“THE idiom “as plain as the nose on your face” turns out not to be applicable to Lady Caroline Wenlock.
The nose on her effigy in St Helen’s, Escrick, near York, was damaged in a fire that gutted the church almost a century ago. The early-20th-century restorers could manage only a crude replacement. Today, almost everyone agrees that it looks more like a chunky male nose than the patrician appendage that one might expect of the sister of a Dean of Windsor and wife of the first Baron Wenlock.”
But when parishioners wanted to perform a nose job as part of a Heritage Lottery-funded restoration at St Helen’s, they discovered that no one knew exactly what the original had looked like. “Pre-fire, she had quite a delicate, pointed nose. After the fire, it was awful,” Caroline Wandless, a churchwarden and the Lottery project lead, said.
Caroline Wandless was recently interviewed by Church Times. The whole article can be read here.