We had to restore the Sanctuary in 2008 in a hurry, because a stone fell during Mass. So there wasn't time to gather sponsorship in advance, or to apply for grants. Infuriatingly, no grant-giving trust will make grants for work already completed, but that is no reason why individual benefactors should not.
Behind the altar there are fifty two statues of saints and angels, and above them there are twenty heads of saints. All of them were cleaned and restored by Taylor Pearce of New Cross. The statues were all taken out, crated and carted to South London, where they were cleaned, the missing bits restored, and the gilding refreshed. The heads wouldn't come out, so were restored in situ. We have calculated that it cost £350 for each of the heads, and £750 for each of the statues.
In the event this gambit raised over £50,000 (because many of the donations werre Gift-Aided) which covered the entire cost of restoring the statues and the screen in which they stand, with the alabaster spire over the tabernacle.
Here is the full list.
Twenty Heads - on the Gospel side:
a Blessed John Forest
b Blessed Margaret Pole
c Saint Thomas More
d Saint John Fisher
e Saint Thomas Aquinas
f Saint Anselm
g Saint Jerome
h Saint Leo
i Saint Athanasius
j Saint Ephraem the Syrian.
on the Epistle Side:
k Saint Basil
l Saint John Chrysostom
m Saint Benedict
n Saint Bruno
o Saint Francis of Assisi
p Saint Bernard
q Saint Edmund Campion
r Saint Oliver Plunkett
s Saint Alexander Briant
t Blessed John Storey
Fifty two Statues - upper deck, Gospel side:
1 Saint David
2 St Columba
3 St Edmund of Abingdon
4 St Edward the Confessor
5 St Frideswide
6 St Dunstan
7 St Michael
8 St Bede
9 St Hilda
10 St Alban
11 St Helen
12 St Gregory the Great
13 Our Lady
lower deck, Gospel Side:
27 St Andrew
28 St Charles Borromeo
29 St Stanislaus Kostka
30 St Francis Xavier
31 St Dominic
32 St Henry the Emperor
33 St Raphael
24 St Augustine of Hippo
35 St Gertrude
36 St Ambrose
37 St Julia
38 St Peter
39 St John the Evangelist
Upper deck, Epistle side:
14 St Joseph
15 St Augustine of Canterbury
16 St Winifred
17 St Chad
18 St Edith
19 St Cuthbert
20 St Gabriel
21 St Thomas of Canterbury
22 St Bertha
23 St Hugh
24 St Simon Stock
25 St Thomas of Hereford
26 St George.
lower deck, Epistle Side:
40 St Mary Magdalen
41 St Paul
42 St Cecily
43 St Sebastian
44 St Hubert
45 St Monica
46 St Uriel
47 St Ignatius
48 St Aloysius (Luigi) Gonzaga
49 St Teresa
50 St Francis de Sales
51 St Vincent de Paul
52 St Patrick
This list differs slightly from the one in our parish history "St Aloysius, Oxford, the Third English Oratory" (millennium edition 2000, still available at £2.95 from the Lodge) because some of the statues had been wrongly positioned after the disastrous interventions in the 1950s. We have put them back in their original order, as ashown on the oldest photograohs.
Some saints have been sponsored by individuals on their own behalf, others for children or godchildren, in memory of the dead, or anonymously. Others are sponsored by two or more people together.
Here are the Saints being crated up.
and here is the low-loader with two and a half tons of saint on board;
