In the Next Few Years

Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads.  These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder. 

The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves.  There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness.  Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people.  Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose.  And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.

How, then, do we keep ourselves steady?  There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand.  With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours.  We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity.  We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations.  We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children.  We can say that political causes do not make good religions.  And so on.  It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.

 

All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one.  We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax.  Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new.  The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial.  We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year.  The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’  We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time.  For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world.  Yes, we know all this.  And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.  

In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose.  So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one.  Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society.  Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions.  Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself.  The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality.  Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.

In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen.  Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear.  Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for.  Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused.  Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo.  Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching.  We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language.  It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.

A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church.  But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much.  We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society.  Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well).  The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.

In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex.  We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism.  We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it.  All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.  

There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded.  To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations.  For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes.  To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games.  For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been.  It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed.  It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right.  It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated.  Truth must be twisted and then toppled.  Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.

This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre.  I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well.  But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield.  Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.

But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass.  For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will.  It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted.  Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good.  If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright.  Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.

DrewCR2 · There is a green hill

The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh.  I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,

That we might go at last to Heaven,

Saved by His precious blood.

Why Mary Whitehouse Was Right

All cultures need their mythologies, and all mythologies their villains: an old truth, but one as true of Progressive Modern Britain as of any other society, any other civilisation.  Today, as in any other age, a whole cast of antagonists are kept ready to be invoked against any criticism or challenge, avatars of the forces of backwardness to be loathed and jeered.  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 the dread syllables ‘Mary Whitehouse’, if one dares, is to summon an unmistakeable image into the progressivist mind: a reviled great-aunt, perhaps even a witch, lips pursed with disapproval, eyes blinking indignantly behind horn-rimmed glasses, preening her blue-rinse hair and sallying forth against all the fun and games of the Swinging Sixties.  This too is a caricature, and one quite as shallow as any of the others, but one equally necessary to the progressive cosmology.  Somebody had to be found to play that role, and Mrs. Whitehouse fit the bill.  And it was imperative to the Great Myth 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 and just.  Today the campaign she fought may seem entirely lost — all around us reigns the ‘disbelief, doubt and dirt’ that she opposed — but the justice of her position has been vindicated by the passing years: vindicated, and one day will 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 we allow a broadcaster’s 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 being invited over the drawbridge to serve as seer, sage and minstrel.  This is, long though we have forgotten it, a solemn trust indeed.  It is the trust of hospitality, the mutual courtesy of guest and host.

In its early decades under the chairmanship of Lord John Reith (1889–1971), and above all during the Second World War, the BBC generally understood and fulfilled this duty.  When in peacetime the Television Service was resumed, 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 the Corporation’s 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 an impertinent 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 when 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, the more easily to usher in the great liberalisation of social customs and moral standards that has now transformed 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 scarcely notice, let alone discuss or debate, 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, the first to call the BBC to account for this abuse of trust.  But it is worth pointing out that her concern arose initially not from her own viewing, 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-form pupils (i.e. aged fifteen or sixteen) had revealed upset and confusion arising from televised dramas or panel discussions.  One among several examples was a drama including close-up shots of ‘the screams and agony’ of a woman in labour, which understandably caused them anxiety 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.)  Though confident that her pupils would recover in time, she still thought it a needless setback and an intrusion at a sensitive time in their 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 it was her own generation that was principally 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, in a later chapter:

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 so much being driven from below, by a spontaneous uprising of Baby Boomers, as being orchestrated by the cultural elites from above.  

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 travelled to London to take her concerns directly to the BBC and the Independent Television Authority, the fore-runner of ITV.  At the BBC she was, she said, 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 on that occasion was Grisewood’s superior, the extraordinary figure of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (1910–1987), who served as the BBC’s Director-General during the crucial years 1960–1969 (and who incidentally was also the brother of the novelist Graham Greene.)  When Mary Whitehouse spoke of her own generation’s responsibility for the Permissive Revolution it was probably him that she had most in mind.  Both were born in the same year — a remarkable 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, set down in 1969, could have been written last week: this is fluent 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 had come to hold that position at all.  BBC Directors-General do not come from nowhere: other people, somewhere, had thought him the man for the job.

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 Government was willing to renew the BBC’s Charter for a further twelve years.  The Corporation had set its course, and with 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 word of the campaign 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 not so 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.

It was at this meeting in Birmingham that one of the main battle-fronts of the 1960s was at last drawn up in plain sight.  Several factors combined to catapult the occasion into the national news, and thereby the national consciousness.  The first was an unexpected last-minute request from the BBC to televise the meeting, a request to which Whitehouse agreed — only to find, shortly after proceedings began, 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.)

Things did not all go the troublemakers’ way, however, 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).

The result was, of course, a sensation, and one on the strength of which the Clean-Up TV Campaign swelled into a national movement.  Mary Whitehouse found herself cast as its figurehead — and thus 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 as the number of signatures reached nearly half a million.  There was not the slightest moderation of its programming.  Its only direct response would have been better not made at all: 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 down 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 was open in his hatred of 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 the Director-General — 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 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 she and they 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 well-equipped to defend them against rational objection in the public forum — on television, on radio, in print and in university debating societies — and needed no convincing of the media’s important role in facilitating genuine debate.

Embed from Getty Images

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 only too 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 sides of 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 and savagely 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.

Embed from Getty Images

Receiving the O.B.E., 9th December, 1980

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, she believed that 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 channelling of it, a disciplining, for the sake of the peace of mind of younger viewers.  But she was not against the tackling of serious issues, as is evident from 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 not trivial.  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 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 1960s, 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, broad-church Anglican though she was, she rather remarkably ended her book by quoting at length from Pope Paul VI — to the point of 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 giving way 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, and only failed because not enough people stood with her.  We need the strength of 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 in a Thames TV studio who, having supported her arguments in a TV 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.

Ten Years Since Benedict’s Visit

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster, 17th September, 2010

Already it has been ten years since Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.   Ten years, then, of tea twice daily from my souvenir ‘Papal Mug’ (I make that over seven thousand cups), and ten years, too, that my life has been on the course on which those four days confirmed me: a course with a particular direction, with a particular confidence, in the service of a particular Person.  I cannot be the only one for whom the whole experience helped to affirmed and clarified all that matters most in life, and indeed what life really is.  So, not least because it also happened at a formative time for me, on the threshold of university, I remember the Papal Visit with great happiness, and continue to draw strength from its memory.  It will remain a high moment for the rest of my days.

The long-serving Papal Mug

This had not always seemed likely, however.  One way and another, the months before the visit constituted a rather unpleasant prelude, in which whole swathes of the press and media engaged in an eight-month campaign of hostile publicity not simply against the idea of the visit, but often explicitly and unashamedly against the person of the Pope and the Catholic Church as a whole.  The opposition, overwhelmingly secularist-atheist in character, often went well beyond legitimate criticism of the Church’s institutional failings, or reasonable scrutiny of public expenditure, and curdled swiftly into ill-veiled hatred of the Christian faith itself.  Commentators who ought to have known better indulged in highly personal attacks on Pope Benedict’s character, or fulminated against caricatures of Catholic teaching, or simply ranted against religious belief in general.  Crazed calumnies about Joseph Ratzinger’s supposed corruption or Nazi sympathies or authoritarianism, all nonsense and all child’s play to refute, were sent gleefully off to the printers instead of the compost-heap where they belonged.  Deep down, of course, what these commentators really disliked was Benedict’s resistance to moral relativism; his quiet insistence on the absolute truth of the whole of Catholic Christianity, including those aspects that our age finds difficult.

The most enthusiastic opponents organised themselves into an outfit calling itself ‘Protest the Pope’ (American style — they didn’t even have the decency to protest against the Pope in the British and prepositionally proper manner!).  It was extraordinary to see how much they loathed the Church, or at least what they mistook for the Church; it was both sobering and instructive for us to hear things said and left to stand which, if uttered against almost any other visitor to this country, let alone any other religious leader, would have been seen by all for the smears they were.  The ‘Protest the Pope’ gang was from the outset both very silly and very small, but it received such disproportionately generous airtime from the media that things at one stage began to look serious.  Would Richard Dawkins and his accomplices actually attempt a stunt like a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict, ridiculous as it sounded? Were they seriously going to ruin the whole thing?  It is by inducing such anxiety that many bullies work, intimidating others as much by their threats as by their actual deeds.  Even in March there was a sense that the whole visit might be in jeopardy:

Some would oppose this proclaimer of peace;
Some disbelieve what he wants to increase;
Some would believe that the world has no hope;
Others know why we must welcome the Pope.

Some have more interest in money than God;
Some are content to give anger the nod;
Others, who know what is built on this rock,
Welcome his peace.  Let him come to his flock.

Well, in the end, this prayer was answered, thank God.  For at last the day came, and the moment Pope Benedict landed in Scotland, the mood changed utterly.  No sooner had all and sundry seen what he was really like, and the public’s true attitude became clear, than the press changed its tune.  The hatred and opprobrium vanished; it was shown to have been over-amplified, even illusory; it was gone with barely a whimper.  ‘Protest the Pope’ simply ceased to be relevant.  There was no longer anything to fear, and we bore our disparagers no ill will.  The BBC, transformed, began excellent and thorough coverage of the visit.  (It is so often the way with the Corporation that it does come up with the goods in the end, when it knows the world is watching!).  Above all, Pope Benedict received the warm and triumphant welcome he deserved, and there followed in succession four days of remarkable gestures, images and experiences.

What strikes me, in retrospect, is to see the different ways in which these moments worked and touched us: though always the same man, he was visiting us in various different guises.  Here was a head of state, a pastor to guide his flock, a thinker with ideas to contribute to our cultural and social conversation, a missionary to a land forgetful of God, and a priest entrusted by Christ with His authority and consolation.  He was both ‘world leader’ and ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’, and a figure of interest even to non-Catholics, even to non-Christians, including some of my own friends.  This many-layeredness was evident from Pope Benedict’s very first engagement, his meeting with the Queen in Edinburgh.  This being a state visit, the first of any Pope to the British Isles — St. John Paul II’s 1982 journey having been technically a ‘pastoral visit’ — Benedict was, formally speaking, Her Majesty’s guest and counterpart.  But, in the very same moment, the head of the Church of Rome was greeting the head of the Church of England, and the healing of old religious as well as political wounds was continued.  Most simply, and perhaps most importantly, we saw two people who understand and believe the Christian faith and share its hope, who know both the burden and the importance of duty, offering by their steadfast example quiet encouragement to millions of people.  So it was that, even within the first hour, Benedict had touched the people of Britain in the national, the ecclesiastical and the personal spheres.

The day in Scotland concluded with a Mass in Bellahouston Park (with a specially-composed Mass setting by James MacMillan), and the next day, the seventeenth, the Pope came down to London.  That afternoon a group of friends and I went to see if we could catch a glimpse of him leaving Lambeth Palace on his way to Westminster.  Now at last I could see for myself just how mistaken the media had been in the months beforehand.  The mood among the waiting multitude on Lambeth Bridge was one of unalloyed excitement; open delight was alive in this city that is often so jaded and cold-shouldered.  The anticipation steadily grew and grew, until a ripple of cheers rose to our right… all at once the Pope-mobile was in view, sweeping rapidly towards us — and there he was!  A wave of jubilation accompanied Benedict across the bridge in the twixt-season afternoon sunlight.

Only an hour later, the Pope was giving his remarkable speech in Westminster Hall, a speech which remains no less urgently relevant a decade later:

The role of religion in political debate is […] to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.  And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.  It is a two-way process.  Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.  Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.  This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.  In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. […] I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, 17th September 2010. <http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html>

Then came the first visit by any Pope to Westminster Abbey, and sung Evensong.  For those who love England and long for Christian Unity, it was greatly moving to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope embracing and kneeling side by side in prayer before the shrine of St Edward the Confessor — and then what a sheer treat to hear the music of Herbert Howells thundering from the organ, and the beloved hymn beginning — 

All my hope on God is founded:
He doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good and only true.
God unknown,
He alone
Calls my heart to be His own.

Some readers might wonder: why all this excitement for one man?  Well, of course, the Pope is a mortal like all of us.  But the office he holds goes all the way back to Christ; the first of his predecessors was St Peter himself, to whom Christ turned and said ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’.  So he is Christ’s earthly representative — though the authority entrusted to him is not simply raw power to do with what he likes; rather, his is the responsibility of the hand on the tiller and the eye on the horizon.  He keeps the Church together on the straight and narrow through time and space, so that the one eternal Gospel can be proclaimed anew in every age.  This responsibility remains whether or not the Pope himself is a good or a bad man — though it obviously helps if he is a good one.  That Benedict himself is a kind and gentle man, blazingly intelligent and perceptive to the crises and opportunities of our time, only gave us more reasons to love him when he was Pope.

Procession of parish banners in London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

The summit of his 2010 visit was to be the beatification of the much-loved Cardinal — now Saint — John Henry Newman, at Cofton Park on the outskirts of Birmingham.  But it was the vigil the evening before in London’s Hyde Park that was the high point in my book.  As on Lambeth Bridge, it was the atmosphere that made this gathering extraordinary.  The first hint was at at Victoria station, where a proliferation of the distinctive yellow bags with which we had all been issued drew my eye to a large group of fellow pilgrims.  There was a feeling of recognition, of fellowship, of deep togetherness, not in the least bit oppressive, but refreshing and liberating, which only swelled as we converged on Hyde Park.  As we realised how many we were, the great cultural headwind subsided, and another, sweeter spirit took its place.  Eighty thousand of us all together — I had never been in a gathering that size — and with no need of an enemy for our unity.  Yet for all that volume of people, it felt rather like a family gathering, which of course is exactly what it was.  It was such a simple thing, for us all to meet like that together, but even then I knew the memory would be so happy that it would last for years.  Great assemblies of people can be joyful or they can be ugly… but here we had all fallen in with a very good crowd.

Pope Benedict arrives at London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

And we young people present could see for ourselves, by our own sheer numbers, that we were not as alone in our beliefs and hopes as we might feel in ordinary life.  We all went wild when Pope Benedict arrived, of course, but the hush that descended at Adoration was more memorable, and more unique.  What else would bring about such a moment?  Who else could deliver such a lucid, sincere, quietly but deeply stirring address, with that way of calling us ‘Dear young friends…’ as no mere celebrity or political ideologue would do?  Here was a man who knew how seriously young people want to take life, who knew the depth of our hunger for truth and wisdom, who would not patronise us, offering us a serious speech which was also a message of great joy.  He called us not to mere comfort or apathy or fruitless self-indulgence, but to truth and to greatness and to love — the real thing, measured not by the world’s standard but in a higher currency.  Quoting the same John Henry Newman he was to declare a near-saint on the morrow, he urged us to see dwell deeply on our vocations.  He gave us not the off-hand secular doctrine that drawls at us to do as we please, but the call first to discern and then to follow the true path that God has in mind for us, and thereby to discover the only way to real happiness and real greatness:

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”   

Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Hyde Park, 18th September 2010. <https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/>

Perhaps it was then that I knew I belonged to the Benedict Generation.  Most thoughtful young people do indeed hunger for some great mission; they do want to be called to marriage or to make some great vow of love; they are drawn to authenticity and integrity; they yearn for worthy and meaningful lives and to pursue truth and goodness; they want to know how to help others, and how to understand the world and the mystery of life.  

There could hardly have been better words ringing in my ears as I began the adventure of university.  I was to encounter the spirit of the Benedict Generation again at Fisher House, the student chaplaincy, where I learned that the Faith is intelligent as well as beautiful.  I was to find it in new friends I have made in the years since.  I was to see it in churches and at lectures.  I know I was not alone in this — it is alive in the articulateness of Catholic Voices, and in the lives of many Catholics now in their twenties and thirties.  It is also worth mentioning Paschal Uche, who delivered an address to Pope Benedict on behalf of all young people in Westminster Cathedral’s Piazza the morning before the Hyde Park vigil.  Since his ordination last month he has been Father Pascal: the call he discerned was a vocation to the priesthood.  In short, we in the Benedict Generation know what we learned from our German Shepherd, and will draw strength from that treasure-store for ever.

The Hyde Park vigil begins

So it was that those four days made certain things very clear to me at an important moment.  Whereas I had already been well aware that that the Christian faith was hardly the in-thing in the twenty-first century, the visit’s prelude showed me that a significant cohort of fashionable secularist Britain, not content with mere mockery, hated it outright.  But they did not have the last word, nor did they even speak for most ordinary British people, who remained their usual tolerant (or at least rather apathetic!) selves.  For the visit itself revealed the groundlessness and weakness of the hatred — of all hatred — before the strange strength by which inner goodness and holiness drive out evil; the way in which (to quote Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s step-son) ‘Christianity simply works.’   

How could people hate a man so gentle as Benedict?  The situation presented a clear choice to me.  Whose side was I on?  Was I to go along with fashion, or to be loyal to my Church and my faith, even if this meant dissenting from the spirit of the age?  Yes, I would be I was on Benedict’s side, the side of the Church, and the side of Him whom the Church worships.  I knew where my loyalties lay, and I have never since had cause to regret that choice.  Even when Catholic life requires courage and hard work and unwanted conspicuousness, and however clumsy my efforts, it does not call on any strength that it cannot also supply.  It is the only way.  As they sang in Westminster Abbey, 

Christ doth call one and all:
Ye who follow shall not fall.

Thank you, dear Pope Emeritus Benedict!  May God bless you!  And, as you asked on arriving in our land, “may all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many.”

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.