A TRAGEDY OCCURRED on the 19^th of September 1963. Aged 21, Sara Venetia d’Avigdor Goldsmid lost her life in a sailing accident. She was the daughter of Major Sir Henry Joseph d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, (1909-1976) of the Jewish faith and his wife Lady Rosemary d’Avigdor Goldsmid, an Anglican. The family lived at Somerhill, a Jacobean mansion (now a school) near to the church of All Saints at Tudely (just under 2 miles east of Tonbridge). Lady Goldsmid and her daughter Sara used to worship in this small church, which dates to mediaeval times, if not before. Much of the existing structure was constructed in the 13^th and 14th centuries, but it was heavily restored in the 18^th century.

After Sara’s death, her parents wanted to do something to perpetuate her memory. They and others decided to restore the church. Part of this operation was to replace the existing plain glass east window with a commemorative window, which they asked the artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985) to design for them. This Jewish artist was chosen because Sara and her mother had admired Chagall’s stained-glass at an exhibition they had visited at the Louvre in Paris (France). These included some of the windows that Chagall had created for the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem (Israel). They were installed in 1962 after having been exhibited not only in Paris but also in New York City.

Chagall created the drawings for the windows, and they were translated into stained-glass by Charles Marq (1923-2006) of Rheims (France). When Chagall visited Tudely, and saw his window after it was installed and dedicated in December 1967, he was so satisfied with it that he offered to create stained-glass images for all the other windows in the church. His offer was accepted. He managed to complete this work, but it was some years before the congregation at Tudely finally agreed to replace the existing Victorian stained-glass windows in the church with those created by Chagall. It was only some time after the church warden, Kenneth Stinton, had seen the Chagall windows on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly in 1985 that the idea of replacing the Victorian windows with Chagall’s became acceptable. They were placed in the church by December 1985.

Many of Chagall’s windows at Tudely are rich in dark blue colouring. Entering the church and finding it suffused with predominantly blue light is like entering an underwater space. This might be intentional as poor Sara d’Avigdor Goldsmid’s life ended beneath the water of the coast near Rye (Sussex). If she saw anything at all as she sunk beneath the sea, it might well have been such a dark blue light. I have visited Tudely’s church several times, and each time the same thought occurs to me. My first visit must have been in the 1980s after December 1985, because I have never seen the church without all the Chagall windows installed.

The church is in a rural setting, surrounded by fields. It has become a tourist attraction, and is occasionally used to hold chamber music concerts, one of which I attended in the early 1990s when I was still practising dentistry in north Kent. Although a little remote, this gem of a church is well worth making an effort to visit it.