CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 19 INFRASTRUCTURE WESSEX involvement is largely focused there. As his fame as an author grew, he became very well connected with landowners, senior clergy and other movers and shakers in the county, and was able to lobby them directly or suggest to SPAB who to approach, and what kind of lobbying might change minds. Hardy’s first recorded involvement with SPAB was in 1880 relating to worrying cracks in Wimborne Minster’s central tower. Hardy had become involved through his publisher Charles Kegan Paul, who had spotted Hardy’s literary potential and put him into print with great success. Paul, an enthusiastic SPAB committee member, wrote to SPAB’s secretary suggesting that Hardy might help in advising on necessary repairs: ‘Mr Hardy has only just settled at Wimborne, but his name will be well known to you as the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and other very striking novels. He is an architect by profession though not now practising, and is I think a man who would be thoroughly in sympathy with our society’. Hardy responded positively to SPAB’s overtures and offered ‘anything I can do to assist the Society in the matter of the Minster I will attend to with the greatest pleasure – for I am entirely in sympathy with its movements’. Hardy later went as part of a SPAB delegation to meet the minster’s architect Walter J Fletcher. It was a success, with Fletcher reassuring SPAB’s secretary in November 1881 that ‘I have to thank the deputation of members of your Society for their kind help and useful hints in regard to the works being done to our beautiful Lantern Tower. The repair of the masonry and the pointing-in of the open joints has been done solely with the desire to arrest further decay, by keeping the wet from the interior of the masonry and making the walls as solid as possible.’ SPAB’s 1882 Annual Report noted that ‘the Society sent to the architect in charge a list of recommendations as to the best way of preventing further failure. He, in a very friendly spirit, accepted and carried out the Society’s scheme, with the happy result that up to the present time there has been no further sign of any further damage.’ The 1897 case of the church of St Andrew in East Lulworth shows Hardy drawing on his architectural and repair knowledge. He knew the church well because he had drawn up plans for its partial rebuilding as an apprentice to architect John Hicks in the 1860s, before he had undergone formal architectural training. St Andrew’s incumbent, the Rev Robert Usher, asked SPAB for advice in repairing the 15th-century tower. SPAB’s secretary, Hugh Thackeray Turner, asked Hardy if he could visit the building to see if he agreed with the architect’s proposed works, but ‘if you cannot do this perhaps you could help us by asking your brother, Mr [Henry] Hardy, the Builder, whether he could visit the building for us, or better still, perhaps you could arrange to visit with him.’ Hardy responded noting that ‘this tower is one of exceptional grace and artistic proportions, in curious contrast to the customary local architecture of so late a date… and when in its prime… must have been of extraordinary beauty’. He included descriptions of work he deemed absolutely necessary although, somewhat surprisingly, he recommended Portland cement pointing in his schedule (although this was much weaker than it is today). For example, for the south-east buttress, ‘take down to level of second slope from top and replace stone for stone. These are large and can easily be numbered and marked. The re-erection to be done in Portland East Lulworth Church in the 1890s after the rebuilding of the nave and chancel, but before the tower repairs (Photo: SPAB)
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