South Yorkshire Times August 12, 1950
Conisbrough’s “Gothic” Nightmare
If Conisbrough Parish Church is to be restored to its rightful dignity and full beauty the pulpit will have to be removed says the Vicar, the Rev. G. F, Braithwaite in this month’s issue of the Parish Magazine.
He describes his pulpit as the “Child of some Victorian designers Gothic nightmare.”
The pulpit, writes Mr. Braithwaite, would feel more at home in some Hollywood tabernacle or Norman temple than in the plain but pleasing severity of our Saxon Church. “What business has its overdressed little Gothic Arches and its stupid little bits of marble in a church like ours? None at all” he writes.
Among other criticisms Mr. Braithwaite makes of the building as it stands is the comment that the electric lighting of the nave is “little less than scandalous.”
“It is evident” he says “That no one of any but local authority was consulted about its installation, It is unthinkable that any advisory committee worth its salt, or any antiquarian body, would have consented to the hacking out of so much Saxon masonry—-stone mellowed and ‘undisturbed for well nigh a thousand years—to make way for the tawdry appliances now in use.”