Alice Buckton
She was the daughter of George Buckton who was a remarkable home-educated chemist, entomologist, astronomer, artist and musician. Alice was also educated at home in her early years. As a child, her family had, as a neighbour, poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and she listened as he told her of his belief in the immortality of the soul. Tennyson had a remarkable effect on the Victorian mind in that he introduced the whole Arthurian saga including the Holy Grail and other poems and links to Avalon.
Like her father she became a talented all-rounder. She spent her early years working with a number of Charites serving the poor.
She was an early feminist and spent time in Berlin where she met her life-long companion Annette Schepel. In 1898, she returned to England where she set up a centre in London providing services to help with the independence of women.
Alice was a competent poet and playwright her first book of poetry was published in 1901. In 1904 Alice produced her play, Eager Heart.
In 1907 she attended a lecture by Tudor Pole on the Blue Bowl. She began visiting Glastonbury and exploring the old pilgrimage route that had been maintained by oral tradition.
In 1912 Archdeacon Wilberforce persuaded Alice to leave London and buy the Catholic Seminary in Glastonbury that had recently come on the market. The Seminary had an interesting background in that it started off as the Anchor pub on Chilkwell Street. In its grounds were the neglected Chalice Well and a Bathing Place which had been popular in the 1700s when Glastonbury boomed as a spa. Around the mid-19th century, a Catholic group purchased the pub and its grounds. They extended and enlarged the buildings and set it up as a seminary offering a range of courses to students. The new seminary was a large building facing on to Chilkwell Street with a chapel, a lecture hall and a range of small cell like bedrooms to accommodate residential students.
Alice adapted the complex and used it as a base from which she offered a range of courses and workshops including beekeeping, weaving, painting, services for the sick and poor and education of small children. She adapted a Georgian building on the site as her home.
In 1919, she co-operated with Frederick Bligh Bond when he designed the vesica piscis lid for the Well which is still in place today. She shared his belief in what she called the ‘Watchers of Avalon’ – the heavenly company of one time monks who were overseeing the spiritual rebirth of Glastonbury and England.
In 1922, she brought the people of Glastonbury together to make a film ‘Glastonbury Past and Present’.
She kept working at the centre until her death in 1944. In her will she left the properties to a group of trustees who were asked to set up a charitable trust and run the property as an international cultural and healing centre. Efforts were made to run the centre, but the trustees found themselves unable to maintain the buildings and in 1949 sold the whole complex to the owners of Glaston Tor school, on condition that the public could have access to the well. It was run by the school for nine years and then in 1958 the property was sold to the Chalice Well Trust set up by a group including Tudor Pole and Lord Grey.
Since purchase by the present Trust, the seminary buildings have been demolished, Alice Buckton’s home converted into a Retreat House and the grounds opened into lovingly cared for and spacious gardens including the ancient sacred well.
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