January the 8th, 2010 ... Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham in Surrey ... i was driving my little truck back into london on a very cold and snowy morning when i spotted Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham looking rarther picturesque ... the old A23 was plenty wide enough to park on the unswept margin and i walked along the crunchy snowy path behind the dark trees to see if there might be a picture worth taking ...
the outside of the church lacks grace and ornament so i tried the door because you often find something of interest ... and i did ... leaving behind the noise of the world and entering the stillness, i found this ...
i'd visited a lot of churches, but this was one of the best and unlikeliest discoveries ... yet there was no clue, apart from the flowers, to suggest a context or an identity ... i set my tripod low and quickly framed this shot ... the original image was lost in a disk crash long since, but i've rescued these images from the blog archive for that day ...
the church's silence was broken by echo of the door latch and i turned to find a pale man in a big woolly hat who might just have easily been photographed by roman vishniac in a polish synagogue before the german occupation ...
he approached me directly and inquired if i was here for the funeral ... i explained that i just happened to be a passing truck driver with a camera and was looking for a good photograph of the church
he then introduced himself as STUART KUTTNER of the NEWS OF THE WORLD
he explained that the man in the wonderful photograph was GEOFFREY VAN HAY, who ran a famous bar in Fleet Street, beloved by newspaper men, EL VINO'S ... and he told me it might be worth hanging around for an interesting occasion that was about to happen ...
so i surmised that they must have been friends across several decades and OUT OF MISPLACED EMPATHY asked if he might like me to take the picture again, with him standing by the image of his old friend ... he declined, saying ...
"OH NO ! I am a VERY PRIVATE PERSON !"
the funeral was packed, the vicar said a few nice things about a man he'd hardly known
some journalists told some nice ( but self-congratulatory ) stories illustrating Geoffrey's wit and boldness
we went outside but i stood apart, having resented their smug self confidence, and having had just enough time to realize that Stuart Kuttner was the EMINENCE GRISE in a national scandal and that he appeared to lack ( at that time ) both humanity and humility
but i left wishing i had known Geoffrey forty years earlier
here is wally fawkes' little portrait that was re-printed on my order-of-service card
