The Times December 2023

The Times

23rd December 2023

Laura Freeman explores the genesis of Alma Ramsey-Hosking’s Coventry Crib, commissioned for the cathedral’s first Christmas in 1962

Laura Freeman

And it came to pass that in the days after Dunkirk a woman great with child found that there was no room at the inn. Or, at any rate, at any hospital from Andover to Southampton. In September 1940, every hospital bed was occupied by survivors of the evacuation. And, lo, a baby, Sarah, was born at home to the artist and sculptor Alma Ramsey-Hosking. And the midwife Sister Weston said unto her: “Do not put that baby into her cot, Mrs Hosking. Hold her, keep her on your hand, where it is safest.” The Battle of Britain was raging and the skies were lit up with dogfighting aircraft. If a bomb fell or a plane crashed, a child in a cot could be separated from her parents. Together, a mother and baby might stand a chance.

Many babies are born in wartime, but not many go on to inspire an important work of modernist sculpture. Twenty-two years after that anxious birth, Alma, her husband, Dick, and their children were living in Warwick. Alma was sculpting in her cellar studio and Dick was the principal of Coventry College of Art. Dick had been keeping a keen eye on the new Coventry Cathedral, to stand alongside the original after that was reduced to a shell by bombs in 1940. The new one was being built to designs by the architect Basil Spence, who had had great success with his pavilion, pier and Skylark Restaurant for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

In May 1962, as the new cathedral neared completion, and a month after the 80ft bronze spire had been lowered by an RAF helicopter (codenamed Operation Rich Man because it was a “through an eye of a needle” sort of job), Spence came to tea with the Hoskings. Over Scotch pancakes and éclairs, he commissioned Alma to make the figures for the new cathedral’s first Christmas crib. John Piper was doing the Baptistery windows, John Hutton the West Screen and Graham Sutherland the Christ in Glory tapestry. How could Alma say no?

This year, I received a letter from Sarah Hosking, now 83, asking if I knew the story of the Coventry Cathedral Crib. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful one. Much has been done in recent years to rediscover the work of women artists of the 20th century. But Alma Hosking was new to me.

“Alma,” Sarah wrote, “was a modern woman if ever there was one; short hair, short skirts. She bought contemporary furniture of chrome and pine and had a passion for modern sculpture, the work of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi.” She had studied under Moore in the late 1920s at the Royal College of Art in London. She had immaculate taste. Sarah’s childhood enthusiasm for pictures of kittens was very much discouraged.

Alma was not sympathetic to religion, but she did like Spence, who was cultured, handsome and, above all, persuasive. Spence came to tea again, this time bringing the bishop, who read the room and didn’t mention God once. Alma was won over. Only two women had been given commissions for the cathedral: Margaret Traherne, who made the ten slender dalles de verre stained glass windows for the circular Chapel of Unity, and Alma. (Later, Spence would commission Elisabeth Frink to create the bronze eagle for the lectern.) Sarah, with her mother in mind, has dedicated the past 20 years of her life to the Hosking Houses Trust, which offers “a room of one’s own” to women writers and artists who need a quiet place to create.

The theme of the Nativity had a personal appeal. Alma was passionately sympathetic to women having babies in extremis, whether during the Blitz or the Roman occupation. While planning the figures, she remembered the words of Sister Weston: “Keep her on your hand.” This baby would not lie in a manger. The Christ child isn’t swaddled, but he is practically soldered to his mother. All the figures were constructed from rough wood and wire armatures, while the figure’s heads and hands and the ox and the ass were in their entirety modelled in bronze powder suspended in a thick resin that, when dry, could be burnished to a glitter.

Alma went round the National Gallery looking at early Italian Renaissance nativities for inspiration for the costumes. She sewed superbly on a Singer sewing machine. Joseph and the three shepherds had robes of striped Indian cotton and open-weave wools before being redressed as kings in silk and velvet at Epiphany. Mary, too, had new clothes — “She would have been feeling better by then,” Alma thought — putting aside her blue cotton and hessian and becoming the Queen of Heaven in a white silk blouse and blue and scarlet robes. Alma used fabric lavishly, letting it fall in voluminous folds. “Air makes form,” she used to say, “like meringues and soufflés.” The “stable” was a sleek modernist stage-set, a pale oak spiral structure — one of the earliest “flat-packs” made in this country — designed by Anthony Blee, a young architect in Spence’s office. Alma’s bronze-dusted Star of Bethlehem shone above it all.

At Christmas 1962, at a splendid unveiling, Alma’s Nativity was blessed by the bishop. She was paid £80, took eight photographs (black and white and out of focus) and left her creation in the care of the provost’s wife. But provosts and their wives come and go, as do deans, vergers and diocesan sewing ladies. Over the next 40 years, Alma’s Nativity was much knocked about.

When Sarah went to visit the cathedral at Christmas in 2004, she found her mother’s creation so damaged and deteriorated she was shocked into action. Alma had died in 1993, but Sarah, who owns the copyright and intellectual property rights to her mother’s work, had the power of say-so. “I expected its state to be bad,” Sarah says. “But not that bad.” The oak structure was nowhere to be seen (they have never found it) and in its place was a basic plywood stable raised on old trestle tables. The figures had been sprayed with brown car paint — a shoddy substitute for bronze — and the many breakages mended with Sellotape. The figures were dressed in a jumble of curtain and haberdashery off-cuts. But the greatest desecration and the greatest grief to Sarah was this “the Virgin’s hand had been sawn off”. The naked baby, wrapped in white bandages, had been plonked in a jerry-built manger.

Sarah, known to her mother as “bossy boots”, set about bossing. She applied to the Spence archive in Edinburgh for the original drawings and tracked down Blee, who told her where to get it rebuilt. The cracked and taped figures were sent in a parcel van to the fine art restorers Plowden & Smith in London. The cathedral staff handed over a black bag containing a few blessed fragments of Alma’s original raiment. Sarah oiled the old Singer, wore her mother’s thimble and with Alma’s imperfect photographs, and postcards by Bellini and Botticelli before her, began to restitch the costumes. Every November since 2005, Sarah has ironed the robes, dressed the figures and scattered the hay. Six weeks later, she gives the figures their Epiphany makeover before packing the costumes away with clean sheeting and mothballs in February.Alma’s creation is still called the Coventry Crib. But that’s just alliteration. When you stand at the foot of the spiral steps in Coventry Cathedral this Christmas, there will be no crib to peer into. The baby is just where he should be. On Mary’s hand, where it is safest.

The Coventry Crib is on display until January 6. To find out more about the Hosking Houses Trust or to apply for a creative residency visit hoskinghouses.org.uk

Related images

The figures were constructed from rough wood and wire armatures
Michael Moralee/Hosking Houses Trust

Alma Ramsey-Hosking with her daughter Sarah
The Hosking Houses Trust