're not hitting You're not hitting it.
They it should be self explanatory.They shouldn't need to come back to ask
questions. And it's a really goodstarting point. You know, you write
what you think is a really simple, clear explanation of what it is you're
wanting to do. Give it tosomeone who knows nothing about what you want
(28:04):
to do. Yes, and basicallythe questions they come back to you work
are the very things that you needto respond to and don't get me wrong.
It can be so destroyed because youthink you've written the perfect thing.
You know, you're just you know, you're so in love with what you've
written, you think it's absolutely hitthe nail on the head, and then
(28:26):
they come back and say, Idon't understand what you're talking about anything.
Oh no, But I don't knowif many people have that. Well,
I guess that's part of the professionalwork, being able to step beyond your
own piece of work and be ableto let it go and be able to
respond to the to the audience againin a way that works with the audience.
(28:49):
That's the hard things. I guessthat's with architecture. We do in
conceptual design, but then we're constantlyworking with what meets the clients and needs
from an architecture point of view.And I'm in an architecture you've got that
end goal. You know, what'sthe end goal is to have the built.
It's it's not it's nothing until it'sbuilt exactly exactly. And it's the
(29:11):
thing with this, you know,if you keep your eye on what's my
end goal? And for us,the end goal was to get the funding
to protect and restore these windows.Yes, so you know, if this
is what I have to do inorder to get that, you know what,
it's a small price to pay.I can. I can swallow my
ego for a little while and justdo what I need to do. But
(29:34):
it is a really good rule ofsome it's to have someone who doesn't know
the project. Yeah. And theother trick to I've sort of alluded to
it already, A weave it thatyou've got to remember the people who will
read these applications, they may haveforty or fifty to read. Now you
imagine you've got forty or fifty applications, let's say they're five thousand words each,
(29:59):
how excit, and you're going tobe about reading them, and so
you've got to grab that reader's attentionimmediately. You need a hook. Now,
for us, it was the windows, and so in the first sentence,
I sold the windows. You know, we have these internationally significant stained
and painted life windows that need boomboom boom bom yeah, yeah, yeah,
(30:23):
And the second sentence was what weneeded. And then go on and
explain so often what we do iswe kind of we build the story,
you know, a bit like amystery novel. We're building the anticipation and
dropping all the clues for this grandreveal at the end of who the who
(30:44):
the murderer was or is, whereasyou need to tip that idea on its
head for funding, You've actually gotto hook them in the first paragraph.
And if you haven't done that,they're not going to read the page.
They're never going to get that fart. You're going to say no, and
it's going to go in the noparle immediately. So you've got to hook
them in really early on. Doesthat ability of the skill that you have
(31:11):
does that come from like a passionateintuition or do you had to have years
of experience to know how to structurethis approach. I had to learn how
to structure the approach. And yes, I had all those terrible moments when
I got, you know, thefeedback that you know, I don't get
the point or something, or youknow, the point came too late.
(31:34):
You need to say it's sooner.So it was a learning proced and by
the time I got to the youknow, I had been writing funding proposals
as my semi retirement job for anumber for several years, and so I've
really gotten into that mode of samningthe story straight up, whereas you know,
(31:55):
if you compare that to academic writingfor general publication and things, that's
very much about explaining the process ofwhat you do and building the story and
building the evidence faith in order todraw the logical conclusions from that where's this
You almost have to start at thelogical conclusion and put that in the front.
(32:15):
So that was something I had tolearn quite early on when I started
in my normal role having to writeSunday and applications, and you know,
the first ones weren't successful. Weare the institute I'm at now, I'll
just do a plug for the NewZealand Policy Institute Research Institute. We're actually
(32:38):
quite successful at getting Sunday. Buteven though we're reasonably successful, I had
never had the success rate that Ihad with my church, Elie Lee's Windows.
Oh gosh, it was extraordinary,can you I mean, for the
listeners, Elleslie Church is really asmall church in a in one of the
(33:04):
outer city suburbs of Auckland or theinner city sub it. I mean,
it's not it's it's a small forinstance, it's a small little church allesleye
Isn't it isn't like the big citykind of experience. It's extraordinary, really,
isn't it. And I mean AlbanMartin retired to Ellesley after having had
his farm originally in Panmua down therein East Tammockey, So yeah, Allesley
(33:31):
would have been little, growing,growing village, a growing township. And
it's a lovely historic village. Andwhat's interesting, I mean we lived on
the north Shore in Auckland for thirtyfive years and then we moved to Elslie
and we knew nothing about Alleslee whenwe moved, right, But what we
love about it is it still althoughit's in the middle of this huge city,
(33:52):
it still has that village feel toit. It is still is a
village and incredibly diverse and energetic village. And the church sits on the hill,
just on the fringe of the villageitself, and we kind of look
on the village and it's just it'svery much that sense of the church being
(34:14):
part of the community. Absolutely.But to talk about numbers, you know,
Pam who I've mentioned, used totalk about as we were going through
this process and the fundraising. Sheused to talk about the faithful forty.
I think she's a little bit optimisticit was really more like the Faithful thirty,
but that doesn't have quite the samealliteration as the Faithful forty. And
(34:36):
so we at that stage had avery very small congregation. And so just
you know, the whole concept ofgetting to six hundred thousand dollars from the
small parish was, as I said, extremely daunting. We knew we would
have to apply for funding, butwe just never really understood how much we
(34:59):
were going to have applied for.But we also I don't think anyone in
their wildest dreams, including me,expected us to be that successful at getting
it as we were. It camedown to this hook that we had something
to stell. Yeah, two questions. So I wasn't I didn't It wasn't
(35:22):
aware that Salmon Read Architects came inat the beginning. I just thought,
maybe you've done all your work,You've got all your funding. And then
Salmon Read came in and advised you, you know, did the did the
design work for the building? Butthey were key right from the site that
report had to come first. Itreally did because that well to start with,
(35:43):
that gave us an idea of howmuch we were going to have to
raise. And I can tell youwhen the parish received that report, it
was almost you know, we justhung our heads and we thought, how,
yeah, how on earth are wegoing to do this? But it
says something about that that practice thatthey do that work in such a comprehensive
(36:07):
way, that they look at thewhole thing, not just the design and
the detailing and the construction detailing.They're looking at how you were going to
what the scope of the workers,et cetera exactly. And they also helped
us for the two big funds wherewe got a lot of money from Foundation
North and Lottery. They have obviouslyassisted in a lot of applications for those
(36:31):
funds and they really understood what thesefunds needed, and so they were you
know, even just the format ofthat feasibility report very much gave us the
structure of what we needed. Sofor each part, you know, the
applications were all different, and foreach part of them I would pull on
(36:51):
different parts of the report, butit was just so well laid out and
so clear and really targeted all ofthe aztecs that we knew we needed.
If you started doing a funding applicationwithout that, you would get the first
(37:13):
fit done and then you'd get tothe next burt, and you then have
to scramble around and pull together allof those bits of paper and all of
that supporting documentation. Then you'd getto the next section and it becomes a
very operous process. But whereas byhaving it all there, it meant when
I came to write the applications,I could not quite write them straight through.
(37:35):
You know, they weren't something you'dsit down and do in an hour.
You know, they would take severalweeks of playing with. But I
had everything at my fingertips to beable to do that. And I mean
it's like any building or restoration,look even just decorating, it's preparation,
preparation, preparation. The better youdo your homework, the better you've written
(37:58):
the contract, all of those,yes, the less problems you have on
the track. I can't recommend highlyenough the idea of having this completed feasibility
report, which became the foundation forall of the early applications. And then
it was very easy to update thatbecause each time you of course had to
put in the accounts and how muchfundraising you had already achieved, and so
(38:22):
it was very easy to update thatone page as we got more and more
funds in, and as we gotcommitment of more and more funds, we
could just update that, which ofcourse kept pushing up what we could aim
for. I mean, when wegot the scoat, originally it was going
to be about six hundred thousand dollarsand as I said, we were just
horrified at the thought. So weimmediately dropped a couple of things off because
(38:45):
we knew we couldn't afford them,and then we thought, you know,
by the time we do it,it will still be about six hundred.
As it turned out, having droppedthose things, we still ended up over
a million, because, like withany historic building done what we could to
do some penetration testing beforehand to makesure that we weren't going to be too
(39:06):
shocked by what was found. Butunfortunately, there was still a few shocks
along the way that we then hadto do variations for. But it's the
nature of a beast when you're dealingwith a building that's one hundreds and thirty
four years old when we started thisprocess, and it's just the nature of
the beast. But I will sayone thing, senior based in Wellington,
I will say one thing that wedid actually pass on earthquakes. You didn't
(39:29):
have to do earthquake. You passed. We're at the bottom end, we
still passed. And being up onthe hill, you also you wouldn't have
had any fear about flooding that hada year ago. Correct, The little
church on the hill, I meanthat's so it is iconic of a village
(39:49):
kind of atmosphere. It's exactly iconic, and in fact, for a long
time it was one of the symbolsfor the village. It was, you
know, this church on the villageof a steep so no very cute.
So you had the report, butdid you say that you know, when
you did do the you know youwere sudden to penetrate the building and sort
of open it up. Then youhad some unknowns that you had to deal
(40:14):
with, which became variations, andso were you able to get more funding?
At that point most of the fundingwas pretty much in place. We
basically had to know the diaces wouldn'tlet us start until they knew we could
finish it, and so we prettymuch had all the funding in place.
It hadn't all been paid, butwe'd had confirmation of receipt of it,
(40:36):
and so we had that all inplace, and then we started and then
of course when we found some ofthese things, we frantically applied to some
extra funds that had short timeline,and we also had some additional funds which
we hadn't planned to dip into,I should say, you know, as
we found these things, the firstthing we dipped into was our contingency budget.
(40:57):
When we were trying to from everything to make it the funding we
thought we had. One of thethings we trimmed quite extensively was actually the
contingency fund. In hindsight, weshouldn't have done that. We should have
increased it. Yeah, yeah,yeah, as always, so we very
quickly chooed through the contingency fund.We then had some back up funds from
(41:22):
the parish used to have another churchin Mount Wellington, and when that was
closed, we had some money andthe trust for that that we planned to
not touch because we had other plansfor that money. Well that's all gone.
Basically every account we had that everyform of future maintenance we cleared.
Yeah, by the end of theproject, we were basically living. So
(41:44):
you would have had an incredibly busyand confident treasurer or accounts kind of volunteer
or someone who was administrating the funds. It was very complex because of how
it's set up within the diarity togethera spreadsheet. I'm a number person,
I'm an economist. I like numbers. In the end, I pulled together
(42:05):
a spreadsheet which had all of thedocumentation that we sent to the accounting part
TML, who do the accounting forthe parish. I had the invoices,
the TML statements of our accounts,and all the bank stains. So you'd
like to think that for every itemthere were three tips that they occurred in
all three of these places. Anactual fact, probably twenty percent had three
(42:30):
tips. I eventually got it allto balance for the dollars once I've put
corrections when the wrong jets he hadbeen paid in those But I knew absolutely
where everything went. But what Ifound fascinating is the three forms of cross
checking just didn't the line. Youknow, we had things on the bank
(42:51):
statement that never showed up in theright bank account or were put into the
wrong bank accounts and then moved out, And we did account for it all,
and we and absolutely show you whereevery single penny was. It's wonderful,
and where every single penny came fromas well. A whole narrative in
itself, isn't it the whole account? Absolutely it was. It was quite
(43:14):
honestly a nightmare, and it wasonly in sheer desperation in the end because
Pam asked me, you know,do you know how much the project has
cot? And I said, well, you know, we've had this much
in and we think we raised thismuch, but I've gotten voices for this
much. And so that was whatinspired me to try and make everything come
(43:36):
together. That actually took I thinklonger to get right than writing the funding
applications. At the other end ofit, I mean that whole, wonderful
kind of robust transparency of the financialside of getting a building belt that's also,
you know, if you've got agood if you know even it's complex,
(43:57):
if you know that narrative is allpart of it. Part of the
the memory of the building is thehow it was costed and how wrong some
of our costing was. Yeah,and it didn't help too that we were
we were literally about two weeks fromtaking the scaffolding down when COVID lockdown happened,
my goodness, and so then ofcourse we had the scaffolding for all
(44:20):
this extra time, and that hadfinancial implications obviously. Oh so you had
to keep paying for the scaffolding becausethey couldn't come on site. But at
least, you know, in termsof the bigger kind of sort of thing,
you got the building built pretty muchbefore COVID, Is that correct?
We got most of it done beforeCOVID. And one of the other advantages,
(44:40):
of course, we then weren't allowedin the church because of the gathering
rules, which actually made it easierfor the buildings because they didn't have to
enable us to have accepted during theperiod of this restoration windows and where were
you holding services in the church?Most of it was external. All the
(45:00):
windows they could actually repair all ofthem in situe except for one. And
so this is actually quite a fewstory. They were painting the church back
in nineteen twenty eight, almost onehundred years ago now, so about ninety
years when we started this project,so about ninety two years from when we
(45:22):
started the physical work, and theywere stripping the paint and step the church
on fire, and so we stillgot the lovely smoke stained ceiling. There's
one panel they had to replace.You can still see the smoke in the
high part of this internally internally,and so in the corner that it started
(45:43):
at the window in that one corner, it's the called the Good Shepherd window,
and that was the only window theyhad to take out in order to
fix it because it had so muchdamage from the fire in nineteen twenty eight
and it had never been repaired.There's the footprint of nineteen twenty eight within
the building itself. That foot frontthe correct ago correct. So that was
(46:04):
the only widow that they had totake out and take that to the workshop
and do a lot of repair on. But we'd go to church on a
Sunday and there'd be little tags ofblue masking tape stuck to all of the
windows. You know. Some ofthe windows had had thirty of these little
tags of where things had to bedone to the window. And so it
was quite reassuring going in each weekand seeing some of the tags removed.
(46:29):
Lovely story, and so they tookthat particular window out to repair it.
Joke of all of that is becausethis was set on fire when they were
stripping the paint in nineteen twenty eight. They hadn't stripped the paint ever since
and just painted over the top becausethey were too scared to do anything.
And so a part of our restorationprocess was to strip the paint using non
(46:51):
heat stripping methods, and they foundseventeen layers of paint. My gosh,
it had been painted over and overagain in the last one hundred and thirty
years. Yea seventeen times. Andwe've got a lovely photo of a board
where they scraped it back and youcould actually see all of the layers that's
(47:14):
ononful going back for the original,which was quite exciting then. And then
seven reads sent up derecommended rendering offor the new paint's work, and we
all went, oh no. Itwas a scorier red and quite a yellowy
color. And they see you,these were the original colors. These were
(47:37):
the colors of the early eighteen eighties. You see a lot of the style
of church around the country which arewhite with red roofs. Yes, well,
apparently that was an eighteen nineties colorskin and so the scorier red with
this yellow with the early eighteen eighties. And we all threw our hands up
and said, no, we can'tgo. That's just awful. We can't
(47:59):
do it. Do it? Andthe architects said, well, this was
technically correct, and so there wassome friction. But what we did decide
it was a very pale gray andwe did all admit to that. Well,
actually it makes what we've got lookreally insipid, so that this was
quite a bold statement. And sothere was a lot of pooen and throwing
(48:20):
of no, we hate the colors. And so we painted some big boards
and the recommended colors, and Ithink we got used to it, and
we eventually agreed to the new colors. I don't think we were going to
be allowed to not agree, mindyou. Okay, then, but when
they scraped us back and you couldget that to that original color, it
was the color that architects had recommended. That's really interesting. So they had
(48:45):
recommended it, but once you scrappedback, that was the color there that
they recommended it because of their knowledgethey're historically because of their knowledge of the
paint schemes that the and then thatwas there when you saw it in reality,
that sort of excavation down to thebase color down to the base coat.
So the color of the church it'sa creamy color, is it not,
(49:05):
But it's it's quite a yellowy cream, but scorier red roof and around
the windows and things scory the windows. And that was another piece of fundraising.
We've got Razine Paint gave us thepaint at what I can only describe
as an exceptionally good yes right,yes, yes, And so they contributed
(49:29):
as well. So that wasn't acash sponsorship, but it was in kind
that enabled us to move on andget things done. I know that all
of those little bits together that butyou had to keep track of all those
little bits, didn't you. Ihad a very big file of everything.
Yeah, so that whole file containslike the original scope, I mean,
the idea of your small parish.Even deciding that you were you knew you
(49:53):
had to do it. You hadto restore those windows, I understand,
or was it was it an emotionalchoice? Let look after this church.
We we started out thinking we needto fix the around to these windows.
And that was before we knew whatthe windows were. We knew it needed
some major work. And then whenwe understood what we had and that,
(50:17):
you know, maybe maybe we canaccess some funding, then it kind of
expanded our horizons. The weebit andso basically by this time on. We
finished the project in twenty twenty.We were almost back to brand new.
You know, our long term maintenanceplan now has very little major work on
(50:38):
it. It's got the gutter cleans, that's got the paint work. The
other thing we had to drop outof scope was replacing the roof because we
just couldn't afford it. So weknow that that's coming. But we did
paint the roof at the time forthe new color scheme, and so that
brought us a few years, sowe know that that's coming. But it
did give us this window of afew years where we knew we weren't going
(51:01):
to have to do any expensive remedialwork. Replacing a roof is not overly
a major outgoing, is it really, And it would have been re roofed
some you know in recent times.I would imagine, well it has been
reroofed, but that was done aboutthirty odd years ago, so it is
definitely getting towards the end of itsnatural life. But of course having done
(51:24):
all of this beautiful work too,it's made us really, you know,
I've got a new goal that Iwould want to start fundraising for, and
that's to put a sprinkle system inbecause it's all well and good having smoke
alarms and things, but we can'trebuild it. If we lose these,
they're gone forever. It's much moreimportant to prevent that happening. So my
(51:45):
new goal is to get ourselves ina position that we can start to apply
for funding to put sprintles in toprotect what we now understand that we have,
because we didn't used to know wehad it, Whereas now that we
do, we you know, we'remuch more conscious of I guess the katiarchy
role of guardianship of what we havemoving forward. So you've done this restoration,
(52:10):
and you've garnered the report and thequality of the history of the windows
and the church, you're in abetter position. Well, you're in a
strong position to augment the upgrade ofthe church as it goes on exactly.
So that's sort of the position whereinnow. But you know, we did
(52:30):
we and we had such amazing supportfrom so many organizations, obviously funding that
we applied for, but also individualsand groups who had no direct connection to
the church but heard what we weredoing and became involved in us. So,
(52:51):
yeah, it was an extraordinary experienceto be a part of actually you
know, you think writing funding applicationshow boring, but it was more like
a roller coaster ride. It wasactually incredibly exciting, traumatic at times,
but incredibly exciting. And then youknow, when you got the letter,
(53:12):
you'd almost be too scared to openit, and then you did and you
know, be on the high forthe next application not seem too bad,
and all because of the hook thatyou had, the hook the congregation that
the community church community is still aliveand it's growing and growing. That's wonderful.
It's growing. And again we're nowwe're now able to grow without this
(53:36):
burden of knowing that they need todo these things. It's sort of taken
that stress about how do we dothis away, and even when we come
to do the next thing, weknow that we can do it because we've
done it. And you know,really you are a small, small church
community, and there's a small noteverybody goes to an anime church of course,
(54:00):
in the wider part of Illsley,the wider part of Auckland. So
you've actually looked after a precious cornerof Auckland. You know, an architecture.
We're so conscious of cost. Ofcourse, it cost, it costs
money to build, the client's moneyand the contractors. It's a project some
and so forth. So the storyis the aesthetics of the windows, it's
(54:21):
the housing a church community, it'sthe house in its landscape as part of
Elleslie. But all of that isthat lovely story. And then it's the
building. But also it's the memoryof the contract. It's the memory of
the processing of the funds. That'sall part of restoration project, doesn't it.
Absolutely absolutely, And in fact itcan be a major part because so
(54:43):
many of these restorations just can't occurwithout it. And you know, I
understand it gets to a point ofdo we spend this money to restore what's
there or do we start again,because so often the budgets would not be
a lot different. That's right forus. Once we understood what we had,
it was a no brainer. Sometimeswe say, look, you know
(55:05):
it's gorgeous and everybody loves it,but let's just demolish. Let's just start
again and do something brand new.But in your case that it was a
restoration for and you had salmon redthe wonderful heritage architects there to sort of
start the process. In terms ofthe scope and yeah, yeah, we
were incredibly fortunate that. I mean, it took us two and a half
(55:30):
years to get all of our ducksin a row before we started work.
So that was establishing what we had, giving the feasibility report from Salmon Read
and so that took probably a yearbefore we wrote our first application. We've
written one application to the Auckland Councilto our local board to get the funding
(55:52):
for the feasibility but the rest ofthat time was spent basically organizing what we
needed in order to go forward.And obviously, as I said, we
didn't have to keep up dating itas we've got funds, but that provided
the foundation and it really, youknow, it's like building and building on
(56:14):
rock foundations. You've got to havethat foundation right. You can't be fudging
it and guessing. You've got toreally understand what you're doing. You've almost
got to have got to the endof the project in order to start it.
Mentally, you've got to have gotto the end of the project.
This is where we're going to endup. In order to get there,
(56:35):
we have to do all of thesesteps. And when you have a real
understanding of that, it makes thesefundling applications much simpler because you keep in
the forefront all the time. Theyusually have very tight word limits on them.
It's much harder to go to atight word limit than to have an
open word limit. It really makesyou concentrate, and so it's a concentrate
(57:00):
of what it is you're trying toachieve, why you're trying to achieve it,
and how it fits the funder's goals. They're the three sort of things
you have to keep in the forefrontall the time, all of the nice
to have about why this is sovaluable to the community. You know,
yes, in some funding applications,that's the why you need to do this,
(57:20):
but in others it's irrelevant. AndI think that's another aspect with writing
funding applications is it's very tempting tocut and paste from one to the other.
Oh, this is like that question, I'll cut that answer and put
it in here. But I learnedvery very quickly that you're better to do
each application them as if it's thefirst application, so that you're really able
(57:44):
to focus on that funder and theway they've asked their questions, even the
order they ask the questions gives you'rea really good indication of what matters to
them. For that same reason,they're going to read the first part first,
and they may never read the lackof part. If you haven't excited
them, they're not going to getto the stuff further on. And it's
(58:07):
always the budget that is further on. So that's not their primary concern,
believe or not. Okay, it'sit's always the why the spur of the
job, how does it fit whatwe're wanting to fund? That is always
upfront. And in academia we knowwhen people are doing a thesis and things
(58:28):
we talk about the elevator pitch orthe three minute thesis. You know,
tell us what your project is likein the duration of an elevator, right,
can you lock it down to literallytwo or three sentences? And you
really need to be able to dothat. So for us, it was
the renovation and restoration of these veryspecial stained glass windows. Everything else,
(58:55):
all the carpentry, all of thewoodwork, the painting, the sixen,
the buttresses, everything else was almosta material to that prime goal. In
order to protect these windows, weneed to make sure that their supporting structure
is sound. We need to putthe new protective glazing on and we could
(59:15):
then tell the story about why ithad gotten to this decision later on in
the application where you've got more space. But it's about keeping absolutely forefront that
two or three sentences that really capturesthe whole essence of what your project is
about. I think that's a wonderfulway to end, Mary, lovely,
(59:37):
thank you very much, Thanks,thank you. No, this is rosalind
to Darby here talking with Mary Hedges, a skilled funding application practitioner. What
was the are when you work inNew Zealand Policy Research Institute. We used
to be the New Zealand Work ResearchInstitute at aut but we actually changed down
day in yesterday, so we're nowthe New Zealand Policy Research Institute. Who
(59:58):
also is a is a member ofthe Elleslie Church Christ Church Church community and
was there throughout the whole process atthe time and the end of this lovely,
lovely stained glass window collection in thischurch. Thank you Mary. And
if I could just do a sellif you're if people are ever in orphan
and want to come and see this, you're more than welcome to come and
(01:00:20):
have a look. Absolutely, it'sit's a very important story in this tiny
little well small little church community therein Ellieslie. Thank you Rosale. This
program was made with assistance from NewZealand on Air for radio broadcast and through
the Accessmedia dot m Z website.Thank you New Zealand on Air.
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