It might be All Saints’ Day today, but I’m afraid I’m picking on just one of their number: St Columbanus, who walked this Earth back in the 500s AD.

He seems to have been a bit of a character: it is said that squirrels used to run down from trees and into the folds of his cowl to be close to him. I think this is supposed to be charming, but it frankly sounds like a massive hassle: he clearly had a lot to contend with.

His life is commemorated through a trail of seven bells in Bangor: the squirrels might have left him alone in death, but the Northern Irish are still keen to knock seven bells out of him. Poor guy.

And, as a rubbish blogger, I’ve only managed to take pictures of six of them. The first one of the trail is a giant bell, and I didn’t notice it, because I was too preoccupied with this: the oldest wall in Bangor:

The commemorative plaque omits to tell us when it was built, beyond a vague ‘13th century’, but it does let us know that the Council did some work on the wall in 2008.

Anyway, this means I can’t show you the first stop on our ‘interpretive art trail’ (not my words). So you’ll just have to imagine a giant bell with a wavy surface, commemorating Columbanus’s childhood journey across Lough Erne to the Island of Cleenish for his early education.

After leaving Cleenish, Columbanus went to Bangor Abbey… a time which is weirdly not commemorated on this Bangor trail. Instead, the second stop on our journey records him leaving Bangor to travel to Brittany.

While in Brittany, Columbanus worked to ‘root out the lusts of the flesh’. I imagine that being covered with squirrels might have helped with that.

He also founded a school in a former Roman fortress in the mountains. It became so oversubscribed that it eventually needed new premises, which he founded at Luxeuil:

While there, he met Gallus—another monk who had been taught at Bangor Abbey—who began to follow him. He originally came from somewhere on the French/German border, which will become important later.

The bells then seem to skip the bit of Columbanus’s life where he hid in a cave for a few years in search of solitude. They also have nothing to say about his spat with some bishops over the date of Easter: he wrote to Pope Gregory I and Pope Boniface IV on the point. Gregory ghosted him, and he folded before Boniface could reply.

I think this is a fascinating bit of his story, with much to say about the interaction between the divine and the human in the making of Christian festivals, and I’d definitely have dedicated a bell to it, but I’ve never been asked to make even one interpretative artistic bell in my entire life (to date).

Anyway, we skip ahead to Columbanus being thrown off a ship following a storm. The captain judged that the storm was god’s punishment for transporting Columbanus. Columbanus ended up at Bregenz in Austria, where he built an oratory:

And this is where Gallus’s heritage becomes important: as he could speak the local language, he played a big role in helping Columbanus convert the locals to Christianity.

And—local connection alert—Bregenz was twinned with Bangor in 1987 ‘in celebration of this important historical connection’ (not my words).

Since 2001, Bangor has also become a ‘sister city’ of Virginia Beach in the United States, though I regret to report a lack of connection to Columbanus. This relationship exists ‘because of the similar port area, military affiliation, and oceanfront tourist attraction’.

Back to Columbanus, whose time at Bregenz wasn’t going so well: a war had resulted in the area being subsumed into Burgundy, and a few of Columbanus’s students had been murdered. So, like any man of God, Columbanus prayed hard for a peaceful resolution and stayed to help defend his adopted community ran off to Italy.

Gallus, however, stayed behind, in hiding in a little cell. Eventually, long after his death, an abbey was built in his honour. Little-by-little, the Swiss city of St Gallen grew up around it, and, in 1983, the abbey area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Oh, and there’s also this:

Meanwhile, Columbanus was living it up in Milan, where he was welcomed by the King and Queen of Lombardy. He once again set about converting the locals:

The Bangor Antiphonary, a historically important 36-leaf book of hymns and prayers put together in Bangor Abbey about a century after Columbanus’s death is somewhat inexplicably in Milan, though no-one seems particularly vexed by that. I suppose to many in Northern Ireland, it’s better than it being in one of the London museums, where it would probably have ended up had it not been taken abroad. Maybe they’d have loaned it back to the locals occasionally, like the Lindisfane Gospel.

The King of Lombardy gave Columbanus a tract of land at Bobbio, near Milan, to build a monastery—where, ultimately, Columbanus died and was buried:

Twenty years after Columbanus’s death, Jonas of Bobbio wrote a biography of him—the first known biography of an Irish person. And in 2002, because of his history of travelling through Europe, the Vatican declared St Columbanus to be the patron saint of motorcyclists… which honestly feels like a stretch.

But as for the bells—well, I think that we have to count them as a success. I’d never heard of the bloke before I saw them, and now know I’ve written (and you’ve read) a 1,000-word treatise about him.

And that’s the power of interpretative art trails… maybe.

If I told you that a man stole billions of pounds worth of historical art purely for the love of it, doing nothing with it but hanging it in his bedroom in his mum’s attic, you’d surely want to read more. I certainly did, and Michael Finkel’s non-fiction account of Stéphane Breitwieser’s crimes did not disappoint.

Finkel weaves a propulsive tale, reaching from the fine detail of how Breitwieser stole individual pieces to asking questions about the nature of museums, crime, culpability and even art itself. It’s also a love story, exploring Brietwieser’s intense but complex relationships with his girlfriend, his mother and his father.

This was enormous, astonishing fun. I’d have liked a dash more of the reflection, philosophy and doubt, but this short is still worth your time.

Here are some passages that struck a chord with me:

He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline.

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Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.

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Before working art crime, Darties had spent a decade in antiterrorism. He sees parallels between art thieves and terrorists—crimes that destabilize society, with psychological fallout.

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When you wear your heart on your sleeve, it’s exposed to the elements.

Still visible in Redcar is a former local newspaper office, for a paper that has had quite a few different titles over 155 years. From 1869 to 1938, it was The North Eastern Daily Gazette. From 1938 to 1940 it was The North Eastern Gazette, then The Evening Gazette, and since 2014, it’s just been The Gazette. A bold decision, then, to carve the name above the door.

I have a history with the newspaper: as a student, I blogged for them for a while. I can’t remember how that came about, but I do remember having a bit of back-and-forth about the title of the ‘column’, as they wanted some reference to me being a ‘trainee doctor’ which seemed inappropriate to me as a mere medical student. It ended up being called ‘Simon Says’—hardly inspired—and it only lasted a year or so, after which their digital strategy changed.

This is Grant’s Clock on Whitley Bay’s promenade. Many sources—even including the local council which owns it—will tell you that the clock was “unveiled by Councillor James Hamilton Grant in 1933”. From the contemporary newspaper record, I can tell you that this isn’t true.

From the Sheilds Daily News, 13 April 1933:

Whitley Bay’s first public town clock was unveiled yesterday afternoon, Lady Gregg performing the ceremony, which was presided over by County Coun George Lang, chairman of the Whitley and Monkseaton Urban District Council.

The clock is the gift of Coun G Hamilton Grant, the vice-chairman, the pillar upon which it stands being provided by the Council.

[Councillor Lang commented that] it had been a common complaint of visitors that there was no clock on the promenade, and it would be a boon to them as well as to the residents. “People will be able to stay down here and spend their money until the very last minute, before rushing to their trains,” he added amid laughter.

The article also, somewhat mysteriously, says that “Coun Grant explained the circumstances under which he had offered the clock to the council”—but declines to elaborate. I can tell you, however, that he was elected as chairman of the Council about a week later. Make of that what you will.

In the newly-minted city of Bangor, County Down, there is a heritage trail carved into the paving, highlighting nearby objects and sites of interest. Here’s a representative sample:

It’s slightly hard to make out in that photo, but the left-most panel has some text written around a whimsical circle:

One of Two Edward VIII Post Boxes

The capitalisation and occasionally boldened words are, I regret, entirely the Council’s choices.

Edward VIII reigned for only 326 days, before abdicating so that he could marry a divorcée, Wallis Simpson. In 1937, it would have been unthinkable for the Head of the Church of England to be married to a divorced woman, something which wasn’t a barrier for the current occupant of the post. Religious doctrine may present a sheen of timelessness, but it’s shifted an awful lot over the last century.

For our purposes, this means that there aren’t that many Edward VIII postboxes—though even so, I was surprised by the ‘of two’—surely there are more than two of the things?!

A moment’s research reveals that I’m right: 161 of them were installed, of which perhaps half remain. So perhaps the engraving refers to Edward VIII post boxes in Northern Ireland.

A bit more searching, and I’m satisfied: there appears to be a much-celebrated example in Belfast—so celebrated, in fact, that’s it’s been removed from service and placed on display with a special plaque.

And isn’t that nice? Both of the Northern Irish Edward VIII postboxes have special plaques pointing out their unusual nature. Bravo. I’m satisfied.

Or so I thought.

The plaque on the Belfast example makes a startling claim: it says it is the only example in Northern Ireland. How can this possibly be?

Back to Bangor. As it turns out, the heritage trail is referring to this, on the front of Bangor Post Office:

This is a remarkable Edward VIII royal cypher on the front of a Post Office… but it isn’t a postbox. The clue is in the lack of a slot.

It used to be common for Post Offices to have cyphers on them, in much the same way as post boxes. As Post Offices are less common than post boxes, there are far fewer Edward VIII Post Offices than postboxes.

Therefore, the heritage trail could have made the much more impressive claim that this was Northern Ireland’s only Edward VIII Post Office. Instead, it made a less impressive claim, and in so doing, revealed the Council’s inability to recognise a postbox.

Today’s lesson is that you shouldn’t trust everything you see on the floor.

Okay, that’s enough memorials… but how about another mosaic?

This triptych at Whitley Bay station was installed in 1983, only three years after the Metro replaced British Rail services to the station. They cover up the old ticket windows.

A plaque records that:

This mosaic was made by the following young people of the Projex Agency under the supervision of Ian Patience

A J Murphy, L Spoor, J Blyth, A Thompson, C Rafferty

Assisted by

D Munro, T Emery, C Higgins

The work was jointly sponsored by Gateshead MBC, Northern Arts, Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive and carried through the Youth Opportunities Programme of the Manpower Services Commission

Hilariously, these days, ‘Projex Agency’ appears to most commonly refer to a modelling agency ‘that transforms average ladies into top-tier global influencers’ by helping them to grow the popularity of their 18+ OnlyFans accounts. I’m not sure that’s the sort of thing Gateshead MBC and Manpower had in mind forty years ago.

After a couple of days on the trot of mildly depressing posts about memorials, here’s another. Don’t worry, I’m fine.

This is Redcar’s memorial to their remarkable and much-loved MP, the late Mo Mowlam. She famously didn’t want the job as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, which she became following Labour’s 1997 election victory. Yet, despite her reservations, she threw herself into the role, overseeing the negotiations which led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

This remarkable legacy was achieved despite having been diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumour in late 1996, which sadly finally ended her life in 2005.

This memorial was unveiled in 2009: an intricate mosaic designed by local artist John Todd. It was installed alongside the new-refurbished Coatham Boating lake, a stone’s throw from her former home. (The boating lake has since sprung a leak, hence it looking a little under-filled in the background of that picture.)

This fountain in Cullercoats commemorates a lieutenant lost at sea, many thousands of miles away:

Erected by a few friends in memory of Bryan John Huthwaite Adamson, Lieut RN, Commanding HMS Wasp which sailed from Singa Pore Sep.10 1887 and was never heard of after. The site was given for this memorial by His Grace the Duke of Northumberland 1888

Bryan Adamson was born in Cullercoats in 1851, joined the navy at the age of 14, and became a Lieutenant at the age of 22.

HMS Wasp, which Adamson commanded on its final fateful voyage, was also a local, built at the Armstrong Marshall shipyard in the mid-1880s. The ship made it safely to Singapore, but was lost on a subsequent voyage from there to Hong Kong. In all, 80 people perished when the shipped disappeared without a trace.

HMS Wasp’s location remains a mystery to this day: it is supposed that it sank following a particularly violent typhoon, which is known to have damaged and sunk a number of other vessels.

This anchor, on Redcar seafront, belongs to the Finnish sailing vessel ‘Birger’, which sank in the area in 1898. The sinking not only cost 13 lives, but the vessel’s wheelhouse tore through Coatham Pier, severing it—and, indeed, the whole pier collapsed into the sea the following year.

Over the following days, Christmas presents which those aboard were carrying back to their families washed ashore. Redcar residents thoughtfully collected these, and forwarded them on with letters of condolence.

The Birger’s anchor was recovered by the Cleveland Divers’ Club 100 years later, and now stands ‘in memory of all seamen who have no known grave but the sea’.

There’s a much fuller story of the Birger’s sinking on Kerry Shaw’s Notes from Redcar blog.