The Much-travelled Paintings of Bessie Edmondson and the Lost Church of St Christopher's

The Single Bird Painting

My search for St Christopher’s Church in Derby began with an almighty crash back in November 2023. A painting done by my grandmother Bessie Edmondson (1890-1966), just before she was married in 1914 to my grandfather Harry Lomas (1888-1973) and which was hanging on the wall of my home in Borgofranco, Northern Italy, decided time was up.

The string and tape and glue she had applied over one hundred years’ ago were no longer sufficient to hold the frame together. The painting itself was not on canvas but on porcelain, and so was quite heavy. It was one of two similar paintings of birds that she had done at the time. This one was painted just before she was married, and was signed B.E. (Bessie Edmondson). The second, which can be seen below, was signed B.Lomas, so after her marriage. Both hang on the wall here in Borgofranco, as do other paintings she did of the Yorkshire Dales.

When the painting fell I rushed over to check the damage. I feared that it could have been smashed, after all it was on porcelain. Amazingly, only the frame was destroyed while the painting survived. I took it to a retired local frame maker, who still opened his workshop for a couple of hours a day every morning. He was quite particular, if he didn’t like you, he would be too busy to do any work for you.

Luckily the story of my grandmother’s work interested him, and I showed him photos on my phone of some of her other paintings, and that of a Japanese-style plate she had done in 1905. After elementary school, she worked at the Royal Crown Derby Porcelain Co., hand-painting pottery. This plate was her apprentice passing-out piece, an exquisite design, which she was allowed to keep.

My grandparents’ house at 82 Pear Tree St, Derby was full of her paintings. In 1961, her health deteriorated and she and my grandfather, who was nearly blind by this time, had to leave Pear Tree St. For the rest of their lives, they lived 3 months at a time either with us or with my father’s sister.

The Travelling Paintings

When my grandparents left Pear Tree St in 1961, most of their furniture was sold off or given away. The family convened to see what could be done with my grandmother’s paintings. She decided that she wanted the Japanese plate to stay with her, and so in fact it lived for many years at my parents’ home, first in Dorchester Ave, Derby then in Long Eaton. When my mother died, I brought the plate home to Borgofranco.

My parents selected the picture with the two birds and a couple of her Dales’ paintings. One of them is now in Borgofranco, while the other is in Milan, at my brother’s house. How the single Bird painting that had fallen off my wall actually got to be there at all is a story in itself.

What apparently happened is that my other grandmother, Edith Johnson (1896-1984), my mother’s mother, was so upset that Bessie Edmondson’s paintings were going to be thrown away, that she took 5 of them herself, including the Bird picture above. So I often saw it hanging in her house, and she decided it should come back to the Lomas side of the family, and so left the painting to me in her will. When she died in 1984, that painting came to Italy.

My parents must have also taken another painting when Edith Johnson died, as I discovered it in the attic of their house in Long Eaton. That too is now in Borgofranco!

That is not all: one of the other paintings rescued by Edith Johnson was seen and liked by her eldest daughter Cynthia, who lived in Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. So that painting moved to Canada sometime in the 1960s.

In 2002, my mother Muriel Goodall, then aged 82, was visiting her sister Cynthia, then aged 85, in Ladysmith, and recognised the style of her mother-in-law’s paintings. “Is that by Bessie Edmondson?”, she asked Cynthia. Cynthia and Muriel then decided that it needed a new frame, and together they chose the frame you can see here. They also agreed that “sooner or later” the painting should be returned to the Lomas family. Cynthia thus wrote on the back of the painting “For Muriel”.

In 2010, my wife and I were in Ladysmith and we visited Cynthia who was now living in a care home. You can see my grandmother’s painting on her wall, top right.

While in Ladysmith, we were staying with my cousin Muriel, named after my mother, and who I knew quite well. I told her about the painting, and that it said “For Muriel” on the back.

In 2013, my aunt was not well, and had to leave her care home, and the family had to decide what to do with her belongings, including the painting. Of course, they knew nothing of my mother and aunt’s agreement that it should come back to the Lomas family, but when they saw “For Muriel” written on the back, they assumed, incorrectly, that she had donated it to her daughter Muriel. When she received the painting, Muriel e-mailed me and asked what she should do with it. In the end she sent it to my mother Muriel in Long Eaton, where it resided in my mother’s house for the next year or so. After she passed away, that painting too came out to Borgofranco!

So now at home I have the 2 Bird paintings on porcelain, 3 Dales’ views, and the Japanese plate from Royal Crown Derby. I think that my grandmother would be quite pleased that some of her creations are still being admired here.

And so to St Christopher’s

Coming back to re-framing the first Bird painting, the guy did a very good job, and so I took him the second, similar painting. When I went to collect it, he told me that behind the painting he had found a pen-and-ink drawing, very precise, apparently done in 1908, of a church I had never heard of in Derby, St Christopher’s.

Now, the St Christopher’s drawing is an original, it is not a print, and it was most likely given to my grandmother by the artist, H.E.Richardson. It is dated 1908, my grandmother at that time would have been 18, and after her time at the Royal Crown Derby, it looks like she knew this artist. The drawing had been framed.

When she did the second Bird picture, and signed it B.Lomas, it must have been after 1914, and probably she was looking around for a frame and so decided to re-use the St Christopher’s frame, and simply fixed her porcelain painting on top, where it remained for over a 100 years until I had it re-framed now.

My wife liked the old drawing and so now we would like to restore it to its original frame, but, the question was, “where on Earth is or was this St Christopher’s Church?” It must be somewhere near where my grandmother lived at the time in Derby. She was from Middleton St, my grandfather from Pear Tree St, somewhere nearby St Christopher’s was hiding. Our friend Mr Google did not know where the church was or had been. The only clue he gave me was a link to a Mormon library where apparently the baptisms etc from 1903-1956 had been recorded for St Christopher’s, Derby. Despite ancestry having digitised most of Derbyshire some years ago, no digital versions were available, and no indication of where the church could have been were available.

Apart from that, no immediate help from Google. Looking at a full list of present and past churches in Derby, there was no sign of a St Christopher’s. I looked at old maps of Derby. If the church records were only available from 1903, and the drawing of the church was from 1908, I needed some maps from around 1910. Unfortunately, most of the Derby maps from that period very usefully only say “Church”, without giving any names!

Then I checked the Derby Evening Telegraph archives and discovered that St Christopher’s was part of the parish of St Thomas’s, in Pear Tree Rd. Now we were getting somewhere, as St Thomas’s was the local church for my grandparents. In fact, that was where they met. My grandfather, Harry Lomas, was a tenor in the choir of St Thomas’s. My grandmother, Bessie Edmondson, lived in Middleton St, and taught Sunday School at St Thomas’s.

After they married in 1914, they lived in Pear Tree St, and so it was possible that my grandmother even went to St Christopher’s church, if it was part of the same parish. More searching of the Derby Evening Telegraph archives and I found a memorial service in 1916 at St Christopher’s for local dignitary Sir Francis Ley. Now anyone who used to go to Derby County’s famed Baseball Ground stadium as I did, would know the name “Ley”. We had the Ley Stand, and behind the Baseball Ground was the Ley Foundry. So we were definitely in the right area.

More information from the Telegraph in 1933 talked about the origins of St Christopher’s Church, apparently paid for by Mr Ley himself. But where exactly was it? Right next to the Baseball Ground, on an old map, I found a “Mission Church” on Shaftesbury Crescent. My wife said “do a Google Map of that area, perhaps the church still exists.” She was right, it still does exist (see photo), but is in a sorry state, abandoned and derelict. It was though exactly the right church, and corresponded exactly to the drawing hidden behind my grandmother’s painting. We had found St Christopher’s!

In fact I must have walked past that church many times in the past. Shaftesbury Crescent is a continuation of Pear Tree St, where my grandparents lived and where, by the way, I had been born in the front room too many years’ ago! A few yards further on we had the Baseball Ground, now just an almost-forgotten memory. I can though still “feel” the “Pop-side” move as the action moved around the Baseball Ground!

I then discovered that the church had been sold to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and renamed as St George’s. They abandoned it in 2002. The building was sold in 2019 for demolition. An article in 2023 in the Telegraph and also on the BBC web site talked about saving St George’s, and a plan was presented to the Derby City Council in November 2023, to convert the church into apartments, while maintaining the outside structure. Apparently the Council would decide by mid 2024, so if anyone knows anyone on the Council, perhaps put in a good word for this building originally commissioned by Mr Ley in 1903, and originally known as St Christopher’s.

John Lomas
26 November 2024