AS a boy Christopher McCall watched the creation of the Water Garden. The Hampshire Chronicle has reported in recent weeks that the future of the garden is uncertain after its sale on the open market. Here, Christopher McCall QC recalls the creator of the garden, the then-city MP Sir Peter Smithers, who served from 1950-1964...

AT a time when the Water Garden to the east of the Close is coming under the microscope it is perhaps worth remembering who it was who brought about this marvel.

At the time Peter (later Sir Peter) Smithers was the MP for Winchester, a seat which he had held since 1950 after an earlier period as a district Councillor, and he lived in Colebrook House.

The gardens of Colebrook House were bisected by a little stream flowing from the direction of the Cathedral; beyond the garden wall on the other side of Abbey Passage were four small houses and the stream passed under them. They were condemned by the city council in the 1950s as unfit for human habitation. Sir Peter bought the site and demolished the houses to open up a new view of the Cathedral with a rectangular pool in which it was reflected: a delight for the public and a continuation of the theme of his own private garden.

A distinguished plantsman, he laid out the Water Garden with care both as to its architecture and its planting. In this he was helped by the then Cathedral Architect Wilfred Carpenter Turner (whose wife Barbara was not only a noted local historian and city councillor but also one of the founders of the Winchester Preservation Trust, the forerunner of the City of Winchester Trust of the present day).

The result of this collaboration is there for all to see, a fine memorial to someone who served the City well. His most notable achievement for the constituency was to torpedo a plan to create a vast reservoir underneath the City for the storage of gas, something which in more enlightened times must seem an unthinkable folly, but was then regarded as a perfectly acceptable way to treat one of England’s finest cathedral cities. Sir Peter led a formidable alliance into battle and forced the Government into what was described in an obituary as a “humiliating defeat”; yet so far from being disowned by his party he was soon after appointed a Foreign Office minister.

It would be wrong however to think of Sir Peter as no more than a politician with a love of gardens. His wartime career took him from the navy and MI6 into diplomacy: politics followed, in the course of which he served briefly as UK representative on the UN General Assembly, before being appointed Secretary General of the Council of Europe in 1964. In that position he was able to pursue his vision of an Europe of independent states (and towards the end of his life he watched the creation of the Eurozone with some distaste). It was perhaps this approach to Europe that led Mr Heath to oppose his being given a peerage as recommended by Harold Wilson; at all events Sir Peter accepted an invitation from the Swiss government to take up residence in Switzerland where he built another wonderful garden in the hills above Lake Lugano.

In later life he received awards for his superb photographs of plants and his contribution to horticulture as well as the Alexander von Humboldt Gold medal for nature conservation.

It is typical of the man that the nearest he came to writing an autobiography was the publication of his book, Adventures of a Gardener. In that book, which contains fascinating accounts of his service during the war and displays to the full his love of plants, he told the tale of the creation of the Water Garden, and of his replanting of trees in the Cathedral Close; it is prefaced by a charming account of a neighbour telling Sir Peter how he had seen a ghost emerge from a wall of Colebrook House where a century before there had been a door. It was plainly a benign ghost for Sir Peter loved his time in Winchester.

Who knows now – perhaps there is another benign spirit watching over the Water Garden by which Sir Peter would surely have wanted to be remembered by the citizens of Winchester.

Christopher McCall QC