The Old Un's Notes: Church Kneelers. By Harry Mount

Is there anything more heart-warming than a church kneeler?

And now this most British of things has found its biographer in the shape of Elizabeth Bingham, the leading authority on Anglican church kneelers and founder of the website parishkneelers.co.uk.

Bingham’s new book, Kneelers: The Unsung Folk Art of England and Wales, includes some of the loveliest kneelers ever made, including the one pictured (right).

It also tells the story of the kneeler. The earliest surviving examples go back to the early-17th century: two Turkey-work kneelers for Wadham College, Oxford, one in honour of the college’s founders, Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, the other for James I.

Since then, kneelers have come in all materials, including, in 1915, Rexine – that familiar red fake leather. All was well until it was discovered that the ingredients of the fabric included cellulose nitrate, a low-powered explosive.

The Coronation in 1953 relaunched a boom in kneelers. Wildlife and plants became popular subjects, as did local pubs, shops, castles and factories. One features the slip road to the A14.

Elizabeth Bingham noticed a decline in kneelers in the 1980s – exacerbated by a decline in churchgoers and a decline in those who kneel in church. In Derby Cathedral, 1,500 canvas-work kneelers are in store. In many parish churches, kneelers have even been binned.

‘Modernising clerics are removing pews in favour of chairs,’ Bingham writes. ‘Few chairs are designed to accommodate kneelers. Only small contortionists can manage to kneel in the rows of chairs in Westminster Abbey’s transepts.’

Here’s hoping the Abbey will be crammed with kneelers, and people kneeling on them, for King Charles’s Coronation, however much they must contort themselves!