This injury was repaired, and new foundations were laid, down to the solid chalk, and the upper parts of the tower were secured. Funds at that time permitted of little else being done. In 1871, an appeal for £50,000 was issued, resulting in a subscription of about £21,000; and in 1875, a further appeal for £30,000. Then the clerestory began to fall. A new faculty was granted, and more subscriptions came in, but by 1879 all these funds were again exhausted, and the restoration committee resigned. Then came the great opportunity which Lord Grimthorpe had long desired, of getting the restoration entirely into his own hands. He was an incredibly wealthy man,[2] with a passion for exercising the part of amateur architect, and an equal passion for controversy. He procured a new faculty, granting him unlimited power at his own expense, to “restore, repair, and refit the Church.” Thus, disastrously for antiquity, was the old building made over to him, without let or hindrance, to do as he would.
The handiwork of Lord Grimthorpe is writ large, all over the building. He did the most extraordinary things. In restoring the transepts he put in what purported to be “Early English lancets,” with false heads that look like genuine heads from without, but from within are seen to be cut off square; and was so enamoured of the red Roman tiles that give so noble an appearance to the exterior that, in rebuilding the walls, he supplied the lack of genuine ones for the new work by especially manufacturing “Roman” tiles of his own, to form the walls of the south transept; designed in what has been very fitly styled “Railway-station Gothic.”
It would be wearisome to follow Lord Grimthorpe in detail, in his new way with an old Abbey. With extraordinary passion and virulent contempt for public opinion, he swept away genuine Norman work, and in many places gave a brand-new appearance where had before been the bloom of antiquity. Controversy followed upon controversy, during the progress of these works, and Lord Grimthorpe went grimly on his way, replying to arguments with the personal abuse of which he was a better master than he was of architecture. His critics were “the usual howlers”; Street to him was “the immortal author of the worst great Gothic building in the world,” by which, of course, he meant the Law Courts; the foremost architects and antiquaries talked “ignorant nonsense,” and were persons who would “call everything destruction on which they have not got a percentage.” Here, indeed, be “words that sting, and thoughts that burn.” They are vehement, and they hurt, which was the object of them. Like Alan Breck, he was a “bonnie fighter,” even though, as an architect, he did not begin to exist. One of his worst atrocities was the hateful wash-tub done in stone, which serves for pulpit in the nave.