The Window Book or Kottage Klassicks No 5 dated 1935 is clearly one of a series but, unfortunately, the only one we have. It is handwritten and handbound by the Colonel under a unique pseudonym ‘Wick’ and in his opening pages he provides some information which enables us to guess at its origins.
He describes it as an annual production which would suggest that No.1 was produced in 1930, the year in which he returned to live in Lavenham full time and to play a regular role in the life of his nephew, John, then aged 6. He says that it is really too serious a work for the series but “there has not been enough merrier and more juvenile literary and artistic material produced here to merit a publication by itself”. By 1935 the relations of young John and his mother Evelyn with his father RG were extremely strained and John was away at school or with his mother. It is easy to imagine the Colonel in earlier, happier years, working with his nephew on an annual project to amuse him.
The Window Book also tells us, since it “printed by the Little Hall Press, late the Cottage Press” that it was in 1935 that the Colonel renamed the building he had re-created.
It provides wonderful plans, detail and dating evidence for the reconstruction of the house in its “historical” section and then proceeds to describe in technical and artistic detail how the windows of the central hall were renovated with drawings of all the decorated glass therein.
