HERITAGE TREASURES: 19th Century Altar Missal

This is the gold-stamped image on the front board of the altar missal belonging to William Willson, first Bishop of Hobart Town. It depicts the Coronation by angels of the Virgin Mary in heaven against a background of clouds, set within a vesica having a border of cherubim.

In the spring of 1847 Willson purchased the missal, printed on the Presses of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1846, and then had it bound in England. There is every reason to believe that the binding is by Thomas Richardson of Derby and that the gold-stamped images on the end boards were produced from designs by Pugin, undergoing the same artistic degradation in translation as did so many of his illustrations for Richardson’s publications.

A considerable number of these cheap re-prints of standard works of piety and instruction accompanied Bishop Willson to Tasmania in 1844 for distributing to his convict chaplains. He once remarked to an episcopal colleague, ‘I had nearly all my books bound by Richardson, Fleet St London, or Derby …’

Subsequently, the book was used in the private chapel of his Macquarie Street residence and then by his successor Daniel Murphy, being moved to the new episcopal residence in Barrack Street behind St Mary’s Cathedral in 1880. Murphy’s nephew, Fr Daniel Beechinor, who had been cathedral administrator since 1868, was appointed Dean of Launceston in September 1880. He took north with him a variety of items deemed superfluous to the cathedral’s needs, including a superb 1866 chalice by the renowned South Australian silversmith Charles Edward Firnhaber, and Willson’s missal. Beechinor built a number of small wooden churches throughout his district, including the Church of the Sacred Heart, Karoola (1888), which was supplied with the Willson missal. In 1908—as the book’s inscription records—he had it transferred to St Anne’s, Lilydale.

By Brian Andrews