It was 1975. The Most Rev. John Maury Allin was Presiding Bishop, the Episcopal Church had almost three million members, and on the same day in September that The Living Church published an editorial about breakaway churches, four women were ordained Episcopal priests in an unsanctioned service in Philadelphia. The weekly publication cost 35 cents.
That summer, Bryan Marshall was working in the steel trade and felt “so bored looking at thousands of tons of gray metal” that when he saw a job opening advertised in the Church Times, he applied. It was for a sales position at J. Wippell & Co. Ltd. He was 25 years old, born and raised in the English Midlands.
“I knew of Wippell and their fine reputation for the highest quality products for the church and clergy,” Marshall wrote in a reflection he shared with TLC about his time with the company. His future employer was founded by Joseph Wippell, who moved to Exeter in the late 18th century to start a career as a grocer and tea dealer. A desire to expand the business eventually led him beyond tea leaves and vegetables.
Peter Thomas, writing for the website Exeter Memories, recounts how Wippell quickly established himself in various trades, including church decoration. By 1847, he was described as a mercer and church decorator. After showing his company’s services at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, he renamed the business J. Wippell & Co. It became synonymous with vestments, robes, and clerical clothing for churches, cathedrals, and universities. The company also became a preeminent name in stained glass, with a design studio in Exeter.
Marshall was hired in 1975 for the company’s satellite office in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. He trained in England for three months, then sold his grand piano (netting about £300), traveled to London, and took his first transatlantic flight to John F. Kennedy Airport.
“I remember it being very cold,” Marshall told TLC, days before Christmas in 2025 and nearly 50 years after he arrived in the United States on December 6, 1975. He said he had always wanted a leather coat and used the piano money to buy one before leaving England. “It was absolutely useless, because I was freezing cold, and I realized that you don’t buy a leather coat, you need to get something which is really going to be warm,” he said. He was met at the airport by his boss, Basil Pritchard.
“After the harrowing travel experience over toll bridges and busy highways of Queens and Bronx, New York, finally over the George Washington Bridge into Bergen County, New Jersey, it was off to a whole new life,” Marshall said. “To suddenly turn up before Christmas, it was very hard, a bit of an emotional wreck to start with, but you had to kind of focus on the job and get settled in … and I did.”
Marshall came from a large family. He has a twin brother and three younger siblings. At one point, all of them were part of the church choir. “I think my parents were very glad to see us go off to church,” he said, laughing. The experience steeped him in the musical tradition. He played the organ and, at one point, felt called to the priesthood. “I prayed that so often … from when I was 13,” Marshall said. “Different things, certain things in the educational pattern, just didn’t happen.”
But moving to the United States, he believed, brought him into a different kind of calling—one that would take him across the country as he witnessed the history of the Episcopal Church unfold. He met seminarians who later became bishops. At one point, he even measured Archbishop Desmond Tutu for cassocks as the South African cleric prepared to receive the Nobel Prize.
‘A Masterful Product’
Upon arriving in the States, Marshall had to take a crash course in driving on the other side of the road. It was daunting, but necessary, as his job required extensive travel across dioceses to showcase Wippell’s offerings.
“Having spent the early weeks preparing, I was ready to hit the road in January with my first Wippell display at the Diocese of Newark Convention,” he said. When he set out for downtown Newark, a massive snowstorm hit. But his car was packed.
He had one rack displaying cassocks, tippets, preaching scarves, cassock albs, Eucharistic girdles, surplices, cottas, choir robes, vergers’ regalia, and academic robes, and another for chasubles, dalmatics, tunicles, copes, and stoles.
There were also stained-glass window panels, illuminated in both leaded and faceted glass—an element he would come to know intimately. Asked how many stained-glass installations he has worked on, Marshall said: “It’s got to be surely well over a thousand.”
His first stained-glass project was at St. Andrew’s Church in Newport News, Virginia. “Each window [has] a story to tell every generation,” Marshall said of every project. Throughout the process, from discussion to installation, “The Holy Spirit undoubtedly directs the hearts, minds, hands, and voices to combine in a masterful product to the glory of God!”
Every window was customized, with input from clergy and committees, and often from donors. Sometimes special requests were included—animals, cars, or institutional crests—usually as memorials. On one occasion, a basketball appeared in a rose window at a Georgia parish.
At St. Andrew’s, he worked with the Rev. Douglas Burgoyne and Eleanor Mabry, among others. When they asked how long he had been with Wippell and about his experience, “I replied it was a matter of weeks, but proudly stating that it was with full training in the Exeter Studios.” The subject of the west window was the “Te Deum,” a canticle he knew well.
Decades later, the Rev. Paul Nesta of St. David of Wales Church in Denton, Texas, contacted him about an east window using the same theme. Marshall had worked with the parish in the early 1980s on the windows now in the narthex. Those windows were installed in 1985 under the leadership of the Rev. Edward C. Rutland. Ten years later, Rutland wrote about them in TLC, saying Wippell had provided “richly colored and highly detailed windows, a translucence that reminds one of the Salisbury Cathedral.”
Rutland wrote that the four windows “indicate the history and variety of literature and learning in Anglicanism,” depicting the Venerable Bede, St. Hilda of Whitby, John Donne, and C.S. Lewis.
The new Denton window will be placed behind the altar. “It’ll be very, very focused on this wonderful subject” of the “Te Deum,” Marshall said.
Marshall has also worked with universities, including Sewanee and Duke University. He oversaw stained-glass installations at the former and provided furnishings such as an altar cross, candlesticks, and a processional cross for the latter.
In Sarasota, Florida, he worked with St. Boniface Church, providing all furnishings, including massive stained-glass windows—about 36 feet wide and 12 feet high—and a suspended altar cross.
“It was designed in a particular way so that it reflects the light of these stained-glass windows. It’s this wonderful sort of iridescent colored light playing in the windows,” Marshall said.
In a fall 2023 newsletter of the National Altar Guild Association, Jane Mercer of Province II wrote about the long relationship between the Church of St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and Wippell. “It is interesting to be aware of the many creations supplied by Wippell that enhance our worship and parish life,” Mercer wrote. “This long relationship is notable throughout our building, in our furnishings, stained-glass windows, and at the altar—all to the glory of God.”
Mercer wrote that most of the chapel’s stained-glass windows were designed and produced by the company, and that the Rev. Al Niese first worked with Marshall in 1993 on the Beatitudes windows in the nave.
“Bryan, the U.S. representative with Wippell for 48 years, has had a close relationship with St. John over this time, advising on many projects,” Mercer wrote.
In May 2023, J. Wippell & Co. announced its closure due to financial difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic. Marshall said the news was surprising. As it turned out, the Denton project—already in negotiation—will be the final Wippell window in the company’s more than 200-year history.
“Due to the amount of work involved thus far, it was agreed that all design expenses would be settled with Wippell and that the same artist agreed to complete the work, which would include the final Wippell hallmark,” Marshall said. “This window will be installed in 2026.”
Nesta confirmed that the window was designed while Wippell was still in business and that permission was granted to use the logo. “The window is due to be completed in February or March and installed in Easter. It will be blessed by Bishop Rob Price [of Dallas] on Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026,” Nesta said.
Wippell was acquired in June 2024 by Watts & Co., which continues to produce clerical attire, vestments, and church silver using Wippell’s original patterns. Watts & Co. has a dedicated Wippell showroom in London and CEO Robert Hoare told TLC that the company is exploring the possibility of relaunching Wippell stained glass.
Stained glass was not the only offering Marshall provided. “I’ve also done everything from … full choir robes to vestments in churches and altar frontals … anything that’s sort of textiles or wood, gilded wood,” he said. But it was stained glass that drew him most.
As Marshall prepares to see the Denton window installed, he describes its theme: “In the center of the window … you would have the seated Christ, usually seated, enthroned, and the rainbow at the back of him.”
“And then you have attendant saints, prophets, apostles, martyrs … so many coming from the early prophets and apostles and then the martyrs of the church and the early church fathers,” he said.
“It’s a whole wonderful conglomeration of saints … it’s really Christ in glory.”
Correction: The print version of this story failed to report Watts & Co.’s 2024 purchase of Wippell.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
