‘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.

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.

Farewell to the 455s

Through Mitcham Eastfields on a Horsham train, 10 August 2011

This coming Saturday, 14th May, sees the withdrawal from the suburban routes of the South Central Division — the tangle of railways running out of Victoria and London Bridge into south London — of the class 455 electric multiple units that have held sway in these parts for nearly forty years.  Their siblings on the South Western lines out of Waterloo will apparently follow in the next few months.

Basking in the sun at Victoria, 28 August 2013

Few ordinary passengers are likely to mourn them.  They are not glamorous, nor were they built to be, though I think better care could still have been taken of their interiors in recent years.  They were designed for mass short-distance transport, to lug commuters around the Hills and Commons of the southern boroughs; to venture to climes no more exotic than Crystal Palace, Epsom Downs, Caterham or Dorking.  I doubt they have averaged more than around twenty miles per hour over the course of their working lives.  But they have worked solidly, clocking up thousands upon thousands of rush-hours since the early 1980s.

Rumbling across the South Circular overbridge into Tulse Hill, bound for the Wimbledon loop, 11 April 2019

I am among those who will miss them.  It was against the backdrop of these faithful workhorses, plying their way up to London or down to Dorking, their acceleration distantly, enticingly audible over the suburban rooftops, that my rail enthusiasm was first contracted and swiftly found to be incurable.  The aforementioned South Western sister-class ran right past my grandmother’s garden, and I used a 455 as my subject for the centre-piece of a school art project (because I knew I could draw trains and buildings, but not people!).  More recently — until the pandemic in fact — my train into work was reliably formed by one of these units.

A Victoria-bound semi-fast accelerating through Mitcham Eastfields, 4 January 2011

Like the slightly younger 319s (themselves a familiar sight around South London until a few years ago) and their cousins the recently-scrapped two-car 456s, the 455s were built at York by British Rail Engineering Limited, as lettering on the step-plates proudly declared.  However, in contrast to the 319s — which were more souped-up trains, designed for Luton and Gatwick routes, for people with flights to catch, always seeming cramped by the chords and spurs of suburban south London, itching for the open stretches of the Brighton or Midland main lines — the 455s seemed gentler and more sedate, more suited to the way we do things here, south of the river, in the land of the electrified third rail.  To a 455, with its seldom-attained top speed of 75 mph, it did not seem to matter if we got to Ewell East now or some time next week.  They trundled their way around, taking their time about everything.  No point rushing this curve or that junction; there’ll only be something else to brake for around the next bend.  

Through the window onto dawn-lit commuterland, 1 October 2018

Adding to the dreamy aura of these trains were the various reassuring sounds they made: the chirruping of the brakes and the soft sigh on their release, the warble-piping of the original door alarms, the clunk of the camshaft on departure, and the leisurely thrumming of the brake compressors, this last being the sound I will miss the most.  Then there were the motors, matching the register of a cello, rising from a growl from a standstill to the very top of the tenor range if given the chance to stretch their legs.  The only alarming sound was the occasional crunch of electricity arcing from the third rail. 

Arriving at Streatham Hill on the 1617 to London Bridge, the once-daily parliamentary service via the Leigham Spur and Tulse Hill, 25 April 2019

The motors themselves are worth remarking on, for they are actually recycled.  Incredible as it may sound, they are over eighty years old, and more than twice the age the trains they have been powering.  The early Eighties, when these units were built, were not an easy time for British Rail, which, struggling under persistent inadequacies in government subsidy, had constantly to make do and mend with their scarce resources.  Their solution in this case was to fit the new trains with not only second- but third-hand motors built originally by the Southern Railway for its electric units in the 1930s.  Though now into their ninth decade and effectively dating from the electrification itself, the motors still seem perfectly sound to my ear.  Whatever the reason is for the withdrawal of these trains, I doubt it has anything to do with the traction equipment.

A down train draws into Wandsworth Common, 9 December 2018

I am not the only one sad to see them go.  ‘South London is [going to] feel weird without them,’ said one contributor to the ever-perusable Rail Forums.  Another chap, a driver who also films the modern railway scene and has a presence on YouTube, told me in an exchange in the comments, ‘These were the trains I grew up on, the trains that took me on all sorts of adventures and when I passed out [i.e. qualified] as a driver became my core traction.’

Epsom train rounding the curve south of Mitcham Junction, 4 February 2022

There is always a pang to see the clearing out of the furniture of our beginnings, however ordinary these things may be.  Perhaps, in fact, the more ordinary and the more constant they have seemed, the sharper the pang.  Bit by bit, the railscape of my childhood is disappearing (the analogue signals, the bell at Eastfields level crossing, the late Phil Sayer’s voice over the speakers…), and by the end of this weekend another major part of it will have crumbled completely away.  I will certainly miss the familiar presence of these old units, with the many associations they hold for me.

A final farewell, Mitcham Common, 4 February 2022

But let us end with the nearest a 455 ever came to attaining railway glory.  Under the pre-2018 timetable, one single passenger service each weekday was booked to run non-stop down the fourteen-mile line from Dorking to Horsham, and this was generally allocated to a 455 unit.  So, just before that timetable was abolished, I took one of the last opportunities to experience this run, and filmed the journey from just beyond Betchworth Tunnel to just short of Horsham.  As I have said, 455s hardly ever had the chance of a clear non-stop flat-out run like this, and certainly in their latter years Horsham was the furthest south they ever ventured in regular service.  So it was a rare treat to see this humble suburban unit reliving the glory days of the old Bognor expresses, accelerating to the full line speed of 75 mph along probably my favourite stretch of railway in south-east England.  (We really begin to pick up speed after Holmwood, five minutes in, and after Ockley, at six minutes, there is the added bonus of some jointed track, which we hammer over at full tilt.)  The date was the 14th May, 2018 — four years to the day, as it turns out, before the final withdrawal of the class.

The ‘Portsmouth Lines’ Once More

Passengers resigned to the sedate progress of trains running out from London via Streatham, Mitcham or Carshalton towards Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking might be surprised to discover that, in railway parlance, these are referred to as the ‘Portsmouth lines’.  A strange name, because none of the suburban trains trundling down this way are bound for anywhere nearly as exotic.  Most are content to fizzle out at Epsom or Dorking; the furthest south any direct passenger trains get is the hourly service to Horsham in Sussex.  But this name, hidden away in the technicalities of railway operation, is a clue to the line’s past glories.

Detail (click image to enlarge) of the current railway network of south London, Surrey and West Sussex.  Most of these lines were built by the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.  The so-called ‘Portsmouth lines’ run south from Peckham Rye via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom and Dorking to Horsham.  London expresses from the south coast formerly used this route between Horsham and the connection at Streatham with the main line into Victoria, but since 1978 have run via Three Bridges and East Croydon.

Because communication on the railway must always be clear and unambiguous, almost every piece of infrastructure — junctions, bridges, tunnels, signals — has an accepted name or number by which drivers, track workers, signallers and engineers alike can be sure they are discussing the right thing.  This goes for every running line on the network, too: every individual track that carries trains has a particular name.  This is usually of two or three words, and generally giving some indication of the line’s route and its direction.  On a four-track main line, for example, there is usually an ‘Up Fast’ or ‘Up Main’, the track carrying expresses towards the railway’s main centre (traditionally either London or Derby), then a ‘Down Fast’ for those coming the other way, and Up and Down ‘Slows’ or ‘Reliefs’ for stopping trains.  All over the place there are ‘Loops’ and ‘Spurs’ or sometimes ‘Reversible’ lines for stretches of bi-directional track.   All this means that tracks and routes can be recognised and distinguished from each other immediately, even at complex junctions.  It allows a driver to communicate a train’s exact position to a signalling centre miles away, or a track worker knows where to aim his pick-axe, and so on.

A diagram of Streatham South Junction from an old version of the Sectional Appendix for Kent and Sussex.  See p. 511 onwards for the entirety of the ‘Portsmouth’ lines.

As with so much on the railways, these names have often been established for decades, even surviving changes in the use of the track itself.  So it is with the ‘Up and Down Portsmouth’, which begin at Peckham Rye in south London of all places, where the lines branch off to the south-west from the South London line out of London Bridge.  The tracks keep their Portsmouth name as far as Leatherhead, the last junction on the line.  Between there and Horsham, since there is no diverging route from which they need to be distinguished, the two tracks are known simply as the ‘Up and Down Main’.

Nowadays this line is seldom thought of as a through route at all; no direct trains travel its whole length in ordinary service.  But its builders, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, really did have their sights set on a far prize when they completed it in 1868.  Via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking they established a new route to Horsham, and, by running thence onto the Arun Valley line southwards to Arundel and the junction at Ford, to the south coast: Bognor, Littlehampton and the line along the coast to Chichester and Portsmouth.  (On the approach to Portsmouth the L.B.S.C.R. ran afoul of its competitor, the London and South Western, whose rival Portsmouth Direct line offered another, quicker route from London Waterloo via Guildford and Haslemere.  Competition between the two companies had ignited into outright conflict and actual blockades in the so-called Battle of Havant in 1859.)

The L.B.S.C.R. and its successors’ expresses to Portsmouth and Bognor went via Sutton and Dorking for many years.  They generally ran to and from London Victoria, joining and leaving the original route via the spurs and junctions at Streatham where it crosses the Brighton Main Line. (This remains the principal route for trains on this line).  The highest honour in the line’s history was surely on the 2nd February 1901, when Queen Victoria’s funeral train came this way.  She had died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on the 22nd January; her body was carried from Portsmouth to London at speeds reported to have reached 80mph.

A video uploaded to Youtube by ‘Bogglesham’ of trains at Dorking (North) station in 1972, including some serving the south coast.  Update: this film can be seen in higher quality here: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-last-years-of-victoria-to-portsmouth-expresses-1977-online

Those days are almost forgotten now.  Regular expresses via Sutton and Dorking came to an end in 1978, when they were almost all re-routed, at least in part in order to serve the rapidly-expanding airport at Gatwick.  Trains coming up the Arun Valley now take the longer but faster-timed route via the Brighton Main Line, running east to Crawley, joining the main line at Three Bridges, and heading for London via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon.  Meanwhile the old line has been relegated to a back route, the service along its southern section especially being cut back to a pretty sparse offering until the improvements of the new timetable of 2018.  Yet even down here the past was not quite buried: at the junction immediately north of Horsham station, the lines to and from Dorking are still referred to as the ‘Up and Down Main’ and the busier lines to Three Bridges merely as the ‘Up and Down Horsham’.

A video by ‘thetransporthub’ on Youtube including a diverted London Victoria – Gatwick train racing through Ockley station earlier this year with that now-rare sound, the glorious percussion of wheels over traditional jointed track at nearly 75 mph.  Sadly for railway romantics, the track is likely to be replaced in August 2021.

Not altogether forgotten, then.  Memories are long on the railways, and about once a year the old route is used for diversions during engineering works, sometimes for trains serving Gatwick but at other times, as at November half-term this year, from distant, far-flung Portsmouth itself (a place whose existence is unimaginable in this pandemic year).  The normal route being closed at Crawley for the installation of a new footbridge, the Portsmouth and Bognor expresses were once again sent the old way.  Running non-stop from Horsham to Clapham Junction apart from an unadvertised call at Epsom (perhaps to pick up or set down a guard, or for a crew change) they offered the unusual sight of twelve coach trains sweeping, if not exactly at high speed, up and down to London from the south coast along a line that is now effectively a suburban branch.  After ten months without any of my usual railway adventures, it was nice to see the ‘Portsmouth lines’ regain, however briefly, a glimmer of their former glory.

Update, 30th December 2020: A shame that a landslip on the embankment near Ockley has scuppered the reprise of this arrangement that had been due this week.

A diverted up express slows for the curves at Mitcham Junction, 21st November 2020.  Ordinarily it would run via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon; today it has been sent via the scenic route.

The Burning of the Leaves

Fingers of fire make corruption clean on Mitcham Common, 18th November, 2020.

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

from ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ by Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

Season of Mists

        It is a time of year that’s to my taste,
        Full of spiced rumours, sharp and velutinous flavours,
        Dim with the mist that softens the cruel surfaces,
        Makes mirrors vague.  It is the mist that I most favour. 

from ‘Autumn’ by Vernon Scannell (1922–2007)

 

Light against Shadow

It is an awe-striking thing to see our self-assured, hyper-ingenious civilisation brought so completely to a standstill.  An old peril has returned to stalk the world, and has swept over us with breathtaking speed.  Maybe January’s floods distracted me, but it was not really until the Coronavirus reached Lombardy that I started paying it close attention — and this was on the advice of a friend with whom I had been hoping to make my first visit to Italy in April, and who, having lived through the SARS epidemic in Singapore in 2003, had some idea of the approaching danger.  His early alertness has been completely vindicated.  (On the other hand, the pandemic really has erupted with extraordinary speed, and I don’t think that we need blame ourselves if we were taken by surprise.)  All in all, it was not until perhaps two and a half weeks ago that the scale of the crisis dawned on me, and I realised that it was only a matter of time before it engulfed us in Britain too.

Since then, an uneasy stillness has grown gradually heavier and heavier over our lives.  Even a fortnight ago, central London was perceptibly emptying out, which means I suppose that it was merely very busy rather than, as under normal conditions, pandemonium.  Road traffic subsided noticeably: one evening, on my way back home from the station, peals of church bells came to me in a street where I have never before heard them over the noise, and a blackbird’s song sounded with startling clarity from a branch high above me in the dusk.  Long before the streets fell silent, though, the atmosphere had changed: all was sober, muted, as if we were all marking some joyless anti-Christmas.  Before we were sent home from work a week ago last Tuesday, the air in the office was ionised with anxiety, and however hard we tried, we could hardly talk of anything but the virus.  We knew the wave was coming, and we were waiting for it to break over us.  Now it is upon us, and suddenly, I think still to our disbelief, we are all stuck.  Nothing can happen; nothing can move.  We find ourselves (in the Clerk of Oxford’s words) in the ‘longest Lent of our lives’.

Now the skies are empty of aeroplanes, and the torrents of traffic that usually come stampeding down my road have abated, most strikingly at night.  The new hush is slightly disconcerting, but to one who finds London’s noise immensely wearing, not unwelcome at all.  Being cut off from work, the pub, the rest of the country and from church is still taking some getting used to, though, and what an odd sight it was to see the Prime Minister leaning over his desk on Monday (23rd) to grab our lapels and tell us all to keep to our houses.  His instructions on how to wash our hands a few weeks ago was a strange enough sight… the only other public leader I can think of with such a strong opinion on this subject was Pontius Pilate.

The coronavirus had set me thinking about light and shadow even before I heard the words of last Sunday’s second reading ringing around the walls of Fisher House, the Catholic chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge, over the Internet and out through speakers into our living room.  "Be like children of light," read Fr. Chase, Lent-robed in pixellated purple, and the words of St. Paul as fiery as ever. "Try to discover what the Lord wants of you, having nothing to do with the futile works of darkness but exposing them by contrast… Anything exposed to the light will be illuminated, and anything illuminated turns into light".  Without a doubt, a new darkness has entered the world, but what happens when it meets the light is, as ever, far from straightforward: it is a mystery, one that we in our day are not the first to notice.  Already we can see that its effect is not simply to cast a shadow over things, but to embolden the light where it shines, or to show where it is thrown at different angles, in rays we would never normally see.  What the shadow brings is causing us great suffering: the unexpected and hastened deaths, the pain of the stricken, the fear of the vulnerable (and ours on their behalf), the anxiety of doctors and nurses before the unknown, the ruin of businesses and commerce, the evaporation of holidays and weddings and grand projects, and the load added to the existing troubles of so many (for example, are there people in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Yorkshire and the valleys of South Wales now confined to homes still damaged by flood?).  The shadow is real enough, and may be as grave a menace as we fear.  But it does not go unanswered.

I can see many silver linings being fanned into brilliance.  One is that we have just had an opportunity to prove to ourselves how much we value human life, and I think we have acquitted ourselves pretty well.  Are we prepared to bring the economy to a grinding halt in order to save life, even fragile life?  Yes, we are.  This is worth knowing, it seems to me.

Secondly, we are building new solidarity.  The virus is everybody’s common foe, so our common purpose is to defeat it: we are all on the same side.  What is more, it is a silly little cell with knobbly bits which has no feelings.  There is no other side to the argument; we have no need to consider its point of view: it must be vanquished.  So there is a strange relief with which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into that one uniting purpose, even if the noblest pinnacle of our sacrifice is to sit in a chair at home.  In tight corners we find out moral choices sharpened and starkened.  They are not always made easier, but sometimes the right course of action at least becomes clearer, and I think that is happening here.  Once or twice in the past week a rare feeling has caught me, one which I remember once shivering surprisingly down my spine when I came across a photograph of a gigantic, catastrophic pall of smoke over London after a Blitz bombing raid: the East End burning.  Even at a remove of seventy-five years, a cold intoxicating thrill swept over me, the beautiful clarity of war that an enemy brings about by placing himself wholly in the wrong, and us, together, gloriously, in the right.  This can be, of course, a highly dangerous feeling, and one which can be transmuted in seconds into fire-blooded vengefulness.  But as long as we limit our vengeance to the virus, maybe this new just war will do us good, and unify us, straighten our priorities, and remind us of our common humanity.  So it is that, paradoxically, even in this grave situation, there is a sense in which I feel more at home in Britain now than I usually do.

The East End of London in flames, 7th September, 1940. 
From www.ghmartinez.blogspot.com.

But we are forging new and valuable bonds in quieter ways as well.  The Internet is being used with tremendous energy and imagination in order to help the vulnerable and overcome our collective isolation.  (I would include the Church in this, which I think has responded commendably to this crisis, as I rather suspected it would).  There have been the email circulars that various firms have sent to ‘customers and colleagues’ alike, so that civilians like me overhear their thanks to their staff.  (The cynical might scoff, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that the message is sincere.)  A colleague at work told me that in the hour and a half she had spent queuing in Morrison’s the previous Sunday (15th March), she spoke to more of her neighbours than in all the fifteen years she has lived in that part of London.  And then there was the extraordinary occurrence in my street on Thursday evening: the audible and visible observance of a national round of applause in support of the National Health Service.  Normally, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen on our road, in which, one way and another, neighbourhood sentiment is on the patchy side.  Jubilees, Royal Weddings and Remembrancetide had all passed by unmarked, but now applause rang out from the front gardens and windows of neighbours who do not really know each other that well, but had found a common cause.  It helped that we were all bound to be at home anyway, and of course there was no traffic to compete with, but it was still a moving and heartening occasion.  For the first time I have ever seen, there was a general exchange of ‘Good night’ across the street.

I think a time of enforced monasticism will do us no harm, either, and maybe we will all emerge from this strange time a little wiser than before.  There are those of us whose lives only a world-wide pandemic could slow down!  Perhaps we will find new aspects of life to notice.  For instance, we might observe the strange paradox that, even as this virus reminds us of our physical, incarnated nature — that we really are one body — those of us not actually struck down by it are experiencing it as a malevolent spiritual force, invisible and silent.  The material and the spiritual are not so easily distinguished as we think.

In passing, I think I will note some other miscellaneous aspects of this crisis that have struck me.  For instance, that China has sent doctors to Italy and medical testing kits to Spain.  Also, that it is interesting how many prominent people have gone down with the illness: politicians, public figures, and even the Prince of Wales.  And is this the moment at which the phrase ‘to stay home’ (American, surely?) will supplant the British ‘to stay at home’ in our speech on this side of the Atlantic?  Finally, one more reason to hope: it has occurred to me that the pandemic will spark ambitions in scores of youngsters to become pathologists or doctors.  So, although a time of fear and uncertainty like this ‘has the capacity to bring out both the best and the worst of our human nature’, as our Archbishop John Wilson has said, I think we can have every hope that this darkness too will be ‘exposed by contrast’ with the light, and driven away.

I hope and pray that all readers, and those dear to them, are safe and well and as cheerful as we can be in these times.

In the original version of this article I stated mistakenly that the words of St. Paul, ‘Be like children of light…’, the Second Reading for Sunday 22nd March, had been read by Fr. Mark Langham; actually they were read by Fr. Chase Pepper, who was con-celebrating.

‘We will not break faith with ye’

At eleven o’clock this morning, there was a sound that is seldom heard in the crowded suburb of south London where I live.  Almost utter silence: the traffic banished, the sirens hushed.  Apart from an initial smattering of inevitable phone-bleeps, and the muttering of a far-off helicopter, there was only the whispering of leaves fluttering to earth in the crisp sunlight.   Normally, the cenotaph lies marooned in the turbulence of the one-way system on the London Road, but today the way was clear to the triangle of dewy grass where it stands.  There, in the presence of the Deputy Mayor of Merton, and the Chairman of the local branch of the British Legion, with Scouts (and Cubs and Rainbows and Beavers) and Sea, Air and Volunteer Police Cadets, the hymns had been sung, the unaccustomed words had been spoken, the bugle had sounded, and Mitcham for a moment lay in the quietness it knows only in these two November minutes of Remembrance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Pastoral Symphony, 2nd movement, with its famous bugle-call

“The Legion of the living salutes the Legion of the dead,” announced the vicar of St. Mark’s church.  “We will not break faith with ye,” we said.  It is scarcely expressible how strange such solemn language sounds now, in Mitcham and in almost every part of modern Britain, so great is the chasm between the civilisation that first uttered this sentence and the civilisation in which we say it now.  Yet say it we did, and there was no reason to suppose that anyone present did not mean it.

Squadron 43F (Mitcham and Morden) of the RAF Air Cadets.

The wreaths were laid, and the National Anthem sung.  Then renewed music from the band was the signal for the procession to march out and round to salute the dignitaries, and away up the London Road.  I was moved and impressed.  It was a superbly turned-out procession, and I think it marked Remembrance Sunday solemnly and fittingly.

The Cenotaph at Mitcham, Greater London, 10 November 2019.

And then the Police re-opened the road and flung wide the flood-gates, the first cars came round the corner, heralding the return of the unreceding tide to cut off the Cenotaph once again.  Sooner than we supposed, our affirmation of faith and honour was put to the test.  Will we remember, as (American Air Force) Colonel Gail Halvorsen told the televised Festival of Remembrance last night, that ‘attitude, gratitude and service before self bring happiness and fulfilment in life,’ and that ‘without providing for someone in need, the soul dies’?  Will we remember the fallen, and the price of war: invariably its own Hell to pay?  Will we, in spite of troubles and distractions, live in gratitude for our peace and freedom?

The last seconds before the A217 road was re-opened to traffic.

150 years of St Pancras Station

St. Pancras station on the morning of its 150th birthday, 1st October, 2018.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the opening of St. Pancras station in London.  The Midland Railway began services from its new terminus on the 1st October 1868, having constructed an edifice fit to beckon travellers to the Kingdom of Heaven, never mind Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, or Sheffield (and eventually Manchester and Scotland).  No expense had been spared in the effort to blow King’s Cross next door, and their rivals the Great Northern Railway, out of the water.  George Gilbert Scott was the architect of the Midland Hotel, which forms the station’s façade onto the Euston Road, and William Barlow’s cast-iron overall train-shed roof contained the ‘widest and largest undivided space’ enclosed by any structure in the world at the time of its completion.

St. Pancras station from Midland Road, September 2018.

It has occurred to me recently how unfortunate it was that the Gothic Revival coincided so squarely with the Industrial Revolution.  For no sooner than these great buildings were finished than they were exposed to the grime and acidic rain of the cities they had been meant to dignify.   The arches and spires that should have soared luminously and goldenly skywards, just as they would have done in the Middle Ages, were gradually blackened and darkened by Victorian dust and soot until, a century later, they had been transformed into the world-weary hulks so detested by modernist architects.  Yet, of course, the Gothic revival had been meant largely as a romantic answer to the Industrial Revolution.  So perhaps it is simply a tale of noble defeat in its battle against utilitarian commercial enterprise.

Or was it?  For there were those like John Betjeman, Jane Fawcett, Bernard Kaukas and others who, when public affection for Victorian architecture was at its lowest ebb, saw through the grime to the glory beneath.  Now, thank goodness, most of the building has been restored to its original splendour.

Exactly the same anniversary is celebrated today by the Peckham Rye – Sutton line in south London, which the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened also on October 1st, 1868.  East Dulwich, North Dulwich, Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Hackbridge and Carshalton stations also celebrate their 150th birthdays today.  This line, which is probably too ordinary to be called quirky but still not straightforward enough to be wholly dull, diverges just west of Peckham Rye from the South London line that originates at London Bridge, burrows in a cutting through Dulwich, is carried aloft across a valley of surprising green, climbs through a tunnel to Tulse Hill, descends to Streatham, crosses the Wandle plain, and works its way uphill again through Carshalton to join the older line from West Croydon at Sutton, all the time undulating and curving this way and that, threading its way through existing routes.  It is a railway that fills in missing links, is not always altogether clear where it is heading, and merrily duplicates other lines.  It is still generally used only in sections, rather than from end to end as a through route, except in weekday peak hours.

There must have been a sense in 1868 that the main task of building Britain’s railways was accomplished, and that only the finishing touches were needed.  It is true that the Severn estuary and the Firth of Forth had not yet been conquered, but it must have seemed that there was not much left for the insatiable builders to achieve.  Barely forty years after the railway age had begun, the engineer’s task was nearly a matter either of crowning the railways with glory (it must have been hard to imagine what could surpass St. Pancras station) or of filling in any last gaps in the suburbs and the countryside to eliminate any doubt about the system’s comprehensiveness.

Update:

It will have been someone’s onerous duty to polish off this enormous cake!

On Majesty

One significant milestone in my formation as a stick-in-the-mud, fogey and all-round defender of old things occurred when I discovered, at the age of about nine, that my very ordinary suburb of south London had once boasted its own cinema.  For several decades, with its confident Art Deco façade, the ‘Majestic’ had presided over the Fair Green in the centre of town, and the flickering world of the pictures had dwelt waiting within.  Of course I straightaway wanted to know what had become of it.  It did not take me long to find out.  Having been converted into a bingo hall in the early 1960s, the building had been pulled down altogether in 1978.  No trace remained, save in the name of the street beside it, Majestic Way.  And what stood in its place?  The blank concrete hulk of the Kwik Save supermarket.

The Majestic Cinema, Mitcham, circa 1970. 
Photographer: E. N. Montague.  © Merton Historical Society; reproduced by their kind permission.

This was, I suppose, a particularly iniquitous piece of mid-twentieth-century urban planning, though practically every town in Britain must have a story to rival it.  It certainly had a formative effect on me, immunising me once and for all against any tendency to presume any superiority in new things over old things.  Certainly I could scarcely comprehend the jettisoning of the cinema, ‘Majestic’ in name and nature, for the insolent windowlessness of its successor with its gimmicky moniker.  It had been ours, and we had thrown it away.  All long before my time, but melancholic nostalgia still flooded and intoxicated my being, rich and dark as ale, and not without a bitter edge either.

Mitcham’s Fair Green in May 2018, seen from about the same position as above.

But it was not a question just of this particular building.  I think I sensed the passage of greater, intangible forces, the tides of culture of which its disappearance was a sign.  I felt cheated, not only of the cinema itself, but of the vanished civilisation that had been capable of building it, sustaining it, and, I think above all, of giving it such a name as ‘Majestic’.  For the word itself spoke volumes.  It was plain enough to me that the culture in which I lived would never choose a name like that for a public building, a cinema or anything else — not in a month of Sundays.  Yet there had existed, not that long before, a world that did.  This modest picture-house with its grand epithet was proof that this world had been alive in my own town.  So, too, was the supermarket proof that the cultural revolution had not left it unvisited.  This, as they say, was personal, which is why its loss struck me with such force.  The old world had been alive here, I realised; and here too it had been lost.

Just as I could see no contest between the Art Deco cinema and the Brutalist supermarket, and none between the names ‘Majestic’ and ‘Kwik Save’, I had no trouble in deciding which I preferred of the respective civilisations that built and christened them.   Everything about the two institutions was different because everything about their worlds was different.  I knew where my loyalties lay.  In one age, an age of muscular steam power and palatial trans-Atlantic liners, even a cinema chain, in all its undoubted mercenary-mindedness, could calculate, correctly, that Thirties glamour and a single crowning resonant adjective, would draw in paying audiences far out in these workaday fringes of south London.  There had been poetry in that world.  But the other, later era, the era in which one might go up a street named Majestic Way only to find, at its culmination, like a grotesque joke, such a thing as a Kwik-Save — this era was hollow, and ironic, and hard of heart.  Conscious as I am of the many faults and sins of that old civilisation, and of the weaknesses and cruelties of people in all ages, and of the irretrievability of the past, I am simply still in far greater sympathy with the first era than with what came later.  Still I know where my loyalties lie.

Well, that is how I became a curmudgeon before I was out of short trousers, and I have been about eighty years old ever since.  But I tell the story because I think it is worth asking the question to which it leads: why is this quality of majesty so singularly lacking in our present age?  Except in a few places and on very few occasions, we build or do hardly anything that is majestic, or grand, or solemn.  For instance, I think it is remarkable, in an era when the physical scale of most new buildings is greater than ever, that their appearance is not more imposing or magnificent.  In London, with its extraordinary rate of new construction, one question asks itself with the completion of nearly every new building: ‘Is that all?’.  So many buildings are gigantic anticlimaxes, catching the eye not by elegance or ornateness, but by their sheer bigness, by brute size.  Surely this is why the nicknames for these new skyscrapers (some Londoners’, some the developers’ own) stick so instantly.  The most prominent of the buildings that have appeared since the new millenium really are shaped like blown-up versions of small objects: gherkins, electric shavers, walkie-talkies.  Would they be any less impressive were they built on half the scale?  Or, asking another way, how much do their chunky shapes gain by the size they are?  They may be ‘bold’ and ‘dynamic’, as is typically claimed, but are they majestic?  No, and I don’t think they were ever meant to be.  Of course, aesthetics are not the architects’ main consideration: these buildings are big because of the perennial imperative to make economic sense of tiny parcels of astronomically expensive land.  So the central doctrine remains the modernists’, that form should follow function.

A big Cheese-grater, a big Walkie-talkie and a big Shard, seen from the top of a big Gherkin

Yet many of London’s older, laboured-over buildings still defy these efforts to dwarf and outgun them, remaining at least as powerful and impressive to the human eye as their newer neighbours, though a fraction of their size.  ‘Majestic’ is surely the first word we reach for on beholding St. Pancras station, Somerset House, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Palace of Westminster or the Prudential building.  How was their effect achieved?  At St. Pancras (which is 150 years old next month), George Gilbert Scott began at a human scale, at the level of doors, windows, tiles and bricks, concentrating on the detail, and he achieved his overall effect by repeating these details a hundredfold, a thousandfold, in all their careful design and craft, along and around and upwards.  The result, in alliance with the verticality of the neo-Gothic, is a soaring range of glorious multiplication, a towering proliferation of decoration, never (in my view) chaotic or disconcerting, but unified by Scott’s eye into a symphony of fine design and accomplished craftsmanship.  “So much detail!” I overheard a tourist exclaim the other month, looking up at it.  But one then wonders why the Shard skyscraper, whose architect also seems to have had verticality uppermost in his mind, does not seem to have the same effect, though it is nearly four times taller than the station.  It is St. Pancras which invites the eye upwards, whereas the Shard simply defies comprehension and measurement.  It is certainly a very impressive work of engineering, but its refusal to make any concession to a human scale means that, to my eye at least, it seems to dominate rather than to crown its surroundings and observers.  St. Pancras offers a feast, and allows the beholder to savour the sight of it, ascending slowly and by degrees from arches, to windows, to turrets, to pinnacles, and to the clock triumphant.  The Shard is so uncompromisingly and instantaneously impressive that it blows the mind and burns it out.

St. Pancras Cathedral station, London, seen from the Euston Road.

Even the design of ordinary flats and houses has followed a similar path.  So much new housing in Britain has an anonymous, mass-produced and plasticky appearance, whereas, well into the twentieth century, even small houses were built with a certain self-contained dignity about them.  Their solidness, their more natural materials, and the simple distinctiveness of generous sashed windows, gables and chimneys reveal something about their architects: that they knew their work would serve an important purpose, to shelter human families.  What do the flat roofs and blank windows of today’s ‘exciting new developments’ say about the frame of mind in which they were designed?

It is not only in architecture that this change has happened.  In music, for instance, sheer volume often serves as the same substitute for majesty as does bigness in architecture.  There is no shortage of music that relies on brute force for its impact: just turn it up and hear the windows rattle!  But what about music that is instead built up meticulously from the smallest details?  For instance, there is William Walton’s first symphony, particularly the first minute and a half of the fourth movement.  The extraordinary thing about this music is that it is not utterly deafening, even though it sounds as if it ought to be.  It derives its magnificence from its ingenious construction.  The composer has written majesty into every detail — just as Gilbert Scott did in his own field of work —  and the overall effect of the music transcends the sum of its parts: it is transcendental.

And from language, too, solemnity and sonority seem to have evaporated, with the fading of poetry from spoken and written English.  Most language in everyday life is firmly earth-bound; if ever we hear it take flight, we do not really know how to respond; we are possibly even embarrassed.  Where now, except on the rarest of occasions, do we meet with language such as in the opening of Elizabeth Jennings’ poem ‘A Chorus’? —

Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,

Over the pastoral valleys and the meadows,

Over the cities with their factory darkness,

Over the lands where peace is still a power,

Over all these and all this planet carries

A power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger

To some, but by many trusted. Man’s a believer

Until corrupted. This huge trusted power

Is spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,

In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines

From the matchless skies. He is the day’s surrender.

Why has majesty vanished so nearly completely from our lives: from speech, from infrastructure, from civic ceremony?  Perhaps Jennings’ poem strikes straight at the answer.  Could it be because we think it is superfluous to and even incompatible with life as we live it now?  For where majestic things, though not directionless, are generally sedate, and measured, and invite and reward contemplation, being the result of careful attention to many details, the modern world is now too quick; it outpaces and leaves unexercised our capacity for concentrated attention.  Magnificent things once thrilled us with their restrained and dignified power, but these days great many other things are valued above dignity and restraint.  Time seems too short for them.  

It is true that a great deal of modern infrastructure, being invisible, silent or glossily efficient in operation, does not lend itself as well to visible majesty, as older technology did.  Immense and elaborate works of software do their work invisibly, imperceptibly and effortlessly, without plumes of smoke or the thrust of pistons.  Although the Internet is a system of extraordinary magnitude, we never call its operation majestic.  A postal system’s mighty empire of apparatus could inspire poetry such as Auden’s Night Mail, and even radio and television have great confident transmitters as their visible symbols, but we never see the Internet at work.  It appears to accomplish everything with instantaneous ease, and without apparent might or power.

But there is more to it than simple circumstance, I am sure.  I wonder if our boredom and urbane cynicism mask a certain fear of the essence of majesty; we are afraid of where it might lead.  For above all, majesty heightens what it touches.  It draws our eyes upwards, lifting us out of everyday life, so that we apprehend something greater than ourselves.  It is held in common by those who behold it: it draws us upwards together.  Majesty is close to mystery; it is a cousin of solemnity, that paradoxically serious business of rejoicing.  Majesty leads us into the foothills of the sacred, and sometimes higher.  But this is where those of us who settle for mediocrity in our individual lives enter dangerous territory: we must avoid, even fear anything that might disturb us.  The dull, flat flood-plain of secularism is so congested with distractions — ‘exciting new developments!’ — that we never notice the higher ground, nor want to notice it.  If we were conscious of our appetite for majesty, we would surely try to fill it, however imperfectly.

Majesty has survived in some places, though.  Most notably it remains in film, television and fantasy video games.  We do sometimes consent to be lifted out of ourselves; we savour the splendour of imaginary worlds and landscapes; we relish orchestral soundtracks.  Isn’t that half the appeal and sheer fun of the television series Thunderbirds, for instance? — precisely the games of timing and scale they played in order to make the models look as realistic and impressive as possible, and the way the machines and craft all took on pathos and tragic dignity when they inevitably crashed, or collapsed, or exploded so gratuitously?  Don’t all small boys dream yearn to be in charge of huge things, bringing a city to a standstill as a Martian Space Probe — doomed anyway, of course — is manoeuvred gingerly towards its its site of launch, ably assisted by a full symphony orchestra?

And majesty abides still in the Church, of course, which certainly does lift us out of ourselves, and is willing to make a nuisance of itself in doing so.  It was the Church that gave us the most visibly uplifting buildings in most towns and cities, and the beautiful craftsmanship within.  What lives in churches is not confined to the past.  We have heart-felt home-made music and meticulous liturgies.  And the words that are uttered in churches leap out at us, either because they are unfamiliar, or because some new significance in them surprises those who thought they knew them well.  Here is an example: all my life I have heard the second half of the Mass beginning with the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, something like this third preface of Sundays in Ordinary Time.  Familiarity has masked its poetry, but without my noticing it has become one of my favourite parts of the Mass.  Apart from anything else, this is wonderful, ancient poetry which, having first invited its hearers to lift up their hearts, then actually helps them to do so, bearing them heavenwards, towards the angels’ Sanctus:

V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with your spirit.

V. Lift up your hearts.
R. We lift them up to the Lord.

V. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
R. It is right and just.

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks,
Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God.

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation,
through Christ our Lord.

Through him the host of Angels adores your majesty
and rejoices in your presence for ever.
May our voices, we pray, join with theirs
in one chorus of exultant praise, as we acclaim:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

And this atmosphere of majesty is capable of spilling over from liturgical settings into the secular world.  Simply the heightened form of everyday life that the Church proposes can find fitting expression in uplifting art and music and architecture even outside the liturgy.  There is much to savour, for instance, in a promotional film that was made in advance of World Youth Day in Kraków in 2016: the combination of the poetry of the words (which are delivered in sonorous Polish and given subtitles in English), the richness of the music and the grandeur of the cinematographic art all promise a great and noble occasion, which promise was duly fulfilled.

A civilisation will not build what it does not think it needs.  Our culture, in which we converse with ourselves about ourselves, often forgetting that later ages will overhear us, presents strong evidence that we believe ourselves content with the superficial.  So much about our buildings, art and speech tells of a suspicion of majesty and solemnity.  But we cannot distract ourselves forever from it, and our nature cannot long withstand this truncation.  This is because we have forgotten the majesty that we ourselves possess.  We cannot forever be infants, amused by curiously large and funky shapes on our cities’ skylines.  Mitcham’s Majestic cinema was not all that grand, as majestic buildings go, but it answered a hunger: to paraphrase Philip Larkin, it had been a ‘serious house on serious earth’ (at least before its bingo-hall days, I suppose).  I think we do wish, however secretly, that our lives could be enriched by majesty in our public buildings.  We do want to be uplifted by our music; we would not resent being awed by heightened language.  But for our pride, we should not mind feeling small in the presence of greatness, if the greatness were also benevolent.  We long for the majesty of beauty, for the majesty of things timeless, and, even if we struggle to assent to faith, even if we admit it only on our death-bed, or not at all, we long for the majesty of God to lift us out of ourselves.  We think we know already that we long to be taken seriously, but we do not realise quite how deeply, how earnestly, how utterly we long for the solemnisation of our lives — or, at least we are unable to give expression to that longing.  And that feeling is so strong because we sense the majesty and dignity in which we ourselves are clothed, however hard we try to quell or mar it for the sake of our appetites.  We ourselves are majestic, individual symphonies of fine details, beyond our own power to understand, transcending, in spite of our sins, the sum of our parts.

It is hard and sometimes unconvincing to speak in generalities, and this is why seemingly small details can be so telling.  The great unseen spiritual and cultural forces of the last century only sublimated into visibility at moments like the demolition of Mitcham’s small suburban picture-house for the sake of a brazenly superficial, shamelessly inhuman supermarket.  It was not simply a question of planning or expediency, or the neutral result of the inevitable march of Progress.  Like the construction of any building or the utterance of any word, it was a moral act with a moral effect, which in this case has been to alienate the majestic beings, the people of Mitcham, who lived around it.  Those who built the cinema, for all that they had a business to run, did not forget to make their cinema worthy of their audience.  They raised a house dignified enough to host communal experiences that were secular and yet not entirely profane.  One sign of their achievement is the way in which the cinema is still remembered, forty years after its disappearance.  A local lady I was chatting to at our local Heritage Day the other week spoke fondly of dancing lessons in a room above the front entrance.  The creator of the excellent Mitcham History Notes website has carefully compiled information about the cinema, and transcribed news reports from its lifetime.  And how about Kingsway Models’ range of card kits, where you can actually buy a model of Mitcham’s cinema, along with the Sidcup Regal and the Southall Dominion?  But there is no similar model of the Kwik-Save supermarket.  Which side, then, are we on?  Where do our loyalties lie?  Shall we buy-one-get-one-free?  Or shall we lift up our hearts?