Through a glass darkly – 158

Drama on our doorstep yesterday afternoon. There was a major gorse fire on Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic hill just beyond the bottom of our garden. Our friends arriving from Lyon wondered if it was laid on for their entertainment. I set off to walk [limp] round the hill this morning. But it seems that some of the ground is still smouldering. A fire engine came past me in search of more water. And a police car told me that the top road was closed. So I walked to Duddingston instead.

Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of My Choice

Wilfred Thesiger was the last of the great British eccentric explorers, a product of the latter days of the British Empire. I have been reading his autobiography, The Life of My Choice, published in 1987. It’s the life of the man of a previous age.

Thesiger was born in Abyssinia where his father was the British Minister in June 1910. He was the first British child to be born there. His father had served as honorary Vice-Consul in Van during the Armenian massacres, had fought in the Boer War 1900-01 with the Imperial Yeomanry, and then rejoined the Consular Service to serve successively in Belgrade, St Petersburg, and Boma in the Belgian Congo. In 1909 he was appointed Minister in Addis Ababa. From his parents the young Thesiger inherited a close friendship with Ras Tafari, the future Emperor Haile Selassi, and a deep and abiding love for Abyssinia and its peoples. When he came to England for school in 1920 he found it strange to be in a country with no hyenas, no kudos, no oryx, and no eagles. He was the only boy at his prep school, St Aubyn’s, who knew nothing about cricket, and he was beaten regularly by the sadistic headmaster. During his second term his father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty eight. His mother took a country house in remote Radnorshire.

Thesiger was at Eton, and then went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in autumn 1929.He boxed for Oxford for four years as a light-heavyweight winning three times against Cambridge. In the October 1930 he returned to Abyssinia as Honorary Attaché to the Duke of Gloucester to attend the coronation of Tafari as the Emperor Haile Selassie.  Also present as a journalist was Evelyn Waugh, of whom Thesiger had never heard. “I disliked his grey suede shoes, his floppy bow-tie and the excessive width of his trousers; he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Later he asked me if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I refused. Had he come, I suspect that only one of us would have returned.”

After graduating at Oxford Thesiger returned to Abyssinia for a year. His first expedition was to explore the land of the Danakil, a murderous tribe among whom a man’s status depended on how many men he had killed and castrated. It was a ground-breaking journey made in the company of a small group of natives including armed soldiers. Thesiger had only rudimentary Amharic and basic Arabic, and relied on Omar, his trusted Somali headman. “Omar … would have been upset if I had shared meal with the camel-men … I had grown up accepting our servants as subordinates, distinct in colour, custom, and behaviour”. 

After this first expedition Thesiger did a four-month course in Arabic at SOAS, and went out to join the  Sudan Political Service, travelling up the Nile via Cairo and Luxor. From January 1935 he worked in the Sudan, initially based in Kutum in Northern Darfur, where he and one other official administered an area of sixty thousand square miles, inhabited by a mix of Berber, African, and Arab tribes. His role involved extensive travelling around the region, mainly by camel, building relationships with tribal chiefs, and dispensing justice. And shooting lions which were then regarded as troublesome vermin by Darfur herdsmen. Thesiger remained in Sudan until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1938 he made an expedition to Tibesti, the little known mass of mountains on the border of Chad and Libya, which extend two hundred and fifty miles from east to west and contain the highest peaks in the Sahara. Again Thesiger travelled by camel with a small group, Idris Daud, his teenage headman and five other Zaghawa tribesmen. In remote French Equatorial Africa a local chief warned that Britain’s policy of allowing uncontrolled immigration of Jews into Palestine was laying up troubles for the future. A prescient warning from an unlikely source.

When war breaks out Thesiger is commissioned as a Bimbashi in the Sudan Defence Force. He serves under [Major] Orde Wingate, at that time best known for leading Jewish night squads against Arab guerrillas. Wingate was a passionate Zionist, regarded by military authorities as a security risk for passing information to Jewish leaders. Thesiger describes him as arrogant, ill-disciplined, and resentful of authority; an idealist and a fanatic. Who would have been better suited to the time of the Crusades. Later in the war Thesiger served with the SOE [Special Operations Executive] in Syria and with the SAS [Special Air Service] and the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa. In 1943 he resigned his commission to work as Political Advisor to Crown Prince Asia Wossen.

Thesiger’s best-known expeditions took place after the war. Between 1945 and 1950 he made unprecedented travels across the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, sharing the vanishing way of life of the Bedouin tribesmen. And he later lived among the indigenous peoples of the marshlands of southern Iraq. These experiences are described in his two best-known books, Arabian Sands [1959] and The Marsh Arabs [1964]. Both of which I read a long time ago. In addition he travelled extensively in Iran, French West Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He spent his latter years living among the Samburu tribesmen of Northern Kenya and writing a succession of travel books. Critics say that the quality of his books deteriorated. He died in Surrey in 2003 leaving a vast collection of photographs and negatives to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. 

Thesiger was a child of the British Empire. His father presided over the mud huts of the British Legation in Addis Ababa. His uncle was Viceroy of India. As a six-year-old he experienced the spectacular victory celebrations as Haile Selassie marked his conquest of the old ruler and received homage from the Abyssinian nobility and some sixty thousand fighting men. These early experiences gave him  “a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and … … a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovation in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.” Thesiger’s motives for enduring the torments of travel were complex and intriguing. He hated the materialism of the West and sought an alternative in the austerity of traditional Arab life. He wanted to experience freedom and comradeship, to test himself during hardship and danger in unexplored countries

Women are conspicuously absent from this book. Apart from his much loved mother on whom he doted. Like T.E. Lawrence, whom he greatly admired, Thesiger had close relationships with young Arab servant boys. In his Seven Pillars of Wisdom Lawrence had glorified “friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace”. Equally Thesiger’s books contain seductive photos of androgynous young Arabs. When a Vanity Fair interviewer boldly asked if he had been in love with them, he replied that he did love them, “as long as you don’t mean physical love”. His attachment was “the sort of love you give to your brothers and your family.” Some modern commentators are doubtful about this firm rejection of homosexuality. But I think for Thesiger celibacy was probably part of the penance of the desert. Which for him, as for Lawrence, was a place of purification. Remote from the uncleanness of the ‘civilised’ world. 

Remembering Mrs Minchin

I’ve never been to Ethiopia and my personal experience of the British Empire is nil. But -when I was at Christ Church, Duns, in the 1990s, one of my regular Home Communion visits was to Mrs [Kathleen Winifred] Minchin, who lived at Easter Cruxfield, an isolated farmhouse out in East Berwickshire. Mrs Minchin [it never occurred to me to call her anything else] was a child of the Empire. Her father, Colonel William Molesworth CBE, had been Governor General of the Andaman islands and was subsequently Surgeon to the Viceroy. She had been born in Salem, Madras, but the family had a house in Poona. As child she was staying with her grand-parents in Queenstown in southern Ireland and recalled being taken out of the house to see the Titanic on her maiden voyage. Her only brother, William ‘Moley’ Molesworth, flew with Albert Ball in the Royal Flying Corps, was credited with 18 kills and won the MC and Bar. 

She herself was married, in Simla, to Alfred Alyson Minchin, described by her as ‘a box wallah’. [I think her father would have preferred her to have married an Army Officer !] The marriage foundered, and she came home to Berwickshire to live with her father to whom she was very attached. Of their two children the younger , I think, [and favourite] son, Lieutenant Henry Desmond Penkivel Minchin, was killed fighting in Normandy in 1944. I used to have a slim volume of his not-terribly-good poetry. Privately published. There is an idealised portrait of him in a stained glass window in Christ Church. Mrs Minchin lived by herself in this big house until March 1998, and when she died at the age of 102, I buried her in the family plot at Preston [Edrom] in Berwickshire. I wrote an obituary of Mrs Minchin for The Berwickshire News when she died, but her surviving son Pat thought it best ‘not to make a fuss’ and so it was not submitted for publication. Mrs Minchin’s only grandson, Ronald, had died in his mid-fifties a couple of years earlier. Most probably from alcohol poisoning. Tragic. I took his funeral too.

August 2025

Through a glass darkly – 157

So, President Trump’s five-day golfing holiday here has come to an end. For his round at his Trump Turnberry course he seemed to be accompanied by an extraordinary number of golf buggies including possibly the world’s only armour-plated buggy, presumably a precaution against another assassination attempt. There were very few actual shots of his golf. Word is that he cheats at golf as in many other things. At one golf course he was known as Pele, a reference to his regularly kicking his ball back onto the fairway to a more favourable lie. His bulk and his headwear make him look increasingly like Robert Maxwell, another galloping crook. [Though Maxwell to his credit spoke half a dozen languages well. And, unlike Trump, inherited no money from his father.]

Trump and Keir Starmer are polar opposites in many ways. But I guess we should be grateful that they seem to have forged a decent working relationship. Which might help ramp up pressure on Trump as regards what is happening in Gaza. [And in Ukraine.] I can hardly bring myself to watch the television news from Gaza. I wrote a somewhat intemperate letter to the Church Times a week ago, criticising General Synod, and the House of Bishops, and the UK government for their pusillanimous response to what Israel and the IDF have been doing for many months. Glyn Paflin  e-mailed me to check on my postal address. But they didn’t publish the letter. Disappointing.

Madeleine Bunting: The Model Occupation

One of the more interesting books that I was given for my birthday is Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule. Bunting, born in 1964, studied History at Cambridge and at Harvard, and then joined The Guardian where she worked as a news reporter, leader writer, religious affairs editor, and columnist. She is the author of five books of non-fiction and two novels. The Model Occupation, first published in 1995, was her first book.

German troops arrived on the Channel Islands in June 1940, a few days after the fall of France. Two British battalions had been withdrawn a week or two earlier. It had seemingly been assumed by the British authorities that the war would not reach the islands, and the German troops disembarked from their troopships unopposed. Preparations made by the German High Command in France for a battle for the islands proved unnecessary. Contrary to expectations, the German troops were received with polite deference by the islanders. Numbers were small initially, but by Christmas 1940 there were roughly two thousand Germans on Jersey and a similar number on Guernsey.

This was to be a model occupation, The cordial relations between the German commander and the island authorities were matched by the polite helpfulness of the islanders and the law-abiding soldiers. It soon became apparent that there was no need for German soldiers to carry weapons or to wear a steel helmet. After the fighting in Poland, and the Low Countries, and in France, and the tense expectation of an imminent invasion of England, the Channel Islands must have seemed like a holiday camp to the Germans. They enjoyed the white beaches and the bright blue sea. At the beginning there was plenty of food, and the shops were stocked with goods long unobtainable back in Germany – stockings, shoes, make-up, chocolates – to send home to loved ones. The island shop-keepers, glad of the custom, accepted their Reichsmarks happily enough.

But it was an occupation nonetheless. The bailiffs of the islands had instructions from London to take over the civil administration, co-ordinating with the German military authorities, while trying to ensure that their actions were in accordance with the Hague conventions. But to some people the bailiffs’ actions seemed more like collaboration. And some of their measures are disturbing. When some islanders painted V for Victory graffiti on road signs across the islands, the bailiff offered a £25 reward for information leading to a conviction. And when two German soldiers were killed in a modest British raid on the islands, the bailiffs agreed to supply a list of the names of two hundred British-born islanders, who were subsequently deported to internment camps in France and Germany. From 1941 came a series of anti-Jewish measures. Which included the forced registration of all Jewish residents of the islands. Three Jewish women were deported from Guernsey in January 1942 and all three died in Auschwitz.

The book received glowing reviews on publication. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, in the Sunday Telegraph, that it is “a masterly work of profound research and reflection, objective and humane”. [I am a bit surprised that anyone took Trevor-Roper seriously in 1995 after he had, in 1983, as a director of The Times, rushed to authenticate the forged Hitler Diaries, which the Sunday Times had paid good money to serialise. A misjudgement that caused Private Eye to refer to him as Hugh Very-Ropey. Or Lord Facre.]  Norman Stone wrote in The Times, “Madeleine Bunting is a superb chronicler of what happened … if you want a classic example of the dilemma of resistance, here it is”. But the book was highly controversial, and provoked a furious controversy on the islands, where some critics thought it was inappropriate to dig up details of what looked like a shameful past. In her Epilogue Bunting acknowledges that the story sits uneasily alongside the preferred, Churchillian post-War image of Britain as a country fighting alone ‘on the beaches and on the landing grounds’. The islands’ experience contradicted Britain’s complacent assumptions about the distinctiveness of the British from the rest of Europe. Under occupation the British had behaved much as the French, the Dutch, or the Danish.

Perhaps the saddest story concerns the  fate of the several thousand slave labourers, Russian, Ukrainian, North Africans and Spanish Republicans, who were brought to camps on Alderney. About sixteen thousand prisoners were brought to the islands to work on the fortifications, and they lived and worked, and died, under appalling conditions. Bunting traces some of the Russian survivors who made it back with great difficulty to their home villages. Where as ‘repatriates’ they were accused of collaborating with the Germans and treated as traitors. Some were imprisoned in Stalinist camps and other conscripted into labour battalions.

It is an interesting and controversial book by a gifted writer.

Francis Beckett: Stalin’s British Victims

Earlier in the month, when I was still only in my seventies, I read this book by Francis Beckett. 

In the 1920s and 1930s there were several hundred British and foreign communists living in Moscow. Among them was Bill Rust, a Communist journalist and subsequent editor of the Daily Worker, who moved there in 1928 to work for the Comintern. Beckett tells the story [the book was published in 2004] of four women who were victims of Stalin’s grim purges. Rose Cohen, born in 1894, was the daughter of Polish immigrants in the East End. She worked for the Labour Research Department under Beatrice and Sidney Webb, was a suffragette, a feminist, and a founder member of the British Communist party.  She was beautiful [the love of Harry Pollitt’s life; he proposed to her on numerous occasions], but in 1920 she married Max Petrovsky, a Ukrainian Jew who worked for the Comintern. From 1927 they moved to Moscow. Cohen and Petrovsky both worked for the Comintern and for the Moscow Daily News, and were considered a golden couple by the expatriate community in Moscow.  But Petrovsky disappeared in April 1937 and was shot later that year. Rose was arrested in August 1937 and shot in November. It was only in 1956, after the death of Stalin, that Cohen’s fate became known. And she was posthumously rehabilitated.

Rosa Rust, Bill’s daughter by his first wife, was abandoned in Moscow; and was caught up in the ethnic cleansing of the Volga Germans, spending time in a forced labour camp. She eventually escaped from a copper mine in Kazakhstan in 1943, and was repatriated to Britain with the help of Georgi Dimitrov. In England she first learned English, and then worked for Tass, the Russian news agency as a translator, and married George Thornton, a young communist historian. She and her husband lived happily in Yorkshire for fifty years sharing a love of drama and poetry, and cricket, and walking by the sea. She died in 2000, still speaking English with a strong Russian accent.

Beckett’s story is equally fascinating. His father, John Beckett, was a Labour MP from 1924 to 1931. But he was strongly opposed to Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, and joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, where he served as editor of the publications Action and Blackshirt. During the Second War he was interned in Brixton and on the Isle of Man, clashed with other BUF members and converted to Catholicism. Francis Beckett’s book on his father, The Rebel who lost his Cause – The Tragedy of John Beckett MP, was punished  in 1999. Arguably another casualty of the 1930s.

Envoi

We have friends coming, from Gloucestershire and from Lyon, in the next few weeks. The grass needs cutting. And I am hobbling around, hoping to advance an appointment with a hip consultant. At present that first consultation still looks to be 32 weeks away, which will take us to January/February next year. Susie and I are looking with interest at the website of the Nord Orthopaedics Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania. Watch this space.

July 2025

Through a glass darkly – 156

I’m an octogenarian ! As of last week. It’s been a long time coming. And  I scarcely feel a day over seventy nine. After considering some more up-market options [one restaurant had closed down, another did not open at lunchtime], Susie and I took the train across the iconic Forth Rail Bridge to Aberdour, a station which wins prizes for its flower arrangements.

And we met up with our friends Mike and Wendy, and had lunch at The Sands Cafe. It was excellent: good fish and chips, excellent service, home made ice-cream, and right on the beach overlooking the Forth. It was a glorious sunny day, and my nose has been peeling for the last week.

Celebrations

Susie and I celebrated my birthday and our Golden Wedding Anniversary with a party for seventy people at the former Priestfield Church on the Dalkeith Road. A mix of family and friends. My brother and his wife came from Birmingham, my sister-in-law and daughter from Leamington, the children flew up from down south, and several of Susie’s assorted cousins. Friends came from Edinburgh and from Duns, from Chantilly and Brussels, from Lyon and south-west France.

Priestfield worked well as a venue. The building dates from 1879-80, when it was built to house the Rosehall United Presbyterian Church. It is a complicated Lombardic building with stained glass by Mary Wood and Douglas Strachan. According to a plaque on the wall in a side-room, Susie’s grandparents, the Revd George Percy and Mrs Littlewood, were sent out from Rosehall as missionaries to Manchuria in the early years of the twentieth century. Followed in 1940 by Mr and Mrs Aylwin P. Littlewood, Susie’s uncle and aunt, also sent to Manchuria. It is a good building, and I’d like my funeral to be there. At some unknown future date.’

The church has been through several iterations down the years, most recently as Priestfield Parish Church. There are no longer any Church of Scotland services there following the amalgamation of Priestfield with Craigmillar Park and Mayfield-Salisbury earlier this year. But a Korean congregation worships there. And Newington-Trinity may well meet there for a few months when the heating system at Mayfield-Salisbury is replaced, though to be happening sometime next year.

People drifted in from about midday. The self-service buffet was provided by Nicci, of Butterflies at Marchmont Saint-Giles church. The wine came from Majestic [we have a dozen bottles left over which pleases Susie]. And the soft drinks came from Sainsbury’s. After we had sung Great is Thy Faithfulness, Charlie [Robertson] said Grace, and guests were guided in groups to the buffet.

I had long ago booked SoftShoeShuffle, a skiffle band who play a lot of Lonnie Donegan stuff. But one of them had a stroke, and in their place we had SwingCo, an all octogenarian jazz quartet. Astonishingly the bass player told us he was ninety-three. They played a mix of jazz classics, and Stranger on the Shore. And were excellent.

After which our friend Rebecca, originally from South Carolina but now living somewhere near Limoges, sang a collection from The Great American Song Book. Accompanied by Phil, who was at CH some fifteen years after me, and who was a one-time member at St Andrew’s, Linton Road, north Oxford. Mainly stuff by George Gershwin and Cole Porter. Starting with Summertime. And including True Love from High Society. Which encouraged us to release our inner Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. There is said to be a video of the whole event in preparation. Enormous thanks to Kenny, and to Carole and Michelle and Jade, and to David, who helped the event go so well. 

Life Goes on

Since the celebration we have been to a couple of events at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. First to hear Hamish McGregor and Colin Steele and others pay a Tribute to Ball, Barber, and Bilk. Three of the best known bands of the British Trad Jazz revival of the early 1960s. Good, energetic, New Orleans style stuff. And then to the Classic Jazz Orchestra playing big band stuff by Duke Ellington and Count Basie and others. Both concerts were in the SpiegelTent in St Andrew’s Square. Good venue, but terribly uncomfortable chairs.

In the weeks ahead have three sets of friends coming from Lyon. And I am wondering whether to beg a lift up to Ullapool and Stornaway with my friend Pete in a few days time.  It’s a tempting idea. The problem might be getting in and out of the car.

And I’m wondering whether to try and arrange my reading in a more disciplined way over the coming year. Is this the time to look at some of the dozen or more books on my shelves on the Spanish Civil War ? And should I embark on a complete re-read of the Le Carré corpus. A tempting thought. Meanwhile I’m back in the Psalms.

July 2025

Through a glass darkly – 155

Confessions of a pagan nun

Against a future downsizing from this house [but Don’t hold your breath], I regularly clear small handfuls of books off the shelves and take them to one of the charity shops. Often I can remember when and where I bought books and read them. But I recently came across Kate Horsley’s Confessions of a pagan nun, which was published by Shambhala, an obscure publishing house in the United States in 2001. Shambhala seem to specialise in Buddhist books.  The book has a price sticker of 16,00€. But I have no recollection of when I bought the book and why.

Confessions of a pagan nun is beautifully written. The book purports to be the memoir of Gwynneve, a sixth century Irish nun who in her middle years works in a religious community, both men and women, transcribing the books of Augustine and Saint Patrick. In addition to this work she is recording memories of her pagan youth, and of her independent mother from whom she inherited a wild spirituality and a skill with healing plants. She looks back at her life and she mourns her lost druid lover. [Who may or may not have been abducted by tonsured monks.] Roman Christianity, she reflects, has brought improvements to the rural economy, with a greater variety of crops and of domestic animals, and has also led to a more literate population. But at the same time this new religion, imposed by incomers, has increased inequality, has substantially diminished the role and  freedom of women, and has paid little attention to the beauty of nature. Disturbing events at the cloister bring Gwynneve into conflict with the abbot. Things do not end well.

Kate Horsley, I gather from the internet, is an American writer, who was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1952. As a college student she was involved in the civil rights movement and in anti-Vietnam war activism. She subsequently relocated to New Mexico, and is Professor of English at New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque. It seems that her move to New Mexico was inspired by her interest in Native Americans and she has published half a dozen historical novels.

Why I wonder did I buy this book ? I have little interest in feminist theology. [Though I do recoil with horror from the misogynist remarks of some Roman Catholic bishops.] And I have very little interest in what is loosely labelled as Celtic Christianity. Some thirty years ago I was at a Diocesan retreat on Holy Island, where the main speaker was David Adam, the then Rector of Holy Island, and the author of a dozen or so collections of Celtic prayers and meditations. It was a silent retreat. One afternoon I met [Bishop] Richard Holloway out walking. And I was unsure if and how to greet your diocesan bishop on a silent retreat. He hailed me enthusiastically from a dozen yards away: “Hello, Chris. What do you make of the speaker ? It’s complete rubbish isn’t it.”  I love him.

Celebration

Susie and I are gearing up for a joint 80th birthday and Golden Wedding celebration in the former Priestfield Church. For a variety of friends from Edinburgh and further afield.

We look forward to seeing Andy and Kate, and Joan, from Christ Church, Duns; Diana from Lyon; Armin and Magdalena from Brussels; and Alain and Ann from Chantilly. And my brother and two sisters-in-law, and our children and grand-children , from down south. I had initially booked a skiffle group, but one of them had a severe stroke and they had to withdraw. Instead we have a jazz quartet, whom I’ve not heard play. Word is that their drummer played with Kenny Ball back in the day. And Rebecca Sergeant has come from south-west France to sing, a collection of songs by Gershwin and Cole Porter. She is encouraging us to essay a modest dance to go with True Love, reprising Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly from High Society. But I fear it may look more like a clip from They shoot horses don’t they ! We shall see.

July 2025

Through a glass darkly – 154

Last year I read most of Evelyn Waugh’s earlier books, the novels that is not the travel writing which has dated badly. The conventional wisdom is that the First World War produced great poetry, think Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg; whereas the best known writers of the Second World War produced mainly fiction, think Olivia Manning and Evelyn Waugh, and abroad Norman Mailer,  Joseph Heller, Günter Grass, and Kurt Vonnegut. The Sword of Honour trilogy, based on Waugh’s own  wartime experiences, are certainly Waugh’s most ambitious books. I believe that it is on this mature writing that Waugh’s reputation as a major novelist rests.

Waugh at War

With hindsight it is easy to say that Waugh was not cut out to be a soldier. His free spirit was not suited to the military life. But after the outbreak of the war in 1939 Waugh was proud to be accepted as a successful candidate into the Royal Marines. Initially he enjoyed the ceremonial trappings, the gastronomic quality of the mess, the reflection of the silver candelabra on polished mahogany tables, the ritual clockwise circulation of the port. Life in the Marines initially suggested that he might be able to be both an aesthete and a man of action. But his infatuation with life in the army lasted only a few months. In April 1940 he was temporarily promoted to Captain and given charge of a company of marines. But he was an unpopular officer, vacillating between strictness and laissez-faire with his men. His inability to adapt to regimental life meant that he lost his command, and instead became the battalion’s Intelligence Officer. In August 1940 he took part in the Dakar Operation, which was hampered by fog and poor intelligence which caused the troops to withdraw.

Operation Menace – the Dakar fiasco

In November 1940 Waugh was posted to a commando unit, Layforce, serving under Colonel Robert Laycock. In February 1941 Layforce sailed to the Mediterranean and were involved in an unsuccessful attempt to recapture Bardia. Later in 1941 Layforce were involved in the evacuation of Crete. Waugh was shocked by the general air of chaos around the withdrawal, and by what he saw as loss of leadership and of cowardice among the departing troops.

The defence of Crete

Crete was effectively the end of Waugh’s active military service. In May 1942 he was transferred out of the commando into the Royal Horse Guards, but they struggled to find a role for an insubordinate and unmilitary officer. In January 1944, after being granted three months unpaid leave, he retreated to Chagford in Devon to write Brideshead Revisited, the first of his explicitly Roman Catholic books.

In July 1944 Waugh returned to service and was recruited by Randolph Churchill, a long-time acquaintance and occasional friend, to join the Maclean Mission to Yugoslavia. His relations with the Communist-led partisans were difficult, not helped by his insistence on referring to [Marshal] Tito as she. His chief interest became the welfare of the Roman Catholic church in Croatia, which he believed was suffering at the hands of the Communists and the Serbian Orthodox church. After his return to London in March 1945 his report was suppressed by the British Government in order to maintain good relations with Tito, now the head of communist Yugoslavia. In September 1945 he was released by the army, and returned to Somerset to Laura and his now five small children. The three volumes of his semi-autobiographical war trilogy, Sword of Honour, were published at intervals. between 1952 and 1961.

Men at Arms

In Men at Arms [pub. 1952], the first of the trilogy. Guy Crouchback, in his mid-thirties, [Waugh himself was 36 when the war broke out], from an old Catholic family, is determined to get into the war. It is essentially a question of honour, the need to prove himself. He takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, a thinly disguised portrait of the Royal Marines. Waugh’s move in January 1940 to Kingsdown Camp in Kent, a cavernous Victorian villa surrounded by the asbestos huts of a former holiday camp, caused his spirits to sink. But Kingsdown provided excellent material for a novel. Here Waugh encounters the formidable Brigadier Albert Clarence St. Clair-Morford: “He is like something escaped from Sing-Sing and talks like a boy in the Court Form at school – teeth like a stoat, ears like a faun, eyes alight like a child playing pirates, “We then have to biff them, Gentlemen”.” The Brigadier appears in an affectionate heroic guise as Brigadier Ritchie Hook in Men at Arms. 

Another prominent character is Crouchback’s eccentric fellow officer, Apthorpe, memorably played by Ronald Fraser in the 1967 television adaptation. Apthorpe’s upbringing and  pre-war life in Africa are surrounded by mystery. In an episode of high farce there is a battle of wits and military discipline between the Brigadier and Apthorpe over the latter’s mahogany thunder-box [portable toilet]. Before going overseas Crouchback attempts to seduce Virginia, from whom he is divorced, knowing that in the eyes of the Catholic Church she is still his wife. She turns him down.The book all ends tragically when the Halberdiers finally see action in the abortive Dakar affair. Apthorpe dies in hospital in Freetown, supposedly of a tropical disease. When it transpires that Crouchback had smuggled a bottle of whisky in for him, Guy is sent home having blotted his copybook. There are wonderful moments and comic characters. But I find that the overall sense is one of wistfulness. 

Officers and Gentlemen

This is the second volume of Sword of Honour trilogy [pub. 1955]. After the abortive Dakar escapade, Guy is transferred to a Commando unit training on the Isle of Mugg. The unit is commanded by Tommy Backhouse, for whom Virginia had left him. There is plenty of whisky and high-stakes cards with fellow members of Turtles [based on Whites]. His fellow trainees include Ivor Claire, whom Guy admires as the flower of English chivalry. And also the seedy Trimmer, a former hairdresser on trans-Atlantic liners who becomes an improbable war hero. In a Glasgow hotel Trimmer embarks on an affair with Virginia, a former customer on the pre-war liners.

The high comedy turns to tragedy as Guy is involved in the humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Crete. Guy performs well, but no-one else emerges with much credit. He escapes from Crete in a small boat alongside the disquieting Corporal-Major Ludovic. Once back in Egypt Guy comes under the protection of the beautiful and well-connected Mrs Stitch [clearly based on Diana Cooper] who reappears from earlier novels. She arranges for him to be returned slowly to England, partly in order to avoid difficult questions being asked about Claire, apparently a deserter. The book ends with Guy back in London, asking around in his club about a suitable job.

Unconditional Surrender

This third volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy was not published until 1961, some fifteen years after the end of the war. After the Crete debacle Guy Crouchbank has lost much of his idealism. He is injured while parachute training at a centre run by the increasingly paranoid Ludovic. Who is afraid that Guy will expose his behaviour in the withdrawal from Crete. During his two years at HOO HQ in London Guy is brought back into contact into contact with his former wife Virginia, now pregnant by Trimmer. The couple remarry before he is posted to Yugoslavia, where his Catholic faith is offended by the Communist take-over. Guy tries ineffectively to minister to a ragged group of Jewish refugees, who then suffer because of his contacts with them. In London Virginia gives birth to Trimmer’s child, before she and Uncle Peregrine are killed in an air-raid.

In a short epilogue, set against the Festival of Britain, Guy has remarried, to Dominica Plessington, the daughter of an old Catholic family.  I think we are to assume that Trimmer’s child will succeed as  Guy’s heir. [Though different editions of the book have slightly different postscripts.]

Reaction to the books

Reaction to the books was mixed. Men at Arms won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952. Reviewers were generally favourable. But Cyril Connolly, one of Waugh’s few male friends [caricatured in the trilogy as Everard Spruce], writing in the Sunday Times, complained that the middle part of the book was dull and that Apthorpe was an unfunny private joke. Waugh himself while writing the book had referred to it as ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’, a BBC radio soap of the time [to which my maternal grand-mother was addicted].

Progress was slow on the two subsequent volumes. Waugh was financially secure but maintained an extravagant rate of expenditure, and was looking to his war saga to finance his old age. Waugh was a commercially successful writer, and when Officers and Gentlemen appeared, it sold 26, 000 in the first month. Reviews were mixed. Cyril Connolly spoke of “a benign lethargy, which makes for slow reading”, while praising the latter sections on Crete. Waugh wrote to Maurice Bowra, “I am awfully encouraged that you like Officers and Gentlemen. The reviewers don’t, fuck them.”

By the time Unconditional Surrender appeared, in 1961, reviewers were uncertain what to expect. Waugh himself was “as successful, complacent, and vindictively dotty as ever” [Martin Stannard’s verdict]. His last two books, an anthology of his pre-war travel writing, When the going was good, and Love among the ruins had been dull, and his gifts as a writer seemed like his health to be in decline. At the age of 50 Waugh was old for his years, selectively deaf and rheumatic, and reliant on drugs to counter his insomnia and depression. Disturbingly his son Bron, author of the successful first novel The Foxglove Saga, seemed to be overtaking him in the public eye. Journalists were already writing about Waugh Père et Fils.

Reviewers again divided into two camps, with arguments for and against Waugh’s vision of the war and the world. Kingsley Amis and Philip Toynbee again attacked him for his social prejudices and his snobbery. But Cyril Connolly, while expressing reservations about the “biliousness of Waugh’s gaze” [cue Everard Spruce], was moved to read all three volumes and declared that “the cumulative effect is most impressive, … … unquestionably the finest novel to have come out of the war”. He even revised his opinion of Officers and Gentlemen, describing it as “magnificent”.

Personally I think the books are the best of Waugh’s fiction. The are some parallels with Brideshead, but with rather less of the snobbish nostalgia. Now there is a rich cast of characters: the socially inept Apthorpe, the all action military hero Ritchie Hook, the impostor Trimmer. And Guy’s bachelor uncle Peregrine, who mistakenly thinks that Virginia has designs on him. The episodes of chaotic HOO training on a Scottish island, the Isle of Mugg, and the unsuccessful hunt for an abortionist in wartime London remind us of Waugh’s gift for farce.

Guy Crouchback is a decent man, a melancholic [in Yugoslavia he confesses to a priest that he wishes for death], who chafes at the inactivity and bureaucratic incompetence of war when he wishes to be leading his men into battle. Like Waugh himself, Guy’s failings as a military man, and the failures of the operations in which he is involved – Dakar and Crete, contribute to his growing sense of disillusionment. His Catholicism makes him reluctant to embrace Stalin as an ally, and he is concerned about the future for his co-religionists in Tito’s Yugoslavia. When the war ends with a great victory over Nazism Guy shows no signs of elation. He regrets rather that he had once imagined that private honour would be satisfied by military service and war. Guy’s marriage and his adoption of Trimmer’s child means that the Crouchback line will continue. But it is not clear whether there will be room for the old-fashioned virtues of loyalty and honour and decency in the coming post-war world. Guy Crouchback, like his creator, found little that pleased him in the Britain of the late 1940s and 1950s. It all seems a long time ago.  But I’m glad to have re-read the Sword of Honour trilogy which I first encountered some five decades ago..

Envoi

Susie and I went down to Birmingham for the weekend. The furtherest we have been from home this year ! And the furtherest we are likely to travel. We were there for my niece Léonies’s wedding to Carlos, a mushroom grower from the Canaries. [Disgracefully I have no photos of them.] It was very good to see the family. Whom we probably don’t see often enough. The  weather forecast was for 30º-plus. But the train journeys went very smoothly, both down with Cross Country Trains and then back up with Avanti West Coast. We had booked Passenger Assistance in advance which worked well. But our helper when we arrived back at Edinburgh Waverley was apparently disappointed that I wasn’t my namesake from Coldplay.

We are now back home in Edinburgh, rejoicing in a temperate climate [there are stories of killer heatwaves around the Mediterranean], wondering whether to cut the grass, and fine-tuning the arrangments for a Celebration next month

June 2025

Through a glass darkly – 153

Books can be evocative. I clearly remember being given a paperback copy of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor, Sailor, Spy back in the mid-1970s by Mme Anne Warter, then Directrice of the Paris bookshop Nouveau Quartier Latin, and reading it with great excitement on the rather second-rate Silver Arrow train from the Gare du Nord up to Le Touquet. Later Le Carré books are linked to other memories. I read Little Drummer Girl while on a trip to an EFL conference in Groningen in 1983. And Single and Single during an ICS summer chaplaincy trip to Brittany in 1999.

These past few days I’ve been turning the pages of a book that has been on my shelves for some 50 years. Seeing the red dust-jacket brings back memories of the author. But until last week I had never opened the book.

William J. Fishman

Bill Fishman was born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish immigrant tailor and grew up in London’s East End. He  was educated at the Wandsworth Teacher Training College [where my father did a one-year training course after the war], and then at the LSE. After the war he gained rapid promotion as a teacher, and became principal of what became Tower Hamlets College of Further Education. In 1965 he spent a year as Schoolmaster Student at Balliol, and in 1967 he was Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University, New York. He subsequently resigned his job at Tower Hamlets to become Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then Barnet Shine Memorial Research Fellow in Jewish Labour Studies at Queen Mary College, London.

I never met Bill at Balliol. Which is odd since he was a distinctive character; tall with dark wavy hair, heavy spectacles, and a loud voice. But I got to know him during my time at George Allen and Unwin, as we had a publishing agreement with the Acton Trust who at the time were sponsoring Bill’s research into late nineteenth century labour history. Bill introduced me to Bloom’s, the longstanding kosher Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel High Street. [It closed in 1996.] After a lunch of well-done salt beef with chips and latkes, Bill would lead us on a tour of the surrounding streets drawing attention to the sites of long gone anarchist printing presses and of Jack the Ripper murders.

William J. Fishman: East End Jewish Radicals, 1875-1914

The publishing link with the Acton Trust did not survive my departure from George Allen and Unwin, and Bill’s book was published in 1975 by Duckworth, of the Old Piano Factory in Camden Town. [Duckworth, notable British literary publishers,  was run at the time by Colin Haycraft, once described as “a one-man university press”, husband of the writer Alice Thomas Ellis, and the brother of John Haycraft, the founding director of International House language schools.]

East End Jewish Radicals tells the story of how London’s East End became the home to tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, driven from Russia and eastern Europe by successive pogroms. They settled into the grim tenements of Whitechapel and Stepney and worked in tailoring sweatshops often under appalling conditions. Some of the immigrants had already been political radicals in Russia and they now sought radicalise and unite the Jewish workers of the East End.

Successive measures had eased the restrictions on Jews in public life: in 1833 Jews were allowed to practise at the Bar; in 1845 Jewish schools were permitted; from 1858 Jews could be elected to the Home of Commons; in 1871 the University Test Acts enabled Jews to graduate. But now in the 1870s the marked increase in the number of Jewish immigrants was a source of fear and embarrassment to Anglo-Jewry. Who felt threatened by the arrival of a mass of peculiarly clad, Yiddish-speaking paupers. A letter in the Pall Mall Gazette in February 1886 warned that “the foreign Jews of no nationality whatever are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native-born East Ender”. The Jack the Ripper murders provoked a minor outbreak of Judophobia. After the third murder, an editorial in the East London Gazette declared that “no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime as that of Hanbury Street, and that it must have been done by a JEW – and forthwith the crowds began to threaten and abuse such of the unfortunate Hebrews as they found in the streets …”. 

Against this background Jewish socialists and radicals assumed the role of fighting advocates for their people in the daily struggle against exploitation and prejudice. The earliest record of a Jewish workers’ organisation was a Union of Lithuanian Tailors founded in Whitechapel in 1872. In 1876 came the foundation of the first Hebrew Socialist Union. The secretary was Aron Lieberman, born in 1849 in the Grodno district of Russia, who had studied at the Petersburg Institute of Technology and at a rabbinical seminary in Vilna. Lieberman was a socialist prophet, fluent in Yiddish and classical Hebrew, rabidly anti-clerical, thoroughly committed to educating Jewish workers, and a scathing critic of the Jewish financial aristocracy. The brotherhood of man could only be achieved under Socialism. Lieberman subsequently moved to Berlin, was arrested in Vienna under anti-Socialist laws, and was imprisoned in Austria and in Prussia before being expelled back to England. Following an attractive [but married] young woman to New York, Lieberman was rejected by her and shot himself in a cheap lodging-house in Syracuse in November 1880.

Jewish immigration continued to rise between 1881 and 1891. The tolerance of the hosts diminished as numbers grew and the demands for work and for housing. In 1884 came the appearance of the Poilishe Yidl, the first Socialist newspaper in Yiddish. But this was supplanted a year later by the Arbeter Fraint [Worker’s Friend], a Yiddish monthly tabloid, open to all radicals, social democrats, communists, and anarchists. The paper was linked to an International Workers’ Educational Club, at 40 Berner Street, off the Commercial Road, which offered a base for radical and trade union movements in the East End.

The most influential leader in the decades before the First War was Rudolf Rocker, an unlikely phenomenon in Jewish life, born a Roman Catholic in Mainz in 1873, who for sixty years devoted himself to the Jewish working class and to Yiddish language and literature.  As a young man Rocker was an apprentice bookbinder and a Social Democrat. His first contact with Jews and with Jewish radicals came in Paris in 1893 when he was invited to attend a Jewish Anarchist meeting. Anti-anarchist pressures drove him out of France. He came to London and in 1895 became Librarian of the First Section of the Communist Workers’ Educational Union [Marx, Engels, and William Liebknecht had been members]. In Shoreditch Rocker became intimate friends with Millie Witkop, an attractive young Jewish immigrant from Zlatopol in Ukraine. They thought to emigrate together to the States, but were held at Ellis Island as an unmarried couple. Rocker was a persistent critic of the bourgeois institution of marriage and a longstanding advocate of Free Love. The American Press was heavily critical of the Rockers, holding to the established American puritan ethic; and the couple were shipped back to England. Rocker became editor of the influential Yiddish periodical Germinal,  a mouthpiece for libertarian socialism which temporarily replaced Arbeter Fraint. 

Rudolf Rocker

Fishman interviewed men and women who recalled Rudolf Rocker as “a handsome presence – tall, blonde, sturdy, recognisably German … …  he opened up the vision to us of a new society – no persecution, no hunger, only warmth and generosity.” Social evenings were held in the Crown Hall in Reddens Road. There would be classical opera and Edelstadt’s lieder accompanied by an anarchist pianist, and afterwards Rocker would lecture on some topic of political or literary interest. The Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 1905 brought new immigrants and political refugees. By 1906 the Rocker group opened a Workers’ Club in Jubilee Street, which included a gallery that accommodated 800 people, a library, adjoining classrooms, and a reading room.

Millie Sabel recalled some curious customers:

“I occasionally saw a small, intense man who sat alone at a table in the corner. He has slant eyes, balding reddish hair, drank Russian tea and spoke little. He was Lenin. There was also a handsome, dapper man who came later and helped paint the props at our theatrical – a quiet attractive comrade we called Peter the Lett. He was supposed to be Peter the Painter … … “ [subsequently thought to be the brains behind the robbery in December 1910 that led to the Sidney Street siege.]

The outbreak of war in August 1914 was a death blow to East End anarchism. As it was for the Second [Socialist] International. Though, as Fishman notes, in London’s West End French and German anarchists co-operated to open a Community soup kitchen to feed unemployed German workers. But shortly afterwards Rocker was interned for four long years, and was subsequently repatriated via Holland to Germany. His departure spelt the end of the London Jewish movement.

The siege of Sidney Street

There may be parallels to be drawn between radical Jewish immigrants who are the focus of this book and the  radical Muslim immigrants of a century later. Firman notes the tension between the ideal of educative growth combined with militant action, as proposed by Kroptkin and Rocker, against the concept of ‘propaganda by the deed’ proposed by the men of violence. The murder of the three policemen in Sidney Street certainly forfeited a lot of support among the moderates. Though Peter the Painter became a legendary anti-hero in East End folklore. It is a fascinating and colourful story. But I fear that Fishman’s book scarcely does it justice. He was a lively and captivating speaker, but his writing style is rather dull. Which is why the book is now heading for the OXFAM shop.

Envoi

The garden looks a bit scruffy as we come to the end of ‘no mow May’. We have had ten days of strong winds and squally showers, and I am now waiting for a dry couple of days to cut the grass. But the roses are magnificent. 

AbFab rose

We were sorry not to be away in Normandy with the family for summer half-term,, as we have been for the past three years. But we were delighted to see Craig and the girls, who were up in Scotland for a wedding. And delighted to share a big family meal with them for Amelia’s 14th birthday. 

The girls, like all our grandchildren, are a delight. Joanna would be so proud of them.

June 2025

Through a glass darkly – 152

I’m often given books as presents, and sometimes I don’t want to read them. A few years ago I was given Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century. And although I would like to have read it, I didn’t actually want to open it. And it sat reproachfully unopened on the shelves for a couple of years before I took it along to the OXFAM shop. More recently I was given a copy of a commentary on the book of Job, written in French by a conservative reformed pastor. I have looked at the early pages. But I know that I won’t live long enough to read the rest of it. And I’m aware that it may not sell very fast in the Edinburgh OXFAM shop. On the other hand I have just read, with great interest, a book that I was given for my birthday last summer.

Daniel Finkelstein: Hitler Stalin Mum and Dad

I am not predisposed to like a book by a Tory member of the House of Lords [elevated by David Cameron in 2013]. Who is also a journalist, political commentator, and supporter and director of Chelsea football club. 

[Aside.  When did it became the norm for politicians to make known their football allegiances ?  Did it start with Tony Blair, who claimed unconvincingly to have bunked off school to watch the Newcastle centre forward Jackie Milburn ? He didn’t; the dates don’t work. The prolific Alastair Campbell, onetime journalist and Blair’s right hand man, is known as a lifelong Burnley supporter. David Cameron claimed to be an Aston Villa supporter, but in an interview confused them with that other claret-and-blue team West Ham United.  [Or CSBJ, the Bourgoin rugby club ?] Keir Starmer claims to be an Arsenal supporter, like Jeremy Corbyn and Pritti Patel. He used to have a season ticket at the Emirates, though he may not have paid for it. Rishi Sunak supports Southampton – who have just been relegated. That sounds about right. I don’t think that Clem Attlee or Harold Macmillan ever talked about standing on the terraces at Highbury or at Villa Park.]

But Daniel Finkelstein’s family memoir is an extraordinary and gripping book. He tells the story, in some detail, of how his parents and grand-parents survived events in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. His maternal grand-father, Alfred Wiener, was a German Jew, born in 1885 in Potsdam. He was committed to the development of a modern liberal Germany and of modern Judaism, and saw these things are mutually supportive. After the First War, in which he fought for Germany and was decorated, he became General Secretary of the CV, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. The CV campaigned against anti-Semitism and sought to develop ideas of tolerance, liberalism, and social equality. But after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Alfred realised that he would have leave Germany. He settled in Amsterdam where he was joined by his wife and their three daughters. The youngest, Mirjam Emma Wiener, Finkelstein’s mother, was born in Berlin in June 1933. 

His paternal grand-father, Adolf Finkelstein [Dolu] was born in Lwow, in Poland, in 1890. The Finkelsteins were a wealthy Jewish family, fluent German speakers, partners in the dominant iron and steel business, who also owned property in Vienna.  Prior to the creation of an independent Polish state, Lwów had been a provincial centre of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. Half of its population were Polish, the other half divided equally between Jews and Ukrainians. Dolu married Luisa, the daughter of wealthy landowners, and they had one son, Ludwig, Finkelstein’s father, who was born in 1929. The business prospered and Dolu because known as ‘The Iron King’.

What happened next is an epic tale of survival. Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have written about the suffering of central European Jews under Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, under  Hitler and Stalin, the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. Finkelstein retells the story in terms of his own ancestors.

Alfred Wiener spent his years in Amsterdam assembling documents and data about persecution in Nazi Germany. The collection eventually became the Wiener Library. He himself relocated again to London, and then to the United States, before the war broke out. He was preparing to bring over his wife and daughters when Germany invaded the Netherlands. His wife Grete and their three daughters are trapped in occupied Amsterdam. Their friends included Anne Frank and her family. Of their predominantly Jewish neighbours in Jan van Eijckstraat 90 were murdered in the camps, in Auschwitz and Belsen, in Sobibor and Mauthausen. In June 1943 Grete and her girls were rounded up and sent first to Westerbork camp and then to Bergen-Belsen.

Three years earlier, in April 1940, Adolf Finkelstein had been arrested in Lwów by Soviet troops and militia as part of a bigger round-up. He was held in prison in Poltava and in Starobelsk, and was then sent north to a Siberian gulag, a labour camp, near Ukhta. Very shortly afterwards the NKVD came for Adolf’s wife, Luisa, and their son Ludwig, and they were forcibly relocated to a remote settlement in eastern Kazakhstan to work on a sovkhoz, a Soviet state farm. It was a place of hunger and death. There Ludwig and his mother along with some 100 other exiled Poles survived the freezing winters in a primitive shed built from cow dung. 

That any of his ancestors survived, and that some of them were reunited after the war, is a miracle. Though that is not a word that Finkelstein uses. It is a long story, and I was grateful for the four family trees at the start of the book. The book overlaps thematically and chronologically with Philippe Sands’ East West Street. The authors share a common past in Lwów/Lviv, and Finkelstein acknowledges that they are almost certainly cousins.

Through the detailed story of the Wiener and Finkelstein families, the book underlines the almost unbelievable suffering of the European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. It evenhandedly accuses both Hitler and Stalin of awful crimes against humanity.  Very unfortunately, lingering western guilt about doing too little too late to halt the Nazi holocaust means that world leaders are again doing too little to bring an end to the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians, Which to me looks very like ethnic cleansing. As tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children are sacrificed to save the political career of the odious Benjamin Netanyahu. The book ends with the survivors leading unremarkable lives in the respectable north London suburbs of Hendon and Swiss Cottage.

As I write this, I realise how little I was affected by any of this history when I was younger. I remember that when I was hitchhiking in Europe in the summer of 1963, I went out for a drink in Munich with a Jewish girl from Canada. Who told me that 17 of her immediate family had died in the camps. But I didn’t really take in the horror, and I didn’t make much of it at the time. And I can’t now remember her name.

Envoi

Susie and I continue to limp around on poles, like senior citizens practising for a three-legged race. Unusually, on two successive Sundays, I have been preaching out of town at St Anne’s Episcopal Church, Dunbar. Squeezing into a tiny Car Club car is an effort. But it was lovely on sunny mornings by the sea. And the congregation were very welcoming. Closer to home the roses are coming out, the garden is as good as it gets, and has required regular watering. We have been casting about trying to find a [replacement] skiffle band for a Celebration in July. And we are looking forward to seeing Craig and the girls here next week. It will be Amelia’s fourteenth birthday on Wednesday.

May 2025 

Through a glass darkly – 151

The days go by, each day getting a little longer. Passion Week began with an appointment with the diabetic nurse. continued through a series of early morning services at Newington Trinity, and ended with a walk of witness from Mayfield Church to Nicholson Square. And a sombre service of Tenebrae on Good Friday evening. During which I thought mainly about Joanna. 

The Pope died on Easter Monday. [As did my younger brother 3 years ago.] Probably a kindness for him, but a great loss to the Roman Catholic church. [The Pope, not my brother Peter.]  And beyond, as he was evidently loved by a multitude of people around the world. I read that viewings of Conclave went up by some 250% following his death. Incidentally I think that Robert Harris is a diligent researcher, but not much of a novelist. Ralph Fiennes might be an outside bet as the next Pope. Almost relatedly, I read someone saying in the Church Times that Monty Don displayed many of the desirable characteristics to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. I have little idea as to who that might be. But I think the Bishop of Newcastle has probably put herself out of the running.

Fare Well in Christ

Last month I wrote about two slim books by the English theologian W.H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense and The Stature of Waiting. In recent days I’ve been reading his third and final book, Fare Well in Christ, [published in 1997]. It’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Vanstone starts with a reflection on the word grace. The phrase ‘the grace of God’ is absent from the Old Testament. The Prologue to John’s Gospel clearly states that the grace of God came into the world with the birth of Jesus Christ. Vanstone argues that grace is not just another divine power or attribute. Rather it is the way in which powers and virtues are expressed. The grace of God, Vanstone suggests, is that which elicits from men a response of joy and gratitude.

We then move on to what Vanstone calls the ‘power of stories’. Stories, he suggests, affect us more powerfully than general statements about the way the world is or ought to be. And the Christian church came into being as the evangelists told, and as people received, stories about Jesus Christ.

These stories could not be replaced by summaries of ‘what the story means’.

This leads Vanstone on to the Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross on which Jesus was crucified tells its own story. The image of the “Cross of Christ towering above the skies”  became for centuries afterwards a prominent Christian symbol. Vanstone notes that the Cross has been largely removed from public view, privatised, in our generation. But he offers us six powerful stories, from his own experience, that demonstrate the healing power of the Cross. The power to heal things like anger and obsession. Sermon illustrations really.

Vanstone points to the story of Jesus’s encounter with Zacchaeus as a powerful example of the grace of Jesus Christ. There is no mention of repentance from Zacchaeus, and no mention of forgiveness from Jesus. But Jesus’s words and actions win from Zacchaeus the change of mind and outlook that we call salvation. This healing is a free gift which enlarges the freedom of the person who receives it. God’s healing is never burdensome.

In a final chapter Vanstone reflects on our [largely negative] attitudes towards death and dying. He points to some words found on a tombstone on Oronsay in the Hebrides: “Sleep after toyle, port after stormy seas, ease after warre, death after life doth greatly please.” The words are a quotation from a poem by Edmund Spencer. Vanstone takes issue with the common assumption ‘you only live once’. He encourages us to wonder what life might like when the earthly body is reduced to dust and ashes. It is a challenge to reflect on the mystery of existence.

It sometimes seems that everyone knows everyone in the Church of England. [Except for me. I don’t know anyone.] [Bishop] Donald Allister, whom I see at church most weeks, told me that Bill Vanstone was Rector of the neighbouring parish in Chester Diocese when he was just a curate. And that he, Donald, was once called on to preach for Vanstone at short notice after an accident with a hover-mower while mowing the grass in sandals. Which sounds painful. [Bishop] Richard Holloway with whom I had coffee a week or so ago [lots of laughter and lots of reminiscence] told me that he used to ask Vanstone to preach at St Mary Mags in Oxford [I lived across the road in the 1960s]. And that he was always stimulating.

Envoi

We have had a week of glorious sunshine. I cut the grass and the garden looks as good as it gets. Friends from down south have been staying here for a few days. Nigel was in the youth group at St Nicks, Sevenoaks, when Donald was the curate there. So they caught up a bit over dinner a couple of nights ago. We are invited to a VE Garden Party at the Prestonfield House hotel on Monday, so I hope it will warm up a bit. A piece in The Times today reflects that the Second World War was a novelists’ war, unlike the First War which was a poets’ war. That might be an excuse to re-read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. And perhaps also Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions [published in 1948] and Olivia Manning’s [published 1960-65]. Neither of which have I read. And to make sure to leave time to reflect on the mystery of life !

May 2025

Through a glass darkly – 150

I’m ambivalent about mountains. On the one hand I’m very acrophobic around bridges, high buildings, and mountain roads: as a child I baulked at going  up the Monument in London, more recently I used to be nervous about driving across the Forth Road Bridge, and driving over the Viaduct de Millau is the stuff of nightmares. When I drove from Lyon to Geneva two decades ago, with a long stretch of elevated motorway, my hands had to be prised off the steering wheel when we arrived in Geneva. Visiting the Grand Canyon in 2016 made my toes curl.

Viaduc de Millau

On the other hand I like looking at mountains. ICS conferences at Beatenberg with recurrent views of the Jungfrau were a pleasure, once I had negotiated the rather scary busy ride up from Interlaken. Sitting in Grenoble a year ago, with snow-capped mountains at the end of every street and in every direction, was a delight. And, somewhat perversely, I enjoy books about mountains. Think Nan Shepherd and Robert Macfarlane. And books about mountaineering.

Grenoble 2024

Wade Davis: Into the Silence

This book has sat unread on my shelves upstairs for several years. Wade Davis is a Canadian  anthropologist, a writer and photographer, with a string of books to his name. Into the Silence, subtitled The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, is an ambitious and prodigiously researched account of the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s. The unifying thread is the person of George Mallory “the scatter-brained Adonis and Bloomsbury favourite whose fate would enthral the nation” [John Keay in The Literary Review].

Davis gives us the historical background. Although Britain had ruled [and transformed] India, very little was known of the mountains to the north. Tibet was uncharted and unknown. Only three Europeans had visited Lhasa between 1750 and 1900. Britain had no territorial designs on Tibet. But Curzon authorised [what was in effect] an invasion of the country in 1903-04 in order to establish diplomatic relations and to resolve a border dispute between Tibet and Sikkim, a British protectorate. Younghusband’s mission was a complete military success and forbade Tibet to have any relations with other foreign powers. After opening up the road to Lhasa Younghusband authorised two great thrusts of exploration into the whole mountainous wilderness between Tibet and Nepal. From one of these expeditions came the first clear photographs of the snowy summits of Makalu, Chomo Lonzo, and Everest. “Towering up thousands of feet”, wrote Captain Cecil Rawlings of Everest, “a giant among pygmies, and remarkable not only on account of its height, but for its perfect form. No other peaks lie near or threaten is supremacy : : It is difficult to give an idea of its stupendous height, its dazzling whiteness and overpowering size, for there is nothing in the world to compare with it”.

As early as 1912 questions were being asked as to why the summit of Everest had yet to be conquered. In the previous century, it was noted, more than £25 million had been spent on the fruitless quest for the North Pole. Four hundred men had died, and two hundred ships had been lost. But there had been no serious attempt on Everest. No European had reached its base. The immediate surrounds of the mountain remained uncharted. Little was understood of its structure, the character of its snow and ice, its topography, or the nature of its rock formations that made up its imposing bulk and which narrowed into its imposing ridges.

Descending, 1922

The Everest expeditions of the 1920s

Shortly after the end of the 1914-18 war, Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, President of the Royal Geographical Society was urging the government to consider the possibilities of launching an Everest expedition. In January 1921 the Mount Everest Committee came into being, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club. The RGS was primarily interested in mapping the largely unknown surrounding area; the Alpine Club in the climb itself. 

The committee was very much an imperial body, and the members of the expeditions that followed were primarily military men. As Wade Davis explores in considerable detail, many of the expedition’s personnel were scarred, psychologically if not physically, by their experience in the Great War. The leader of the 1921 Reconnaissance Expedition was Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, a wealthy Old Etonian aristocrat, a fighting soldier mentioned in dispatches seven times and the holder of every medal for valour short of the Victoria Cross. Howard-Bury had survived four years on the Western Front, at Ypres, on the Somme, and at Arras; and ended the war as a German prisoner-of-war in a camp at Clausthal in the Harz mountains. The expedition doctor and naturalist was Alexander Wollaston, who in 1914 had [aged 39] volunteered as surgeon on an armed merchant cruiser in the North Sea; and who subsequently fought in the bloody but little-known campaign in German East Africa. Another early recruit was Dr Alexander Kellas, an Aberdonian and a specialist in physiology with an impressive track record of Himalayan expeditions. Kellas should never have been considered, at 53 was simply too old for Everest, and would die in Tibet.

Colonel Charles Howard-Bury

When after the Reconnaissance Expedition Howard-Bury was unavailable, leadership of the 1922 and 1924 expeditions passed to General Charles Bruce, an Old Harrovian and career soldier, who had commanded a Gurkha battalion at Gallipoli where he was severely wounded. Bruce was good-humoured, said to be an excellent raconteur and fount of bawdy stories. He had experience in the Himalayas and was in 1923 President of the Alpine Club. But his age [he was 56 in 1922], his health record, and his high blood pressure raised questions about his appointment. Bruce’s leadership of the 1922 expedition was generally admired, and he was reappointed in 1924. But in the latter year he contracted malaria while tiger shooting before the expedition and had to be stretchered out of Tibet, the leadership passing to his deputy, Major Edward Felix [Teddy] Norton. Another career soldier, an Old Carthusian, who had survived four years on the Western Front, fighting on the Marne, at Ypres, Loos, the Somme, and Arras, and then surviving the great German Spring Offensive of 1918 when he was at Bapaume. 

General Charles Bruce

George Mallory

They weren’t all military men. George Mallory, the finest rock climber of his generation to survive the war, was an obvious candidate for Everest. Mallory was the eldest son of an Anglican vicar, who won a maths scholarship [aged 13] at Winchester in 1900. He loved everything about Winchester: “the games at which he excelled, the spirit of ardent patriotism, the value placed on honour, loyalty, sportsmanship, and duty, the prayers and hymns, and the rousing renditions of the national anthem that summoned the boys to higher imperial challenges”. At Cambridge Mallory entered a cloistered world, monastic in its ideals, in Arthur Benson’s words “a place of books, music and beautiful young men”. In the homo-erotic world of the Cambridge of that time the good-looking Mallory [“the heavily lashed, thoughtful eyes … reminiscent of a Botticelli Madonna” according to one obituary notice] attracted an enormous amount of attention. At Cambridge he was pursued by the fraternity of the Apostles, among others by Rupert Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes, James and Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Eddie Marsh, and E.M. Forster. Arthur Benson, the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, tormented scholar and prolific writer, who had been sacked from teaching at Eton under scandalous circumstances, became Mallory’s tutor at Magdalene. Mallory’s passion for climbing was strengthened at Cambridge by his involvement with the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, a group that clustered around Geoffrey Young, the most prominent climber of the pre-War years. [Young like Benson had been sacked from Eton for indiscretions.]

George Mallory

From 1910 Mallory taught at Charterhouse, a job for which he was ill-suited. In late 1915, now married with a small daughter, Mallory was given leave to join up and was given a commission in the Royal Artillery. He survived the fighting on the Somme and was spared from Passchendaele by a broken foot from a motor-cycle accident. When he returned after the war Charterhouse had become intolerable. Geoffrey Young proposed Mallory to the Everest Committee, as a route out of school-mastering onto a bigger stage. And Mallory in spite of his wife Ruth and young children was irresistibly attracted to the cause of Everest. It seemed like a good career move.

George Finch

If Mallory was Britain’s finest rock climber in 1921, the finest climber on snow and ice was thought to be George Finch, an Australian from an unorthodox family background. Finch had studied in Paris and then in Switzerland, and had earned a strong reputation in the Alps in the years before the war. During the war Finch had served in France and in Egypt with the Royal Artillery, and then in Salonica with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. For his work in Macedonia Finch was awarded the MBE. Where British climbers still wore Norfolk tweed jackets, Finch designed and produced a windproof anorak and then the first down coat. Finch and Mallory had met in Wales at Pen y Pass in 1912, and in 1920 they climbed together in the Alps. In marked contrast to most of his fellow climbers, Finch was an expert in and an enthusiast for supplementary oxygen, working with academics at Oxford University on the design of high-level Primus stoves and bottled oxygen cylinders.  In 1921 Finch had a complicated personal life. In June 1915 he had contracted a highly unsuitable marriage to an aspiring actress in Portsmouth. In his absence overseas his wife had a baby boy, fathered by the landlady’s brother, to whom Finch gave his own name. [This was the subsequent Australian actor, Peter Finch.] In 1920 he married again, but this too was very short-lived. In December 1921 he was divorced a second time, and within two weeks married his third wife, Agnes Johnston, a woman who remained by his side for the rest of his life. 

George Finch

For the 1921 expedition Finch was initially chosen, but then dropped at the last moment under controversial circumstances following a dubious Harley Street medical review process. Finch was returned to the team for 1922, performed well, and climbed the North Ridge and North Face to a height of 8,320 metres with Geoffrey Bruce, both using oxygen for the first time. But Finch was then dropped again in 1924, officially following a dispute over the reproduction rights of Everest photographs, but seemingly more for being a vulgar Australian and an outsider.

What the expeditions achieved

Nepal was closed to climbers, so these early expeditions all approached  Everest from the north through Tibet. None of the expeditions succeeded in reaching the summit. For the 1921 Reconnaissance Expedition Mallory and Guy Bullock and Edward Wheeler all reached the North Col, at about 7,020 metres, before being forced back by strong winds. Mallory thought that the North East ridge looked feasible for a fresher party. The following year Mallory and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Strutt climbed to above 8,000 metres on the North Ridge before being forced back. And the following day George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, both using oxygen, climbed to 8,320 metres before turning back. These four were the first to climb above 8,000 metres.

The 1922 expedition

In 1924 Norton and Somervell, climbing without oxygen, reached a height of  8,573 metres before being forced back. Four days later Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their high level camp for a further summit bid, using the oxygen apparatus that Irvine had modified. They were last seen by another climber, Noel Odell, apparently approaching the summit pyramid and attempting to climb the very difficult Second Step. They were never seen again.

The 1924 expedition

The disappearance of Mallory and Irvine has spawned a sizeable library of books. Some people think they might have reached the summit, others are sure that they did not. [For both climbers, and especially for the novice climber Irvine, the Second Step would have been a major challenge. Mallory’s body was uncovered decades later, but the evidence as to what had happened is unclear.] Wade Davis is not really interested in whether they reached the summit. He is more concerned to ask what it was that kept the climbers moving onwards and upwards to an almost certain death. He suggests that Mallory had become obsessed by the mountain, and makes a comparison with Captain Ahab and the great white whale. And he argues that for Mallory, and for the majority of members of those early expeditions, their experience of the Great War had given them a familiar [and somewhat casual] attitude towards death. Norton wrote later, “From the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which we all our generation had learnt in the Great War … the tragedy was very near. As so constantly in the war … Death had taken its toll from the best.”

Envoi

It is a big book [560 pages] and a big read. ‘Majestic’, said Michael Palin. The winner of the Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction in 2012. Though Jim Perrin suggests somewhere that the book is most admired by those who know least about mountaineering. Which includes me.

The photos of the climbers, totally inadequately clothed and equipped by modern standards, are wonderfully evocative. The expedition members look “like a Connemara picnic caught in a snow storm”, said George Bernard Shaw. I find it impossible not to admire the sheer pig-headed courage of these men in the days long before risk assessment and Health and Safety. But at the same time a phrase of Bertrand Russell’s comes to mind, I think from his book on Education and the Social Order; to the effect that the English public schools produced men whose bravery was only matched by their stupidity. Of never wanting to lose face in front of your peers.

Arthur’s Seat from Prestonfield House

The nearest I’ll get to mountains in the near future is looking at Arthur’s Seat from the back garden.

April 2025

Through a glass darkly – 149

The amaryllis on the dining table has come out in a big way. And we’ve been out too; we took a Car Club car out along the coast in East Lothian. I couldn’t get my left leg under the steering wheel, so Susie had to drive. After a standard trip to the charity shop, we drove out to Gullane and walked by the sea and had a picnic on Goose Green in glorious sunshine. And then returned via Haddington.

Canon W.H. Vanstone

W.H. [Bill] Vanstone, born in 1923, was the product of an English vicarage. His father was vicar of a working-class parish in an industrial Lancashire town, and his mother was in effect the unpaid parish worker. As he later wrote, their wholehearted commitment to the church could either have inspired him or alienated him. As things turned out they were the model for his own ministry. After taking two Firsts at Balliol in the immediate post-war years, he trained for ordination at Westcott House [a starred First in the Cambridge Tripos] and at General Theological Seminary, New York. He was ordained in 1950. Vanstone was said to be one of the most academically gifted ordinands of his generation, and Oxbridge colleges were keen to recruit him. But, following in his father’s footsteps, he served in two working-class parishes in Lancashire for the next three decades. After a heart attack in 1978 he was persuaded to become a Residentiary Canon at Chester Cathedral, where he remained until his retirement in 1991. He died in Cirencester in 1999. 

In both his Lancashire parishes, Vanstone established a strong reputation through boys’ clubs, and oversaw a celebrated series of summer camps in Wales and in the Western Isles of Scotland. In a camp on Coll the boys went to the Wee Frees in the morning and the Church of Scotland in the evening. There had been a severe storm the previous night, and this was the focus of the Sunday sermons. The Wee Free minister saw the storm as a sign of God’s judgement on sinful men. The Church of Scotland minister emphasised the loving care of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Vanstone and his lads agreed that the latter homily was both shorter and more Christian ! In both his parishes Vanstone made long-lasting friendships, promoted the discipline of regular Sunday worship, and encouraged many men into ordination.

The latter part of his ministry was different. Vanstone’s colleagues at Chester were puzzled by him, and although he loved cathedral worship and gave much appreciated homilies, he clearly found teamwork difficult. He was averse to changes in routine or worship, and unenthusiastic about both liturgical reform and about the changing role of laity following the Second Vatican Council. As his obituary in the Independent noted, he was quick to find reasons to ‘leave well alone’. He is remembered today, if at all, for two slim theological books published in the 1970s and the 1980s.

Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense

My copy of this book suggests that I started to read it in Duns in the 1990s but didn’t finish it. Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense starts with Vanstone contemplating his new parish. He is going to a new housing estate where there is no church building. He visits the new district and  he wonders why so few people show any interest in the new church project. What, he asks, is the purpose of the church ? And he answers the question not in missiological or in sociological terms, as I might have attempted, but in theological terms. He decides that the key question is: How might people respond to the love of God ? [I guess that in the 1990s I found the following chapters, The Phenomenology of Love and The Kenosis of God a bit difficult to grasp..]

Vanstone explores the nature and the cost of authentic love, ‘broader than the measure of man’s mind’. False love is love that lays down limits or conditions; it is love which seeks to maintain an element of control; it is love which is offered with an air of detachment. By contrast authentic love is limitless, and it is precarious, and it is vulnerable. This is the nature of God’s love. 

We are wrong to see God’s work in creation as serene and effortless activity. God’s love is costly, an emptying of himself, a refusal to abandon those who suffer and die. [He instances the children who died at Aberfan.] God’s love does not demand recognition. But rather it awaits a creative response. “Thus we may say that the creativity of God is dependent, for the completion and triumph of its work, upon the emergence of a responsive creativity … … That by which, or in which, the love of God is celebrated may be called the Church”. The supreme task of the church is to enable men and women to respond to the love of God in their lives.

The book won the Collins Biennial Religious Book Award in 1979. As Harry Williams wrote in a foreword, it is a book based on many years of parish experience, of Vanstone’s wrestling with God. The book ends with a wonderful hymn which I have never heard sung.

Morning glory, starlit sky

1.  Morning glory, starlit sky,

soaring music, scholar’s truth,

flight of swallows, autumn leaves,

memory’s treasure, grace of youth.

2.  Open are the gifts of God,

gifts of love to mind and sense;

hidden is love’s agony,

love’s endeavour, love’s expense

3.  Love that gives, gives ever more,

gives with zeal with eager hands,

spares not, keeps not, all outpours,

ventures all, its all expends.

4.  Drained is love in making full,

bound in  setting others free,

poor in making many rich,

weak in giving power to be.

5.  Therefore he who shows us God

helpless hangs upon the tree;

and the nail and crown of thorns

tell of what God’s love must be.

6.  Here is God: no monarch he,

throned in easy state to reign;

here is God, whose arms of love,

aching, spent, the world sustain.

The Stature of Waiting

Vanstone’s second book is perhaps more accessible. He starts with the Passion Story, and argues [he was a classical scholar] that the Greek verb describing Judas’s action is mis-translated. Jesus was handed over, rather than betrayed. Crucially in both Mark’s and John’s gospels, from his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus ceases to be in charge; instead of being the subject of verbs, he is the object. He becomes a person to whom things are done by other people. He moves from action to passion; from acting in freedom to waiting on the decisions and actions of others.

This leads Vanstone into a lengthy reflection on the status of a patient. Perhaps someone who is suddenly cut down by a serious accident or a debilitating illness. Or by retirement ? But we are easily embarrassed and ashamed of being dependent on others; of not being in charge of our lives. Thus many retired people are anxious to tell people they are now “busier than ever”. Retirement can be thought acceptable. But unemployment can be seen as degrading.

Vanstone is concerned to reject the identification of work and self value. He points to a bed-ridden mother of five children, almost wholly dependent on her neighbours, whose helplessness created a social effect that other agencies had tried in vain to achieve. He suggests that we model ourselves on God whom we wrongly perceive as all action, always the subject and never the object. But this is the wrong model. “The long-taught Christian doctrines of the image of God in man and the impassibility of God do seem to imply … … that the role in the world that is uniquely appropriate to man is the role of active subject, of initiator, creator, and achiever; and that in the opposite role of patient, of recipient, of dependent object man falls below his proper stature and status and dignity”.

The climax of Jesus’s life, Vanstone argues, is the Passion rather than the Crucifixion. In ‘handing himself over’ Jesus discloses a free activity of God which culminates in the surrender of freedom. A state where he must wait on the deeds and decisions of men. So too for us. In loving we commit ourselves to waiting on others. Vanstone offers us an example from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Sonia Marmeladov follows Raskolnikov to a Siberian prison camp and waits for him by the prison fence. When she falls ill and fails to appear, Raskolnikov loiters by the fence and as he waits for Sonia realises that he loves her.

Waiting is not a degraded condition. Although it can lead to frustration, it can also be both caring and productive. The glory of God is revealed in the waiting figure in Gethsemane. He is not diminished but invested with enormous dignity. And we too must wait with God, handed over to the world to receive its meaning, its beauty and squalor, its good and evil.

Envoi

The Stature of Waiting is an appropriate book for someone who is retired and waiting, almost patiently, for hip surgery. If there is a biography of Vanstone, I am not aware of it. It seems that he was an elusive man, not universally liked. His slim books, though a bit dated and a bit repetitive, are a corrective to the unfocused activism that sometimes passes for Christian ministry. I was intrigued to read that, according to David Wyatt’s obituary notice in the Church Times, Jürgen Moltmann apparently said that “Love’s Endeavour, Love’s  Expense is the book I’d most like to have written had I still been a pastor in the Lutheran Church.” Robert Runcie was a lifelong friend who preached at Vanstone’s funeral. According to Humphrey Carpenter, he greatly admired Vanstone, saying he was the priest that Runcie would like to have been.

There is a third and final book by Vanstone, Fare Well in Christ, published in 1997, which I shall now try and track down. Meanwhile the garden needs some attention. The grass needs cutting. And we are trying to organise some kind of celebration for the summer to mark the passing years.

April 2025