Assisted Suicide and the Cheapening of Human Dignity

A quick note to record my dismay and sorrow at the passing through its second reading in the House of Commons of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last Friday, 29th November, by 330 votes to 275.  Although the Bill is not yet law, it suddenly brings us alarmingly close to permitting assisted suicide in this country for the first time.

I know that many of the Bill’s supporters are motivated by a just desire to alleviate suffering, but the ease with which assisted suicide has been alighted upon as the answer — as opposed to improved palliative care, or sustained maintenance of health provision — is alarming.  The slippery slope, though a cliché, is perfectly real, and there are appalling stories from Canada and the Low Countries about euthanasia being granted on the grounds of treatable or manageable conditions such as depression or anorexia — and of its being extended to children.  Campaigners for disabled people are understandably alarmed by and fiercely opposed to the Bill, and worried about its likely effect on social attitudes.

There is also, as ever, an emphasis on the idea of dying ‘with dignity’: on our own terms, within our own control, while sentient and in possession of our faculties.  This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of the secular society that we are building, but it fails to perceive the wisdom of the older, Christian vision that we are losing: that our human dignity has a deeper, firmer, more reliable foundation than we readily perceive; that it is not diminished one jot by suffering or infirmity.  The fading of this belief will have consequences graver than our leaders now realise.

Robert Jenrick MP put it like this:

My last point is not about how we can improve the Bill; it is about something that we can never resolve as a House.  The Bill is not so much a slippery slope as a cliff edge.  When we walk out of this Chamber, or out of the gates of this building tonight, we will, in a way, walk into a different country if the Bill passes.  There will be different conversations around kitchen tables.  There will be different conversations had by couples lying in bed at night, or on quiet country walks where people talk about difficult things.  They will not be conversations that make our country a better place.

More important, there will be people who do not speak about these things at all.  There will be imperceptible changes in behaviours.  There will be the grandmother who worries about her grandchildren’s inheritance if she does not end her life.  There will be the widow who relies on the kindness of strangers who worries — it preys on her conscience.  There will be people — we all know them in our lives — who are shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them.  I know those people.  I can see them in my mind’s eye.  They are often poor.  They are vulnerable.  They are the weakest in our society.  And they look to us, to Parliament, to represent them, to support them, to protect them.  In their interests, I am going to vote against the Bill today.  Sometimes we must fetter our freedoms.  We the competent, the capable, the informed sometimes must put the most vulnerable in society first.

Once again I feel this sense of a great cheapening of everything around us: of language, of our sense of the value of human life, of the bonds of duty and of love that exist between us.  The journalist Tim Stanley quoted a ‘very clever’ friend of his who pointed out that the Bill divides the ‘libertarians from the conservatives and the progressives from the socialists’.  Certainly, the proponents of the Bill seem as keen on promoting individual liberty as on lessening suffering: the idea that we must always be able live life on our own terms, even to the point of death, seems to come foremost.  That so many of our political leaders seem to believe human life to be negotiable or mutable at its end, as well as its beginning, is profoundly dismaying.

I am very grateful to my own MP for having voted against this Bill, as she has against similar Bills in the past.  And the Catholic Church, led from the front by Cardinal Nichols, has upheld the sanctity of life very strongly.  It has been pointed out that that a significant number of MPs were undecided when they voted ‘Aye’, wanting to have a longer debate, and that only twenty-eight MPs need to change their minds at the Third Reading for the bill to fail.  It is to be hoped and prayed for that this comes to pass.

I might as well say that I am proud to belong to a Church which stands up for all human life without question, even inconvenient human life — especially inconvenient human life; which says, to those who worry that they are a burden, who feel undignified, who question even their own worth, ‘No.  Your God-given dignity is absolute and inviolable.  We will defend it if all others deny it, even if you deny it yourself.’  My hope is that others will see the wisdom and love that underlie this stance, and will be moved to adopt it.

Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth has put things very frankly, in a pastoral message to his diocese: 

This legislation […] makes one thing crystal clear.  Britain is no longer a Christian country.  To be a Christian in future will not be easy, if ever it was.  More and more, as in ages past, we will stand out from the crowd and from others in our society who see human life, its dignity and value, in a radically different way. 

It is my hope that God will give us the grace to live our discipleship ever more authentically so that the true beauty of our Catholic faith might become even more evident.  I pray that the splendor veritatis, the beauty of the Truth, the hope it gives, especially to the vulnerable, and the Gospel vision of the human person — fallen but redeemed, an incarnate spirit called to live a good life here on earth and one day to be with God for ever in Paradise — will shine out for all to see.

Prayer, then, that the Bill will fall in favour of greater care of the sick and dying, and for courage in any case.  And please write to your M.P.!

Sir James MacMillan: the Kyrie from his 2000 setting of the Mass, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under Martin Baker.

‘The Legion of the Living salutes the Legion of the Dead’

From the Remembrance Service at the War Memorial in Mitcham, south London, 10th November, 2024:

Then shall be said by Siobhain McDonagh MP:

‘The Legion of the Living salutes the Legion of the Dead.’

All: ‘We will not break faith with ye.’

[…]

Chaplain: Will you strive for all that makes for peace?

All: We will.

Will you seek to heal the wounds of war?

We will.

Will you work for a just future for all humanity?

We will.

The Remembrance Parade returns from the Lower Green, Mitcham, south London, 10th November,  2024.  Just out of shot, dozens of Air and Sea Cadets, Scouts, Guides, Cubs and Beavers, all turned out impeccably, completed the procession.

Fanfare for Allhallowstide

An adaptation by Diocesan Design of the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece (probably by Fra Angelico) 

Reposted as tradition by now dictates:

     How shall we pilgrims keep the law of love?
  How shall we follow where our Lord has led?
  The saints know how: they point the way ahead;
  They watch the road to Heaven from above.

  The saints were young and old, were great and small;
  However they were called, one truth they knew:
  Whatever works of woe the world may do,
  The Lord shall never let His faithful fall.

  So we on earth, we should be saints as well;
  We wayward wayfarers whom they invite
  To blaze with love; to set the world alight;
  To join them in the joy in which they dwell.

  As we must one day die, they also died,
  But live now as we hope we too shall live.
  To all our friends in Heaven let us give
  Our joyful greetings at Allhallowstide!

Prayers of the Faithful

We pray that in your love you hear this prayer,
Although your grace is cried for everywhere.
To save us from despair, we need you near us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because we have no shame in ceaseless sins;
Because temptation wins, and wins, and wins,
We need your patient strength to stop and steer us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because we speak too much; because, though weak,
We are not meek, and scorn what we should seek,
Invert our thirst for others to revere us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Because it is so certain that we doubt,
Forgetting what the faithless are without,
And know not why, of trustless anguish clear us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

We pray that in your mercy you forgive
All those who mock how you want us to live;
And those who hear us speak your name, and jeer us:
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Remind us of your warmth too close to touch:
We are so poor, and yet are loved so much;
Feel worthless, yet are priceless.  Let that cheer us.
    Lord, graciously hear us.

Finished 24th June, 2010.  First published in Oremus, the parish magazine of Westminster Cathedral, Edition 208 (November 2018), p. 15, and reprinted here with permission.

Sunday morning Mass at the parish church of Saint Martin, Meudon, Île-de-France.

Lincolnshire Towers: St. James’, Louth

For Lincolnshire Day (1st October), a third article in the ‘Lincolnshire Towers’ series.

St. James’ church, Louth, Lincolnshire, August 2021.

They could not have known how poignant their triumph would prove.  On 13th September 1515, the eve of the feast of the Holy Cross, the people of Louth in Lincolnshire gathered to see the new steeple of their parish church crowned with a magnificent weathercock:

William Ayleby, parish priest, with many of his brethren priests, there present, hallowed the said weathercock and the stone that it stands upon, and so conveyed upon the said broach [spire]; and then the said priests singing Te Deum Laudamus with organs, and the kirk-wardens garred ring all the bells, and caused all the people there being to have bread and ale, and all the loving of God, our Lady, and all saints. [1]  

Theirs was an achievement resplendent with superlatives.  Here, in the far north-east of their county, on the marshward and seaward side of the Wolds, and out on a limb from the central ‘limestone belt’ of England’s main spire-building regions, they had raised the highest tower of any parish church in the land, at 287 feet 6 inches, and one of the slenderest spires, with an apex angle of only 9 degrees 7 minutes.  To this day the tower remains the third-highest extant medieval structure in Britain, after the cathedral towers of Salisbury (404') and Norwich (320') [2].  But the superlatives are not confined to facts and figures alone.  The tower’s weightless loveliness has entranced the eye of all from Pugin to Betjeman.  ‘It rises up stage after stage of impossible beauty,’ wrote Betjeman. [3]  Julian Flannery, in Fifty English Steeples, his magisterial architectural survey of medieval church towers, writes lyrically of ‘this most beautiful of English steeples’, with its ‘sublime verticality and soaring silhouette’.  For him it is ‘the apotheosis of English steeple-building’. [4]

St. James’ church seen from Westgate, August 2021.

The townsfolk that Holy Rood Eve could hardly have known how brief would be the fullness of their triumph, hardly have imagined that their tower would prove a final great masterwork of the English Gothic architecture and the medieval age.  ‘England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth and the arrival of the English Reformation,’ says Flannery,  ‘Within a generation […] medieval England had passed into history.’ [5]  Two decades later it was at this very church of St. James, at the foot of this very tower, and in part precisely because of its beauty, that one of the most violent episodes of the early English Reformation was to unfold.

From Queen Street.

There had been a church on this site since Saxon times but, as in so many parishes of many-towered Lincolnshire, the region’s great wool-wealth was put to repeated enlargements and embellishments.  From the early fifteenth century the entire church was largely rebuilt, and in the middle of the century work began on the great tower.  One remarkable aspect of the tale is that the start of construction can be dated almost at a glance: whereas the first few courses of stone are in white Yorkshire Magnesian limestone, only a few feet up there is a visible change, to the buff-grey Ancaster stone that constitutes the rest of the building.  The generally-accepted explanation for this switch is that the supply from across the Humber was disrupted by the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455 [6].  The testimony of numerous elder townsfolk (‘Thomas Bradley, mercer… Agnes, the wife of Robert English Barker… with many more…’) who at the time of the tower’s completion claimed to remember the laying of the foundation stone, adds corroborative weight to this dating. [7]

The 86ft-high vault beneath the tower…
‘one of the most stupendous volumes found
in any English church,’ says Flannery.  
The ceiling represents under a third of the
tower’s total height: above it soar a further
two hundred feet’s worth of belfry and 
spire.

Like the Gothic masters themselves, Flannery concerns himself equally with technicalities and aesthetics of construction — with art and science alike.  Here at Louth, he believes that, at the culmination of the lessons of three and a half centuries of Gothic steeple building, the art and the science were at last more or less perfected.   ‘Louth remains a seamless distillation of all that had been learned in the art of steeple-building during the preceding two centuries of evolution,’ he wrote.  ‘Faultless in conception and faultless in execution, the tower and spire of St. James’ Church form one of the most sublime achievements of English architecture.’ [8]  Beauty and elegance of design are married to economy and rigour of construction, both serving each other seamlessly: there is simply no tension between form and expression.  For example, as Betjeman puts it, the apparently weightless tower ‘seems to float’ above the town and surrounding countryside, yet is strong enough to support the eighth-heaviest peal of bells in the country in a belfry thrust ninety-two feet up into the air. [9]

The ‘Wild Mare’ treadmill high in the tower.

By 1501 the main tower was complete, and work began on the amazingly slender spire. One consequence of Louth’s relatively late construction is that important artefacts of the building project itself have survived, not least the First Churchwardens' Book of Louth, with its careful records of progress and expenditure.  We know that John Cole was the name of the master mason who began work on the spire, and it is to him that Flannery gives the main credit for the achievement.  Another remarkable survival is the wooden treadmill, or the ‘Wild Mare’ as it is called, by which building materials were hoisted the height of the tower: a workaday relic of an age about to vanish.

‘England was never more beautiful’… If some had witnessed the start of the building of the tower in 1455, how many more, watching its completion would live to see its fate in the next two turbulent decades?  For in 1536 it was in this church and on this day, October 1st, that William Ayleby’s less fortunate successor, Thomas Kendall, was to preach a sermon with momentous consequences.  At Vespers he spoke against the reforms of Henry VIII following the Act of Supremacy two years earlier, which were now encroaching even on Lincolnshire: and he warned the congregation, gathered now not in joy but in trepidation and anger, that there was soon to be a visitation of the church by the authorities.

From Upgate.

His hearers had some idea of what might be coming.  Only a month earlier Louth Abbey had been dissolved, the land given to a friend of King Henry’s and the treasures dispersed.  Did a similar fate await their own church?  Louth, as we know, was rich: there were chantries richly-endowed by the town guilds; there was plentiful church plate and silver.  Local historian and verger Chris Marshall records that among much else the church possessed a shrine of enamelled silver weighing 435 ounces and three silver crosses perhaps as heavy as 237 ounces.  The church as a whole was a thing of such beauty as they could hardly have borne to see defaced.   As Marshall says, ‘The men of Louth were justly proud of their church and it was clear that St. James’ had much to lose.’ [10].  

Father Kendall could hardly have wished for swifter action than what followed: there and then the commoners, led by the shoemaker Nicholas Melton (alias ‘Captain Cobbler’), seized the keys from the church-wardens, rang the bell to summon the townspeople, and set up a watch all night to guard the church’s treasures.  Thus was sparked the Lincolnshire Rising, which, though brief, was to prove one of the most serious manifestations of popular opinion against Henry.

From Eastgate.

Events were to spiral rapidly out of control.  The following day, Monday 2nd, was supposed to be the annual Michaelmas Court; John Heneage, the steward of the Bishop of Lincoln, was pre-emptively seized on arrival and made to swear an oath to the commoners.  Dr. John Frankish, the Bishop's Registrar, was also seized, and as the crowd grew restive he thought it judicious to climb the market cross for safety, though some books and papers he dropped were snatched away and burned.  Two Commissioners working for Thomas Cromwell were fetched from nearby Legbourne and put in the stocks.  The unrest rapidly spread to neighbouring towns: Horncastle, Caistor, Spilsby were up in arms.  They mustered at Orford: they were marching on Lincoln.  The Rising had begun.  Beacons were lit on the Wolds to alert the marshes to the east, and by the Humber to raise Yorkshire.  And then things really turned ugly: Dr. John Raynes, the Bishop’s Chancellor, though ill, was dragged from his sick-bed at Old Bolingbroke, taken to Horncastle, and beaten to death.

By Friday 6th a sizeable rebel force were encamped at Newport on the edge of Lincoln, reinforced by a contingent from Boston and the southern towns twenty miles to the south.   Chris Marshall suggests that a total of ten thousand men were involved.  News came of trouble in Yorkshire — the beginning of the longer and ultimately more serious rebellions known as the Pilgrimage of Grace — and meanwhile, a list of grievances was prepared.  This was sent to the King on Monday 9th.

King Henry did not tarry, replying two days later, not mincing his words:

Concerning choosing of counsellors, I never have read, heard nor known, that princes’ counsellors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people; nor that they were persons meet or of ability to discern and choose meet and sufficient counsellors for a prince. How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience, to find fault with your prince for the electing of his counsellors and prelates, and to take upon you, contrary to God’s law and man’s law, to rule your prince whom ye are bound to obey and serve with both your lives, lands, and goods, and for no worldly cause to withstand. [11]

It is, I think, greatly to the credit of the people of Lincolnshire that they should be thought ‘brute and beastly’ by the likes of King Henry VIII.  But the quarrels that subsequently broke out among the rebels were to prove the Rising’s undoing.  The gentry decided to surrender; then on Thursday 12th the King’s men arrived, under the Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s brother-in-law, and five thousand strong.  Lincoln was never to be sacked: the commoners were sent home — though not without first being ordered to leave their weapons behind.

From George Street to the south.

Unfortunately for the rebels, the law was still to run its course.  Having secured Lincoln and rounded up an initial batch, the Duke of Suffolk and his men were soon in Louth to deal out punishment.  ‘Captain Cobbler’ was one of fifteen ring-leaders arrested; William Moreland, a former monk of the dissolved Louth Park Abbey, was another.  Thomas Kendall had fled to Coventry, but his letters back home were intercepted, and he too was arrested.  Of those sentenced to death, many were hanged in Louth in March 1537, but Kendall was among those taken to the Tower of London and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 25th March 1537. [12]

Plaque opposite St. James’ Church marking the Lincolnshire Rising.

The townspeople’s fears for their church were to be vindicated.  The guilds and the chantries, the shrines and the ‘lights’ of the candles before the images, were all dissolved and removed.  Yet when in 2006 a public vote was held to decide the date of the proposed Lincolnshire Day, it was today, October 1st, the anniversary of Thomas Kendall’s defiant sermon, that was chosen.  Memories are long in this proud and spirited county, guardian of the last secrets of Deep England, and they have not faded yet.

References:

[1] The First Churchwardens’ book of Louth, quoted in Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016), p. 467.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3], John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011), p.405.

[4] Flannery, ibid., p. 9, p. 471.

[5] Ibid. p. 9.

[6] Ibid. p. 460.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. p. 9.

[9] John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011), p. 405)

[10] Chris Marshall, Occasional Papers, 4: St James’ Church Louth and the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536.  (Louth: District Church Council of the Parish Church of St. James’, 2019), p.10.

[11] Claire Ridgway, ‘4 October 1536 – The Lincolnshire Rising’, published 2016 on the website of the Tudor Society, retrieved September 2022 from <https://www.tudorsociety.com/4-october-1536-the-lincolnshire-rising/>.

[12] Chris Marshall, ibid. p. 4.

Principal sources:

• Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016)
• Claire Ridgway, ‘4 October 1536 – The Lincolnshire Rising’, published 2016 on the website of the Tudor Society, retrieved September 2022 from <https://www.tudorsociety.com/4-october-1536-the-lincolnshire-rising/>
• Chris Marshall, Occasional Papers, 4: St James’ Church Louth and the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536’.  (Louth: District Church Council of the Parish Church of St. James’, 2019) 
• John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011).

Celebrating Ernest Tomlinson’s centenary

Today is the centenary of the birth of Ernest Tomlinson (1924–2015), the prolific Lancastrian composer of light orchestral music.  He deserves to be remembered not only for his own elegantly-crafted and uplifting music, but for his defence of the entire genre of light music when in the 1960s it fell, or was pushed, so emphatically out of fashion.  The story of his rescuing of music scores thrown out wholesale by the BBC as the Corporation of the time rushed headlong to follow new trends, and of his subsequent foundation of the Library of Light Orchestral Music in a barn on his farm at Longridge in Lancashire, contributed to my own decision to train as a professional archivist.  Having steered the Light Music Society through the lean years of the late twentieth century — during which, for some decades, there was no light music at all on BBC radio, despite, or perhaps because of, its former ubiquity — he lived to see something of a revival in its fortunes.  This remains visible not least in the continued thriving of the Light Music Society (whose membership I have enjoyed for nearly a decade), and the Library’s recent move from Longridge to the Victoria Hall in Bolton.

(There are more details of Tomlinson’s battle for light music in this biography, and also this tribute that I wrote shortly after his death in 2015).

His music helped me through the revision for my final university exams, and having written to him to tell him this, I received a very warm letter in reply, which I will treasure always.

On Friday 27th September, BBC Radio 3’s ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ will be a celebration of his music, along with others of a similar style — including Ruth Gipps!  

‘Miranda’, from an adaptation of The Tempest

The Sudden Straight Face

It is strange that one of the saddest songs in the English language should have been written by two comedians.  Michael Flanders and Donald Swann are still best known for their light comic and satirical pieces — ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘The Gnu’ or ‘The Gas-Man Cometh’ — but when they turned their satirical eye to the Beeching Axe, the mass closure from 1963 of about a third of the British passenger railway network, they produced, in ‘The Slow Train’, for many people the definitive lament for these mostly rural branch lines, and for the way of life that was lost with them.

The song bears all the Flanders and Swann hallmarks — the deft word-play, the affectionate satire, the sense of the ludicrous — but the mood is utterly different from usual.  Seing the damage that Beeching was doing, suddenly they were serious — and indeed, in the live recording, made sixty years ago when it was all actually happening, there is, apart from a few appreciative titters at a pun or a station name, no laughter at all, only rapt silence.

This complete change of key seems to me utterly audacious.  The audience had paid for comedy, after all, yet here suddenly was tragedy, an entirely sincere farewell to a familiar feature of the national landscape, to a distinctive characteristic of our society, destroyed by human folly, with only the word-play providing the thinnest veil of wit.  Audacious, but thoroughly effective: first we are puzzled that we can’t find anything to laugh at, disconcerted to think that we might have missed a joke.  Then the inverse feeling: surprise, in the pit of the stomach, as we realise that we really are being addressed seriously.  There is a sense of having had a narrow escape, as if one has nearly walked giggling into a full and silent church.   (They’re being serious, and we thought it was going to be a joke!).  

And yet it is still satire, for Flanders and Swann had noticed, along with others since, the totally inadvertent poetry of Section 1 Part 3 of Dr. Beeching’s report, the ‘List of Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ (in England, though the destruction in Wales and Scotland was just as wanton).  Buried deep behind the oily bureaucratic euphemism of the report’s title, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, is a list that has been called some of the most moving poetry in the language — or are ‘like names on a war memorial’, as the satirist Ian Hislop has said:

Abbey Town

Acrow Halt 

Acton Central 

Addingham 

Adlestrop 

Ainsdale 

Airmyn 

Aldeburgh 

Aldermaston 

Aldridge 

Alford Town (Lincs.) 

Alfreton and South Normanton 

Alresford (Hants.) 

Alrewas 

Altofts and Whitwood 

Alton Towers 

Ambergate 

Andover Town 

Apperley Bridge …

Of course, it is bleakly amusing that those unable to perceive the true value of railways, their marriage of elegance and efficiency, had by their very tin ear betrayed themselves in accidentally producing such moving poetry — fifth on the list is Adlestrop itself! — and Flanders and Swann, simply by transforming it into a serious song, throw this irony into definition.  They are punning away as usual, ‘The sleepers sleep…’ but the music itself has all the pathos of a folk-song.

The British passenger railway network, 1963 (left) and 1984 (right)

The Sudden Straight Face had another strategic advantage in that particular era, and that was the strength it lent to anyone making a point that was easily mocked.  This was the age of the satire boom, satire far more biting than Michael Flanders’. Then, as now, mockery was one of the vandalisers’ chief weapons; anyone who objected to the sweeping away of old things was opening themselves up to a round of scoffing (“Backward!  Nostalgist!  Move with the times!”).  But by proving that they could make an audience laugh, and indeed by laughing at themselves, they could build up a kind of credit with their wit, to be expended in an outbreak of earnestness like ‘The Slow Train’.

The person who knew this as well as Flanders and Swann was, of course, the poet John Betjeman — the man who in some ways ought to have written ‘The Slow Train’.  (In fact, my friend Maolsheachlann justifiably said he was ‘flabbergasted’ I hadn’t mentioned it when I wrote a few years ago about Betjeman’s poem ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’).  Reading A. N. Wilson’s biography of Betjeman reminded me of the occasion in 2018 when I had passed through the Halt, a tiny station of two short platforms on the outskirts of Warminster in Wiltshire.  At the time I wrote that Betjeman’s poem seemed to capture a paradoxical seam that runs through all of his work: irrepressible humour on the one hand hand, and sincere, vulnerable sorrow on the other.  It applied to his life as well: Wilson paints a picture of a man distraught at the ruination of England, acutely conscious of his personal flaws and ‘afraid of being found out’, who nevertheless craved merriment and silliness, and would gleefully assign nicknames to his friends, or throw his table-napkin over his face and howl with glee.  

John Betjeman and Flanders and Swann knew that they were operating in a culture of heavy cynicism.  Sincerity alone, from a standing start, was no good: this was precisely the age in which anyone speaking in defence of old things or high ideals would bring clanging mockery down around his ears.  But the Sudden Straight Face was their secret weapon.  First Betjeman poked fun at this tiny station, answering his own rhetorical question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open?”…

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,

Two and sometimes three

Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches

To Westbury, home for tea.”

As many as three passengers for a mile’s journey!  Clearly a vital transport interchange, we chuckle; good old Betjeman, silly old England.  But then in the final stanza comes this outburst: 

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,

And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol

Steam trains will return.

Betjeman’s work derives much of its poetic power from this contrast between the gleefully satirical and the ingenuous — in some circles embarrassing — earnestness.  The man is a great jester, as Wilson’s biography shows, but there are some things in this world so serious that they snuff out even the jester’s laughter.  This is why that plangent ‘horrible roads’ and the prophecy of the return of steam, a ripe, irresistible invitation for Sixties mockery, nevertheless withstands that mockery.  The Sixties Modernists stand primed to scoff at anyone avowing a sentimental attachment to this unprofitable station, but the poet has got there first — he has already laughed gently at its ridership of ‘two and sometimes three’ passengers, and has laughed at himself for loving it.  So the love, which is serious, has now been fired by clay; by pre-empting the jeers the poet has hardened his work to withstand and outlast hostility.

I think Betjeman employs this manoeuvre to greatest effect in his poem ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N’ (such a Betjemanian touch to give the postal district!).  Here he begins by relating a typical Betjeman church visit, beautifully written as always, but with a hint of self-deprecation of his own style:

With oh such peculiar branching and overreaching of wire

Trolley-bus standards pick their threads from the London sky

Diminishing up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire

Threads and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by

And, more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire

Bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high.

Stop the trolley-bus, stop! And here, where the roads unite

Of weariest worn-out London — no cigarettes, no beer,

No repairs undertaken, nothing in stock — alight;

But then the tone changes, and the poem more becomes earnest, and highly personal:

These were the streets they knew; and I, by descent, belong

To these tall neglected houses divided into flats.

Only the church remains, where carriages used to throng

And my mother stepped out in flounces and my father stepped out in spats

To shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong

And back in a country quiet with doffing of chimney hats.

Still there is the typical Betjeman detail, the evocation of details of the vanished past.  But now he has made himself vulnerable by writing of his parents, of the deeper, more personal connection that he has to this church.  And then he goes further.  The church is not merely an architectural curiosity, nor even a relic of family history or of a bygone age, but the House of God in which Betjeman is no passing visitor but an invited guest:

Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small

Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,

Is the Power that sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,

Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;

Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all —

Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.

So it is that the Sudden Straight Face allows Betjeman to do what I believe he generally struggled with, to write straightforwardly about his faith, in perhaps the most confident proclamation of faith he ever made (and it is nice to think that some of these lines were chosen to accompany his statue at London St. Pancras station in 2007).  By the protective layer of his self-deprecation he pre-empts any mockery or satire of these most personal things, his memories of his parents and his vulnerable faith.  Thus he shows how, even in an age of cynicism, sincerity, once whetted to a blade, cuts cleanly through cynical clinker with a strange and unequalled power.

And we, the audience, cannot deny the sincerity even to ourselves; it is almost as infectious as laughter.  By our uproarious laughter of a moment ago we have proven to each other that we have hearts — at least it has with this open, wholehearted humour of Betjeman and Michael Flanders, as opposed to the sniggering of modern comics.   If we have hearts, we have no need to pretend to be unmoved by sorrow and loss.  So it is, first by laughter and then by sighs, that we find companionship in each other.

More on ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park’  from the Rev. Malcolm Guite.

Rondel for Sea Sunday

The freight ferry MV Nord Pas-de-Calais setting out from Dover into a choppy English Channel, 11th August 2011.

A poem reposted according to tradition for Sea Sunday, an annual ecumenical day of prayer for seafarers, whose essential work and hard lives are often overlooked and forgotten. The Catholic charity for seafarers is Stella Maris, the ‘Apostleship of the Sea’, which was founded in Glasgow in 1920. 

Psalm 106 (107): 23–24 

These men see the works of the Lord

And his wonders in the deep; 

Little else they see who keep

Watch and faith with brothers’ accord.

Neither wealth nor fame they reap,

But they have a different reward:

These men see the works of the Lord

And his wonders in the deep.

They see more than log-books record:

What it is to watch slow, steep

Heaps of water leaping aboard;

They see tumble-tumult and broad 

Dazzling seas and comets’ sweep;

These men see the works of the Lord

And his wonders in the deep.

‘They that go down to the sea in ships’, words from the 106th Psalm set to music by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995).

Thoughts on Polling Day

Recently I have been trying to notice more, and appreciate, how nicely-kept some of the front gardens are around my part of south London.  In May and June particularly, their fresh colours have stood out against the brick and pebble-dash or arid drop-down driveways around them.  They stand out too against a broader backdrop of dullness, for around them is a generally a street, is a borough, is a city, is a country, is a continent, is a world, in which all sorts of things seem to be going downhill.  The town centre, for instance, is becoming noticeably more litter-strewn, more graffiti-spattered, emptier, less hospitable: we sense we are in decline.  And there are some things that seem to crystallise this decline.  One wet day in April a local pub, the Burn Bullock, a seventeenth-century coaching inn long neglected by its owners, was gutted by a fire so spectacular that local suspicions of foul play seem quite understandable.  There is much frustration at the negligence of the owners and the borough council’s seeming impotence in the matter.

And Britain, too, suffering a similar sense of decline, of the decay of public infrastructure, of a weakening of solidarity and a sense of the common good, of moral and social disillusionment, goes to the polls today.  With good reason many people are unhappy with the present government, dissatisfied with their record, and angry at the personal moral failures of its members, particularly during the crisis of the pandemic, and the indication of the polls is that they will be thrown out of office.

2024 is a year of many elections around the world, and ours is not the only anxious and fractious electorate with compelling reasons for its frustration.  In some places crisis has spilled over into catastrophe: war (both in those places whose names we know only too well, and also in others of which we hear little), drought (East Africa), economic collapse (Lebanon, Venezuela) and the persecution of minorities (China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and more).

We remain fortunate in this country that, flawed and skewed as it may be, we have a working democracy; that we can vote out an unpopular government, and that the verdict will be accepted.  Of course, in voting out a government we also need to vote in a new one, and, sanctimonious as it may sound, it is surely healthier to look for something to vote for, rather than the obvious things we might vote against — but this is harder than it sounds, and in this election the choice seems as narrow as ever.  Anyone asking how the parties will look after the weakest and most vulnerable — the disabled, the destitute, the elderly, the unborn, small children, those vulnerable to crime, genuine refugees, and the otherwise downtrodden — and also those less immediately vulnerable but still in precarity — renters, the lonely, young fathers and mothers, the indebted, the unhappily employed — will find slim pickings indeed.  Which of the parties will foster the common good and civic society?  Who will uphold marriage and family life, and the happiness of children?  Who has a competent answer to the twin problem of the energy crisis and our duty of stewardship to the natural world, our ‘common home’, and to people whose livelihoods bear the brunt of our over-consumption and waste?  Who will enable the police and the courts of law to apply justice (tempered with mercy, not excuse-making), to the scourge of crime, of drugs, of dangerous driving, of vandalism, of burglary, of robbery, of assault and of murder, so that the law-abiding can live in peace?  Who will manage the public finances prudently and with integrity?  Who is worthy of the stewardship of the extraordinary bequest of our country from generations past, or worthy of the responsibility to hand it on, at least intact if not improved, to the generations to come?  I am afraid I have found no clear answers.

I wonder if the main answer lies (and has always lain?) with us, with ordinary people.  To return to the suburban gardens — here they still are, little defiant oases, easily missed but there all the same, quiet but eloquent counter-witnesses.  Seeing them I realise that it is every day, not just polling-day, that we make a difference to our surroundings and our neighbours — and thereby to the world, however modestly.  After all, a front garden, too, is a kind of vote: a mark made for a cause, a cross planted in a box, with a spirit of hope for the future.

D-Day 80

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, Operation Overlord, on 6th June 1944: the first phase in the Allied invasion and liberation of Europe, and thus of final victory in the Second World War.

Four years ago, our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall.  Tested as never before in our history, in God’s providence we survived that test; the spirit of the people, resolute, dedicated, burned like a bright flame, lit surely from those unseen fires which nothing can quench.

Now once more a supreme test has to be faced.  This time, the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.  Once again what is demanded from us all is something more than courage and endurance; we need a revival of spirit, a new unconquerable resolve.  After nearly five years of toil and suffering, we must renew that crusading impulse on which we entered the war and met its darkest hour.  We and our Allies are sure that our fight is against evil and for a world in which goodness and honour may be the foundation of the life of men in every land.

That we may be worthily matched with this new summons of destiny, I desire solemnly to call my people to prayer and dedication.  We are not unmindful of our own shortcomings, past and present.  We shall ask not that God may do our will, but that we may be enabled to do the will of God: and we dare to believe that God has used our Nation and Empire as an instrument for fulfilling his high purpose.

After nearly five years of toil and suffering, we must renew that crusading impulse on which we entered the war and met its darkest hour.

I hope that throughout the present crisis of the liberation of Europe there may be offered up earnest, continuous and widespread prayer.  We who remain in this land can most effectively enter into the sufferings of subjugated Europe by prayer, whereby we can fortify the determination of our sailors, soldiers and airmen who go forth to set the captives free.

The Queen joins with me in sending you this message.  She well understands the anxieties and cares of our womenfolk at this time and she knows that many of them will find, as she does herself, fresh strength and comfort in such waiting upon God.  She feels that many women will be glad in this way to keep vigil with their menfolk as they man the ships, storm the beaches and fill the skies.

At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young or too old to play a part in a nationwide, perchance a worldwide, vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth.  If from every place of worship, from home and factory, from men and women of all ages and many races and occupations, our intercessions rise, then, please God, both now and in a future not remote, the predictions of an ancient Psalm may be fulfilled: ‘The Lord will give strength unto his people: the Lord will give his people the blessing of peace.’

The address of King George VI on D-Day, 6th June 1944, from <https://www.royal.uk/80th-anniversary-d-day-landings>.  Only with difficulty were he and the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, dissuaded from crossing the Channel to watch the landings for themselves.

Manifesto of the Suburban Romantics

Pollards Hill, south London

For years now and in countless emails my old friend Maolsheachlann (alias the Irish Papist) and I have been lamenting the state of poetry in the English-speaking world, or at least in Britain and Ireland.  Our main complaint has been simply that almost nobody is writing the sort of poetry that we want to read — musical poetry, poetry that rhymes and scans or which at least does not scorn tradition, which appeals as strongly to the heart as to the intellect, which essentially affirms human dignity, and from which the ordinary person can glean an intelligible meaning.

Bentley Rise, near Doncaster

The first edition of John Masefield’s Collected Poems sold 80,000 copies and his poems were read in pubs; who can say that today?  The nearest anyone comes to that sort of appeal is the priest-poet Rev. Malcolm Guite, whose 28,000 newsletter subscribers and sold-out readings are testament to his justly-celebrated poems — but he feels like an honourable exception.  It is not just about numbers, of course, but most modern poets seem actively to be striving to shrink their readership, not to widen it.

Dawn over Dulwich, south London

And yet, as Ralph Vaughan Williams once declared, ‘the composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole community.’  Surely this is as true of poetry as it is of music.  Wherever there are human beings there must be a hunger for verse and song, because, whatever else has changed utterly in our world since Masefield’s heyday, the hearts of human beings are still made of the same raw material, and remain the same vessels of joy and sorrow aching for correspondence and resonance.  The calling of today’s poets is the same as ever — to write what will answer that longing.  But too few seem to realise this.

Mitcham, south London

Maolsheachlann has done more than most to try to redress this situation, namely by living out his own vocation as a poet and sharing his work on his ever-readable blog.  But in submitting his poems to various magazines and journals he has run up against a second obstacle: the reluctance of publishers and editors to publish poetry.  Even magazines which ought to be sympathetic both to Maolsheachlann’s work and his themes have turned down poem after poem with pat answer after pat answer.  He reports a shyness, or an embarrassment about it — as if even they are unsure what it is actually for.

Coulsdon, Surrey

What can we do about all this?  Well, one of the great advantages of poetry is that it can speak for itself; when it is recognised and loved, it needs no other justification.  But poets themselves may need inspiration to get there, and their readers encouragement.  At past moments of poetic decadence or despondency, new movements have arisen to revitalise things and give a clear, though not constraining, new direction.  Maolsheachlann and I think this is such a moment.  

So here is our idea: Suburban Romanticism.  And here is its draft manifesto.

1. The Suburban Romantics are on the side of life.
2. The Suburban Romantics favour all the poetic conventions that were the poet’s stock-in-trade up to the day before yesterday, especially rhyme and metre.
3. The Suburban Romantics believe that traditional poetic forms (such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, the villanelle etc.) are just as valid in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
4. The Suburban Romantics do not agree with Thoreau that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”, or with Wilde that “most people exist, that is all”.  We celebrate the routine, the ordinary, the workaday, the familiar.
5. The Suburban Romantics are not afraid of sentimentality or nostalgia, nor are we afraid of challenging or subverting sentimentality or nostalgia.
6. The Suburban Romantics do not genuflect before any transitory socio-political orthodoxies.
7. The Suburban Romantics want to evoke mystery, not practice mystification.
8. The Suburban Romantics are nourished at the wells of myth, legend, archetype, the sacred, the proverbial, the folkloric, the sacramental, and so on.
9. The Suburban Romantics do not disdain the topical, the ephemeral, the colloquial, the commercial, and so on.
10. The Suburban Romantics accept that the great majority of people (and perhaps an ever-increasing majority) are destined to live in suburbs, conurbations, commuter towns, housing estates, and so on.  We insist that these can be the subject and setting of poetry; not just the poetry of satire and protest, but the poetry of affirmation and celebration as well.  We seek the re-enchantment of the world, the transfiguration of the commonplace.
11. The Suburban Romantics have a special respect for Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, who demonstrated beyond all doubt that traditional forms can be used to explore contemporary life.
12. The Suburban Romantics are quite willing to use irony, but not to live in it as our natural element.
13. Suburban Romanticism is not a straitjacket.  We do not preclude forays into free verse, rural themes, bleakness, misanthropy, obscurity, or any of the things against which this manifesto is a riposte.  But they should be the exception, not the rule.

Wimbledon

I ought to be clear: the idea is not that all Suburban Romantic poems have to take suburbs as their theme or setting; ‘Suburban’ in this case conveys more of a disposition, or a sense of scale.  ‘Provincial’ — which is perhaps a precise term for Philip Larkin’s outlook — might be an equally valid term, I think.  Likewise, a Suburban Romantic poem may strike a major or a minor key, praise or mourn, and sing of places or people alike.

Worcester

What it all look like in practice?  Here are some poems I would retrospectively claim for the Suburban Romantics.  

• Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh’s own A Gable Wall
• John Betjeman, The Metropolitan Railway or Middlesex
• Vernon Scannell, A City Remembered (the city in question is Leeds, by the way)
• Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
• Vernon Watkins,  Trees in a Town
• Carol Ann Duffy, Prayer (if only more of her poetry were like this!)

What do readers think?  Does this sound like the sort of poetry that you would like to read?

Wimbledon Common

Happy St. George’s Day!

The view west from Kelston Round Hill, Somerset, on Good Friday (29th March) this year.  In the middle distance, the river Avon in flood at Bitton; beyond, the city of Bristol.

Wishing a very happy feast of St. George to all who call England home, or who wish her well!

Elegy for the Burn Bullock

Grim news yesterday evening (19th April 2024) of a serious fire at the Burn Bullock pub in Mitcham, south London.  Eighty firefighters and twelve appliances were in attendance.  Nobody was hurt, but the damage to the listed building is considerable, possibly beyond repair.  Although the oldest, Tudor, part is apparently relatively intact, the devastation to rest of the building is obvious from the news pictures.  Behind the handsome eighteenth-century façade overlooking the London Road — from whose false windows I first learned about the ‘window tax’ — the fire has ravaged all three floors, as well as most of the 17th-century wing.  The roof is gone. 

This former coaching inn was known as the King’s Head until 1975, when it was renamed in honour of the cricketer Burnett ‘Burn’ Bullock (d. 1954), who was also a previous landlord.  Cricket is essential to the story of the pub and to this part of Mitcham.  Right next door is the pavilion of the Cricket Club, while across the road the Cricket Green has a serious claim to be the oldest in existence: the game has been played here since 1685.  The Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers was formed in the pub, in an upstairs room now known to have been destroyed.  The building is a Mitcham landmark, and for three centuries has been an unmistakeable part of the Cricket Green.

What is so painful is that this disaster has been entirely foreseeable.  Since the pub closed in 2013, it has spent more than a decade sinking into dilapidation while its future has been debated.  Various planning applications by an evidently elusive landowner have been found unsuitable by Merton Council (as well as by the neighbouring Cricket Club).  Meanwhile the situation has been exploited by squatters, who have been occupying the building illegally since 2014, and ignored a series of council enforcement notices.  Now the pub’s place on the ‘Heritage at Risk’ register of Historic England has been vindicated in the most horrible way.

A foreseeable disaster, and foreseen.  The Burn Bullock has been ‘disgracefully neglected for years’, Mitcham Cricket Club has said.  ‘Our worst fear’, was the opening to a Twitter thread reporting the fire by a member of the Cricket Green Community & Heritage Association.  They and other organisations have been sounding the alarm repeatedly for some time.  It is a nightmare we have long been dreading; I have been particularly worried about it since the affair of the Crooked House in the West Midlands in which criminal owners tore down the remains of a listed pub building suspiciously promptly after it (equally suspiciously) went up in flames.  So it is very hard not to feel angry as well as bereft.  The thought also crosses the mind that the fire might not have been an accident, not least because it was so spectacular, even after a day of rain.  I suppose we shall soon find out.

It is also depressing because — without pointing the finger of blame at any party in particular — the whole slide to this point has felt so inevitable.  It seems symptomatic of broader trends that seem to be all around us at the moment, not just in Mitcham but in Britain in general: a leaden sense of ineffectiveness, impotence, even hopelessness in public life.  Why were the civil authorities unable to enforce the law; why did an ‘enforcement notice’ turn out to be nothing of the sort?  Why did the landowner, who himself seems to be merely a representative of a larger and even more labyrinthine investment company, allow the building to decay, fail to secure it against intruders, and otherwise neglect his responsibilities — which were as much to his neighbours as to his shareholders?  Why were the mechanisms which exist precisely to prevent such catastrophes ineffective in this case?  The price of this neglect is now paid by the ordinary people of Mitcham who find themselves unable to hand down to the next generation another piece of their heritage, another familiar landmark.  This pub stood for three hundred years, survived road-widening (as neighbouring buildings did not), suburbanisation and the Luftwaffe (which in 1941 scored a direct hit on the nearby Cricketers pub), but we in our own time have been powerless to keep it safe.  Ten years were enough to bring about its downfall — and three hours sufficient for its finale.  

Why does Mitcham always seem to lose out?  In spite of the hard work and determination of many locals doing their best to maintain civic pride (the Pawełek ice-cream parlour and restaurants, the Wednesday Coffee Club at the Royal British Legion, the very welcome Canons refurbishment project, a number of dedicated local conservation groups), they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the encroachment of powerful, impersonal, faceless forces.   Developers who know nothing of the place and seem to have little regard for Mitcham’s vestigal ‘village feel’ (or at least the sense of a ‘village suburb’), are always circling with various outlandish plans for flats as pricey as they are boxy.  The town centre around the Fair Green to the north has slumped badly in the past ten years, and the indifference of the volumes of traffic coursing their way through along all points of the compass seems symbolic of these eroding, homogenising trends.  The damage to the Burn Bullock is a further and irreplaceable blow to that intangible thing, the character of a place: the particular flavour, accumulated with many layers of years and generations of pride and care, that makes it feel like home.

A picture of the pub as it was some time in the late 1980s can be seen here.

Mitcham Cricket Green, where cricket has been played since 1685, with the Burn Bullock pub in the background to the right.  Watercolour by Terry Harrison (1951–2017), reproduced with his widow’s kind permission.

‘Spring came by water to Broadoak this year…’

A century since the Spring that inspired Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957) to write these lines:

Spring came by water to Broadoak this year.
I saw her clear.
Though on the earth a sprinkling
Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
Bright curve of Severn River
Was of her gospel first giver.
Like a colt new put to pasture it galloped on;
And a million
Small things on its back for token
Of her coming it bore. 

[…]  If
Spring dreamed
Lazily in Earth’s half-frozen blood,
On Severn’s flood
Her presence bravely gleamed.
Yea, all who sought her
Might see, wondering, how Spring walked the water.

The full poem can be read on the website of Gloucestershire Archives here.

The hamlet of Broadoak, Glos., glimpsed from a Cardiff-bound train in June 2017.  In the distance, the A48 road converges with the bank of the Severn estuary.

Harvey was a very interesting figure.  In adolescence he was very close friends with the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983) and the poet-composer Ivor Gurney (1890–1937); all three were deeply influenced in their lives and works by the landscape of their native Gloucestershire, the Cotswold hills and the river Severn in particular, yet Harvey was the only one of the three to make a permanent home in county.  He was also a Catholic convert, an adherent of the Distributist cause (an attempt, championed by by Chesterton and Belloc, to translate the teachings of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum into an economic theory) and a solicitor whose sense of charity led him so often to practise pro bono that he eventually had to sell off his business.  I have written more about Harvey, Howells and Gurney here.

The Benedictus from the Missa Sabrinensis (‘Mass of the Severn’, 1954) of Herbert Howells, a great friend of Harvey’s in their youth.