Shaw, G.B.--Fabian Society

this remarkable and celebrated window is a striking manifestation of shavian wit while also symbolising what the fabian society, forerunner of the labour party, stood for. Representing the Fabian aim to forge a New World Order, it shows Sidney Webb and Shaw hammering the globe into shape, beneath the motto in the upper border “Remould It Nearer to the Hearts Desire”. Standing to the left, with an address-caption over his head (“Sec. Fabian Soc. | 4 Clements Inn | Strand W.C.” within a stamped envelope), the Society’s Secretary, Edward Pease, pulls ropes over a pulley to pump bellows stirring a fire. Above the globe is the Fabian coat of arms, of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Behind Webb is another shield with the motto “Pray Devoutly Hammer Stoutly”. Below, in the centre, is a stack of eleven books, comprising works by Webb (Fabian Tracts and Essays, etc.) topped by some of Shaw’s plays (Man and Superman, Plays Pleasant, Plays for Puritans, Getting Married, etc.). On either side, most of them kneeling in prayer as if in reverential homage to the books, are the Fabian Executive Committee, the men ranged to the left, the women to the right. The first man, crouching on the left, is H.G. Wells, cocking a snook at the others. He is followed by the actor-manager Charles Charrington, Aylmer Maude (translator of Tolstoy’s War and Peace), G. Stirling Taylor (reading a book, New Worlds for Old), and the dentist F. Lawson Dodd. The women, from left to right, are Maud Pember Reeves (mother of Amber Reeves, who bore Wells a daughter in 1909), Miss Hankin, the suffragist Miss Mabel Atkinson, Mrs Boyd Dawson, and, at the end, the artist who made the window, Caroline Townshend herself. The antique dress they wear was humorously inspired by Pease’s fondness for the Tudor period and, like the portrayal of the kneeling figures in profile, parodies earlier features of church art.

H.G. Wells is caricatured as cocking a snook at the Executive Committee because, at a general meeting on 14 December 1906, to his extreme chagrin, he was soundly defeated by Shaw for control over the Society. Wells wanted a revolutionary re-organization of the Society, with a complete abolition of the ‘Old Gang’ on the Executive Committee. Instead, Shaw gave a resounding platform performance making fun of Wells and reducing his audience to waves of laughter. For triumphing so completely over him, Shaw was afterwards accused of giving “a disgraceful exhibition”. He himself wrote: “I certainly was not proud of it and was very anxious that its aspect as a personal exploit should be forgotten.” Nevertheless, this did not stop him from impishly designing the present window a few years later. Nor (if it were ever viewed at the time) did it do anything to avert Wells’s general sense of grievance about Shaw and the Fabians, which manifested itself not only by his resignation from the Society in 1908 and some satirical portraits of Fabians in his The New Machiavelli in 1910, but also posthumously, when his rather sour obituary of Shaw was published after Shaw’s death in 1950 four years after Wells himself had died.  

In the event, for whatever reason, Shaw never actually collected this window from Mrs Townshend’s workshop. It probably remained there until 1947, when her niece Eva Bourne (also a stained glass artist) presented it to the Beatrice Webb House, Holmbury St Mary, Dorking, Surrey, where it hung until 1978. The presentation in 1947 was made with great ceremony by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, himself an erstwhile Fabian, as was the present Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  

The window is a well-known memento of Shaw and the Fabian Society and has been frequently reproduced in books on these subjects.