Comfort and Welcome

Not every gift to the cathedral is visible. Much of what the Friends have funded since 1958 has simply made the building usable: warm enough to sit in, lit well enough to see by, and with somewhere to sit down.

about this project

The Practical Work

A cathedral in Orkney in February is a demanding place to sit for an hour. Some of the Society’s least glamorous funding has gone on heating, lighting and seating, and on the systems that let a congregation hear what is being said.

The need is not new. When Provost James Scott set out the case for founding the Society in 1958, he cited heating alone running at £400 a year against a capital fund that was shrinking rather than growing. The Friends were formed in part to meet exactly this kind of cost, and they have been meeting it ever since.

The list is long and unglamorous, which is rather the point. The Society has paid for sound system upgrades, lighting schemes, new toilet facilities, the automation of the cathedral clock, and a new west door and improvements to access. It replaced seven hundred chairs. In 1987 it offered to meet half the £1,200 cost of installing closed-circuit television, on condition that the cameras stayed away from the congregation and were used for the choir and the masons.

The work continues. More recently the Friends gave £120,000 towards a brand new boiler and the installation of emergency lighting, and a further £8,000 to install the lights used by Kirkwall Flower Arrangement Club during the annual flower festival. The Club donates the proceeds of the festival to the Friends, so the money finds its way back into the building.

“Too many people regard St Magnus Cathedral as a museum piece and not as a living entity."
Rev J M Rose, at the annual meeting of the Society, 1960

The Society also supports the cathedral’s daily running, including the visitor custodians who welcome people through the door and answer their questions. For most visitors, the custodian is the cathedral’s first voice.

None of this appears in a guidebook. But a building that is cold, dim, inaudible and has nowhere to sit is a building people visit once. The practical work is what allows everything else, the worship and the music and the remembering, to happen at all.

Fundraising

Chairs the Friends replaced

The cathedral’s annual heating bill in 1958, the figure Provost Scott cited when making the case for founding the Society

The Friends’ gift towards a new boiler and emergency lighting