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Roland François Lack as Saint Jerome

Roland François Lack's birthday is on Saint Jerome's day. Saint Jerome was the translator of the bible. He is also the one who removed a thorn from a lion's foot, said lion becoming a faithful friend thereafter. An intellectual, Saint Jerome's cutting wit made him not always that popular with his fellow scholars/monks. As he was profoundly absent minded, and one assumes short sighted, his 'friends' decided to get back at him by planting a blue dress in his room. Next morning, Saint Jerome dressed in a hurry to go to mass, flinging on the first clothes he could find (one again concludes that tidiness was not his forte) and ran to church wearing the dress, whilst all the other monks snickered. RF Lack told me that the reason the lions in Trafalgar square look a bit weird is that the sculptor, Landseer, modelled their bodies on a cat for want of a better model. He sadly cannot recall where he heard this information so i cannot verify it. Now RF

Louis Figgis as Saint Louis

5x7 inches Saint Louis was Louis the IX of France. The only canonised French king, he was born on the 25th April 1214, died in 1270 and was canonised in 1297. His feast day is the 25th of August and he is the patron saint of France, hairdressers and embroiderers. He was a crusader and died during his second crusade outside Tunis, some say of bubonic plague, others dysentery. Saint Louis established the Sorbonne University and commissioned the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité in Paris where the crown of thorns is housed. The Sainte-Chapelle is my first 'wow' moment as a child when I saw it. Aged 10 my grand-parents took me on a trip to Paris where amongst other things I got frowned at by choir boys whilst eating the biggest lolly-pop ever in Notre-Dame. Having over the years been reluctantly dragged to many a Romanesque church as part of my cultural formation, the Gothic splendour of the Sainte-Chapelle took my by surprise. On the other island in the Seine, t

Siobhan Wanklyn as Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc first heard in early teens some fellow dead Saints talking at the bottom of her garden advising her to save France, etc. Her parents - who seemed to have been rather open minded - let her get on with it and off she went to try and convince slightly less open minded military men that she was up to snuff. After some persisting she did manage to convince them and was taken to the King whom she impressed. Her background had to be checked as it needed to be established that the King, his army and France were under divine protection as per her visions, rather that following the ranting of a witch. Her credential as a pure maiden of Christian virtue having been confirmed (hence the insistence on her virginity), she went off to war. She is likely to have been a standard bearer rather than an active combatant. As we all know, she was captured by the English and burned at the stake after being tried for heresy. Interestingly, the heresy bit was because she dressed as a b

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