‘What poetry needs is a place at the table,’ begins a recent piece by my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh which I heartily enjoyed and recommend, not just because he goes on to write very attentively and generously about a poem of mine, but because I agree so strongly with the more general point he is making: that poetry has become strange to us, and that this is a tragedy.
The reason for its scarcity in our lives these days, he argues, is not that we do not revere it, but almost that we revere it too much, so that, thus ‘safely exalted and ignored’, it has been forgotten and grown strange. When we do meet with it, it seems unfamiliar and discomfiting. We know that it is Important Language, but we don’t know why; we forget, except on rare occasions, what the poetic register is for. We intuit its sincerity and its seriousness, but not its purpose, even though our forbears throughout the ages understood this naturally. We think it is perhaps a kind of public therapy session for the poet, an unburdening of his emotions and preoccupations, and listen to it out of politeness if nothing else. Perhaps we think of it as a porcelain dinner service, kept in the dresser for special occasions. We think it is only for the solemnest moments, for funerals and centenaries, to be intoned only by professional actors and public figures.
But this is to miss a vital element of poetry. Poetry is a craft, something that belongs to a community, and is to be shared and enjoyed by many, and often. We treat music and film in this way; Maolsheachlann argues; why not poetry? He says,
Whenever I’ve shared my poetry with people (with a very [few] exceptions), the reaction is generally twofold:
1) I like it.
2) It makes me think of X or Y or Z.
But what I was really gunning for is a critical reaction. What is good about it? What is bad about it? What does it suggest to you in terms of meaning and association? Exactly the sort of critique anyone would have about a film, a novel, a painting, a piece of music. I just want my poem to be treated as a piece of work, not as pure sacred self-expression, immune from analysis.
The price of our present misunderstanding is that we hardly encounter poetry at all. And yet it is an essential vitamin, a vital mineral; it should be our daily bread. It involves emotion, yes, but also the distillation and disciplining of emotion. It is elevated language, yes, but not actually sacred. We should not shrink from its invitation to attentiveness any more than we would begrudge such an invitation from a film or a piece of music. We should welcome it into our lives. It should season our speech like salt, deepening its flavour, and, by making us more attentive to our words, make us in turn more mindful of our human dignity.
But like all good things, like all gifts, it is also an end in itself, to be cherished and rejoiced in for its own sake.
May St. George and indeed St. Edmund and Our Lady of Walsingham save and protect England, this small precious portion of the Earth’s surface: much misunderstood, much maligned, much afflicted in various ways, but still the home of many people of good will, and still to be honoured, cherished and defended.
The Fantasy in E Major by Harold Darke (1888–1976) in an arrangement for strings by C. Jenkins, accompanied by a sequence of paintings by James Lynch (b. 1956) mainly of scenes in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Many thanks to YouTube user David Harris for putting the two together.
Where all was dark there is suddenly fire; where there was death there is life once more. Happy Easter to one and all!
In Święta Lipka in north-eastern Poland, on the 4th May 2019, an irresistible arrangement of a familiar tune is sung by participants in one of the many Liturgical Music Workshops that are run by Hubert Kowalski (conducting) and othersacross the country and elsewhere in Europe. They sing, ‘Pan zmartwychwstał i jest z nami’ — ‘The Lord is risen, and is with us’ — or, as we know it in Britain, ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’.
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!), thesteadily 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.
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.
Words from the second Psalm, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral. ‘They arise, the kings of the earth; princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.’
A treasured prayer, the tenth of the Solemn Intercessions for Good Friday:
Let us pray, dearly beloved, To God the Father almighty, That he may cleanse the world of all errors, Banish disease, drive out hunger, Unlock prisons, loosen fetters; Granting to travellers safety, to pilgrims return, Health to the sick, and salvation to the dying.
A moment of silent prayer. Then the Priest says:
Almighty ever-living God, Comfort of mourners, strength of all who toil, May the prayers of those who cry out in any tribulation come before you, That all may rejoice, Because in their hour of need Your mercy was at hand. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Long-suffering readers may have noticed the blog tradition of reposting every Ash Wednesday a short poem I wrote a few years ago, the ‘Lent Rondel’. This gives me the chance not only to inflate my blog statistics by regurgitating old material, but also once again to fail to resist the temptation to fiddle around with the poem a little bit more. One kind and especially long-suffering reader, my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, poet and author of the Irish Papist blog, suggested that I explain the thinking (which he presumed there had been; I told you he was kind) behind the original composition of the poem and these subsequent yearly tinkerings.
Well, here goes. I think most poets would agree that a poem is not something one sets out to write, as one sets out to write a letter or a diary entry. A poet does not get up in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall write an Ode to Spring’ and have it all down by 5 p.m.. It is all usually much deeper, stronger and more mysterious than that. A poem begins, as far as I can tell, with a tiny moment of germination: a spark of realisation or conception, a recognition that a poem ought to exist — or even that it already exists, and that the task at hand to work out its exact form — or ‘find out’, as the ‘famous men’ do in that wonderful passage of Ecclesiasticus.
But a poem seldom arrives in a single brilliant flash of inspiration, leaping whole and sound into the mind and onto the page. I think a lot of people these days have forgotten this — especially people who think they aren’t interested in poetry. A poem is made by a combination, even a dance, of inspiration and craft, one taking over whenever the other momentarily runs out of steam. Robert Frost said, ‘A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.’ The bad news is that writing poetry therefore often involves hard work. But the good news is that it is not just the preserve of a chosen few; I am sure that most people could write a decent poem if they put their mind to it. There is nothing Calvinist about it: it is a matter of both grace and works.
The sensation of writing a new poem is rather like trying to remember an existing poem that is just out of reach of the memory — and of course there is no anthology in which to look it up. In this sense, it is also like a crossword puzzle whose solution lies not on the back page or in tomorrow’s edition but in the heavens somewhere, taking form on the page only after a good deal of thought and discernment. It is also like prospecting a mine, working one’s way down likely seams in the hope of striking gold.
It is also comparable to the work of a sculptor, in that the finished product is to some extent there all along. Just as a sculptor gets rid of all the extraneous stone around the work’s true form, the poet has to get rid of the extraneous words, trying and retrying different phrases or with verbs conjugated differently, putting words in end-on or trying slightly different meanings, until, ideally, the perfect marriage of form and meaning is found, everything fitting as soundly and naturally as plain speech, and having the ring of truth.
For this reason, one thing the poet feels is the need to get out of the poem’s way. A true poem has a force and a life of its own, pushing itself into the world, asserting its existence; it has to be written, weighing on a poet’s conscience until it has emerged (and thereafter lifting blissfully from the shoulders, leaving euphoria behind). As Charles Causley said, ‘If I didn’t write poetry I think I’d explode.’ This is consistent with one measure of all the truest and greatest art, which is that life feels unimaginable without it. Imagine a world without Handel’s Messiah; imagine no Wordsworth, no Dickens, no Constable. Remember the sight of Notre-Dame de Paris in flames; how unbelievable it seemed that it might cease to exist.
Now I hasten to clarify that I am not making such claims as this for my rondel. My point is that most poets feel that their poems have a life of their own, insisting on their own existence. A true poem is no work of mere ego; it is called out of you by forces beyond yourself; the words ‘discernment’ and ‘vocation’ come to mind. Even so, it can be tough going. You never really rest until it is finished, and you always know at some level if it is not, however you may wish to deny it: this or that line or phrase doesn’t quite ring true; this or that word sits oddly or lumpishly. You always hope for the winds of inspiration to save you from too much craftsmanship. ‘Will you choose,’ as Edward Thomas cried, ‘choose me, you English words?’. Or, in the words of Yeats:
A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these […]
So, as far as this Lent Rondel is concerned, the original ‘spark’ that I remember arose from noticing the rhyme of the words ‘Lent’ and ‘repent’ (which I can hardly have been the first to do). This nagged away at me until the tell-tale sequence of thoughts arrived: ‘those words are interesting — that would make a good poem — ah yes, it probably is a poem, and I have to find out it what it is’. What came into my mind was a picture of a short, bracing message of encouragement at the start of Lent. The briskness of rondel form would fit, I felt, and this at least gave me a ready-made shape for the poem — rather like the grid of the crossword-puzzle. I then hit on the phrase ‘hold fast’ (which is what I think of as a ‘twin-truth’ — a double meaning whose two senses reinforce, not contradict, each other) and thought a good refrain would come from this.
Now, looking at my notes, I am about to undermine everything I have just said about poetry being long, arduous work, as by my own standards I seem to have got the first draft of this down startlingly quickly — ‘within an hour, between 10 and 11 pm on 13 February 2018’ (once an archivist, always an archivist). Most of my efforts generally take me months. Even so, every Ash Wednesday since I have dithered over the refrain and the punctuation. Originally it was the slightly purple-tinged ‘O followers of Christ, hold fast’, but I soon settled on this:
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast; Be not afraid; keep faith; keep Lent.
Something still didn’t feel right, though, and I fiddled around with it several times, including with the punctuation (like Oscar Wilde, taking all morning to put in a comma, and then taking it out again in the afternoon):
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast. Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent: […]
But this year I decided that the second line needed to run more freely, and recast it entirely —
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent.
— which I hope is an improvement. It feels right to begin with the salutation (‘All friends’…), and to put the two ‘hold fast’s next to each other since, after all, they are saying something slightly different. After all this trying to be clever, the second line is simpler and does not overload the refrain.
So far, so much dithering. Yet the first round after the refrain, ‘…all people pent / in pleasure’s prison, bravely cast / Your senseless sin aside at last’ came to me almost whole and entire, and I have always been happy with it. The only later alteration I made was from the original ‘needless sin’ to ‘senseless sin’, with its serpentine and sin-suggestive sibilance, but that sort of ‘tightening up' is par for the course. I was also pleased at the way we land on the line ‘Believe the Gospel and repent’ (which hopefully call to mind the priest’s words as he smears our foreheads with ash, ‘Repent and believe the Gospel). That fell into my lap like a gift (as per Edward Thomas’s appeal).
The part that was hardest to write at first was, in fact, the part that is a also little more awkward for the reader, the lines beginning ‘For by God's Son, who underwent / The Cross…'. This perhaps makes sense in that something slightly more complicated is being said, and of course I had only just enough rhymes for this very tight poem: it’s no good having a set of three very good rhymes (‘Lent’, ‘repent’, ‘pent’) if you can’t reach a total of five at all. However, I am satisfied enough of having avoided anything contrived even with these lines. (And perhaps it is no bad thing if a mention of the Cross should cause a slight stumble in the rhythm). I have altered very little about it, except that ‘thirst and hunger’ was originally ‘hunger’s hardness’: sometimes — and perhaps especially in a Lenten poem — plainer is better.
So there we are: a simple guide to writing a Lent Rondel, and agonising over it for four years.
In response to Maolsheachlann’s request, I have dug the different versions out again and found to my surprise that the changes were less significant than I remember. I really was fiddling around with colons and semi-colons for several years, unable to work out what was wrong with the refrain until this year’s re-casting. (One of my questions was whether you have two colons in the same sentence?…)
2018–2019
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.
All grunged-up souls, all people pent
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast
Your needless sin aside at last:
Believe the Gospel and repent.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:
The thirst and hunger will not last,
For by God’s Son, who underwent
the Cross, we know that we are meant
For endless life when pain is past.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
2020
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.
All grunged-up souls, all people pent
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast
Your needless sin aside at last:
Believe the Gospel and repent.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:
The thirst and hunger will not last,
For by God’s Son, who underwent
the Cross, we know that we are meant
For endless life when pain is past.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
2021
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent.
All grunged-up souls, all people pent
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast
Your senseless sin aside at last:
Believe the Gospel and repent.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast;
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:
The thirst and hunger will not last,
For by God’s Son, who underwent
The Cross, we know that we are meant
For endless life when pain is past —
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
And here again for good measure is the current and, I hope, final version!
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast; Fear not these desert days of Lent. All grunged-up souls, all people pent In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast Your senseless sin aside at last: Believe the Gospel and repent. All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast; Fear not these desert days of Lent. The thirst and hunger will not last, For by God’s Son, who underwent The Cross, we know that we are meant For Heaven’s home when pain is past — All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast.
I have nothing original to say about what has just flared into horrible flames in the east of our continent; only that I share the general horror at the sight of the face of Europe suddenly disfigured once again by ‘conventional’ territorial warfare between nations. Once again the world’s hard law asserts itself: that peace is fragile; that brute force is the plaything of the tyrant; that we cannot solve our problems by ourselves.
The days are turning slowly at the moment, and there is a lurid, unreal gleam to them as the nightmare unfolds. The shock of naked evil takes time to sink in. I understand only in outline the background to this crisis, but whatever the legitimacy of Russia’s complaints hitherto, and whatever the misbehaviour of Ukraine or the impertinence of the West, nothing justifies this campaign of outright and wholesale military aggression, let alone the very nasty weapons and tactics that are being used. Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark puts it plainly: ‘This is outrageous. It is outrageous before Almighty God, it is outrageous before the world.’
Yet no swift or easy end seems likely, not now that the invasion force has been committed. This shows every sign of being a long and bitter and ruinous struggle, with impossible cost to life and limb. Thus opens yet another chapter in the tragic histories of both Ukraine and Russia.
Somehow, although the conflict is far to our east in Britain, it reaches close to home in certain ways: for me, most obviously with respect to my Ukrainian neighbours, who still have relatives in their homeland. I was startled, too, to read news of the Polish composer Paweł Bębenek, who on the day the invasion began was in the Ukrainian capital to conduct one of his singing workshops, just like the one I attended when he came to London last October. Hearing news of the invasion, he knew he had to leave straightaway. After a fortunate but desperate escape in a Polish diplomatic car, he is now safe at home, but it seems to have been a close-run thing. (I now understand more fully why, at one moment during the London workshop, he mentioned the anxiety and suffering of Ukraine, briefly but with much feeling). One way and another, this catastrophe does not feel as remote as it might have done.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there is a feeling of powerlessness at this remove. Contribution to the humanitarian efforts (Caritas, Aid to the Church in Need, the Disasters Emergency Committee, of which CAFOD is a member) is one obvious and valuable way to help. But it occurs to me that it would also be an idea, if we have the opportunity, to think imaginatively about the sort of help that could be given. We could, for example, favour with our patronage any Russian local or family businesses that may be nearby, and thus reassure their owners, and remind ourselves, that a nation is more than any crazed madnesses of its government. So far we have generally been good at remembering this (including my neighbours, to their great credit), but we know how human beings can be: such reassurance will do no harm. Russia too is a noble country and its ordinary citizens deserve better than the present leadership; they should not be blamed for Russia’s disgrace.
One other thing we can do is to keep going about our lives with care and purpose. It has occurred to me before that in my work as an archivist, one good catalogue record added is one small deed done for order against chaos, for truth against falsehood, for good against evil. In no way is this equivalent to the valour of a soldier defending his homeland, but it is something; and the same goes for everyone. It also aligns with the words of the poet-priest Malcolm Guite in the video below, in which he discusses C. S. Lewis’s exhortation, appropriately enough in a sermon of 1939, not to abandon poetry and beauty in times of tribulation. We in Britain may not be directly engaged militarily in this new war, but we are engaged always in the great cosmic battle, in which every sound line of verse, every sweet bar of music, every true word, every good deed, every laugh, every tear, every prayer carries its weight. And it is on this plane of existence that war itself ultimately begins and ends. For, as Archbishop Wilson also points out, just as all war is fundamentally conceived in the heart, so too in the heart alone can it truly be ended. Let it be so, let it be so.
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast; Fear not these desert days of Lent. All grunged-up souls, all people pent In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast Your senseless sin aside at last: Believe the Gospel and repent. All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast; Fear not these desert days of Lent. The thirst and hunger will not last, For by God’s Son, who underwent The Cross, we know that we are meant For Heaven’s home when pain is past — All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast.
Posted according to tradition (in a revised version), and also published in this month’s edition of Oremus (no. 274, March 2022), the ever-enjoyable magazine of Westminster Cathedral.
Seven hundred years ago today, at half-past four on the morning of the 13th February 1322, the monks of Ely were creeping back to bed having just said Lauds, when a terrifying explosion of sound burst from the cathedral next door. An earthquake, was their first thought, and, given what they found when they ran into the nave, there might as well have been one. The Norman crossing tower had collapsed; rubble choked the floor; the church lay open to the sky.
The disaster had not been altogether without warning. Cracks in the tower’s masonry had developed not long after work had begun on the new Lady Chapel just to the north, so the monks were already taking the precaution of avoiding the cathedral sanctuary. This was one reason why nobody was killed in the collapse. Even so, the sacristan, Alan of Walsingham, was in understandable despair at the scene, ‘not knowing which way to turn nor what to do.’ [1] He had only been in office for three months, and he must have suspected that the Lady Chapel works, which he himself had put in hand, had hastened the catastrophe. Never mind that he had already presided over Ely’s other recent misfortunes; in 1314 it had beenAlan who had opened the shrineof St. Alban, the first English martyr-saint, in order for Edward II himself to declare the relics’ veracity, only for the King to declare that the true relics were not these, as Ely had claimed since 1045, but those in the possession of the abbey at St. Albans. Now not only was Ely’s reputation in tatters, but the very fabric of its building lay in ruins.
Yet Alan of Walsingham turned out to be exactly the right man for his job, for it was he who, once he had recovered himself, devised and oversaw the replacement of the crossing tower — which was not merely a replacement, but its far surpassing. Already considered ‘remarkable for his skill in goldsmith’s work’, he was about to prove an acute knowledge of and instinct for the science and art of architecture. Within six months he had had cleared not only the rubble of the old tower but the four columns that had supported its corners, widening the crossing into a huge octagonal space. Over this he placed a structure so audacious that the cathedral might have been built to incorporate it, rather than the other way around: the famous and quite unique octagon lantern tower. With the help of the master carpenter William Hurley, Master of the King’s works south of the river Trent, Alan’s brainchild was translated into reality. By their extraordinary imagination and the magnificent workmanship they oversaw, four hundred and fifty tons of lead and timber were made to soar weightlessly into heaven, where they have remained ever since, letting nearly seven centuries of photons flood down into the nave.
Detail of picture above: John of Burwell’s carving of Christ in Majesty, in the place it has occupied since 1340.
It is remarkable that we know all these names; in tales of cathedral-building, most of the heroes are anonymous. Yet at Ely we even know who carved the the central roof-boss at the octagon’s culmination, the figure of Christ in Majesty on which all its lines converge. The craftsman was John of Burwell, a local man from a village south-east of Ely, and his carving was lowered into position in 1340. Only eighteen years after disaster befell his city, he made good its crowning triumph joining the ranks of the men had brought this architectural masterpiece to completion, a perfect marriage of art, engineering and devotion that remains the jewel of Ely to this day.
The Cathedral and octagon tower from across the river Great Ouse
[1] Jon Cannon, ‘Cathedral: the Great English Cathedrals and the World that Made them’, (London: Constable, 2011), p. 323.
A message from Her Majesty the Queen on the seventieth anniversary of her accession to the throne. Amid its characteristic understatement are certain poignant details; I am particularly moved by the beginning of the final paragraph.
Thank God for our Queen.
Tomorrow, 6th February, marks the 70th anniversary of my Accession in 1952. It is a day that, even after 70 years, I still remember as much for the death of my father, King George VI, as for the start of my reign.
As we mark this anniversary, it gives me pleasure to renew to you the pledge I gave in 1947 that my life will always be devoted to your service.
As I look ahead with a sense of hope and optimism to the year of my Platinum Jubilee, I am reminded of how much we can be thankful for. These last seven decades have seen extraordinary progress socially, technologically and culturally that have benefitted us all; and I am confident that the future will offer similar opportunities to us and especially to the younger generations in the United Kingdom and throughout the Commonwealth.
I am fortunate to have had the steadfast and loving support of my family.
I was blessed that in Prince Philip I had a partner willing to carry out the role of consort and unselfishly make the sacrifices that go with it. It is a role I saw my own mother perform during my father’s reign.
This anniversary also affords me a time to reflect on the goodwill shown to me by people of all nationalities, faiths and ages in this country and around the world over these years. I would like to express my thanks to you all for your support. I remain eternally grateful for, and humbled by, the loyalty and affection that you continue to give me. And when, in the fullness of time, my son Charles becomes King, I know you will give him and his wife Camilla the same support that you have given me; and it is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort as she continues her own loyal service.
And so as I look forward to continuing to serve you with all my heart, I hope this Jubilee will bring together families and friends, neighbours and communities – after some difficult times for so many of us – in order to enjoy the celebrations and to reflect on the positive developments in our day-to-day lives that have so happily coincided with my reign.
I do not myself think that there has been overall social or cultural improvement in Britain over the course of our present Queen’s reign, but that is no fault of hers: it is we who have failed in following her example. But her words here show that in spite of that, without bitterness, she is thinking foremost of our unity in the years ahead.
What a treat, last Thursday evening at the Royal College of Music, to hear Ruth Gipps’ Fourth and Vaughan Williams’ Eighth Symphonies played by the students’ Symphony Orchestra. In fact, for me it was several treats wrapped up in one: it was the first time I have heard Vaughan Williams’ Eighth played live, the first live performance of a Ruth Gipps symphony I have heard at all, and, more generally, it was a delight to find the future of British music in such safe hands. And after these past two years it was also a real tonic to drink in the fizz and the liveliness of a university atmosphere.
I already knew and loved these two symphonies, but had not realised what an interesting pairing they would make in concert. In spite of their contrasting moods, both are adventurous as far as sonority is concerned, making lavish use of the timbres of woodwind and percussion in particular, and producing, in each case, moments of remarkably bright and gleaming sound — just the thing for mid-January.
But their moods are certainly contrasting. The Gipps, which was conducted by the great Martyn Brabbins, is overall rather more questioning and unsettled than the Vaughan Williams, even at times agonised, having, as Jill Halstead has put it, ‘an undercurrent of pessimism found in only a handful of her works.’ There is still that weaving together of spiky energy and romantic lyricism that is so characteristic of Gipps, along with melismatic solo, duet or trio passages, but the backdrop against which they are heard is a melancholy and uncertain one of shifting harmonics and rhythms.
“That is a really difficult symphony,” was Martyn Brabbins’ opening to the little ‘mid-amble’ he delivered to the audience after the Gipps, and yet one would hardly have thought, had he not told us, that he and the orchestra had only had two rehearsal sessions together before the performance. “But that’s how it is in the U. K.: we don’t have much rehearsal time. So they have to get used to it!” he said. He was very warm about the musicians. He also made some observations which put into perspective how remarkable the recent Ruth Gipps Revival has been: even this great British conductor admitted that she had been in his blind spot; he had heard of her name in the seventies, but never met her, and this was only the second piece of hers that he had ever conducted. She really did seem to have dropped into obscurity. Yet now, with no small thanks to him, the next generation of young musicians have had the chance to play and hear her music for themselves.
Next came Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no. 8, in which each movement was placed under the baton of a different student conductor (and which resulted in the unusual spectacle of four conductors lining up to take a bow at the end!). This too was clever programming, because, while the outer movements are famous for using ‘all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer’, the second movement uses only the wind sections, and the third only strings. I rather liked the style of the conductor of the third movement, while the chap who won the jackpot to conduct the tintinnabulous final movement — “it’s just like Christmas,” as Martyn Brabbins put it — was absolutely in his element. The various solos were carried off masterfully, and the overall blend was testament to rock-solid musicianship.
This is a symphony so full of life and gaiety that it might be a surprise — but if so an instructive one — to find that Vaughan Williams wrote it in his early eighties. The first movement alone contains almost his entire, and considerable, range of moods: the solemnity, the radiance, the tempestuousness, the serenity. But the mood is overall joyous and optimistic; only in the thoughtful third movement, the Cavatina, a kind of latter-day Tallis Fantasia, are there pangs of sorrow, or regret, or something like it. It is full-blooded, lusty music that reminds you that you are alive, and is all wrought together so masterfully: rich and intricate, but never too much. Martyn Brabbins admitted that he used not to like it when he was young, “but now,” he said, “I can’t do without it;” and nor can I.
How wonderful that this should be done, as Gipps’ centenary year draws to a close, and Vaughan Williams’ begins. Many thanks to all involved for a wonderful evening.
These have now been nearly two rather difficult years. The hardship of the pandemic continues, menacing us not only in the obvious ways, with sickness and the threat of sickness, but also by disorientation and incertitude. So much about it seems so hard to read, so impossible to predict; even with reliable statistics, it is often a struggle to work out what such figures actually mean for our lives. Hard information is not enough by itself to arbitrate between imperatives; for that, something different is needed: the gift of wisdom.
Many of the strands of hope I thought I perceived at the onset of the pandemic — greater local feeling, a sense of unity, a new awareness of the sanctity of life — seemed to fade with the receding of the first wave of the virus. The blessed quietness of the roads lasted only a few weeks here in mid-suburban south London before the traffic came surging back, if anything heavier and more aggressive than before (though I have been surprised this past month by a distinct lessening in comparison to December last year. The mood on the roads often seems a useful barometer for the public mood in general). Even during the first wave, certain things marred the solidarity: I did not like the police helicopters on the lookout for gatherings on the nearby Common — a huge expenditure of resources supposedly too scarce to provide basic foot patrols in ordinary times — nor the Government’s almost immediate resort to the law to enforce the ‘lockdowns’, even though the great majority of people clearly understood the seriousness of the diesease and were already taking heed of the unfolding crisis. As for a pro-life revival, its seeds are evidently yet to spring; only this past autumn the House of Lords was debating yet another motion for assisted suicide. There is much to be grateful for in the development of the vaccines, and some aspects of the good things I hoped for have come about — but overall it has been an uncertain, unsettling time.
Then there is the new gear into which the dictatorship of relativism has shifted, the breathtaking speed with which that nameless thing, the ideological movement that is all around us, has conquered so completely the mainstream of our culture. Identity politics, imported wholesale from the United States, is one way to describe it, or radical-secularist-progressivist-post-modernism; I do not really think we yet have an adequate word for it. But it is frightening and dangerous. In Britain for the first time in something like a century it is once again fashionable and respectable to judge people not by their character but by their arbitrary and immutable characteristics. Meanwhile, in the highest and most venerable institutions, simplistic or ideological readings of history go unchallenged, extreme conclusions are drawn, and guilty verdicts are passed on our forbears. All high principles, all traditional distinctions are undermined and torn down.
If, as the claim runs, there is no truth, merely power, no wonder the dictatorship of relativism wants that power for itself, however stridently it proclaims its good intentions. Such is the strength of this thing that even the pandemic itself has been relativised before it, and never more clearly than at that dizzying moment when the mass protests and disorder of summer 2020 actually found favour with respectable public opinion. That episode, to me, was more alarming even than the first wave of the pandemic: to see the three months’ solidarity evaporate not for weddings, not for funerals, not even for the national memorial of V. E. Day, but for contentious street protests inspired by events in a different country and advocating a hostile and revolutionary ideology; and then to witness the behaviour of supposedly serious and grown-up public bodies — even the most cherished and trusted public institutions in the land — suddenly issuing startlingly, embarrassingly politicised ‘statements’ in support of these protests. One feels the ground moving under one’s feet in noticing the kinds of remarks, however outrageous, that because they are politically approved one can get away with saying in public, by comparison to those that one cannot say: the plain common sense, the eternal verities even. A radical and narrow-minded agenda is taking advantage of a general crisis of leadership to flourish in our institutions, and it is an agenda that is growing ever more overtly hostile to common decency, to fair-mindedness, to traditional Britain and ultimately to the Christian faith and imagination.
The whole movement is a caustic solvent, dissolving memories, restraints and all kinds of proper boundaries, notably those between the political and the personal, and between the political and the religious. In many circles it is increasingly difficult to demur, to reserve judgement on a matter, to remain apolitical, let alone to make one’s own mind up about a particular issue (no sooner does a newsworthy event occur than one particular interpretation of it emerges and is pressed home). Many people feel considerable misgivings about it all, even as they experience the not inconsiderable pressure to give in and go along with it.
The cultural upheaval has, on the other hand, brought certain grounds for hope, such as the possibility of interesting and fruitful alliances between, say, us inveterate churchgoers, who are well used to life on Progressivism’s list of enemies, and those newer to troublemaker status, such as those of a ‘secular liberal’ persuasion who recognise and reject the authoritarian streak in identity politics. Only a few years ago we might have considered each other opponents; now, though, there is an opportunity to find some common cause, an unexpected way to put into practice Pope Francis’s ‘culture of encounter’, and a chance to remind the world — and perhaps ourselves as well — that the Church is always keen to take part in exciting conversations, wherever they are happening and whomever between, and willing to make its contribution to the public forum. The New Evangelisation has some interesting new dialogues to enter, and I think some surprises await us.
All the same, ordinary life is undoubtedly growing more difficult for those of us who wish simply to live a quiet life in accordance with the wisdom of our forbears; increasingly, it will take actual grit. The lines that began this post were composed by the writer and ornithologist John Buxton on Christmas Eve in 1941 while a prisoner-of-war at Laufen camp in Salzburg. Our situation is obviously very different from his, but I think we can still profit from the wisdom of his approach. Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads: we, like Buxton, in that ingenuous style reminiscent of a medieval carol, might find ourselves reciting simple truths in defiance of the world’s madnesses:
His mother in the stable
Watched him where he lay,
And knew, for all his frailty,
He was the world’s stay.
Now of course this is Christmastide, when it is proper to feast and make merry, and I should not really be striking such a minor key here. (In truth I had originally intended this post for the end of Advent; New Year’s Eve seemed the next most thoughtful moment!) This is a precious time of year, one of the few seasons when we can return properly into the real world of our homes and families, and precious not only because the celebrations of Christmas will give us the strength to face the year to come, but because they are good and glorious at the present moment, for their own sake. And in any case, they do not only give us strength for the future; ultimately they are the future; they are a foretaste of the chord into which all things, the world’s woe and all, shall resolve.
For he should be the Saviour,
Making wars to cease,
Who gives joy to all men,
And brings them peace.
Wishing all readers good health and much happiness in the New Year.
Herbert Howells’ haunting setting of John Buxton’s carol ‘Long, long ago’. Sung by I Fagiolini, 24th December 2020.
The liturgical year is the Church’s colour-wheel, lending its hues to the year’s seasons, and every year I think I am fondest of the sweet mauve of Advent. Now its mood of quiet anticipation has brought us to this day, Christmas Day, when, by the quiet marvel in the stable, Christ, the Son of God, entered not only our world but our human family, and so changed everything for ever. No earthly power can touch this truth; no ideology destroy it; and by it we know — even when life seems to demand of us impossible courage — that all things shall be right in the end. Purple gives way to white and gold; the triumph of innocence is at hand; the Devil’s works are set unravelling. A light has shone into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Merry Christmas, one and all!
Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rosetti’s carol In the Bleak Midwinter, sung by the choir of Winchester Cathedral (conducted by David Hill) to a beautiful string accompaniment.
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.
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.
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.
