If your family hails from Falmouth then the chances are that they will at some point have come into contact with All Saints Church – ‘the church at the top of the hill’, near the Rugby Club. Almost everything in All Saints Church was given or made by local people – the organ, the processional cross and the choir stalls, to name but three. Donor families included the Goodings, Andertons, Grylls, Bowyers and Curgenvens, and many, many others.
The history of Falmouth’s society and families is therefore written in stone, wood and glass, preserved in the building itself. The fantastic rainbow-coloured East window, designed and made in Falmouth by Leonard A Pownall, is a good example. The foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in November 1887, a month so wet and windy that the Royal Marquee blew down the night before and there had to be hasty improvisation before the dignitaries arrived.
That ‘can-do’ spirit went on to become one of the defining characteristics of All Saints. When the Bishop of Truro fell ill before the consecration in 1890, for instance, the church asked the holidaying Bishop of Barbados to stand in for him, and when the West Window blew out in a gale in 1893, it was taken as an opportunity to create an even better one. The replacement round window ‘Our Lord in Glory’ was itself blown out 130 years later, in the winter of 2023, but has been restored to its former beauty thanks in part to the generosity of today’s c.