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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
In May 2009 this headline appeared in the Daily Mail:
Wedding row priest who refused to marry outsiders
quits 'Bridget Jones' village
The gist of the story is that the Rector, Father Charles
Lawrence had claimed that too many couples were
applying to be married at the 12
th
century church of
St James simply because of its film credits. They were,
said the Rector, simply aspiring to the celebrity of the likes
of Rene Zellwegger, Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz.
Father Lawrence’s stand caused quite a rift within the
parish and after just four years as incumbent he moved to
pastures new. No bride yet has shown any interest in
following in the footsteps of St James’s 14
th
century
anchorite Christine Carpenter who obtained permission
from the Bishop of Winchester to be bricked up in a cell
in the north wall of the chancel. Through a hole in the wall
from the churchyard she was fed food and drink and
through a hole into the chancel from the church she was
able to take Holy Communion. You can still see the house
where her father lived in the village. The church lych gate
was designed by Edwin Lutyens who designed several
buildings in and around Shere for the Bray family, Lords
of the Manor since 1487. Throughout all that time the
Brays have been patrons of the living of Shere Church.
Just along from the pub in the centre of the village is a
drinking fountain above a very deep well. The fountain
was provided by a pair of local Temperance sisters and my
goodness they must have been spinning like windmills in
their graves when Shere became a regular haunt of the late
hell raiser and carouser Oliver Reed who lived at Broome
Hall in Ockley just the other side of Abinger Common.
A
substantial part
of Broome Hall with nine bedrooms
and 7.5 acres of grounds is also on the market right now –
a snip at £1.65m. At the risk of getting you addicted to this
sort of thing take a peek on website www.zoopla.co.uk.
A recent biography of Reed,
What Fresh Lunacy Is This?
by Robert Sellers takes the stuffing out of the hell-raising
to expose the less heroic aspects of alcoholism. Reed’s
famous naked wrestling scene with Alan Bates in Ken
Russell’s film
Women in Love
was filmed at Broome Hall.
One chap writing a review of the new biography recalled
watching the film at the cinema where during the famous
scene the elderly lady sat behind him whispered to her
companion “
nice carpet”.
If you come to visit Shere try and make it when the little
museum is open
(Tuesdays and
Thursday April to
end October) – it’s
super! Housed in
the old parish hall
Moneypenny says
the clicking of the
loose parquet floor
took her right back
to school days and
that, in a nutshell,
is the charm of this
place. Our visit, a
sequence of oohs
and ahs at long
forgotten objects
from our
childhoods, was
much enhanced