Special stained glass windows saved by community group
Stained glass windows have been removed at St Mary's Church, Ince. They were installed in 2013, in tribute to a member of the congregation and former headmistress of St Mary's School, Ethel Round. The church is up for auction and Friends of Hindley Cemetery want to save the stained glass windows and be used in the chapel at Hindley Cemetery, but need to raise funds to have them installed.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Hi, I'm Dorothy Harrison. Until the reorganisation of the churches I was Church Warden and then
00:05 laterally Assistant Church Warden. When the church closed we were really concerned about
00:11 what was going to happen to the furniture that's in it but mainly the windows, particularly
00:16 Ethel Rowan's four windows that were in memory of her. The thought that these might end up
00:22 being broken, her daughter Caroline was absolutely devastated. And then Neil Cook, who's the
00:28 director, decided that this particular Saturday last summer we'd have a come and get what
00:33 you want and an awful lot of people from various churches turned up. Kerry, it was the first
00:39 time I met Kerry and when she actually said that she was responsible for the restoration
00:44 of this chapel in Llys Emytrae and these windows would be absolutely perfect for the... She's
00:49 worked so hard to organise everything to raise the money and then to get to the stage where
00:55 we are today where the windows are actually coming out. We can actually see some kind
01:00 of closure and it's just exactly what we wanted. Ethel was a stalwart at this church. She was
01:09 head teacher at St Mary's School. The dates I don't know. But she'd sit on the third row
01:16 from the back pew and nobody would dare sit in her seat. She was very particular in what
01:23 happened. There were certain hymns that, for example, All Things Bright and Beautiful,
01:28 that she'd slam the hymn book shut and say, "I refuse to sing that. I've sung it enough
01:32 at school." I suppose in some respect it was like the law according to Ethel. Nobody dare
01:38 argue with her. You couldn't call her anything else but Mrs Round. You had to show respect.
01:44 When she was 90, I'm sure it was either, it couldn't have been her own, it was her 90th
01:48 birthday. We had a party at Wiggaliffe Theatre. She was very involved with the theatre. In
01:55 fact, there's a bench there in memory of her with a photograph above and I think it says
02:01 memory of Ethel or Ethel's bench. But you learn an awful lot when you sit. It was Malcolm
02:08 Forrest who was the rector at the time who was interviewing her. He didn't realise just
02:12 how much she'd seen, how much she'd done and how much she'd been involved with. It was
02:18 amazing. She was a remarkable woman.
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