These have now been nearly two rather difficult years. The hardship of the pandemic continues, menacing us not only in the obvious ways, with sickness and the threat of sickness, but also by disorientation and incertitude. So much about it seems so hard to read, so impossible to predict; even with reliable statistics, it is often a struggle to work out what such figures actually mean for our lives. Hard information is not enough by itself to arbitrate between imperatives; for that, something different is needed: the gift of wisdom.
Many of the strands of hope I thought I perceived at the onset of the pandemic — greater local feeling, a sense of unity, a new awareness of the sanctity of life — seemed to fade with the receding of the first wave of the virus. The blessed quietness of the roads lasted only a few weeks here in mid-suburban south London before the traffic came surging back, if anything heavier and more aggressive than before (though I have been surprised this past month by a distinct lessening in comparison to December last year. The mood on the roads often seems a useful barometer for the public mood in general). Even during the first wave, certain things marred the solidarity: I did not like the police helicopters on the lookout for gatherings on the nearby Common — a huge expenditure of resources supposedly too scarce to provide basic foot patrols in ordinary times — nor the Government’s almost immediate resort to the law to enforce the ‘lockdowns’, even though the great majority of people clearly understood the seriousness of the diesease and were already taking heed of the unfolding crisis. As for a pro-life revival, its seeds are evidently yet to spring; only this past autumn the House of Lords was debating yet another motion for assisted suicide. There is much to be grateful for in the development of the vaccines, and some aspects of the good things I hoped for have come about — but overall it has been an uncertain, unsettling time.
Then there is the new gear into which the dictatorship of relativism has shifted, the breathtaking speed with which that nameless thing, the ideological movement that is all around us, has conquered so completely the mainstream of our culture. Identity politics, imported wholesale from the United States, is one way to describe it, or radical-secularist-progressivist-post-modernism; I do not really think we yet have an adequate word for it. But it is frightening and dangerous. In Britain for the first time in something like a century it is once again fashionable and respectable to judge people not by their character but by their arbitrary and immutable characteristics. Meanwhile, in the highest and most venerable institutions, simplistic or ideological readings of history go unchallenged, extreme conclusions are drawn, and guilty verdicts are passed on our forbears. All high principles, all traditional distinctions are undermined and torn down.
If, as the claim runs, there is no truth, merely power, no wonder the dictatorship of relativism wants that power for itself, however stridently it proclaims its good intentions. Such is the strength of this thing that even the pandemic itself has been relativised before it, and never more clearly than at that dizzying moment when the mass protests and disorder of summer 2020 actually found favour with respectable public opinion. That episode, to me, was more alarming even than the first wave of the pandemic: to see the three months’ solidarity evaporate not for weddings, not for funerals, not even for the national memorial of V. E. Day, but for contentious street protests inspired by events in a different country and advocating a hostile and revolutionary ideology; and then to witness the behaviour of supposedly serious and grown-up public bodies — even the most cherished and trusted public institutions in the land — suddenly issuing startlingly, embarrassingly politicised ‘statements’ in support of these protests. One feels the ground moving under one’s feet in noticing the kinds of remarks, however outrageous, that because they are politically approved one can get away with saying in public, by comparison to those that one cannot say: the plain common sense, the eternal verities even. A radical and narrow-minded agenda is taking advantage of a general crisis of leadership to flourish in our institutions, and it is an agenda that is growing ever more overtly hostile to common decency, to fair-mindedness, to traditional Britain and ultimately to the Christian faith and imagination.
The whole movement is a caustic solvent, dissolving memories, restraints and all kinds of proper boundaries, notably those between the political and the personal, and between the political and the religious. In many circles it is increasingly difficult to demur, to reserve judgement on a matter, to remain apolitical, let alone to make one’s own mind up about a particular issue (no sooner does a newsworthy event occur than one particular interpretation of it emerges and is pressed home). Many people feel considerable misgivings about it all, even as they experience the not inconsiderable pressure to give in and go along with it.
The cultural upheaval has, on the other hand, brought certain grounds for hope, such as the possibility of interesting and fruitful alliances between, say, us inveterate churchgoers, who are well used to life on Progressivism’s list of enemies, and those newer to troublemaker status, such as those of a ‘secular liberal’ persuasion who recognise and reject the authoritarian streak in identity politics. Only a few years ago we might have considered each other opponents; now, though, there is an opportunity to find some common cause, an unexpected way to put into practice Pope Francis’s ‘culture of encounter’, and a chance to remind the world — and perhaps ourselves as well — that the Church is always keen to take part in exciting conversations, wherever they are happening and whomever between, and willing to make its contribution to the public forum. The New Evangelisation has some interesting new dialogues to enter, and I think some surprises await us.
All the same, ordinary life is undoubtedly growing more difficult for those of us who wish simply to live a quiet life in accordance with the wisdom of our forbears; increasingly, it will take actual grit. The lines that began this post were composed by the writer and ornithologist John Buxton on Christmas Eve in 1941 while a prisoner-of-war at Laufen camp in Salzburg. Our situation is obviously very different from his, but I think we can still profit from the wisdom of his approach. Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads: we, like Buxton, in that ingenuous style reminiscent of a medieval carol, might find ourselves reciting simple truths in defiance of the world’s madnesses:
His mother in the stable
Watched him where he lay,
And knew, for all his frailty,
He was the world’s stay.
Now of course this is Christmastide, when it is proper to feast and make merry, and I should not really be striking such a minor key here. (In truth I had originally intended this post for the end of Advent; New Year’s Eve seemed the next most thoughtful moment!) This is a precious time of year, one of the few seasons when we can return properly into the real world of our homes and families, and precious not only because the celebrations of Christmas will give us the strength to face the year to come, but because they are good and glorious at the present moment, for their own sake. And in any case, they do not only give us strength for the future; ultimately they are the future; they are a foretaste of the chord into which all things, the world’s woe and all, shall resolve.
For he should be the Saviour,
Making wars to cease,
Who gives joy to all men,
And brings them peace.
Wishing all readers good health and much happiness in the New Year.
Herbert Howells’ haunting setting of John Buxton’s carol ‘Long, long ago’. Sung by I Fagiolini, 24th December 2020.
The liturgical year is the Church's colour-wheel, lending its hues to the year's seasons, and every year I think I am fondest of the sweet mauve of Advent. Now its mood of quiet anticipation has brought us to this day, Christmas Day, when, by the quiet marvel in the stable, Christ, the Son of God, entered not only our world but our human family, and so changed everything for ever. No earthly power can touch this truth; no ideology destroy it; and by it we know — even when life seems to demand of us impossible courage — that all things shall be right in the end. Purple gives way to white and gold; the triumph of innocence is at hand; the Devil's works are set unravelling. A light has shone into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Merry Christmas, one and all!
Harold Darke's setting of Christina Rosetti's carol In the Bleak Midwinter, sung by the choir of Winchester Cathedral (conducted by David Hill) to a beautiful string accompaniment.
Every culture needs its mythology, and every mythology needs its villains. This is even true of Progressive Modern Britain, which has a whole cast of antagonists ready to be invoked against any criticism or challenge. Who, they are meant to imply, would want these avatars of the forces of backwardness in charge once again? Most are nameless caricatures: the beak-nosed mother superior, the grim-jawed sergeant-major, the hawk-eyed headmaster, and so on. But one character does have a name, a name immediately recognisable to many of the elders of our culture, and viscerally hated by them. To utter, if one dares, the dread syllables ‘Mary Whitehouse’ is to summon into the progressivist mind an unmistakeable image: a reviled great-aunt, even a witch, lips pursed with disapproval, eyes indignantly ablink behind horn-rimmed glasses, preening her blue-rinse hair and sallying forth against all the fun and games of the Swinging Sixties. This too was a caricature, just as shallow as the others, but one equally necessary to the mythology. Somebody had to found to play that role, and Mrs. Whitehouse fit the bill. And according to the Great Myth it was imperative that she and all she stood for had to be defeated: vanquished emphatically, and seen to be vanquished.
Mary Whitehouse (1910–2001). Picture from Mediawatch U. K., successor of the N.V.A.L.A.)
But the real Mary Whitehouse, who died twenty years ago yesterday (November 23rd), was no mere caricature. She was an astute and brave woman, probably one of the most courageous British women of the twentieth century. She knew what she was about, and her firm principles and faith led her clear-sightedly to choose a path that was often hard and lonely but which she knew to be right. Today, the campaign she fought may seem entirely lost — for all about us triumphs the ‘disbelief, doubt and dirt’ that she opposed with such determination — but the justice of her position has been vindicated by the passing years: vindicated, and will one day be seen to be vindicated.
Mass media is today so ubiquitous that we scarcely ever think about its fundamental mechanisms. What is actually happening when we turn on the TV, when a broadcaster transmits its signal into our homes? A tacit trust is established between those transmitting and those receiving. Viewers and listeners lend the broadcaster their ears and eyes, trusting it for a time to provide better company than they can muster amongst themselves. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then the BBC — promising to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, as it has since its foundation in 1922 — is invited across the threshold as seer, sage and minstrel. This is, though we have long forgotten it, a solemn trust indeed. It is very similar to, if not the same as, the kind of trust that exists between guest and host.
In its early decades under the chairmanship of Lord John Reith, and above all during the Second World War, the BBC generally understood and fulfilled this duty. When the Television Service was resumed after the war, similarly high standards were maintained for over a decade. However, as the fore-tremors of the social revolution of the 1960s gathered strength, certain elements within the BBC, pushing first a little bit, and then further and further, discovered that its unwritten contract with its viewers could in fact be stretched, and stretched, and ultimately breached, with no consequence to itself. After all, a householder could not really round on the television set in the corner and tell it, as one could a rude guest, “I will not have that under my roof!” It all went one way. Moreover, television, once installed in a home, could not really be got rid of — not least because in those days, far more than now, it was experienced communally: both on the scale of the household, with families typically tuning in together, and of the nation, since the whole country shared the same two or three channels. Thus the BBC discovered that it could say whatever it liked in front of the masters and mistresses of millions of houses at just the moment that it was cementing itself into place as the chief channel of national conversation.
Accordingly the BBC, or at least revolutionary elements within it, laid intangible siege to millions of houses, against all those little castles flying the flag of Old Britain — gentle traditional Britain underlain by the Christian faith — precisely in order to undermine its decency, its restraint and its quiet respectability, and the more easily to usher in the great liberalisation of social customs and moral standards that has now been accomplished in our society. By no means was this necessarily the work of some dark complot or conspiracy: it is enough to understand it simply as the predictable consequence of the gaining of access by a concentration of people with a certain political and moral outlook to the technological means by which to make that outlook mainstream — means which also happened to constitute the most powerful form of propaganda ever devised. The siege against the ordinary British household continues unabated to this day, but so successful has it been that in most places we are scarcely able to discuss what the BBC and other broadcasters have persuaded us to tolerate.
Mary Whitehouse touched a nerve from the very start, then, because she was really the first ordinary viewer to stand up for herself, to call the BBC to account and to challenge its abuse of trust. But it is worth saying that her concern arose initially not from anything she had herself seen on television and personally disapproved of, but from the effects she had observed particular programmes to have had on young people, specifically the girls in her care as a secondary schoolmistress in Madeley in Shropshire. In her 1967 memoir ‘Cleaning-Up TV’ she recounts how conversations with her fourth-year pupils had revealed upset and confusion arising from dramas or panel discussions they had seen on television. One among several examples was a drama including close-up shots of ‘the screams and agony’ of a woman in labour, which had made some of her pupils anxious about the idea of marriage and motherhood. ‘In one fell swoop,’ Whitehouse said, ‘all that I had been telling them about how wonderful and challenging an experience it was to give birth to a child had been wiped out.’ (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 15.)Not doubting that they would recover in time, she still thought it a needless setback and an intrusion at a sensitive time in her pupils’ lives. She considered that the new trends in television were making them feel less free, less happy, less hopeful about the future — that then, as now, the Progressive Revolution favoured the ease of adults over the welfare of the young.
This concern for young people is one of the most important things to understand about Mary Whitehouse. It was perhaps her main motivation. Far from blaming the young for the new social trends, she made it quite clear that her own generation was at fault:
Sometimes if I am feeling tired or dispirited I think back to those youngsters [in Shropshire]. In their heart of hearts they want to regain so many of the things we older people have discarded in our attempts to keep ‘with it’. They say they will bring up their children differently: they will have walks together in the country, they will be thrifty, they will discipline their children, they will teach them to say their prayers. Will they when the time comes? […] I don’t know the answer but I do know there was something genuine and wistful about they way they spoke and I believe that this is the real spirit of youth before it is sullied, and pressurised by the wrong values of the society that we have built around them.
Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning-Up TV (London: Blandford Press, 1967), p. 14.
And again, later on:
When as sometimes happens I am shouted down or laughed at by students it helps to remember that those really responsible for the present permissive trend in our society are my own generation. […] In our anxiety not to be thought square […] we have, by and large, created a candy-floss society in which the young can find little of hard substance on which to cut teeth of conviction. The passion for the so-called ‘Open’ approach to everything, which discards all established values, has betrayed our young people into the hands of manipulators who exploit their immaturity and aimlessness for their own ends. (p. 39)
From her perspective, the Permissive Revolution was not being driven from below, by a spontaneous uprising of Baby Boomers, so much as orchestrated from above by the cultural elites.
Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, photographed by Godfrey Argent, 25 April 1968. National Portrait Gallery, Photographs Collection NPG x16892, ref. mw119795. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence 3.0.
In the summer of 1963, Whitehouse went directly to the BBC and the Independent Television Authority — the fore-runner of ITV — with her concerns. At the BBC she was received ‘courteously and sympathetically’ by the Director General’s Chief Assistant, Harman Grisewood, who seemed to her ‘deeply and genuinely concerned’. ‘How “up from the country” I was,’ she was later to say. For the person she did not meet was Grisewood’s superior Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (1910–1987), an extraordinary figure, who served as the BBC’s Director-General during the crucial years 1960–1969 (and who was also, incidentally, the brother of the novelist Graham Greene.) When Mary Whitehouse spoke of the responsibility of her own generation for the Permissive Revolution, it was probably him above all that she had in mind. Both were born in the same year — an interesting fact pointed out by Louise Perry — and yet whereas Whitehouse sought to defend the values and faith of Old Britain, Greene was at the forefront of the push for the New Morality. His ambition, he said, was to —
[…] open the windows and dissipate the ivory tower stuffiness which still clung to some parts of the BBC… I wanted to encourage enterprise and the taking of risks. I wanted to make the BBC a place where talent of all sorts, however unconventional, was recognised and nurtured.
Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, ‘The Third Floor Front’, quoted in Robin Carmody, ‘Sir Hugh Carleton Greene’, web article published by the Transdiffusion Organisation, retrieved 23 November 2021 from https://www.transdiffusion.org/2002/01/01/hugh.
These words, written in 1969, could have been produced last week: this is perfect Newspeak from a near-Edwardian. Almost in itself it explains the broadcasting of the gritty ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ which were so to dismay Whitehouse in late 1963, along with the ‘satire boom’ of 1964. And there is much to ponder in the fact that Greene held that position at all. Directors General do not come from nowhere: someone, somewhere, had thought him a good appointment to the post.
The kitchen-sink dramas — with their unflinching portrayal of social issues and in many cases uncritical depictions of extra-marital relations and even abortion — were followed, in 1964, by the news that the BBC’s Charter was to be renewed for a further twelve years. The BBC had set its course, and with the Charter in hand its way seemed clear. So Mrs. Whitehouse, together with her ‘old friend’ Norah Buckland, wife of the Rector of Longton in Stoke-on-Trent, decided to organise a petition, calling on the BBC for a ‘radical change of policy’ and programmes ‘which build character instead of destroying it, which encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of our family and national life’ (p. 24). Ringing up the news desk of a local newspaper in order to spread the word was to have momentous consequences. ‘Before the day was out a reporter had found his way to my home and in response to his questioning we had agreed that we would be holding a public meeting, and what was more that we would hold it in the Birmingham Town Hall’ (p. 24).
This impulsive decision caused Whitehouse and Buckland no little nervousness in the months that followed. But they need not have worried, at least as far as attendance was concerned. The petition took off like wildfire, and thousands of people were soon putting their names to it: men and women alike, of all different ages, in all kinds of occupations and living in all parts of the country. (There is a particular pang in reading of a ‘significant trend’ of letters ‘from men who had positions of great responsibility during the war and who are now dismayed and amazed at the decline in the spirit of our people’.) By the day of the meeting, the 5th May, 1964, 120,000 signatures had been collected — these were brought together and placed on the platform in the Town Hall — and a number of public figures had added their voices to the cause, some travelling long distances in order to be present.
It was at this meeting in Birmingham that one of the main battle-fronts of the Sixties was at last drawn up in plain sight. Several factors combined to catapult the occasion into the national news. The first was an unexpected last-minute request from the BBC to televise the meeting. Whitehouse agreed to this — but then, shortly after proceedings began, it became clear that the audience had been infiltrated:
Dotted about the hall, closely in touch with one another through pre-arranged signals and immediately next to the television cameras was a group of bearded toughs who had come to break up the meeting and steal the limelight in the press and television. At a given signal one of them rushed across the stage to try and grab the microphone and questions were thrown at him from his colleagues in the hall […] This interruption was not just a case of a few hoodlums acting the fool. It was an organised affair. My colleagues who were making a tape-recording of the meeting for our own use observed that BBC staff with microphones were stationed at frequent intervals around the hall in spite of their promise not to do so. (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 36.)
However, it did not all go the troublemakers’ way, as this enjoyable paragraph records:
A group of young Catholics, incensed by the publicity being given to this tiny group who had no support from the body of the meeting, made the camera men furious by turning the spotlight off the interrupters! A row of nuns joined in the slow handclap which rose from the body of the hall (to drown the shouting of the interrupters) and the thick soles of their shoes made a great contribution to the beating of feet on the floor. (p. 36).
It was, of course, a sensation, on the strength of which the Clean-Up TV Campaign swelled into a national movement. Mary Whitehouse likewise found herself cast as its figurehead — and as her opponents’ arch-nemesis.
What was the response of the BBC to all this? Negligible. It refused to meet with members of the campaign, even when the number of signatures had reached nearly half a million. There was not the slightest moderation of its programming. Its only direct response would have been better not made: to mock Whitehouse very obviously and with astonishing cruelty in the satire programme Swizzlewick, even alluding to a quite unrelated incident involving her husband, a road accident which had caused him a nervous breakdown, whereby he had come round a bend in his car and run over a suicidal man lying in the road. But perhaps it is the reaction of Hugh Greene himself, as the campaign gathered strength and numbers, that is most remarkable and most telling. Quite simply, he hated Mrs. Whitehouse and all she stood for. According to Mary Kenny, Whitehouse ‘was banned from entering Broadcasting House; indeed her name could not even be mentioned on the air without prior reference to senior management.’ He had an obscene Medusa-like portrait of her hung in his office. She had been allocated her irrevocable place in the Progressive Mythology.
From all this behaviour — of the Town Hall troublemakers, of the BBC satirists and of Hugh Greene — one sees a pattern emerging. One sees that Mary Whitehouse was not, as is almost invariably implied, an over-sensitive and hysterical maiden-auntish figure, forever clutching her pearls and grasping for her smelling-salts. No, she was quite in possession of her faculties. It was her opponents, the progressive revolutionaries, who time and again revealed themselves to be lacking in reason and scornful of fair argument. Some commentators in our own time, such as the comedian Andrew Doyle, have likened the aggressive activists of our own time to Mrs. Whitehouse, the accusation being that both seek to suppress freedom of speech. But this is terribly unfair to her. It must be stated emphatically: she was fundamentally in favour of the free exchange of ideas. ‘Properly handled[,] every subject is admissible,’ she said in Cleaning-Up TV (p. 151). Although she certainly had decided views of her own on many matters, she was willing and equipped to defend them against rational objection in the public forum — on television, on radio, in print and in student debating societies — and needed no convincing of the media’s important role in facilitating genuine debate.
Mary Whitehouse (L) with the singer Judy Mackenzie at the Festival of Light Rally in London's Trafalgar Square, 25th September, 1971
Furthermore, Mary Whitehouse’s methods were entirely civilised: petitions, public meetings, newsletter campaigns and telephone calls, with occasional recourse to the law as available to all British subjects. Again it was the ugly stratagems of her opponents that sound unpleasantly familiar to us today: the disruption of gatherings, the shouting down of speakers, the assault on reputation by personal accusation and slander. They objected not to her manner or language but to the very expression of her ideas, and moved not to defeat her in argument but to intimidate her into silence, a tactic that we have seen from the progressive side in umpteen social and moral debates ever since. Mary Whitehouse, for decades the recipient of hate-mail and death-threats, and the object to this day of highly vindictive and peculiarly savage and personal mockery and satire, was no pioneer of our modern ‘cancel culture’: really, she was its first target. Then, as now, a vocal and aggressive minority pursued its cause to the bitter end, showing no mercy in battle and giving no quarter in victory. The strength of this movement was considerable then, and culturally speaking is almost total now — but it is one and the same radical progressivism.
Mary Whitehouse’s understanding of freedom of speech was a nuanced and considered one. She did not oppose the expression of any particular idea in itself, but she was against improper manners of expression. In other words, there are right and wrong times and places, as well as tones and attitudes, for the discussion of sensitive or controversial matters. ‘Family viewing time’ in particular she considered sacrosanct: to keep certain subjects for after the watershed was not a suppression of speech, but a disciplining of it. But she was not against the tackling of serious issues, as proven by this candid and courageous paragraph:
What about a play […] about women who are determined to see through a pregnancy whatever the difficulties. I am not talking through my hat, as I gave birth, when our first child was seventeen months old, to twin boys following a very difficult pregnancy. It was suggested that my babies should be medically aborted since X-rays showed that they were likely to be delicate. I declined the offer. The babies did not live, but I have never regretted the decision we made. They remain part of our family and I am grateful for what they gave to me of courage and maturity. Countless women are making the same kind of decision all the time. This seems to me wonderful dramatic material as well as true reality. If only such ideas were acceptable. But they are not. (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 168.)
Her views did align with those of today’s radical progressivists in one respect — and to this extent they too are quite right. She understood that words matter. In a television interview of 1973 with the writer Jill Tweedie, the conversation turned to the subject of swearing. “What can be actually damaging, actually harmful to children, about words?” Jill Tweedie asks. “Words are the means by which we express ourselves, by which to a great extent our culture is judged,” Whitehouse replies, “We have to help the young to grow through the rebellious crudities of adolescence and find more subtle, more beautiful, more tender ways of expressing what they feel.” “But is there any harm,” Tweedie insists, “any active harm in certain words?” “Yes, certainly,” says Whitehouse, “because it’s the degradation of your culture; it’s the degradation of the whole quality of the way you communicate with one another and the way you live. I think it [swearing] is a very harmful thing.” Not least as a Christian believer, a member of a religion of the Word, she understood that speech is never a trivial thing. Words are actions in so far as they influence other people’s thoughts and feelings and character, and to this extent at the very least they really do change reality. Freedom of speech notwithstanding, we have a duty to mind what we say and how.
Jill Tweedie interviews Mary Whitehouse on Thames TV, 20 February 1973
Mary Whitehouse understood another distinction that seems never to be made in our present fraught debate over freedom of speech: the difference between necessary offence and gratuitous offence. The former is something that we risk giving in any discussion of a controversial matter, and that parties in a debate must set aside, or rise above, for the sake of the common pursuit of truth. The latter, however, is offence caused for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of causing outrage or upset. And it is this second kind of offence that the BBC, from the Sixties onwards, has too often deliberately given to its family audiences.
The BBC has not appeared in a favourable light in this article, but it should not be forgotten that Mary Whitehouse, after the initial opening salvo of her manifesto, was always careful to ‘give appreciation to the many people working in the BBC whose programmes were first class in every respect’ (p. 20). Such appreciation is as important now as it was then. But in spite of these individually excellent programmes, and the BBC’s still-matchless ability to rise to great occasions when it knows the world is watching, it seems beyond doubt that of the two schools of broadcasting, John Reith’s and Hugh Greene’s, it is the latter that has prevailed when it comes to everyday programming. (Just consider how jarringly the brash idents elbow aside the end of the Queen’s Christmas address every year). Figures such as Robin Aitken have argued that, since almost all of the people in charge of BBC programming share a particular world-view, this world-view inevitably influences the flavour of its output, and thereby undermines its claims to impartiality. In the past five years especially, there has been a growing and increasingly overt politicisation of much BBC output, and we seem to be back in late 1963, when, as Mary Whitehouse put it, ‘it looked exactly as if our much-respected BBC had launched into a trial of strength with its viewers and was determined to answer criticism by producing programmes even more likely to affront the good taste of the country’. (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 20).
In our own time, which is proving to be a kind of second Sixties, Mary Whitehouse has much to teach us. The battle-lines may have shifted since her time, but the combatants and stakes are much the same: aggressive radical secular progressivism versus such fortresses as are left of Christian and traditionally-minded Britain. Mary Whitehouse was from the beginning ecumenical in her approach, and saw that Christian churches (to which we may now add many of our cousins in other religions) had to stand together for the sake of the common good. This is perhaps why she, a broad-church Anglican, rather remarkably ended her book by quoting at length from Pope Paul VI, actually giving him the last word.
We urgently need her sort of courage today: the courage, when scoffed or cackled at, when condescended to or dismissed out of hand, or when sworn at or slandered, not to back down; the courage to stand our ground even when the ground itself seems to be moving under our feet. Her only weakness, in so far as the weakness was hers, was a tactical one: many of her methods would have worked far more effectively had Britain still been the fair-minded country she believed it to be. We need the faith with which she defied ridicule and scorn for the sake of a kingdom not of this world. ‘But for her,’ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, ‘the total demolition of all Christian decencies and values in this country would have taken place virtually without a word of public protest.’ [1]
Mary Whitehouse, film director Michael Winner and a studio audience debate violence in film and television. Hosted by Sarah Kennedy and broadcast on Thames TV on the 10th September, 1985.
And so, with one gentleman who, having lent his support to her arguments in a Thames TV studio debate in 1985, praised her solitary courage in defiance of a largely hostile audience, I say, ‘Three Cheers to Mrs. Whitehouse’. May her soul rest in peace.
[1] Sandra Salmans, ‘British Woman Carries On Crusade Against Sex and Violence in the Media, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (NY Times News Service), 7 April 1977, p. 53.
For Remembrancetide, words of Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry in his Director’s Address to the Royal College of Music on the 24th September, 1917:
I am afraid there is no longer any hope of young Purcell Warren being alive. He has not been heard of for months. It is a peculiarly tragic case. He was one of the gentlest, and most refined and sensitive of boys, and was of that type which attracted people's love. He was a very promising violinist, and had also began to show characteristic qualities as a composer which were quite surprising, for there was a subtlety and a dexterity about his compositions which made us look upon him as likely to make a personal mark. He endured bravely some very uncongenial experiences in the earlier stages of training, and then he had to face the barbarities, and one of humanity's tenderest possessions was ruthlessly destroyed.
Francis Purcell Warren (1895–1916) was reported missing at Mons, during the Battle of the Somme, on the 3rd July, 1916; his body was never recovered.
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!
Church of the Holy Ghost, Nightingale Square, Balham, London
In requiring as it did of many Christians the longest absence of their lives from the pews of a church, the pandemic sheared us of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the textures, the accidentals of our faith. Yes, the Church was always there — we knew it was waiting; we could see it online — but there was no church-going.
Westminster Cathedral, London
There were many who lost much more than this, I know, but it was a deprivation all the same, a desert exile. Perhaps it was experienced differently in the different churches. I should think that Evangelicals and Pentecostals felt the silence above all most keenly: the absence of the sound of the word of God, and the muting of God’s praises sung by many voices. Anglicans — even the Anglican clergy themselves — were banished in many cases from places of great beauty, exchanging for the kitchen or living room the houses of God whose atmosphere Roger Scruton evoked so beautifully:
The Anglican church [...] is a place of light and shade, of tombs and recesses, of leaf mouldings and windows decked with Gothic tracery and leaded glass. Strange aedicules line the chancel walls — aumbry, sedilia and vestry door — suggesting the rituals of an ancient temple. Choir stalls, rood screen, altar, font and pulpit are as though dusted with holiness from the hands that carved them, and the light that falls upon them is strangely intimate, seeming to come from another source than the light that fills the nave. The scents of damp stone and plaster, of altar flowers and dusty kneelers, mingle to form a kind of restrained incense of their own, and you fall silent as in the presence of a mystery. People travel up and down England visiting these places, and there is one simple explanation as to why: namely, because they are sacred.
Roger Scruton, Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), pp. 40–42.
For most British Catholics, God and man agree to meet somewhere rather more out of the way, away from the centre of things: perhaps where a town’s Victorian outskirts would have been, down a side-street or at an awkwardly-angled street corner, in the church of dark brick which, however handsomely built, would originally have have been marked obstinately on town plans as an ‘R. C. Chapel’. Or perhaps down a suburban avenue, under confident inter-war eaves, still in brick but lent a daring freshness by clean Art Deco lines. Or maybe a futuristic Sixties concrete marquee awaits, with buckets placed here and there to catch the rainwater dripping through the ceiling. Some parishes, of course, enjoy the legacies of fantastically wealthy Victorian benefactors trying to chalk one up against the Church of England, as at St John’s Cathedral in Norwich, Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, Sacred Heart at Wimbledon, or St Giles’ at Cheadle in Staffordshire. The fifteenth Duke of Norfolk, seeking a suitable commemoration of his twenty-first birthday in 1868, sold his estates in Sheffield — which meant most of land on which the city was built — and put the proceeds straight towards the construction of Arundel Cathedral in Sussex. But apart from these glittering heirlooms, most of the fabric of the Catholic Church in Britain has a home-made, slightly scruffy feel to it — a well-worn, well-loved unkemptness.
Sacred Heart, Wimbledon, S.W. London.
That fabric, even over only two centuries of emancipation, has grown rich with detail and cherished associations. For instance, every diocese is a tapestry of dedications, which have their occasional quirks. That St Peter and the Guardian Angels, Paradise Street, should be found among London’s brickish former Docklands in Rotherhithe, or that the church of Our Lady of Sorrows should serve the Sussex seaside resort of Bognor Regis (with its Butlin’s holiday camp and all!) seem to me paradoxes in the best Chestertonian tradition.
St Peter and the Guardian Angels, Paradise Street, Rotherhithe, London
They say we are a religion of ‘smells and bells’ — of sense and taste and touch — and so we are, but these are not confined to the liturgy. A Catholic church is a mingling of many things. The smells, for example, begin at the door, each church having its distinctive mixture of stale incense, of the reek of must, of faint flowers, of long use. The other senses swiftly follow: the shock of holy water cold on the fingers and forehead, the tiles unyielding to the genuflecting kneebone, the soft crinklings of the hymn-books. The muted seething of traffic may seep faintly in from outside, or in winter be displaced by the vainglorious bluster of the electric heating. The echoes may be gloopy or desiccated according to whether the congregation numbers five on a weekday morning, or is wedged in to the gunwales on Good Friday.
Arundel Cathedral, W. Sussex
If Mass is about to begin, somebody will be pottering around here and there, and pairs of shoulders hunched in prayer will be dotted about in the pews or in the Lady Chapel. Bars of music might float from the choir loft, or one or two mild emergencies may break out, in a flurry of stage whispers, about who is or is not down on which rota. There are the same old practical problems: misprints lurking in the hymn book, going up for Communion in the right order so as to return to the pew in the same configuration, the stowage, once the heaters at last have accomplished their labours, of heavy coats in winter so that they will not slither onto the floor, and one in particular which must have been going on for centuries and which we seemingly still cannot sort out: how to ensure the preservation of one’s nose when one is kneeling in prayer and the person directly in front sits back in their pew. All the while, though, that quiet signal of salvation, the sanctuary lamp, burns unblinkingly at the altar, stilling the great blustering headwinds against our lives.
Saint Martin, Meudon, Île-de-France
And who are we; who are the People of God? At Mass you will see the whole of life. The tiny fierce stares of babies all agape at the world; the gleefully wrigglingly irrepressible squirmings of toddlers; teenagers pained with overcorrected gaucheness; students and young adults in greater numbers than the BBC would care to admit; newlyweds and new mothers and fathers; middle-aged stewards and parish stalwarts; the gingerly manoeuvrings of the elderly, many long into widow- or widowerhoods; the twinkling, in the depths of ancient faces, of eyes that have seen everything. There are the well-turned-out and the down-at-heel; the healthy and the afflicted; the upright and the downtrodden. There are all manners and ranks of professions or trades; lifelong parishioners and occasional visitors; those firm in faith and those haunted by doubt or listless with indifference. There are the hidden unborn. From peers and parliamentarians to the hard-up and homeless, from millionaires to migrants, baronets to binmen, ‘Christ doth call one and all’.
Arundel Cathedral, south aisle
And, perhaps in London especially, you will see the whole world. In my home parish, deep in the capital’s southern boroughs, I can immediately think of fellow parishioners from Italy, Uganda, Spain, the Philippines, Nigeria, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Goa (and elsewhere in India), Mexico, Poland, South Africa, France and Finland, along with an older generation of Irish Londoners — the Murphys, the Quinns, the Connollys — and their descendants. You will hear earthy Wandle Valley talk, or crisp Eastern European consonants, or rich West African speech with its clean vowels. And just when I think the list is complete, I remember the occasional but disarmingly determined presence of Irish Travellers. But in all this there is cause neither for fraughtness — providing we remember that our dignity comes from the one God who made us all — nor, pleasing as it is to see the name of Jesus Christ outperforming the sum total of the world’s divisions of Diversity Officers, for self-congratulation. We are simply the people whom God has entrusted to each other in this particular time and place: a motley bunch to be sure, mumbling the responses and droning the hymns — or ‘praising God with our silence’, as a Nigerian priest once teased me and the rest of his reticent, undemonstrative congregation — all struggling, all knowing ourselves to be less than saints, but all, at least, aboard.
Pugin’s cathedral of St. Chad, Birmingham
Sense and touch are, of course, by no means the whole story. We do not depend upon them — ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is not food and drink’ — and the privations of the pandemic did not diminish anything of the fundamental truth or validity of the faith. After all, the Eucharist that dwells at its heart asks for a momentary suspense of our senses. As Hopkins put it in his translation of the Tantum Ergo —
Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.
Still, this means that sense and sensation are transcended, not rejected outright, when we meet God. The physical world is not simply to be purged. After all, He not only made it, and saw that it was good, but saw to it that our very bodies are one day to be incorporated — in a more literal sense than we can know — into Truth Himself, the author of ‘all things, visible and invisible’. Consequently I rejoice to see the accidentals once again; I taste and see that the Lord is good.
The then-newly-cast bells of Notre-Dame de Paris on display in the cathedral nave, February 2013
Eleven years ago, Pope Benedict delivered these words to a multitude of 80,000 in Hyde Park in London...
This is an evening of joy, of immense spiritual joy, for all of us. We are gathered here in prayerful vigil to prepare for tomorrow’s Mass, during which a great son of this nation, Cardinal John Henry Newman, will be declared Blessed. How many people, in England and throughout the world, have longed for this moment! It is also a great joy for me, personally, to share this experience with you. As you know, Newman has long been an important influence in my own life and thought, as he has been for so many people beyond these isles. The drama of Newman’s life invites us to examine our lives, to see them against the vast horizon of God’s plan, and to grow in communion with the Church of every time and place: the Church of the apostles, the Church of the martyrs, the Church of the saints, the Church which Newman loved and to whose mission he devoted his entire life.
I thank Archbishop Peter Smith for his kind words of welcome in your name, and I am especially pleased to see the many young people who are present for this vigil. This evening, in the context of our common prayer, I would like to reflect with you about a few aspects of Newman’s life which I consider very relevant to our lives as believers and to the life of the Church today. Let me begin by recalling that Newman, by his own account, traced the course of his whole life back to a powerful experience of conversion which he had as a young man. It was an immediate experience of the truth of God’s word, of the objective reality of Christian revelation as handed down in the Church. This experience, at once religious and intellectual, would inspire his vocation to be a minister of the Gospel, his discernment of the source of authoritative teaching in the Church of God, and his zeal for the renewal of ecclesial life in fidelity to the apostolic tradition. At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion. Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations. In a word, we are meant to know Christ, who is himself “the way, and the truth, and the life”.
Newman’s life also teaches us that passion for the truth, intellectual honesty and genuine conversion are costly. The truth that sets us free cannot be kept to ourselves; it calls for testimony, it begs to be heard, and in the end its convincing power comes from itself and not from the human eloquence or arguments in which it may be couched. Not far from here, at Tyburn, great numbers of our brothers and sisters died for the faith; the witness of their fidelity to the end was ever more powerful than the inspired words that so many of them spoke before surrendering everything to the Lord. In our own time, the price to be paid for fidelity to the Gospel is no longer being hanged, drawn and quartered, but it often involves being dismissed out of hand, ridiculed or parodied. And yet, the Church cannot withdraw from the task of proclaiming Christ and his Gospel as saving truth, the source of our ultimate happiness as individuals and as the foundation of a just and humane society.
Finally, Newman teaches us that if we have accepted the truth of Christ and committed our lives to him, there can be no separation between what we believe and the way we live our lives. Our every thought, word and action must be directed to the glory of God and the spread of his Kingdom. Newman understood this, and was the great champion of the prophetic office of the Christian laity. He saw clearly that we do not so much accept the truth in a purely intellectual act as embrace it in a spiritual dynamic that penetrates to the core of our being. Truth is passed on not merely by formal teaching, important as that is, but also by the witness of lives lived in integrity, fidelity and holiness; those who live in and by the truth instinctively recognize what is false and, precisely as false, inimical to the beauty and goodness which accompany the splendour of truth, veritatis splendor.
Tonight’s first reading is the magnificent prayer in which Saint Paul asks that we be granted to know “the love of Christ which surpasses all understanding”. The Apostle prays that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, and that we may come to “grasp, with all the saints, the breadth and the length, the height and the depth” of that love. Through faith we come to see God’s word as a lamp for our steps and light for our path. Newman, like the countless saints who preceded him along the path of Christian discipleship, taught that the “kindly light” of faith leads us to realize the truth about ourselves, our dignity as God’s children, and the sublime destiny which awaits us in heaven. By letting the light of faith shine in our hearts, and by abiding in that light through our daily union with the Lord in prayer and participation in the life-giving sacraments of the Church, we ourselves become light to those around us; we exercise our “prophetic office”; often, without even knowing it, we draw people one step closer to the Lord and his truth. Without the life of prayer, without the interior transformation which takes place through the grace of the sacraments, we cannot, in Newman’s words, “radiate Christ”; we become just another “clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1) in a world filled with growing noise and confusion, filled with false paths leading only to heartbreak and illusion.
One of the Cardinal’s best-loved meditations includes the words, “God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another”. Here we see Newman’s fine Christian realism, the point at which faith and life inevitably intersect. Faith is meant to bear fruit in the transformation of our world through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives and activity of believers. No one who looks realistically at our world today could think that Christians can afford to go on with business as usual, ignoring the profound crisis of faith which has overtaken our society, or simply trusting that the patrimony of values handed down by the Christian centuries will continue to inspire and shape the future of our society. We know that in times of crisis and upheaval God has raised up great saints and prophets for the renewal of the Church and Christian society; we trust in his providence and we pray for his continued guidance. But each of us, in accordance with his or her state of life, is called to work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom by imbuing temporal life with the values of the Gospel. Each of us has a mission, each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person. As our Lord tells us in the Gospel we have just heard, our light must shine in the sight of all, so that, seeing our good works, they may give praise to our heavenly Father.
The Malvern Hills seen from fields east of Whittington, Worcestershire, in late August 2021.
Does it come about now, the cusp between summer and autumn? Or has it already passed? Or is it still to arrive? The change hides deep in the veins and roots of things, like the turning of a tide, or the recognition of a truth. Elizabeth Jennings smelled it before she could see it:
Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere. [1]
Those lines are a perfect description of days such as Monday was in south-eastern England, though in suburban London there was no hint of smoke of the kind that awoke autumn for Elizabeth Jennings. Summer still, then — but then Tuesday, with a lessening of the haze or a change in its quality, throwing down a more golden light from a bluer sky, maturing the palette into that of an illuminated manuscript, brought about an anagnorisis of sorts. On the Common the crickets still sizzle in the parchment-yellow grasses, and there are startling splashes of colour from the thistles and gorse, though the cow-parsley is going over. The trees are, yes, ‘heavy with growth’, and dark with it, too, as dark as they are green; some already bear rashes and outbreaks of rust, but, less brazenly, even where all seems green at first glance, there is a dustiness, a mauveness, a wine-darkness in the shadows. It is the purple of finished splendour, of growth itself grown old: the summer is an empire whose conquests are complete.
But the seasons always turn to linger a few times before they are quite gone, and I rather suppose that even these incongruous days of the high twenties are not quite the end. ‘Ambiguity’ is Jennings’ word for it —
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.
I have been trying to work out which should come first: the poem from which these lines are taken, Song at the Beginning of Autumn, or Ruth Pitter’s free-verse Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer. Perhaps Pitter follows Jennings, even though she is describing weather like today’s. ‘We had thought summer dead,’ she says —
But now hot camomile in headlands grows,
Strong-smelling as from toil of reaping: bees
Their delicate harvest in the rusty rows
Of scarlet bean, and woodbine that still blows,
Though flower with berry, gather and do not cease;
No mushroom yet, for dryness of the leas;
No leaf too early sere, for droughty root,
Drops from the trees,
But grave broad green guards the thick purple fruit.
The pandemic has taught me much that I have needed to learn about the passage of the seasons, and not only of the seasons, but of the details of the seasons. Still more has it taught me that they cannot be pinned down by the observer or the poet. ‘When I said autumn, autumn broke,’ says Jennings, but she is speaking of the memories and associations that autumn, or its herald, releases into her mind. All the same, there is undoubtedly a counterpoint between the turns of the seasons and the moods of the mind. For days like these, days of mingled moods, signposting the seasons — and even for those lacklustre, overcast days against which they stand out — I follow Ruth Pitter, and give thanks.
[1] Emma Mason (ed.), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), p.
[2]Along with two other poems, Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer can be found on p. 279 of The New English Weekly, 7 July, 1932 (vol. I, no. 12), or p. 11 of the PDF document at this link: www.modernistmagazines.com/media/pdf/294.pdf
The secular-progressive opponents of the Church think of her only as a worldly force; a powerful one, yes, and stubborn, but one whose final defeat now seems within reach. And if it could be defeated, what a prize that would be for Progress! All those treasures in the Vatican citadel broken up and sold off... all those schools and universities and halls of propagation scattered to the four winds... all that power torn away — this supreme manifestation of Organised Religion, this most oppressive of 'oppressive structures', finally toppled and brought to ruin! Think how many other, mightier empires and kingdoms Progress has already vanquished, that now are but the dust of the Wrong Side of History... the Church too, they think, with one big effort, could be overthrown. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' they would not be the first to scoff.
Meanwhile we, the poor peasantry in the pews, grin wryly to ourselves. If only they knew, the secular-progressivists, the sheer ricketiness of the whole outfit! Organised religion? More like disorganised religion! Dripping ceilings, peeling paint, prehistoric plumbing... and parish incomes, these days, scarcely greater than those of a meagre crowd-funding campaign for any secular cause. Artistic treasures, in the main, do not pay the bills. And this is before we come to our other weaknesses: self-interest, grudges, fear, indifference; the confusion and the cynicism and woeful inadequacies amongst our own members — in our own hearts — even as the Faith ebbs steadily out of our cities and civilisation.
But still, to everyone's surprise, the Church abides, and will not go away. Here it is, this ramshackle body of believers which, owing to what he memorably called its 'knavish imbecility', Hilaire Belloc was certain would not have lasted two weeks without divine assistance; here it is, after all these centuries, ever being made new. The Church's long defeat by the forces of this world may go on and on and on, but it is never accomplished; it is never finished. But it should not be a surprise: after all, the Faith on Good Friday was finished as completely as anything has ever been finished, but on Easter Sunday found itself suddenly and entirely back in business. After that, she can survive anything. What Chesterton once said of the virtue of faith applies to the Church as well: it is 'a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors', one which resolutely contradicts, if only by quiet non-assent, the world's madnesses and iron ideologies, and which awaits in patient hope the turning of the tables, the unassailable vindication, the unanswerable victory — and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
Side-chapel in the church of Saint Maurice, Lille, France, December 2019.
Wonderful news: this year the music of Ruth Gipps will be heard at the Proms for the first time since 1942 — and not once but twice!
First is a performance of the Second Symphony, in which Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on Thursday 5th August at 7.30 p.m. The concert will be broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall on BBC Radio 3, and also televised from 8pm on BBC Four. More details here.
Then, at 1 p.m. on the 30th August, the Sea-Shore Suite will be heard as part of a concert of 'French Fancies' with François Leleux (oboe) and Eric Le Sage (piano). This will take place at the Cadogan Hall: details here.
What a triumph this is in Gipps' centenary year! Many thanks to all involved.
Extract from the Second Symphony (Andante — Maestoso).
Today, the seventeenth of June, being the feast-day of St. Botolph, I am reminded of a memorable trip I made a few years ago, one unseasonably warm February day, to one of England’s greatest parish churches: a church dedicated to him, and whose town is named after him: Botolph’s town, or Boston, in Lincolnshire.
The tower of St. Botolph’s, Boston, seen from Church Street (February, 2019).
In truth, it all began with St. Wulfram, and his church at Grantham. A few months previously I had finally done as I had long intended, and got off the train for a proper look at it — at least, one longer than the fifteen-seconds’ vision with which it beguiles the passengers of London- or Scotland-bound expresses, soaring heart-stoppingly into view above the blurred tiles and whizzing chimneys of its parish. After all the occasions on which this astonishing spire — briefly England’s highest, and still the fifth-tallest of all our medieval steeples — had flashed before my eyes, a visit seemed long overdue, and it did not disappoint. But then I realised that the spire of St. Wulfram’s was not alone, and that Grantham is the gateway of a county whose sky-line is studded with great and graceful towers: as well as Boston there was Louth, and of course the great cathedral at Lincoln itself, which had been for two centuries, before the collapse of its spires in 1548, the tallest building on earth.
So northwards from London it was once again, out of King's Cross through an unpromising, almost greenish-grey morning. Harringay… Hatfield... Hitchin… Huntingdon… and not forgetting, after Peterborough, to ‘hail humble Helpstone’, the home parish, resting-place, and in many ways the whole world of the poet John Clare. (Incidentally, the parish church here is also St. Botolph’s.)
‘Hail, humble Helpstone’: a glimpse of John Clare country near Peterborough.
Boston from London means changing at Grantham, so before the Skegness train came in I had a chance to admire the tower of St. Wulfram’s once again, and to wonder how St Botolph’s would compare with it. These two Lincolnshire towers both stand on the same river, the Witham, Grantham quite near its source and Boston at its mouth, but as well as sixty miles of river, two centuries and great differences of style lie between them. [1] Grantham’s steeple, finished in 1320, is in all the handsomeness of the Decorated style, while Boston’s — mostly in the more ornate and intricate Perpendicular — was begun much later, in around 1430, and took until at least 1500 to complete. St. Wulfram’s had been a launch into the unknown, literally to new heights, and its masons were learning as they went, but at Boston the Gothic style was being finessed and perfected — though this is not to imply any lack of audacity or inspiration in its construction. On the contrary, these qualities were, as we shall see, abundant.
Onto the Poacher Line, then, and the train, soon happening clatteringly onto jointed railway track, wound on into Lincolnshire, past the Roman town of Ancaster (source of much limestone for the county's churches, as well as for the colleges of Cambridge), through Sleaford with its despondent and derelict Bass Maltings, and then out into the open Fens. ‘Six years of a flat land,’ wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who was born in Boston, where her father was Chief Medical Officer: she meant the first six years of her life, before the family moved to Oxford. A rather laconic verdict (and, remarkably, she never returned), but it must be admitted that there is something uncompromising about the sheer flatness of these parts, something that leaves nothing much to be said. They are as flat as that, and that is flat.
How extraordinary to glimpse on the horizon, then, amid the relentless horizontality of everything, a vertical shape: a tower aimed straight at Heaven, built in an architectural style which took as its fundamental principle precisely the emphasis, the exaltation of verticality at every opportunity. The closer it draws, the clearer the sheer contradiction it offers to its surroundings, and the sheer scale at which it does so. ‘It dominates the town, it dominates the landscape,’ said Betjeman. [2] Naturally, then, it has with been known for centuries with wry affection as ‘the Stump’.
The ‘Stump’ from just south of Boston’s Grand Sluice. The scaffolding is a frustration, but does provide a measure of the tower's height - that of a forty-floor tower-block.
The sky was still sullen as we rounded the curve into Boston, and this, combined with the warehouses and supermarkets around the station, lent weight to a first impression of the town as a place with its sleeves rolled up, unprettified and unpretentious. Although it is a market town amid swathes of arable land, it was originally (and indeed remains) a port — after all, it was from the sea, and the wool trade, that the wealth came to the church — and the town retains, I think, a port’s brisk unkemptness, a refusal to give itself airs, even though, with its handsome Georgian buildings, it could afford to do so. Yet even as I approached the church from the station, a strengthening sun dispelled the cloud, and the day transfigured itself into bright cloudless warmth, quite untypical of February. And there it was, the mighty tower, the great upthrust of Gothic glory, with an incredible audacity, even a youthfulness about it, seeming all the more extraordinary after the greyness and the garages a moment before.
Only one thing marred the view: the scaffolding cladding the entire western face of the tower — quite a contract for someone! The programme of works on the tower also meant that, unusually, it was closed to the public. On the other hand, the filigree of poles and planks did provide a useful measure of the tower’s scale — and, already, an excuse to return for a second visit.
St Botolph’s from the Market Square
‘One of the glories of England,’ Peter Hitchens has said of it, ‘and in my view one of the sights of the world (and I’ve seen a few).’ Julian Flannery, in his magisterial survey of English medieval steeples, calls the tower —
…one of the greatest triumphs of medieval engineering. It is quite as daring as the hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall, the octagonal lantern of Ely Cathedral or the pendant fan vault of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, and yet is on a greater scale than any of these masterpieces. For sheer spectacle, the 266 feet of masonry soaring straight from the pavement to the sky is unsurpassed by any church or cathedral in England. [3]
‘Dizzyingly open’, even with scaffolding
Two-hundred-and-sixty-six feet makes this the seventh tallest of any extant English medieval tower. Older churches had risen higher — Grantham to 274ft — and the weathercock of St. James’ church at Louth, at 287 feet the highest parish church in England, was placed into position not long after Boston was completed — but, since all the other towers incorporate a spire, this is the tallest medieval parish church tower measured ‘to its roof’. It was not a question simply of height, though; there were other things in the masons’ minds. Flannery observes out how slenderly and economically the tower was built, with the walls between the load-bearing buttresses so lean (scarcely three feet thick) as to be almost skins of stone. The result, as Flannery goes on to point out, is an interior spacious enough that it could fit most ordinary church towers inside. The space beneath the tower is also flooded with light, fulfilling another principal aspiration of medieval masons — it is ‘dizzyingly open from inside’, says Betjeman. Again, on my visit in 2019, scaffolding impeded the view, but even this seemed to leave open an incredible amount of space and height.
Excavations in the north aisle.
Even without the great tower, the older body of the church itself would be worth coming a long way to see. Not least because nave and chancel are contiguous with the enormous space under the tower, this is the largest parish church in England by volume. It is also a ‘calendar church’, having twelve internal pillars for the months of the year, fifty-two windows for the weeks of the year, seven doors, and three hundred and sixty-five steps to the top of the tower. [4] The chancel, built to a scale which in most churches would make for an impressive nave, contains fourteenth-century stalls and misericords, and a remarkable altar-piece. There was plenty of life in the church, in spite of the works: a little gift-shop, where I bought a post-card for my desk at work, a growing scale Lego model to raise funds for the church, and other pilgrims moving quietly round the church — families, a group of Scouts, a young couple holding hands.
The chancel with fourteenth-century stalls and misericords.
It was time to have a look at the town itself, so I ambled around the market-place, and the side-streets, and then a little way upstream to the Boston Lock Café for lunch (the all-day breakfast is warmly recommended). The ‘Lock’ of the café’s name is the Grand Sluice right in front of it: it is here that the river Witham technically ends, and the tidal waters of the Haven, leading out to the Wash and the open sea, begin. Various works in the eighteenth century to improve the navigation of the Witham brought about a second heyday for Boston, hence its many Georgian buildings. Fortunes seem to rise and fall nowhere so dramatically as in ports, or at any rate seem to rise and fall much faster than a great church can be planned and built. In fact, even as the tower here was being raised, the town itself had fallen on hard times, and the booming trade of the thirteenth century was a thing of the past. Julian Flannery draws an interesting comparison with the city of Liverpool, where construction of the Anglican cathedral was completed in the 1970s under economic circumstances quite different from those in which is had started in 1904.
Where Red Lion Street meets Wormgate.
The course of my amblings was largely determined by the sheer difficulty of photographing the tower: I had to retreat by some distance simply to fit it into the frame. As the afternoon wore on, I found myself to the east of the church, and meeting with the sight of the sun shining straight through the open lantern at the top: another demonstration of the slenderness and lightness of the construction. Yet the tower is still strong enough to hold a full peal of ten bells, and these above the cavernous space already described — there must be few belfries higher than Boston’s.
From Wide Bargate in late afternoon
Yes, they built it not only beautifully but masterfully, for in spite of its position right on the banks of the Haven it has never needed shoring up or major structural work. There was a practical purpose to it, as well: the tower has served as an unmistakeable aid to navigation for miles around, especially for seafarers on the Wash. (Scorch-marks on the masonry offer evidence that beacons were hung here for precisely this purpose: it really was a lantern tower.) On a clear day the Stump is even visible from the west coast of Norfolk, and I have never forgotten a spine-tingling picture of St. Botolph’s on the horizon, silhouetted starkly against the setting sun, which the photographer Gary Pearson captured from Hunstanton, twenty-one miles away.
From the Market Place
Another interesting aspect of the tower observed by Flannery are its four distinct levels, corresponding roughly to the four generations of masons it took to build it. He adds, though, that in order to avoid too prominent a horizontal division between them, and so to maintain the priority of verticality, the breaks in the masonry of the buttresses at the corners are made at different levels to those of the tower faces. By thus interrupting the horizontal lines, while keeping the vertical lines continuous, there is nothing to distract or mislead the eye as it is drawn heavenwards. The similarity of the tower’s lower half to that of St James’s at Louth has led some to suppose that a spire was the original intention here too, but owing to various aspects of the construction Flannery thinks this unlikely. As for the unmistakeable octagonal lantern tower, he points out precedents and possible influences as various and far-flung as Beverley Minster, the belfry at Bruges and Brussels’ Town Hall as evidence that this was the intention all along. The Flemish connection is interesting: ‘People called it Holland,’ remembered Elizabeth Jennings, and not only because of the flatness: in the other Low Counties, too, great belfries like this were raised.
The ‘Stump’ and the Haven in evening light.
Spring-like as the weather might have been, the law of the sun was still winter's, and all too soon the time came for the train home. From London a day-trip to Boston is easily possible by train, but it perhaps does not allow for a very long day. I could hardly complain about mine, though, as the train set off back westwards, through the the dark levels and glassy drains, to Grantham and the main line — but I knew there would have to be a return, once the scaffolding was gone, to admire the tower in its full glory.
The South Forty Foot Drain, west of Boston, seen from the Nottingham train
References / footnotes:
1. The river Witham has a curious course: from Grantham it flows northwards all the way to Lincoln (at one point being separated from the Trent by only a narrow watershed) and then, once through the Lincoln Gap, back south-eastwards again. Though it is eighty-two miles in length, its mouth and its source are fewer than thirty miles apart as the crow flies.
2. Richard Surman (ed.), Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2001))
3. Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016),
