In the floor of the western Nave, just to the east of the central west door is a memorial paving stone to the Fire Watchers of Canterbury who, during WWII, manned strategic positions in the City including on the Cathedral roof.  

One third of medieval Canterbury was destroyed in German air raids between 1940-44. On 1st June 1942, during the so-called “Baedeker” air raid, said to be a reprisal bombing for the Allied 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne on 29^th May 1942, two bombs destroyed the Cathedral library to the north, and several houses to the south. The blast blew out much of the glass in the Southwest Transept. 

The Fire Watchers stationed on the roof dealt with each incendiary device, either by throwing it to the ground below using long handled shovels, or by dousing it with sand or water using a stirrup pump. The fact that the Cathedral did not suffer serious fire damage from the incendiaries that fell on the roof during this and subsequent air raids was very much down to the individual bravery of The Fire Watchers.

The font, a gift from Canon John Warner in 1639, was smashed by the Puritan iconoclasts only three years later in 1642. The broken pieces were collected up by William Somner (registrar to Archbishop William Laud) and hidden in his house. Following the Restoration of Charles II the font was repaired and reinstated in the Nave in 1663.

The restored font remained in the Nave until 1787, when the Dean George Horne‘s notorious Nave Clearance took place. It was returned to its original position in the Nave only in 1896, where it has remained ever since.

The font stands on a marble plinth, with the four figures of the Evangelists (Saint Matthew with an angel, Mark with a lion, Luke with a bull and John with an eagle) around the stem. Above this, there is a shallow, octagonal fluted bowl, on which a two-storey wooden cover rests, adorned with figures of the 12 Apostles, 8 on the lower storey, with the remaining 4 above. The cover rises to a pinnacle, on which stands a figure of Christ blessing little children and is raised by a metal pulley, which hangs from a bracket, bearing the royal arms of Charles II (1660/1685), marking his restoration in 1660. Under the cover, a dove represents the Holy Ghost.

This window is closely associated with Richard II (1377-1399), though he was deposed by his cousin Henry IV before it was completed, it is possible that he commissioned the window directly. The tracery border at the very top of the window contains the coats of arms of Richard and of his two wives, Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of France, whom he married by proxy in 1396 when she was six years old.

Though completed in 1405, the West window contains some much earlier and historically important 12th century portraits in stained glass, the Ancestors of Christ. The portraits – 13 from a series of 86 – were moved here from high up the eastern clerestories of the Choir and Trinity Chapel in 1799 to fill the space left after of much of the Cathedral’s stained glass was destroyed by Parliamentary troops and puritan iconoclasts in 1642-43, at the start of the English Civil War. 

The row of lights at the top of the main window, featuring seven kings, somehow escaped the damage inflicted on the lower two rows and is thought to be part of the window’s original stained glass. The ‘eighth king’ in the middle of the second row is a modern reproduction c.1925. 

 In the centre of the bottom row of the window is the famous depiction of the fallen Adam delving wearing a fleece, dated to around 1178. Until recently this work was generally regarded as the oldest stained glass portrait in England – though art historian Prof Madeline Caviness has suggested, as long ago as 1987, that four of the Ancestors seemed to belong stylistically to an earlier period than those in the rest of the series. Recent spectroscopic examination of the portrait of Nathan (using a handheld “Windolyser”) in the Great South Window has confirmed this hypothesis, and Nathan is now dated to 1130-1160 i.e. before the fire of 1174 that destroyed most of the Choir and Trinity Chapel.

This analysis strongly suggests that the similarly styled portraits of Rehoboam (ROBOAS) and his son Abijah (ABIAS) in the second row from the bottom of this window should also be dated to 1130-60, making them among the oldest surviving stained glass portraits anywhere in the world.