My thanks go to Christine Mason who has provided this week’s Bygone Salisbury. Christine is one of the speakers at the history festival happening at the end of August.

The Walton Canonry at 69, Cathedral Close, now has a blue plaque celebrating the artist Rex Whistler, 1905-1944 and his brother Laurence, 1912 – 2000, the glass engraver. 

Rex took the lease on the Walton Canonry in 1938 and installed his parents there. 

As war loomed he intended to live and work permanently in Salisbury, where he would be near his close friends Edith Olivier at Wilton, Stephen Tennant at Wilsford and Cecil Beaton at Ashcombe.

At the outbreak of World War II Rex refused to be considered for a position as an official war artist, and instead volunteered for the Welsh Guards, where he was accepted into the 2nd Armoured Division, and began training as a tank commander on Salisbury Plain, stationed at Codford St Mary.   

After further training in Yorkshire, the Armoured Division finally sailed from Portsmouth to Normandy on June 28, 1944 and went into action on July 18. 

Rex was killed by a mortar shell within the first hour, and so his longed-for wish to live in Salisbury was never fulfilled.

His work was wide-reaching, including, but not only, portraits, theatre design, book illustration and advertisements, but he was most renowned for his murals, notably Plas Newydd in Anglesey and the restaurant of Tate Britain, but locally his final mural can be seen at Mottisfont Abbey.

There is a tiny paint pot, brushes and a cigarette painted high on the wall near the ceiling on the day war was declared, indicating that he would return to complete the mural, which was not to be.

As a memorial Laurence engraved a glass prism encased in a lantern and placed in a side chapel in the cathedral.

As it revolves it shows the cathedral and the Walton Canonry.

Tickets for Christine Mason’s talk on Sunday 27th August available from the History and Rocketship Bookshops.