St Mary the Virgin (Churston Ferrers)

St Mary the Virgin is the parish church in Churston Ferrers in Devon. The grade II-listed church was originally built in the 14th century as the private chapel for the Ferrars family at the adjacent Churston Court who then handed it over to the local parish in 1490. The east side of the church has a stained glass window donated by Agatha Christie. Unfortunately the church is usually kept locked and the only way to visit it and view the window is probably to attend its services on Sundays.

Agatha Christie's Stained Glass window

While staying at Greenway, Christie was a regular worshipper at the church. In the 1954, she decided to donate money for a new stained glass window on the east side of the church. To her, it was "a beautiful little church and the plain glass east window always gaped at me like a gap in teeth. I looked at it every Sunday and used to think how lovely it would look in pale colours." After some research, she settled on a Bideford artist James Patterson who submitted a design which she liked. Her plan for the design was not without its hurdles. Both the diocese and Patterson himself wanted to follow tradition and have the window feature the cruxifixion. However Christie herself wanted to feature Christ as the Good Shepherd. In the end Christie had her way when the diocese, after some research, agreed with the good shepherd theme since the church was a pastoral parish.

Christie does not describe another set of hurdles in her Autobiography. These related to her plan to assign the rights of a story to the church to fund the construction of the window. The negotiations for this plan was carried out by Christie's literary agent Edmund Cork. To begin with, the solicitors acting for the diocese wanted thier fees paid directly rather than out of the gift. Then story which she wrote. The Greenshore Folly proved difficult to sell because it was conceived as a novella, too long for a short story and too short for a novel. When submitted to an American magazine The Week, the editor demurred and replied with two pages of suggestions on how the story could be shortened. Christie refused and withdrew the story and instead wrote another one, Greenshaw's Folly for the church. To simplify matters and speed up the process, Edmund Cork suggested that Agatha Christie Limited (ACL) buy over the rights from the diocese for £1000. This sum was enough for the window as well as the solicitor's fees. This solution was effective but unfortunately gave rise to a belief in the congregation that the rights were snatched back because of the perception that the gift had been too generous.

The window was installed in 1957 without any indication of the donor, as Christie specified. After Christie's death, Rosalind Hicks installed an explanatory plaque.

Agatha Christie was very pleased with the window. Instead of the traditional reds and blues, it was predominantly mauve and pale green, her favourite colours. She wanted it to be "a happy window which children could look at with pleasure." The centre panel features the Good Shepherd with His lamb. The other panels show the manger and the Virgin with the Child, the angels appearing to the shepherds, the fishermen in their boat and the figure walking on the sea--"all the simpler scenes of the Gospel story." Christie believed that the design will stand the test of time because it was so simple and she felt proud and humble to have been permitted to bring it about.

St Mary the Virgin in 2023.

The east side of the church in 2020. The window to the right is the one with the stained-glass donated by Agatha Christie.