Winchester Cathedral, Wilberforce memorial

On 17 July 1873 Samuel Wilberforce fell from his horse and was killed. He had been Bishop of Oxford for twenty-four years but in December 1869, he was made Bishop of Winchester. He was buried in the south transept of Winchester Cathedral, where Sir George Gilbert Scott designed a lavish memorial to him in 1873, with an effigy by Armstead, supported by angels, under an elaborate canopy.

Pevsner, N. and Lloyd, D., Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in the Buildings of England (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 682.Fisher, G., Stamp, G. and Heseltine, J., (eds), The Scott Family, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Avebury Publishing, Amersham, 1981), 76.

Winchester Cathedral choir screen

Sir George Gilbert Scott also provided Winchester Cathedral with a new open-work choir screen as a memorial to Bishop Wilberforce in 1875 which Scott said was ‘stupidly marred by filling in the openings with plate glass’.

Scott’s Recollections , IV, 201-2, 352.