Former accountant Stanley Shepherd tells Terry Grimley how his passion for Pugin began.

A chance visit to a National Gallery lunchtime lecture in the 1960s was the start of a passion for art history for a former Birmingham chartered accountant.

Now it has culminated in a definitive book on the stained glass of the Victorian architect Augustus Welby Pugin.

Stanley Shepherd, who worked for Dunlops in Birmingham, Gateshead and London and later for Fleetway Publications and Mappin & Webb, took a diploma in the history of art at the extra-mural department of London University, followed by an honours degree at Manchester University. After writing a dissertation on the Smethwick glass makers Chance Brothers he gained a PhD on Pugin’s stained glass from the University of Birmingham in 1997.

Now the thesis has been developed into a book, The Stained Glass of AWN Pugin, with photographs taken specially by Worcestershire-based architectural photographer Alastair Carew-Cox.

“I started in about 1990 really, and finally the book came out this year, so I always say I spent longer writing about Pugin’s stained glass than he did producing it,” Mr Shepherd says.

“He didn’t really start on stained glass until 1835, so that’s about 17 years – and that was only a small proportion of what he did.”

An amazingly energetic individual, Pugin gave a huge kick-start to the Victorian neo-Gothic revival, driven by his passion for the middle ages and the Catholic faith. His work is principally identified with church architecture and fittings – including metalwork as well as stained glass – but he also made a big impact on national life through his work at the Palace of Westminster. Astonishingly, given the scale of his achievements, he was just 40 when he died.

Even though early 19th century Birmingham could hardly have been further removed from Pugin’s idea of the ideal city, he had very strong connections with it.

St Chad’s Cathedral, which he designed when he was just 27, was Britain’s first Catholic cathedral since the Reformation when it was consecrated in 1841. And in the Birmingham family firm of Hardmans Pugin found his most sympathetic collaborators in the supply of metalwork and, later, stained glass.

Stanley Shepherd’s book documents Pugin’s determined but often frustrated efforts to match the achievements of medieval stained glass. His impatience with his collaborators is often all too evident.

“But then he suddenly goes to the other extreme and says this is the best window since the middle ages – he does that more than once,” says Mr Shepherd.

Apart from St Chad’s, Pugin windows can be found in Birmingham at St Thomas & St Edmund of Canterbury, Erdington, St Laurence, Northfield and St Mary’s College, Oscott.

Pugin’s most spectacular complete church interior is also in the Midlands – St Giles, Cheadle, in Staffordshire.

Much of the book is taken up with the extraordinarily comprehensive gazeteer which documents all of Pugin’s surviving windows in great detail and, thanks to the survival of Hardman & Co’s archives, gives brief accounts of those which have disappeared. It suggests that a window in St Augustine’s, Solihull, may have been destroyed as recently as 1976 when an extension was being added.

Compiling the gazeteer was an epic undertaking.

“There were only about half a dozen churches in England I didn’t go to, but I didn’t got to churches in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland,” Mr Shepherd explains.

“Before you go to these places, you ring them up and often the chap at the other end hasn’t got a clue. In one case I asked if a window, The Crucifixion, was there and was told it was. But when I got there it was very obviously a later version. If the chap had looked he would have seen it was dedicated to someone who died in 1914. But at least that was only somewhere in East Sussex.

“When I was very green about it I thought I could do half a dozen churches in a day, but in reality if you could do three you were doing well. I took photographs and paced out the church as well, because I did little sketch plans. What I really needed was a chauffeur, a secretary and a photographer.

“I have to say I enjoyed it, but I didn’t like the photography – I found it was the quickest way of chucking money down the drain. But I could get a reasonable image that was perfectly good enough for the thesis.”

A few of the original photographs have found their way into the book, but most have been re-taken by Alastair Carew-Cox with his professional large-format camera. This collaboration had a long gestation period.

“After I finished the thesis he met someone and got the impression I was doing a book, which I had no idea of doing. He came round and asked if he could do the photographs.

“When I remembered about it much later, I didn’t remember his name, but I knew it was a double-barrelled name and thought there was a Carew in it. I found this number, rang up and said are you the chap who came to see me ten years ago?”

Mr Shepherd, who will be 80 at his next birthday, says he has no plans for another book.

“I would never do another book – it’s horrendous. I don’t know if it’s been the same for everyone. After doing the thesis I thought in my naivety it would be simple to do the book. But the descriptions in the thesis were much longer, so I had to rewrite them.

“The publishers had much greater difficulty with me than with most authors. I’m very old-fashioned and don’t have email, so everything had to go through the post. There was a huge amount of checking on this: it’s not too bad checking text, but when you had to check the gazeteer it became quite difficult.”

He didn’t have Satnav, either, but still managed to find his way round the churches with the aid of an old-fashioned map.

“Some are in incredible places. There’s one in the middle of a field in Little Dalby in Leicestershire. That’s what I enjoyed really – I did enjoy just seeing these windows.”

* The Stained Glass of AWN Pugin is published by Spire Books at £34.95.