Dr Sue Gattuso writes:
ROBERT (BOB) DAVEY, a Sussex man, was born in 1929. A Christian believer from an early age, he became a member of his PCC at the age of 14, when he asked a question at an open meeting about the condition of the churchyard; he ended up a member of the group and doing the work himself.
Over the years, he became a staunch Church of England follower, Reader, bell-ringer, and churchwarden. An engineer by trade — he worked for an agricultural engineering company and later oversaw maintenance for the Southern Water Board — he and and his wife, Gloria, moved to Norfolk in retirement in 1987, interesting themselves in antique dealing.
When in 1992, Gloria, out for a ramble with the local Women’s Institute, took notice of a curious construction completely covered in ivy, she was intrigued enough to force her way through and saw that it was a ruined church that had been used by satanists. When she told Bob, he immediately went to the church and threw out all the signs of their paraphernalia. He could not abide the thought that people would desecrate a church in this way.
For the next almost 30 years, he spent every minute of every day dedicated to the restoration of that church, St Mary’s, Houghton-on-the-Hill, near Swaffham. From the very beginning, he wanted a full restoration. All the work had to be the best available; and, where there was no grant to be had, he paid for it himself. There was a small team of volunteers who helped him to cut down the ivy and clear the interior and the overgrown churchyard. He used contractors and experts where necessary — if there were none, Bob did the work himself. Despite his engineering career, everything he undertook here was a giant learning curve.
There were just fields and a farmhouse near by when Bob uncovered St Mary’s. There was no road to it, no houses, but a whole history to unearth. Once the architects dated the church to around 1090, there needed to be archaeology digs. Stone-age flint tools were found. Was the mound on the west side a Bronze Age barrow? Roman tiles had been used in the build of the church — was this piece of stonework part of a Roman foundation? Was a length of wood found inside part of an Anglo-Saxon church floor or wall? These possibilities have yet to be explored.
Bob’s vision was to create a space for Christian worship, meditation, natural beauty, and sensing God’s presence; his eye was fixed solely upon that goal. He said many times that this was the most important part of his life. This was what he was meant to do. It was a God-given task, and nothing and nobody turned him from it.
Little did he know at the beginning that God was literally looking down upon his work.
In 1995, paint was found on the wall. Experts were called in, reports were written, permissions were granted and eventually a scheme of wall-paintings was uncovered, dating from the building of the church. There was a triple mandorla, encasing God seated on a Throne of Mercy, with Christ on the cross on his lap and a dove flying between the two — the earliest known Trinity. There were angels sounding the last trump and people emerging from graves. There were the creation of Eve, Noah’s ark, a wheel of life, devilish figures, and more.
No longer was Bob maintaining a forlorn and forgotten church, but a Grade I listed, vulnerable, and needy repository of ancient wall-paintings. It didn’t faze him — it just meant that he had more people to fence with — something that he delighted in.
Perhaps the crowning glory of his work in his view, apart from the MBE, the visits of Princess Margaret and the Prince of Wales, and the Buckingham Palace Garden Party, was, in 1998, when he shared a conservation award from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors with Windsor Castle, standing shoulder to shoulder with the monarch.
There is no doubt that without Bob there would be no St Mary’s as we know it today. There would certainly have been no wall-paintings.
His legacy is not only the church, but also the love that all our visitors have for Bob, for the building, and for the garden. And it is the task of the trustees to find a way to maintain that spirit and move Bob’s vision forward. We are working together with the diocese of Norwich to find the right pathway.
Bob said: “If they don’t look after it, I will come and haunt them. They won’t get a moment’s peace.” Well, we don’t want that!
Bob Davey died on 4 March, aged 91.
