The Times - UK (2021-11-11)

66 Thursday November 11 2021 | the times

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Reyntiens, left, with John Piper and the Benjamin Britten memorial window for

Aldeburgh church in 1980; right, the Baptistry Window in Coventry Cathedral

When students visited Burleighfield
House arts centre in Buckinghamshire
in the 1960s and 1970s they would often
find its ebullient and charismatic co-di-
rector, the stained-glass artist Patrick
Reyntiens, in traditional Scottish dress.
As well as wearing the kilt (he argued
he had every right to do so through his
mother’s family, who were Macraes), he
frequently espoused his belief in the su-
periority of Scottish education. He at-
tended Edinburgh College of Art in the
1950s and found there an atmosphere
that embraced a wider European artis-
tic tradition, in contrast to the art
schools in England such as his London
alma mater, Regent Street Polytechnic.
Despite his Scottish roots, Reyntiens
was also thoroughly English, deeply
European and devoutly Roman Catho-
lic. He was born Nicholas Patrick Reyn-
tiens in a house on Cadogan Square,
London, in 1925, and educated at the
Catholic boarding school Ampleforth
College in North Yorkshire. He loved
the culture and rural setting of Ample-
forth and, in a sense, throughout his
professional and private life, Reyntiens
never left the type of architectural and
spiritual sanctuary that the school rep-
resented.
While his mother was Scottish, his
father was a Belgian-born diplomat and
he was largely brought up by a nanny,
Violet Grey, who read Dickens to him.
The family home was filled with beauti-
ful objects and fine art, including a por-
trait of his Belgian grandmother by
John Singer Sargent.
At Edinburgh College of Art he took
classes in drawing and painting, and his
teachers included Leonard Rosoman,
who taught mural painting. There he
made lifelong connections and friend-
ships, including with the gallerist,
teacher and fellow Catholic, Richard
Demarco, and the painter Anne Bruce,
whom Reyntiens later married.
He was one of a cohort of older stu-
dents whose enrolment in higher edu-
cation had been postponed because of
the Second World War and National
Service. He did not see active service
due to ill health but, as a lieutenant in
the Scots Guards (he joined the regi-

ment in 1943) he formed part of the

honour guard at the Potsdam Confer-

ence in July 1945. Pithily, he revealed

decades later to his family that, “Stalin

was a very short man”. On inquiring

how he knew this, the family was told,

“... because I was standing behind him

and Churchill”.

Reyntiens felt acutely the devastation

caused by war. In particular he recalled

the destruction of Cologne with, signifi-

cantly, its cathedral spires left intact by

Allied bombers because they acted as an

unmistakable landmark.

Another cathedral, St Michael’s in

Coventry — less fortunate than those

of Cologne because it was destroyed by

a Luftwaffe bombing raid in November

1940 — would provide the setting and

impetus towards fame and artistic re-

cognition for Reyntiens. At Coventry,

in the early 1960s, an entirely new

structure was built alongside the ruins

of the old St Michael’s to a design by

Basil Spence, with a tapestry by Gra-

ham Sutherland, sculpture by John

Bridgeman and nave windows by Law-

rence Lee, Keith New and Geoffrey

Clarke. Reyntiens collaborated with the

artist John Piper (to whom he had been

introduced by John Betjeman) to create

stained-glass panels for the baptistry

window.

He continued to work with Piper on

projects such as Eton College Chapel

and Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathe-

dral. “There is rather a queue for Pat-

rick and me now,” wrote Piper. Over

time Reyntiens’ own commissions and

restoration projects became a roll call

of some of the best examples of postwar

English ecclesiastical fenestration, in-

cluding the Henry Moore Memorial

Window at Much Hadham, Hertford-

shire, and works for his alma mater

Ampleforth Abbey.

Although Edinburgh College of Art

had a department devoted to the medi-

um, Reyntiens’ entrée into the glass

world was from a different direction. A

fellow student there, Patrick Nuttgens

(later a prominent architect and aca-

demic) was the son of the glass artist

Edward Nuttgens who, in the early

1950s, was looking for an apprentice;

Patrick put in a good word. Nuttgens’

studio was in Piggott’s Hill, Bucking-

hamshire, a short distance from where

Reyntiens and Anne then lived. She

would predecease him in 2006 and he is

survived by his children, Edith, an artist;

Dominick, a writer; Lucy, a stone con-

servator; and John, a stained-glass artist

who worked with his father.

In the 1970s Reyntiens’ friend Demar-

co set up Edinburgh Arts, an experimen-

tal school based in his gallery in the city.

He invited Reyntiens to become part of

his “faculty”. Reyntiens did not, as might

have been expected, lecture on the his-

tory of stained glass. Instead, he em-

barked on a more ambitious series of

talks, tangentially linked to ecclesiasti-

cal art history. Demarco noted that,

“The lectures led to a conception of the

individual as a being whose road to ful-

filment lies in opening himself up to all

varieties of cultural experience.”

Another participant in Edinburgh

Arts was the Venetian gallerist and

photographer Gabriella Cardazzo, who

owned a house near Ilminster, in Som-

erset, which she sold to Reyntiens and

his wife. During the negotiations they

asked her if the house flooded as it was

beside the River Isle. “There’s a little

water sometimes... ” came the reply in

a strong Italian accent. The first winter

they heard the wind howl and watched

the river rise from a babbling brook to a

15ft-high torrent, with fountains of

water bubbling through the flagstones

in the main room.

Despite such privations the home in

Somerset provided respite from storms

elsewhere. Burleighfield House, set up

as an art centre in the early 1960s by

Reyntiens and his wife, had put the

teaching of the art and craft of

stained glass at its heart. Students spent

their summers on a “cathedral crawl”

around Europe and the grounds were

used for sculpture shows, but eventually

a lack of core funding forced the centre’s

closure.

In between commissions Reyntiens

worked as an art critic, once writing

effusively of an El Greco show at the

National Gallery that it was something

“no cultured human being should miss”.

Patrick Reyntiens, OBE, stained-glass

artist, was born on December 11, 1925. He

died after a short illness on October 25,

2021, aged 95

the role on the spot. “There was no

question I was going to get the part and

I left with the scripts for the first 12 epi-

sodes,” he recalled. He spent the follow-

ing weeks preparing for the role by re-

searching Nazi history at the Imperial

War Museum.

“It was about five years not doing

anything else. It was utterly time-con-

suming but it got an enormous amount

of recognition and people stopped me

in the street,” he said in 2020.

Patrick Reyntiens

Stained-glass artist who, together with John Piper, created majestic windows for Coventry Cathedral and Eton College Chapel

TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD;ALAMY

Clifford Rose

Veteran actor and founding member of the RSC who made his name playing the ruthless Gestapo officer in Secret Army

When Clifford Rose played the Gesta-
po officer Ludwig Kessler in the 1970s
BBC television drama Secret Army, he
was so convincing that a German
woman wrote to him saying he resem-
bled her husband who had been killed
in the war and that she would like to in-
vite him to tea.
He didn’t take up the invitation but
his portrayal was so potent that when
Secret Army ended after three series,
the BBC asked him to reprise the role in
Kessler, a six-part 1981 drama that
transported the story to the modern
day, in which the former Sturmbann-
führer (assault unit leader, a rank
equivalent to major) had changed his
name and become a rich industrialist
trying to escape detection of his past as
a war criminal.
With his stern, rimless glasses and
clipped tones, Kessler became Rose’s
defining role in a career that spanned
seven decades. “At first Kessler was a
one-dimensional Nazi villain but as the
series went on they gave me a mistress,
which was the making of the character
and allowed me to present another side
of him,” he recalled.
When he was invited to meet Secret
Army’s producer Gerard Glaister, who
planned the drama as a follow-up to his
successful Colditz series, he was offered

Stratford-upon-Avon was not only

where he lived for much of his life, but

was his spiritual home, too. A founding

member of the Royal Shakespeare

Company, over the course of his career

he appeared in all but two of the Bard’s

37 plays, the exceptions being King John

and Henry VIII.

He cited as his personal favourite The

Merchant of Venice, in which he played

Antonio in a 2004 RSC production, but

he rated playing the ghost of Hamlet’s

father not far behind in Adrian Noble’s

1992 modern-dress production with

Kenneth Branagh as the prince.

It was, he suggested, his years of ex-

perience as a Shakespearean actor that

gave him such authority as Kessler and

he went on to be seen regularly on tele-

vision in a variety of other shows, in-

cluding Doctor Who, Fortunes of War,

Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders,

Alan Bleasdale’s 1991 drama series GBH

and War and Remembrance, in which he

signed on again with the SS to play

Hans Kammler, who directed the con-

struction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau

extermination camp.

His wife, the actress Celia Ryder, pre-

deceased him in 2012 after a 55-year

marriage and he is survived by their

two children, Duncan Roslair, a retired

hypnotherapist, and Rosalind Cooke, a

medical secretary. Both were named

after Shakespearean characters in the

plays in which he was appearing at the

time of their birth.

John Clifford Rose was born in 1929

in the Herefordshire village of Ham-

nish Clifford, the eldest of two sons to

Ethel (née Pratt) and Percival Rose. His

parents had a smallholding and his

father was also a lay preacher.

He won a scholarship as a boarder to

King’s Worcester, whose school tie he

wore when playing the gynaecologist to

Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in

the 2011 biopic, The Iron Lady. He decid-

ed the tie that the wardrobe depart-

ment had supplied was “too garish” and

substituted his own.

He hoped to become a surgeon and

on leaving school in 1948 applied five

times to medical school. He reported

that he “couldn’t get in because they

had a quota system whereby you had to

have either been in the army or have

done your National Service, which I

didn’t want to do”.

However, he had also starred in

school plays and after playing Macbeth

in his final year, his headmaster had

written in his school report: “If you ever

want to become a professional actor I

think you have the makings of it and I

would back you.”

Unable to get into medical school, he

read English at King’s College London.

By the time he graduated, his younger

brother, David, was training at Rada

and his parents suggested he should al-

so “have a go” at the theatre.

He made his London stage debut in

1953 with John Barton’s Elizabethan

Theatre Company. Seven years later

Barton co-founded the RSC with Peter

Hall, and Rose was one of the first ac-

tors engaged by the new company.

He went on to work with Donald Sin-

den, Paul Scofield, Vanessa Redgrave

and Peggy Ashcroft, who took him

under her wing. “I adored her and she

often invited me to her dressing room

after a show for a drink,” he recalled.

When he appeared in On Stranger Ti-

des, the fourth of the Pirates of the Car-

ibbean films in 2011, he found a new au-

dience who had never seen him with

the RSC or as Kessler. He continued

working almost to the end of his long

life, most notably playing the Dean of

Windsor in The Crown.

Clifford Rose, actor, was born on October

24, 1929. He died on November 6, 2021,

aged 92

Clifford Rose as Ludwig Kessler

BBC

Email: [email protected]