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What's onVisiting York Minster.
Visit2025 marks 100 years since the Five Sisters Window was rededicated as a memorial to women who died in the First World War.
A storied artwork
The Five Sisters Window is a storied but often overlooked artwork; its grisaille (grey) glass makes it strikingly different to other windows in York Minster. Completed around 1250, the window is made up of five lancets, each over 16 metres high and 1.5 metres wide.
The finely painted clear glass is set into geometric designs with jewel-like points of uncoloured glass making the distinctive pattern.
Image reference: SC Pamph 133/32: Views of York Minster, 1861
The vision
The inspiration for the memorial came from a vision Helen Little had in November 1922.
She described a dream where she saw her two little sisters, both of whom had died in childhood, standing hand in hand in the North Transept, one beckoning to her, the other pointing upwards to the Five Sisters Window. She saw the window move slowly backwards as if on hinges, revealing a garden. She looked down and saw that both her little sisters were pointing upwards to the window.
She arose in her sleep and cried out:
‘The Sisters window for the sisters’.
The appeal
Helen Little witnessed the ‘untiring devotion’ of women during the war while in Egypt with her husband, Colonel Charles Blakeway Little. She explained: “Our hearts fly back to our splendid brothers who gave their lives […] But where is there any adequate national memorial to those our sisters?”.
A public appeal to raise the £3000 for its restoration as a memorial was started by Helen Little and Almyra Gray in 1922 following Helen Little’s vision.
In a letter to The Times, published in 1933 after her death, she explained the Five Sisters Window had, since her first visit to York Minster in 1909, held a ‘quaint simplicity, quiet dignity and lofty purity [which] has appealed to me irresistibly.’
Image reference: D10/F: costs of restoration, York Minster Clerk of Works
Success!
Within weeks of its launch, the appeal had attracted 32,000 subscribers and raised more than the £3000 needed for its restoration.
The restored window was unveiled on 24 June 1925 by the Duchess of York in the presence of 800 relatives of the women it commemorates.
The roll of honour
The names of the 1,514 women commemorated are inscribed on oak panels on the north side of St Nicholas’s Chapel. This memorial includes Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by a German firing squad in 1915 for helping 200 Allied soldiers to escape from German-occupied Belgium.
The window was removed for protection during the Second World War. When it was reinserted, a special service of welcome was held, in which women who died in service during the First and Second World Wars were remembered.
Image reference: YM Old Photos/d
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