Which Dartmoor churches did Harry Hems work on?

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All Saints, Ashburton, Avonwick, Bovey Tracey, Buckfastleigh Abbey, Chapel of Ease, church, community, Dartmoor, Harry Hems, Hennock Church, Horrabridge, Lustleigh Church, Lydford, Mary Tavy, Meavy, North Bovey, nr Lifton, Okehampton, Ruth Gidley, Shaugh Prior, Simon Olding, St Andrew’s, St Edward’s, St Eustaceous, St John’s, St Pancras, St Peter’s, St Petrock’s, St Thomas-a-Becket, Stowford, Tavistock, Tavistock Congregational Church, Widecombe-in-the-Moor, wood carvings

I have been trying to work out which churches on Dartmoor Harry Hems worked on.  RAMM’s Hems collection contains hundreds of medieval wooden carvings, presumeably taken from churches he worked on.  Sadly, we only know where a few came from, so they are not much help with this problem.  Luckily, Hems kept very detailed scrapbooks containing every scrap of publicity that he could get hold of – there were 22 volumes and 19 survive in the Westcountry Studies Library.  Another stroke of luck is that in 1976 someone called Simon Olding went through these scrapbooks and made lists of all Hems’ projects.  RAMM holds these lists and they are a treasure trove of information.  Thank you Simon, whoever you are!

From Simon’s lists I have found 19 churches that Hems worked on: Ashburton, St Andrew’s; Avonwick, Chapel of Ease; Bovey Tracey, St Thomas-a-Becket; Buckfastleigh Abbey; Hennock Church; Horrabridge, St John’s; Lustleigh Church; Lydford, St Petrock’s; Mary Tavy; Meavy, St Peter’s; North Bovey, St John’s; Okehampton, All Saints; Shaugh Prior, St Edward’s; Stowford, nr Lifton; Tavistock Congregational Church; Tavistock, St Eustaceous; Tavistock, St Peter’s and Widecombe-in-the-Moor, St Pancras.  I wonder if there are any more?

I look forward to working with with Ruth Gidley, RAMM’s Community Participation Officer, to build up contacts with these churches and their communities.

From Simon Oldings’ list of Hems projects in Devon

New Hems woodwork images

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Bosses, Harry Hems, Medieval, photography, Simon Olding, wood carvings

A couple of treats today.  Firstly, I got a sneaky peek at the new Moor Stories website.  It’s starting to come together and looks really good.  Secondly I got a disc of images by Dave Garner of Harry Hems objects.  Dave Garner is a superb photographer and has been taking pictures of RAMM’s objects for many years.  He originally photographed the Hems collection as black and white transparencies, now we’ve got him back to take new digital images in glorious colour.  The Hems collection is one of the most important in RAMM and so it is very useful to have good images of it.  We should be able to use many of them in the Moor Stories project.

The images that immediately stood out were some of the roof bosses.  A roof boss is the decorative piece of carving used to cover the joints between beams on a barrel vaulted ceiling.  Most of the RAMM roof bosses have swirling leaf or floral designs.  They are quite chunky pieces of carving as they were positioned high up in the church roof and had to be visible from the floor.  Originally these pieces would have been brightly painted, now all but a few tiny traces of this paint has gone and they are a uniform brown varnish colour.

Medieval roof boss from the Harry Hems collection

Medieval roof boss from the Harry Hems collection