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

Through a glass darkly – 148

The good news is that the magnolia is about to come out in the front garden. I’m reluctant to write about Donald Trump. Seeing him on the television news fills me with revulsion. [I feel the same way about Benjamin Netanyahu.] Back in October 2020, when I had started writing this blog, I addressed the question, ‘Why do so many American Christians vote for Trump ?’  Catholics as well as Evangelicals apparently. I described Trump as “a greedy, boastful narcissist with a limited understanding of the world and a greatly inflated idea of his own abilities. … … who presents himself as a Christian, as a Presbyterian, and as a Pro-Life candidate, which plays well with his supporters.” And I was promptly assailed by an American reader, whom I don’t know, who told me very clearly that, whatever Trump’s deficiencies, Joe Biden had definitely lost his marbles. Sadly, she may have been right.

Learning lessons from history is sometimes a dangerous way to proceed. But in view of the ongoing and very difficult problems in Ukraine. I was interested to pick a book off the shelves which I don’t ever remember reading. A book that tells the complicated story of American foreign policy in the 1990s, specifically in the days when Bill Clinton succeeded George Bush senior as president..

David Halberstam: War in a time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals

Halberstam is an American journalist, who wrote The Best and the Brightest, a long and complex [and, I think, brilliant] book about how the States became embroiled in the Vietnam War. The book won a Pulitzer Prize. In this more recent book [published in 2001] he tells the story of the making of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era. As in his earlier work, he explores in some details the internecine conflicts and the struggles for dominance among the key players in the White House, in the State Department, and in the military. An abiding theme is the tension between the military, who were determined never again to be trapped in an inconclusive ground war; and civilian advisors and officials, most of whom had never served in the military. And who thought for a mix of reasons that America should ‘do something’. The book offers fascinating mini-biographies of the men [and they were mainly men] involved; Bush senior, Reagan, Kissinger, Clinton, Colin Powell, General John Shalikashavili, and Madeleine Albright among others.

One aspect of the story that struck me is the enduring heritage of the Vietnam war. For both civilians and military. Clinton and the Democrats were intensely aware that it was Democratic presidents who had committed [for whatever motives] to Vietnam, that is John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Yet most of the anti-war protests had come from the left-liberal wing of the party. Making the Democrats a family seriously in conflict with itself. By the time Clinton was elected, the Democrats had been out of office for twelve years and the Clinton campaign had been very much focussed on domestic issues. On the other hand Bush had negotiated the end of the Cold War and overseen the relative success of the Gulf War, and Bush himself had been a hero as the youngest naval pilot in World War II. But he fought a terrible campaign, was handicapped by his lack of eloquence; and he and his people significantly underestimated their opponent, Bill Clinton. [Halberstam compares Bush losing in 1992 with Churchill losing the General Election in 1945 to Clement Attlee. Though I didn’t think anyone could ever confuse Attlee and Clinton !]

Bill Clinton was the first true post-World War II, post-Cold War president. The defining personal issue for him was racial change in the south. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, an experience that was designed to introduce talented young Americans to the rest of the world, especially England and Europe. But foreign policy remained distant to him. When Lee Hamilton, the veteran congressman who headed the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tried to engage with him on issues like post-Soviet Russia and relations with China, Clinton interrupted him: “Lee, I just went through a whole election campaign, and no-one talked about foreign policy at all … except for a few journalists”. Hamilton, who was a bit put out, responded: “You know every president’s tenure is marked by foreign policy issues whether they like it or not. It just happens that way. No American president can avoid it because he’s the leader of the free world. They think they can, but they can’t”.

And Hamilton’s words were prescient. Unrest in Somalia had escalated in to a full-blown civil war in 1991. Bush had sent 25,000 soldiers there as part of a UN peace-keeping force, and 4,000 were still there in late 1993. But in October 1993 a failed attempt by US special forces to capture warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid led to the deaths of eighteen American soldiers. In addition seventy four soldiers were wounded and two helicopters lost. Questions were asked about the value of US troops in Somalia, and Clinton removed all US military from the country in early 1994. Somalia was a fiasco: it was a tragedy for the families of the young men killed, a tragedy  for an uncertain administration, and a tragedy for the Somalis themselves. It was also a tragedy for anyone who believed that America had an increased role to play in humanitarian peacekeeping operations.

The geopolitical consequences of what had happened in Somalia tragedy were soon felt elsewhere, first in Haiti and then in Rwanda. In Haiti Clinton made an election pledge to confront the junta led by General Raoul Cedras, and to restore the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But many Americans were opposed to military intervention in a country which posed no risk to the United States, and Clinton stood down troops who had already embarked for Port-au-Prince. 

In 1994 the Hutsis in Rwanda embarked on a genocidal killing of the minority Tutsis, killing some 800,000 people in the course of three months. There was a clear need for some kind of outside, peacekeeping  intervention, but the Clinton  administration wanted no part of it. There was a very limited force sent by the UN to provide aid, but the American feeling was that “we had no dog in the fight”. Clinton some years later said that the failure of the United States to intervene in Rwanda  was the biggest mistake of his administration. 

The other long-running problem of the 1990s was the fighting in the Balkans following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. After Slovenia and Croatia, and then Bosnia-Herzegovina, had all declared their independence, the Serbs under their nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic invaded their neighbours on behalf of fellow Serbs. Ethnic cleansing campaigns were initiated by the Bosnian Serbs, and their policy of concentration camps and the widespread killing of civilians aroused worldwide condemnation. Whether or not America should intervene in the former Yugoslavia was the great foreign affairs question of the Clinton years.  

The situation deteriorated in spring 1995. The Bosnian Serbs laid siege to the three, predominantly Muslim, Bosnian towns that lay outside their control. Of the three the one that had the dubious honour of becoming the best known was Srebrenica. It came to symbolise the evil and the suffering of events in Yugoslavia, and entered the list of tragic places like Lidice and Katyn and Nanking in World War II  which were the sites of state-ordered genocide. Halberstam traces the tortuous evolution of American policy in Bosnia and subsequently  in Kosovo in considerable detail. As the military told the civilians that it might be ‘quite easy to go in, but a lot more difficult to get out again …’ without a lot of casualties.

1990s characters

Halberstam is wonderfully long-winded, if you like that kind of thing; reluctant to limit himself to one word where three will do.  He can’t introduce a new character without offering us a mini-biography and character sketch. And the background of some of the lead characters is fascinating. Colin Powell was Chairman of the JCS under Clinton, the senior military man, an imposing and charismatic figure, popular across party lines and potentially a future presidential candidate [and rival to Clinton]. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants, and a product of the Bronx and CCNY’s ROTC programme, a very different background from many of his fellow military.

His successor, John Shalikashvili had arrived in the States as an immigrant in 1952 and had learned much of his English from John Wayne films. His father was from the Soviet republic of Georgia and his mother was a Polish national of German extraction. His father had fought with the Polish cavalry against the Germans early in World War II, but subsequently served in the Georgian Legion under the German flag, fighting in Normandy to repel the Allied invasion. And then with the Waffen SS in Italy. [This was a piece of family history that was kept carefully secret when the family later emigrated to the United States.] 

Madeleine Albright, who became Clinton’s Secretary of State in 1997, and who became the leading hawk on Bosnia and Kosovo, was another who had arrived as an immigrant in the States. Her father had been a Czech government official in the years after World War II, but the family arrived in the States in 1948 to escape a Soviet coup. Both her parents were of Jewish origin, but in 1941 they had become Roman Catholics and they kept their ethnic origins a secret from their children. It was only after she became Secretary of State, and a Washington Post journalist started to investigate her background, that Albright discovered her Jewish origins. And that many of her family had perished in the Nazi death camps.

Lessons to learn ?

There is much  fascinating stuff in this book. I guess the first thing that I came to appreciate is that many parts of the world seem very remote to Americans. Ukraine today is as remote from the concerns of many Americans, as were Somalia and Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. James Baker’s verdict on the Balkans, “We don’t have a dog in that fight” echoed down the years. I think that Clinton’s idealism perhaps did make him want to step in where there was obvious injustice or genocidal acts. But the post-Cold War world was a messy place, and there were always good reasons not to intervene in situations that might turn nasty. Better to ignore them. 

Secondly, I was greatly impressed by the calibre of policy makers under Clinton. Men like Warren Christopher [at State], William Perry [at Defense], Tony Lake, and Richard Holbrooke [the architect of the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War] were all educated, experienced professionals, with lengthy careers in public service. Totally unlike the bunch of Trump cronies, whose main talents seem to be money making and tax evasion. Halberstam notes approvingly that Clinton himself had invariably read everything, books and background papers. While Trump is seemingly proud of the fact that he has never read a book in his life.

And the American electorate has changed too. Halberstam notes that Clinton faced virulent opposition from the very start of his first administration. Part of which was driven by the new force of talk radio; it was right wing, it was populist, and it was angry. 

“It represented a new kind of disenchanted American, more often than not white male and middle to lower middle class, who thought he was disenfranchised by the current culture, which flouted what the right wing called family values, and the current economy, which favoured those who had a certain kind of education over those who did not; it was often rural and small town and nativist. It was also anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-liberal and as such vehemently anti-Clinton. Its constituents had not always been to Vietnam, although they sometimes sounded as if they had, often referring to it as Nam … people who believed that they were the forgotten men and women of America”.

This sounds to me much like the Trump supporters who invaded the White House four years ago. And who strongly resent any notion that the States should be the world’s policeman, willing to intervene in conflicts around the world on behalf of democracy and justice. And peace.

Envoi

I enjoy Halberstam’s books. But I need a break from American politics. As the magnolia stellata comes into flower, and as we journey slowly through Lent,I am going to look again at two profound books by the English theologian W.H. Vanstone.

March 2025

Through a glass darkly – 147

When I was growing up, alpha was the first letter of the Greek alphabet. And the self-appellation of the risen Christ in Revelation 22. But for the past few decades it is best known as an extraordinarily successful course in Christian apologetics. Launched and resourced and promoted by that phenomenon of a church, Holy Trinity, Brompton.

Alpha has been around for the thirty five years of my ordained ministry. But my contact with it has been quite limited. During the 1990s we ran at least one Alpha course in Duns, as a joint enterprise between Christ Church, Duns [Scottish Episcopal] and the parish church [Church of Scotland]. It was promoted, if I remember correctly, as a refresher course for existing church members to encourage them in their faith. And I’m reasonably sure that we ran at least one Alpha course during our time in Lyon, 2000 to 2013. But I suspect that it was led by lay members of the congregation. And what I remember more clearly is that we used the Emmaus course with a small group of newcomers to the church. And that we ran more than one series of The Marriage Course, again led by laity, a marriage enrichment course which also derived from Holy Trinity, Brompton. I have some reservations about Alpha [see below]. But because the Alpha course been so successful I fell with interest on a book which I found a couple of weeks ago at the Faith Mission bookshop.

Repackaging Christianity: early days at Holy Trinity, Brompton

Repackaging Christianity is a 2022 book by Andrew Atherstone, Professor of Modern Anglicanism at Oxford, who has been on the staff at Wycliffe Hall  since 2007. The book starts at Holy Trinity, Brompton, located in an elegant and genteel part of west London. It is close by Harrods, an icon of luxury, where HTB members allegedly do their shopping. For much of the twentieth century HTB was a ‘society church’, favoured by the Knightsbridge elite for christenings and weddings, and memorial services; which offered a very traditional form of worship with sound preaching and good music.

Holy Trinity, Brompton

But things changed significantly with the advent of Alexander ‘Sandy’ Millar, who was Vicar from 1985 to 2005. Millar was an upper class Scot [his father was a major general], educated at Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, who practised as a barrister for ten years before his ordination in 1976. Millar was much influenced in his early Christian life by his experience of charismatic ministry at the London Medical Mission [known in Soho as the London Miracle Mission]. And then by his contacts with Californian renewal movements, and in particular the ministry of John Wimber, the rock musician turned evangelist, the author of Power Evangelism and Power Healing.

John Wimber

Meanwhile, in the mid-1970s, a remarkable group of conversions took place in Cambridge. This group included Nicky Gumbel and Nicky Lee, two old Etonians who had rooms next for to each other at Trinity. Both were converted at the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union [CICCU], who had organised a major mission called Christ Alive led by David MacInnes. Gumbel, not yet fully persuaded, took advice from Jonathan Fletcher, a curate at the Round Church, Cambridge. Another new convert at CICCU was Ken Costa, a graduate law student at Queen’s College, of Lebanese and South African descent.  And another was Justin Welby, another Old Etonian, who arrived at Trinity College in 1974, and who had been baptised as an infant at HTB. After graduating many of this group migrated to London to make their way in secular professions; Nicky Gumbel in law, Nicky Lee in teaching, Ken Costa in investment banking. They found their way to HTB, where they were strong attracted by Sandy Millar’s teaching.

From the mid-1970s the culture of HTB began to change, under the leadership first of Raymond Turvey and then of John Collins. HTB and its linked congregation of St Paul’s, Onslow Square, both began to see a growing, younger congregation and to plan for growth. In 1977 Turvey asked his new curate, Charles Marnham. another who had read law at Cambridge, to develop a Christian beginners’ course. This was the first edition of Alpha. Two years later, in 1979, HTB celebrated its 150th anniversary with a two-week Parish Mission. Supper party evangelism. The missioner was John Collins [David Watson had declined the invitation] and 105 supper parties were arranged during the two weeks. The following year HTB was instrumental in organising a one week Mission to London. This time David Watson was the main speaker. Amid the excitement Sandy Millar discerned that the Holy Spirit was beginning to renew the congregation, bringing “a new freedom, a new love, a new joy, and a new power”. God was promising that “very special days” lay ahead.

Sandy Millar

Repackaging Christianity: Alpha and the Building of a Global Brand

Nicky Gumbel trained for ordination at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, from 1983 to 1986. [I arrived there in 1986 but don’t remember hearing his name.] Atherstone says that he was unhappy at Wycliffe; that he struggled with insecurity and a “lack of self-worth”, and that the academic study of theology with exposure to liberal theologians  was threatening his faith. After college he found it difficult to find a curacy, and looked at nine possibilities before being allowed to return as curate to HTB. After powerful advocacy [prayer? ] from Sandy Millar and John Collins. In September 1990 Gumbel was given responsibility for Alpha.  Atherstone suggests that he was reluctant to take it on, as he wanted to be involved in evangelism to those totally outwith the church.  But he soon recognised the evangelistic value of the materials, and reshaped it as a course of ten sessions each based on a question. Starting with Who is Jesus ? and culminating in What about the church ? Each of the sessions was shaped around a shared meal, usually pasta. And there was a residential weekend, usually about half-way through the course, focussing on the Holy Spirit. Heavily influenced by John Wimber, the weekend  was not an academic discussion, but moved directly to the question, How can I be filled with the Spirit ? Let’s do it. 

Gumbel compared running Alpha to driving a sports car that had several previous owners. But under his leadership take-up of the course accelerated dramatically. By early 1992 there were over 200 people at the Wednesday evening Alpha. From HTB the course spread by word of mouth to churches in Milton Keynes, in Buckhurst Hill in Essex, to Southampton, and to Edinburgh. In the summer of 1993 came the first Alpha conference to help church leaders to set up their own courses. Over a thousand people packed HTB for this first conference, with delegates coming from across Britain and from as far afield as France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Singapore, New Zealand, and the United States.Among the delegates was Justin Welby, who brought four members from his parish in the Coventry Diocese. Who returned “buzzing and excited”. 

Nicky Gumbel

The bulk of Atherstone’s book is concerned with the marketing and the relentless growth of the Alpha course. There are a lot of facts and figures. In September 1998 Alpha posters were placed on 1,700 billboards in the UK.  The whole promotion cost £682, 000. Local celebrities, well-known sportsmen, television and entertainment stars [Samantha Fox], and disgraced politicians [Jonathan Aitken] all featured in Alpha events and press cuttings.` ITV broadcast an Alpha course in 2000, fronted by Sir David Frost. But they got cold feet after seeing the early reviews. [The New Statesman thought it “the worst programme of the year”.] In 2005 Alpha hit cinema screens with a 60-second promotion featuring Bear Grylls along with a footballer and a model. From the mid-2000s Grylls, another Old Etonian, and ex-SAS soldier and adventurer, became synonymous with Alpha. He and Gumbel were good friends, and they played squash together four times a week.

One of the more interesting parts of the book [for me] is the way in which the Roman Catholic church embraced Alpha. After the materials were enthusiastically picked up by members of the CCR. the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. The Chemin Neuf community, another Catholic renewal community, founded in Lyon in 1973 by Laurent Fabre, were also early adopters. As was Charlie Cleverly, a church planter then working in the church in Belleville. Atherstone looks carefully at the modifications that Gumbel made to the course [particularly the chapter Why did Jesus die ?,  in order to gain the approval of the French Catholic bishops. Which in turn offended Northern Ireland Protestants. It is clear that Gumbel negotiated a tricky tightrope.

Alpha:  my reservations

There is no doubt that the Alpha course has been an enormous blessing to thousands of people, in a host of different countries and different confessional settings. People have come to a new and vibrant faith and lives have been transformed. I think, for example, of my [late] friend Alyson, who came to faith on an Alpha course HTB, was subsequently ordained, and had a very fruitful ministry in Paris and in churches in the Chichester and Newcastle dioceses. So – why am I bit sceptical.

First, it is just my prejudice. Can the world be transformed for the better by Old Etonian lawyers ? When Justin became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, I thought that with David Cameron as Prime Minister and Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, Justin might be one old Etonian too many.

Secondly, I was unhappy with the original Alpha teaching materials and the accompanying videos. The ten sessions were wholly propositional, overly didactic, taking no account of the learner’s own background. There was no attempt to find out where people were coming from, nor of how God might already be working in their lives. Rather, this is the teaching that you have to take on board to be a Christian. And the videos [which were later reshot] were lengthy monologues, largely devoid of colour or of humour. Although the course was said to be about ‘Asking questions’, there wasn’t any obvious space for doing so. Anecdotally, Tam, a military man attached to the Foreign Office, whose son I baptised in Kyiv three years ago, told me that he was once thrown off an Alpha course for asking too many questions. 

Thirdly, I found the course intensely individualistic. It seemed to me to be all about my individual faith, about Me and Jesus. In the early versions [and this may well have been modified since], there was virtually nothing about Community, very little about the sacraments, nothing about Belonging. All I had to do was to invite the Holy Spirit into my life and to pray a prayer of commitment. But my experience in church life in the Scottish Borders and even more so in Lyon is that, in Grace Davey’s terms, Belonging can often precede Believing. That many people are attracted into a fellowship that offers love and support and encouragement. Especially in times of difficulty. Here again I am uneasy about Alpha. For me the concept of Journeying is a key metaphor; walking with Jesus in the way of the Cross. Does Alpha Christianity allow for times of suffering and of failure ? Or is it more akin, say, to the seductive promises of the Prosperity Gospel ?

Envoi

Atherstone suggests that Gumbel’s retirement from HTB in 2022 is another moment of transition in the Alpha story. Leaders are already looking forward to a mega celebration of the 2000th anniversary of the Resurrection in 2023. [I shall be 88.If still alive.]  “Although born in English Anglicanism, Alpha now embraces every part of the global church from Peruvian Pentecostals to Japanese Catholics, and from Bulgarian Orthodox to Zambian Brethren”. Yes, there is much to be thankful for and to celebrate. But I am uneasy about the notion of a a future church that is populated and led by people reared on this rather narrow, and somewhat partial, repackaging of the Gospel. Buying into the package is not the way that I came to faith.

March 2025

Through a glass darkly – 146

We are just back from a week down south, with the children and grand-children, and I have been re-reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945 the year I was born. I guess this book has been around all my life. There was certainly a paperback copy in our house in Wimbledon Park Road, the house in which I grew up. [Though my father was more interested in leather bindings than in paperbacks.]  I read most Waugh books when I was at school; and preferred the early books, like Decline and Fall and Scoop, to the later ones. Brideshead Revisited is a turning point in Waugh’s writing; turning away from his early, lightweight books, he now embarks on his A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with an intimate, first-person narrator. The book presents as a  clear lament for the past, but also a statement of faith.

Brideshead Revisited

The book is divided into three parts, book-ended by a short prologue and epilogue.The epilogue sets the scene; it is the middle of the Second World War, and the narrator, Charles Ryder, has de-trained after an overnight journey into a setting which is deeply familiar to him.The new billet for his troops is Brideshead Castle. From where he looks backwards, thoughtfully and painfully.

Ryder is not dissimilar to Waugh, however much he denied it; a middle-class student at Oxford, in an obscure college. a gifted artist, living out a difficult relationship with his elderly father. In Book One, Et in Arcadia Ego, Ryder falls in love with his enchanting fellow undergraduate Lord Sebastian Flyte, the second son of Lord Marchmain. Sebastian lives high up in Christ Church, and introduces Ryder, first to Aloysius his ubiquitous teddy-bear, and then to a string of extravagant old Etonians, and then to the whole Marchmain family and their estate at Brideshead Castle. Ryder is enthralled. He and Sebastian spend much of their first long vacation painting murals on the walls of the castle and drinking their way through some of the older wines in the castle cellars. After which they go to Venice to stay with the long-exiled Lord Marchmain and his mistress in their palazzo on the Grand Canal. Sebastian’s family are all Catholics, which surprises Ryder who is a convinced atheist. Lord Marchmain had converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, but abandoned the church when he left his wife for Venice. Lady Marchmain holds  tenaciously to her faith, and this faith is shared by her elder son, the Earl of Brideshead [Bridey], and her younger daughter, Lady Cordelia.

In Book Two, Brideshead Deserted, Sebastian’s relentless heavy drinking puts all the family relationships under a great strain. Lady Marchmain sees Ryder’s support for Sebastian as a betrayal. Lady Julia, the older daughter, marries Rex Mottram, a rich but vulgar Canadian businessman, who is not only a Protestant but a divorcee with a wife alive in Canada. Ryder goes to Paris to study painting. His relationship with the family is only restored when Lady Julia asks him to track down Sebastian, now seriously ill in a monastery in Morocco. Ryder is commissioned by Bridey to paint pictures of Marchmain House in London which is going to be demolished. The paintings are a great success and Ryder achieves fame and fortune as an architectural painter.

At the start of Book Three, A Twitch upon the Thread,  Ryder is a successful artist, married with two children, returning from America with his wife Celia. The marriage is loveless. And Celia has been unfaithful. Ryder falls in love  [on a transatlantic liner] with Lady Julia, who is now separated from Rex Mottram. Lady Marchmain is dead. Sebastian is reported to be dying in a Tunisian monastery. The aged Lord Marchmain, terminally ill, returns to Brideshead to die in the ancestral home. He determines to make Julia [and by extension Charles Ryder as both are now divorced] heirs to the estate. But the dying Lord makes [arguably] a sign of faith on his deathbed. Which causes Julia, much moved, to realise that she cannot after all marry a divorcee of no faith.

In the Epilogue Ryder, now an army officer, is to be billeted at Brideshead Castle. He is “homeless, childless, middle aged, and loveless”. Although the house has suffered at the hands of the military, the private chapel, which had been closed after the death of Lady Marchmain a decade earlier, is to be re-opened for the use of the troops. Which causes Charles Ryder, now himself a nascent Catholic, to reflect that God’s purposes will ultimately be fulfilled.

This is the first self-consciously Catholic of Evelyn Waugh’s books.  He wrote that the novel is essentially “about the operation of Grace’, that is to say, “the ways in which which God continually calls souls to Himself“. Many of the characters in the book undergo some form of conversion or of reconciliation, including ultimately Ryder himself.

In various letters, Waugh refers to the novel a number of times as his magnum opus. But , in 1950 he wrote to Graham Greene stating “I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled.” In his  preface to the revised edition of Brideshead (1959), the author explained the circumstances in which the novel was written:  “It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.”

The ‘real Brideshead’

Waugh’s friends and contemporaries would have had no trouble in identifying the ‘real Brideshead’.  During the 1930s, after the collapse of his marriage to ‘She-Evelyn’, Waugh spent a great deal of time with the Lygon family at their turreted, ancestral home at Madresfield Court. Hugh Lygon, the younger son, was a friend of Waugh from Oxford, and Waugh’s friendship with the Lygon sisters would last for the rest of his life. Madresfield, like the mythical Brideshead, is a much renovated country house, part Jacobean, part Victorian Gothic, with 136 rooms set in 4,000 acres of parkland, surrounded by avenues of oaks, cedars, poplars, and cypresses, a rock garden, a yew maze, and statues of Roman emperors. For Waugh it was an enchanting world.

So, Sebastian is Hugh Lygon, a languid and lascivious aristocrat [although Waugh also draws on his close Oxford friend Alistair Graham]; Bridey is Elmley Lygon, onetime President of the Hypocrites Club at Oxford, but now a dull and rather pompous MP; while the Marchmain sisters Julia and Cordelia are the Lygon sisters, Maimie and Coote, known as the Beauchamp belles. The younger girls had the Madresfield house largely to themselves as their father, Lord Beauchamp, Lord Steward of the Royal Household, an artist and craftsman, and well-known homosexual, had been driven into exile by his vindictive brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster,  in order to avoid a public scandal. Maimie, tall and blonde, like Hugh, was Waugh’s favourite. 

Of the minor characters, Rex Mottram is an unattractive amalgam of Brendan Bracken and of Lord Beaverbrook. [Sibell, the oldest Lygon sister, was the on-off mistress of Beaverbrook.]  Lady Lygon’s pet Oxford don, Sammy Samgrass, is clearly an unflattering portrait of Maurice Bowra. Anthony Blanche, Charles and Sebastian’s friend from Oxford, is equally clearly based on the witty, flamboyant homosexual, Brian Howard.

There is a disclaimer in the book’s prelims, signed with Waugh’s initials, which reads: “I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.” But I think we can take this with a pinch of salt.

The reception of the book

The publication of Brideshead made Waugh rich. The book’s success in the United States enabled Waugh to fix his income at £5,000 a year for the next 5 years. But reactions to the book were varied. His ‘fan club’, Osbert Sitwell, Graham Greene, Christopher Sykes, and Nancy Mitford all proclaimed the book to be his masterpiece. {His wife] Laura’s family made favourable noises, though they were not people whose judgement Waugh respected. The community at Campion Hall thought Brideshead Waugh’s best book. But Martin D’Arcy and Katharine Asquith and some stricter Catholics found the book distasteful and some episodes embarrassing.

The conscious Catholic apologetic confused some critics. Rose Macaulay complained that Waugh equated “the divine purpose of God at work in the universe … … with obedient membership of a church”. Henry Green was appalled by Lord Marchmain’s deathbed conversion; “my heart was in my mouth all through the deathbed scene, hoping against hope that the old man would not give way, that is, take the course he eventually did”. Edmund Wilson objected strongly to the snobbery of Brideshead, and suggested that the final scenes might have been Waugh at his satirical best were it not painfully clear that Waugh meant us to take them seriously !

Revisiting Brideshead

I have enjoyed re-reading this book. And I certainly enjoyed it when I first read it some sixty years ago. I liked the depiction of the privileged life of Oxford students in the 1920s; and throughout the book there are lavish descriptions of food and drink. Such as the dinner that Charles Ryder selects for  Rex Mottram in a Paris restaurant that sounds very like the Tour d’Argent. Life in an ancestral country house was beyond my imagining. But I was able to envy the glimpse of life on a transatlantic liner. [Susie and I stayed on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, a decade ago. And it isn’t as luxurious as I had imagined.]

So – does this book qualify Evelyn Waugh as a great novelist ? Sadly, I think the answer is No. For two reasons. First, I find the central characters of the book unconvincing. Charles Ryder is a dry stick. While Lady Julia Flyte, the love of his life [played in the much-lauded 1981 television series by Diana Quick, the acknowledged beauty of my student years in Oxford], stubbornly remains a two-dimensional character. She is essentially a composite of the tall, blonde, aristocratic women to whom Waugh was so often drawn  –  Maimie Lygon, [Lady] Diana Guinness [née Mitford], and [Lady] Diana Cooper. None of these women reciprocated Waugh’s romantic attentions. The coup de foudre between Ryder and Julia, in the middle of a storm on a transatlantic liner after their respective marriages have broken down, is embarrassingly badly written. [Waugh later rewrote it.]

Secondly, given the conscious catholic apologetic, I find that aspect of the book unsatisfactory. The Marchmain family are Roman Catholics, and it is the Catholic church to which Ryder has come in the Epilogue, but this faith seems to consist only of rules, mainly concerning divorce and remarriage, and of attendance at the Mass. For me there is nothing compelling about the characters’ faith; nothing that speaks of a living relationship with God in Jesus Christ. [Waugh’s loudly proclaimed conversion and catholic faith remains a mystery to me. But that is anther story.] Brideshead Revisited is certainly a good read. But not a great novel.

March 2025

Through a glass darkly – 145

Hedgehogs have never been a major part of my life. In our early days in Paris, Susie and I had a hedgehog that regularly visited our [first floor] garden. In the very hot summer of 1976 we fed the animal with stale baguette and milk [a big mistake – See below]. And the hedgehog left fleas which then attached themselves to us and our young kitten Myosotis. A decade or so later we occasionally had hedgehogs our garden in Duns. Guscott, our border collie, would circle them curiously and them prod them very cautiously with his paw. Here in Edinburgh we frequently have foxes in the garden, even two or three at a time. But we have only once seen a hedgehog.

Sarah Sands: The Hedgehog Diaries

Sands’ book, sub-titled A story of Faith, Hope, and Bristle, begins when she and her grandson find a poorly hedgehog in her garden in Norfolk. They take the animal to a hedgehog sanctuary on the outskirts of King’s Lynn. Emma painstakingly picks maggots off with tweezers and flushes the animal with a warm saline solution. The hedgehog is called Peggy, and Emma agrees that when she has over-wintered with a foster family she can return to Sands’ garden in the spring.

This encounter takes Sands on a journey of discovery. She discovers that Rory Stewart’s most watched speech on YouTube was about hedgehogs. Stewart points out that hedgehogs long predate human beings, and were around 56 million years ago. He tells her that hedgehogs are a safe way of taking the sound and fury out of social media. Rowan Williams is another hedgehog enthusiast; one of his Desert Island Discs choices was The hedgehog’s song by the Incredible String Band. He applauds the hedgehog’s practical desire to get on with the next job in hand. A prosaic virtue. Hedgehogs like dolphins and otters speak to us of what is precarious. “We get hedgehogs when there is a balance of nature, a co-existence with our environment rather than a domination or destruction of it.” Hedgehogs have managed to outlive roads, dogs, strimmers and pesticides, but they are now an endangered species.

But to say that Sands’ book is about hedgehogs is like saying that Moby Dick is about whales. While Peggy is recovering with a foster family, Sands’ 92 year-old father has suffered a heart attack and is coming towards the end of his life. His heart can be managed with drugs, but no other treatment is possible. This is COVID time.  Her father moves to a local nursing home. “Am I going home ?”, he asks. Sands and his family visit him in the nursing home, lying in bed looking a bit like Francis of Assisi. He sips protein drinks through a straw, and has given up reading The Times. The local vicar visits regularly. [This is rural Norfolk.] He is eagerly looking forward to watching Six Nations rugby on the television, – and then sleeps through it ! “I am so idle these days”, he says. [I slept through the first 10 minutes of England v. Ireland the other day.] Sands recalls the Archbishop of Canterbury telling her that the essence of ministry is “holding the hands of the dying”.

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 [Susie’s birthday], a Beatrix Potter exhibition opened at the Victoria & Albert museum. When Potter’s first love, Norman Warne, the son of her publisher died, she married a vicar’s son and they farmed 400 acres and 2 flocks of sheep in the Lake District. The sketches for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle were made on a holiday to the Lakes in the summer of 1904. Her drawings are anatomically accurate, but with Mrs Tiggy-Winkle wearing a quaint little pinafore. Her second source of inspiration was Kitty Macdonald, a Scottish washerwoman whom they employed at their house in Perthshire. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is both thorny and tender, wild and tame, powerful and defenceless. Sands evokes Derrida who saw the hedgehog as a metaphor for poetry. And who was a great advocate of animal rights. He believed that animals suffer, and that humans cause their suffering. With Mrs Tiggy-Winkle the twist comes at then of the story; when Lucie wants to say goodbye she has disappeared; and is seen “running running up the hill”. And is now revealed as nothing but a hedgehog.

Hedgehog rescuer Emma is frustrated by well-meaning people. They wait too long to bring in ailing hogs. And they feed them  with bread and milk though they are lactose intolerant. When they hibernate they live off their fat. Hibernation is an extraordinary state; more than sleep and less than death. Sands speaks to a Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford. Who describes sleep as “taking absence from the world”. The distinction between life and death is hazy, as when humans are kept artificially alive. Are people who die in their sleep aware of passing from life to death ? Sands notes that those who are close to death are often thought to be mentally clearer and calmer. An Astronautical Conference declared that, if there is to be interplanetary travel, we need to learn how to encourage crew members to hibernate. So that humans would require less energy and less food, and would produce less bodily waste.

The sick hedgehog Peggy is ready to be returned to the wild. It is the right temperature [12ºc] and she is the right weight [892g]. Sands puts Peggy carefully in her new hide in the garden. And in the same night her father dies. Peacefully. By his bed is a copy of the Compline prayer: “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep … “ Her father had prepared the order of service for the funeral. And Sands reads his words about the departure of the pink-footed geese back to Iceland.

Sands’ friend Jane Byam Shaw brought up her son Felix as a nature lover. When he was 14 he died unexpectedly on holiday in France. After his death Jane, who is not religious, bonded with butterflies and with hedgehogs. She set up hedgehog highways in her native city of Oxford. And found that helping hedgehogs helped her cope with her grief. In 2019 Ben Goldsmith’s 15-year-old daughter Iris died in a vehicle accident. He withdrew to his farm and wondered how he could live. Rainbows and wild birds and Iris’s pony were a source of comfort. It was nature that gave him purpose and solace. His brother is Zac Goldsmith, the Environment Minister. Zac Goldsmith says we should nurture hedgehogs, which are a symbol of hope. We need to invest in creating hedgehog highways. 

In Wind in the Willows, two baby hedgehogs live peacefully with kindly Badger and the Mole and the Water Rat. And Badger serves them oatmeal porridge for breakfast. “It is a story of home and hearth, of bacon for breakfast, and afternoon buttered toast by the fire and hierarchies of native wildlife …”. In the real world badgers are one of the few animals that happily munch up hedgehogs, as they do wasps’ nests and baby rabbits. Dogs often bark at and chase hedgehogs, but not aggressively. Hedgehogs are a sign of harmony with nature. But there can be difficult issues. Two decades ago some 600 hedgehogs were culled on the Uists [in the face of strong protests], as they were said to be guilty of attacking the eggs and chicks of Arctic terns and other wading birds.

Sands scatters her father’s ashes in a place he loved, under a tree where stone curlews nested. And wild geese flew overhead. [At my brother’s interment in May 2022 we heard the song, not recorded, of a lark rising.] “My father’s faith was that nature was an embodiment of the divine, and that here he is as part of Creation, earth to earth”. As she sits on the South Uist she imagines her father  with her, wearing his binoculars, absorbed by nature. And now he is “absorbed by nature, as for all of us flesh is grass”. She remembers the words of the Bidding Prayer, for “all those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light”. And she returns home to Norfolk, deeply content to find a hedgehog by her pond.

Envoi

It’s a lovely book. Thoughtful, and not too long. Bereavement is something that we will all face, sooner or later. As Christians we lean heavily on our Easter hope. Our conviction that there is something beyond life on this earth, even if the latitude and longitude and the temperature of that place are unknown. We rest on Jesus’s promise to his disciples that we shall see him again, that in his Father’s house there are many rooms, and that we shall be reunited in some mysterious way with those whom we love and have lost. Those who hear this message for the first time at funerals often struggle with it. Sands does not appear to have any clear Christian faith. But she seems to find solace in her sense that all shall be well with the world. And that hedgehogs can be a symbol of this wellness.

February 2025

Through a glass darkly – 144

Trump’s re-election is a mystery to me and to many European social democrats. [I would say ‘liberals’, but I am no longer sure what the word means.] We all know that he is a a self-obsessed egomaniac. And that he is a serial liar. And that he is a serial abuser of women. And a rather shady businessman. With a strangely orange face. But he also seems to have a very limited understanding of the world and a very limited vocabulary. When Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde challenged him at the traditional service in the national cathedral, asking him to “have mercy on the people in our country who are scared right now”, and on immigrants and on those now threatened with deportation, Trump’s response was that “she’s not a nice person … … not very good at her job”. Which is the language of a peevish five-year-old. The sermon was probably the only critical comment that Trump heard on his first full day in office. And I thought the Bishop should be commended for “‘speaking truth to power’.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian, born into a reform Jewish family in Washington DC in 1964. She specialises in the history of Communism and in the history of central and eastern Europe. She speaks Russian and Polish as well as English, she is married since 1992 to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and cabinet minister [currently Minister for Foreign Affairs], and she has had Polish citizenship since 2013.

I first came across her through her book Gulag: A history of the Soviet prison camps which won a Pulitzer prize in 2004. Gulag traces the history of the camps, beginning with Lenin and the Solokvi prison camp, through the construction of the White Sea canal, to the great expansion of camps under Stalin doing the Second World War. The book looks in detail at the brutal lives and deaths of the inmates; their arrest and interrogation, the all too frequent incidents of starvation and disease, and the circumstances of their deaths. Applebaum draws on the diaries and writings of camp survivors, of whom Solzhenitsyn is the best known. I took the book on holiday to Majorca about 15 years go, and it is a grim read.

After our time in Kyiv in 2021-22 I read Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine [published in 2017]. It is another grim read. The book tells the story of the Holodomor [literally ‘death by hunger’], also known as the Ukrainian famine, which killed several million Ukrainians in 1933-34. Applebaum contends that the famine was man-made, and that the famine was deliberately engineered by Stalin in order to eradicate the Ukrainian independence movement. [Other historians have argued that the famine was a consequence of the Soviet dash for industrialisation and the over-rapid switch to collective farming.] The book won Applebaum the Duff Cooper prize [for the second time], and contributed to the decision of the European Parliament to label the famine a genocidal act against the people of Ukraine carried out by the Soviet government.

Iron Curtain: the crushing of Eastern Europe

Iron Curtain [published in 2012] is about the crushing of Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War. A.N. Wilson [not necessarily a reliable guide] says it is “the best work of modern history I have ever read”. The book concentrates on the three countries of Hungary, Poland, and East Germany; very different countries in terms of their economic and political history, but which had all experienced constitutional government and democratic elections.

Applebaum reminds us of the chaos of Eastern Europe in 1945. By the end of the Second War huge armies and vicious secret policemen had marched back and forth across the region, each time bringing political and ethnic changes. The city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. When the war ended it was called L’viv, was no longer in eastern Poland but in the western part of Soviet Ukraine, and the majority of its Polish and Jewish prewar population had been murdered or deported. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the notion of national sovereignty for any of the nations of Eastern Europe, and strove to eliminate their educated elites. Of the 5 and a half million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. [Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933.]

We tend to think of the last phases of the war as a series of liberations. But it certainly didn’t feel like that for the defeated Germans, and especially not for Berliners. Yes, Soviet soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration and extermination camps, and they emptied Gestapo prisons. But Germans remember very well the looting, the arbitrary violence, and the mass rape which followed the arrival of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers were shocked by the [relative] material wealth of Eastern Europe. Liquor and ladies’ clothing, furniture and crockery, bicycles and household linen were stolen from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states, and shipped back home. No private car was safe. Factories and industrial equipment were systematically dismantled and shipped back east. The Red Army was brutal and powerful. And no Allied Government was in a position to influence what the Red Army did in the occupied lands.

The post-war leaders who emerged in these countries, Ulbricht in East Germany, Bierut in Poland, and Rákosi in Hungary, were all [in the jargon of the time] ‘Moscow communists’, trained in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. By contrast the ‘international Communists’, who had spent the war in western Europe or in North America, were all suspect, as revisionists, or bourgeois deviants, or Trotskyists. But party members who had survived the arrests and purges and confusion of the 1930s now emerged as true fanatics, totally loyal to Stalin and to Soviet policy.

Following on the heels of the Red Army came the creation of a new secret police force, always modelled on the Soviet pattern, the NKVD. Secret policemen were trained in the arts of persuasion, bribery, and blackmail; they convinced wives to spy on their husbands, children to inform on their parents. Military tribunals dealt with suspects, courts without lawyers or witnesses. The Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and at Buchenwald are now pressed back into service to incarcerate tens of thousands of NKVD prisoners. Prisoners were not systematically killed, but many died because they were ignored and malnourished and forgotten. The Soviet Union promoted ethnic cleansing across the region and there was widespread anti-semitism. Large numbers of Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and to North America and to Palestine.

The Soviets were totally opposed to the institutions of a civil society. Artistic and cultural groups of all kinds, both for young people and for adults, were banned if they were not affiliated to Communist party organisations. In post-war Warsaw young communists descended on the YMCA  and smashed jazz records with hammers. Scouting, which had surprisingly strong roots in Eastern Europe, was looked on with suspicion by the authorities, who sought to diminish its influence by bringing it under state control. Similarly the Hungarian People’s Colleges movement, which sought to promote communal living, democratic decision making, folk dancing and singing in rural Hungary, was destroyed by the authorities. Applebaum notes” “The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition for their citizens’ passions and talents”.

High Stalinism

By the end of 1948 the Eastern European Communist parties had forced through enormous changes in the new People’s Democracies. They had created  from scratch the secret police. And they had eliminated any opposition parties. But the socialist paradise was still far away. 

The churches were subject to harassment and worse. But religious leaders remained as a source of alternative moral and spiritual authority. In East Germany the state introduced the Jugenweihe, as a kind of secular equivalent to confirmation services. In Hungary monasteries were closed at short notice. In Poland Catholic elementary schools were progressively phased out. In Hungary Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested and imprisoned. In 1949 Stalin had decreed that the Communist parties should work actively to recruit priests as informers, and to drive a wedge between  Catholic churches in the eastern bloc and the Vatican. 

Applebaum’s book contains amazing photos of the all-female construction brigade working on the new steel mill at Sztálinvaros – Stalintown. This town was unique in Hungary, but one of several ‘socialist cities’ in the People’s Democracies, each founded around vast new steel mills, part of a comprehensive attempt to jump-start the creation of a true totalitarian civilisation. The design and architecture of the new cities was to reflect a socialist blueprint; there were to be no beggars and no periphery. In spite of high intentions the cities rapidly became lawless slums. Nowa Huta adjacent to Krakow was the first Polish city to be built without a church. In 1959 the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla [later Pope John Paul II] celebrated an outdoor mass in a field where he had applied for a church to be constructed. Applebaum sees Nowa Huta as a symbol of the failure of totalitarianism in Poland; “failed planning, failed architecture, a failed utopian dream”. 

By 1951 there was no longer anything that resembled an opposition party in eastern  Europe; no active opposition, no armed opposition. But there was a passive opposition which took the form of jokes and graffiti and unsigned letters. Youthful discontent was fuelled by American radio, broadcast from Luxembourg or from West Berlin. Teenage rebels, known in Poland as bikiniarze, developed a taste for jazz and an envy of American consumerism. Between 1948 and 1961 an estimated three million people [out of a population of 18 million] left East Germany for the West. Many of them because they thought they could make more money.

In the fullness of time Stalin died – in March 1953. A subsequent revolution in Berlin was brutally suppressed with Soviet troops and T-34 tanks. Three years later an uprising in Budapest provoked a second Soviet invasion. But the suppression of the rebellion led to a significant change in the perception of the Soviet Union by Western Communist parties and their sympathisers. The French Communist party fractured, the Italian party broke with Moscow, and the British party lost most of its members. Any lingering rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union was over.

Envoi

Yes, it’s all history now. But some questions remain. Why did the socialist system produce such dire economic results ? Why was the Communist propaganda so unconvincing ? Might more liberal measures have prevented the [eventual] revolutions of 1953 and 1956 ?

 And there are lessons to be learned. In February 1956, Nikita Krushchev stood before the 20th Party Congress and denounced the ‘cult of personality’ which had surrounded the late Stalin:

“it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behaviour. Such a belief about a man … was cultivated among us for many years”.

The speech literally killed Bleslaw Bierut, the Polish leader who was present at the Congress, and died there of a stroke or heart attack, presumably brought on by shock.

In an age of resurgent demagogues, we would do well to heed this warning against the cult of personality. [Think Trump and what some wit has labelled the Nerd Reich.] And we need to learn to value both the democratic process, and the institutions of civil society which serve as a defence against totalitarian regimes. Whether of left or of right.

February 2024

Through a glass darkly – 143

My diary says that we are going to Grenoble this week, for another locum job. But we’re not going. Which I’m sorry about. Partly because St Marc’s is a diverse and welcoming congregation. Partly because Grenoble is an attractive city, surrounded by snow-topped mountains. [A city where our daughter Joanna lived for a year back in the 1990s.] And partly because this mobility problem [an arthritic hip] probably brings to an end a decade of locum work within the Diocese in Europe.

ICS conference, Beatenburg, 2013

You could say it is all [Bishop] Robert’s fault. At an ICS conference at Beatenburg, near Interlaken, in the spring of 2013, he asked me if I had any plans for life after retirement from Lyon. Specifically if I might be available for work in chaplaincies in Europe. As a result of that conversation I subsequently spent 18 months at Holy Trinity, Brussels, in 2013-15.  Robert Innes was then the Chancellor [Senior Pastor] and John Wilkinson the Canon Pastor, and I enjoyed the new-to-me experience of working in a chaplaincy team. Which began most days with Morning Prayer in the church building. At which we were joined one day by Archbishop Justin and his wife. Susie’s old friend Liz kindly lent me her house in Etterbeek, as she was away living in Switzerland; and I had an opportunity to get to know a city [Brussels] and a country [Belgium] which I had only previously passed through on the way to somewhere else.

In those days I was a bit obsessed with questionnaires. So I set up meetings with as many of the congregation as possible, and used a questionnaire to have structured conversations about their faith journeys and involvement in church life. Some of the conversations took an hour, some were much longer. The longest as I recall took all day. In the end, after 150 interviews, with help from a statistically literate member of the congregation, I produced a detailed church profile. But for me the richness of some of the conversations was of more value than the raw data.

Baptismal candle, Holy Trinity, Brussels, 2014

It rained a lot in Brussels. In Ibiza where we did a holiday chaplaincy later in 2015 it didn’t rain at all. We enjoyed the beaches and enjoyed swimming, at least until Susie was stung by a jellyfish. But the  chaplaincy model which had been launched in conjunction with Young at Heart package holidays, with chaplaincies organising Songs of Praise events in hotel lounges on Sunday afternoons, was past its sell-by date. Susie and I hovered around holiday companies’ Welcome events like time-share sales reps. And attendance at Sunday services was disappointing. 

Notre-Dame, Paris, 2016

In 2016 I made a brief trip to St Michael’s, Paris, as a substitute for James Buxton who was ill. [ “I’m a substitute for another guy … … “]. It was my first visit to St Michael’s since I had passed through in pre-ordination days back in 1983. And I had the pleasure of getting to know Alyson Lamb, the then chaplain, whose early death last year was a great loss. Later that year we spent ten weeks in Strasbourg, staying in the chaplaincy flat in the centre of town. The congregation  worships in a Dominican chapel close to the university. For many churches there is a strong feeling that the ‘Golden Age’ lies in the past, and my recollection is that Strasbourg were struggling to  find their way alongside some newer and more dynamic English-speaking churches. [But a glance at the church website suggests that the church now is again flourishing.]

Early in 2017 Susie and I made our first visit to Chantilly, following the departure of Nick Clarke. It is a welcoming congregation, worshipping in what looks and feels like a rural English parish church. With a purpose-built chaplaincy flat and church centre next door. The church and the plot of land on which it stands were a 19th century gift from the Doc d’Aumale, a fabulously wealthy anglophile who had inherited 66 million lives and the estate of his god-father the last Prince of Condé. From the late 19th century there was a substantial English-speaking community in Chantilly, many of them connected with the horse-racing industry.

Chateau, Chantilly, 2017

We made further visits to Brussels in 2017 and 2018. Liz had sold her house in Etterbeek, and the church found us accommodation in apartments linked to members of the congregation. It is always easier going back to places. At Holy Trinity I knew where the key was kept, which was invaluable for the early Communion service. Paul Vrolijk had succeeded Robert Innes as the senior Chaplain, but many of those whom I had interviewed in 2013-14 were still in place.

The first of several visits to St Marc’s, Grenoble, came in the summer of 2019. Grenoble is an attractive city in south-east France, surrounded with a succession of snow-capped mountains. I knew this congregation a little in Roy Ball’s time, but more recently the church had struggled a bit against a newer American-led congregation. St Marc’s is made up of a handful of long-term British expats. a sizeable group of Africans, mainly from Nigeria and Cameroon, and a clutch of PhD students from a variety of different countries. We did two spells at Grenoble in 2020, preached for them on line during the COVID lock-down in 2020, and returned for what looks like a final visit in February-March 2024. Returning home to Edinburgh late on Easter Day.

All Age Worship, St Marc’s, Grenoble, 2024

Further afield we spent Advent and Christmas 2020 with the congregation of St Nicolas, Ankara. The congregation worships in a chapel within the Embassy compound, which means that entry is tightly controlled. It was a complex situation as there had been big group of Iranian refugees in the previous year, but rifts and tensions and aggressive behaviour had led to all Iranians [and Russians] being banned from the compound. Celebrating Communion with a group of Farsi-speaking Iranians in a chapel in the former French Embassy was a very moving experience. We were also delighted to have an opportunity to spend a couple of days in Istanbul, a city which I first visited as a hitch-hiker more than fifty years earlier. And also to visit Konya, the Iconium visited by Paul and Silas in Acts 14, but also the home of Rumi [of the Whirling Dervishes], the Sufi poet and mystic

When the COVID lock-down eased, we were able to spend Advent and Christmas 2021 at Christ Church, Kyiv. In Ukraine we were well out of our comfort zone, but we were warmly received by Christina, the church Warden, and by Kate Davenport, then working in the British Embassy. During our time there I was pleased to baptise the young son of one of the military attachés, Tam, a gunner from Fife. And we took the opportunity to visit Lviv, formerly known as Lwow, a delightful, historic city in the far west of Ukraine. Tam assured me that Russia did not need to invade Ukraine, but the Russian troops invaded a month after we left. And suddenly the city from which we had just returned was all over the television news.

Christmas Day, 2021, Kyiv

In the autumn of 2022 I was back in Chantilly again, following Sarah’s departure. This time it was just me as Susie was in Wycombe with our daughter Joanna who was severely ill. Queen Elizabeth died while I was in Chantilly, and we held a memorial service which was very close in time to the funeral of the long-serving Church Treasurer. [And then very sadly Joanna died too. A loss with which we continue to struggle.] Early in 2023 I had the pleasure of baptising two teenagers.

Baptism at St Peter’s, Chantilly, 2023

After Easter 2023, as we came towards the end of our locum work, we returned to Ankara. During our time there I was asked to judge a scone-making contest at the Embassy Coronation Garden Party, something for which theological college signally failed to equip me. And during the past fifteen months we have made final return visits to Chantilly and to Grenoble.

Ankara congregation, 2024

A decade of locum work around the Diocese in Europe has exemplified Jesus’s words “in my Father’s house there are many rooms”. It has been a rich experience. I am immensely grateful for the hospitality we have received; in particular from Peter and Carole Ludlow, and from Susan Hudson, in Brussels; from James and Julia Howes, and from Ann and Alain Bouchardon, in Chantilly; from Christina and her family in Kyiv; from Stefan and Kaska Michaelis in Ankara; and from Zaz and Jean-Claude in Grenoble. And I have enjoyed hearing some of the stories of a wonderfully diverse group of people in this amazing diocese.

Vicar for hire

I am quite happy worshipping here in Edinburgh on Sunday mornings, in St Peter’s, Lutton Place, and in the nascent Newington Trinity. But I continue to miss the particular dynamic of these gathered, multi-cultural, multilingual congregations around Europe.

January 2025

Through a glass darkly – 142

Susie and I were married on Saturday, January 11th, 1975. It seems a long time ago. I had just started working in Paris for Oxford University Press, and had travelled up from London on the train the previous day. Susie had given up teaching in Oxford the previous summer, and had been living at home for a few months and working for Richard Demarco, the Edinburgh artist and promoter of the performing and visual arts. The night before the wedding I had a drink with Clive in Lesley’s Bar on Causewayside, the last time that I was there. Peter, my younger brother and best man, was travelling from somewhere in Germany, fell asleep and missed a late night train connection, and had to be collected from Waverley Station early on the morning of the wedding after coming up from London on the sleeper.

Weddings were much more basic in those days. We were married in Mayfield Church by Bill McDonald at 12.00 midday. The organist surprised himself by being able to play When I’m Sixty Four while we signed the register. There was a reception at a hotel up towards Fairmilehead which is no longer there. Susie and I were away in time to catch the 4.00pm train back down to London, where we were staying overnight on the way to Annecy. John Akast, a friend from primary school, and more recently a High Court judge, joined us on the train. I suppose he thought that we would like to have someone to talk to ?

On Saturday, our 50th anniversary, we went out to breakfast. Susie had carefully chosen a bar/restaurant in the former Royal Infirmary, now redeveloped as The Quarter Mile. But their ovens were down. So we ate in a Turkish cafe across the road. [Formerly Ollie Bongo’s for cognoscenti of Edinburgh cafes.] The waiter was a third year Computer Science student from Istanbul. I told him that I was first in Istanbul, as a hitch-hiker, in 1964. He told me that his father was born in 1965. Later we were in Marks and Spencer’s, and a nice girl at the check-out gave us a bunch of tulips.

We were in Mayfield Church again yesterday morning. Except that it is now becoming Newington Trinity. The first hymn, by Timothy Dudley-Smith, was highly appropriate:

Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided,
urged and inspired us, cheered us on our way,
sought us and saved us, pardoned and provided:
Lord of the years, we bring our thanks today.

I wore my wedding suit, a double-breasted, burgundy velvet suit with slightly flared trousers [from Simpsons in Piccadilly]. It attracted some comment, and I was assured that I could get a good price for it on Vintage. “Don’t give it to a charity shop”, people said. And after church we enjoyed an excellent lunch with eight close friends at Blonde on St Leonard’s Street.

Susie and I have been assembling some photos. Here are a few photos from down the years. There are hundreds of others !

Honeymoon, near Annecy, January 1975

Dinner, Grand Canal, Venice, summer 1975

Woodstock garden, 1984

ICS summer chaplaincy, Quimper, 2008

Retirement, Edinburgh garden, 2015

Snake Canyon, ? Colorado, 2016

Kyiv, Christmas Day, 2021

Best wishes for 2025 to all [both ?] my readers.

January 2025

Through a glass darkly – 141

We spent  Christmas at Homelands at Lundin Links, enjoying time with Craig and Amelia and Eloïse, and the hospitality of Jan and Colin and Kitty. It was mild and dry, and our room looked across the links golf course to the coastal path of the Firth of Forth.

Remembering the Sixties

October 1962 is where the book begins. [It ends 600 pages later with the funeral of Winston Churchill in January 1965.] In the Observer Penelope Gilliatt praised Sean Connery in the newly released Dr No for playing James Bond as a gentle send-up “full of submerged self-parody”. But Philip Larkin went to see it in Hull, “a pretty poor film” with Connery “a cross between an out of work Irish actor and an assistant lecturer in physics”.

At Highbury little Bangor City lost 1-2 to mighty Napoli in the European Cup Winners Cup. Sir Keith Joseph, the newly appointed housing minister, told the Tory party conference in Llandudno that the current rate of slum clearance was 600,000 to 700,000 houses a year, and that he was pinning his hopes for future housing targets on industrialised [or system] building. One party delegate, Mr J. Addey of Huddersfield, insisted “our cry should not be slum clearance, but central heating and hot water for Coronation Street”. John Osborne wrote a diatribe in Tribune about the Common Market, “a desolate affair of obsessive shopping and guzzling”. Sussex University opened the doors of its modern and very expensive buildings, designed by Sir Basil Spence, at Falmer outside Brighton. A member of the University Grants Committee later reflected: “if only we had looked after the Spences, the pounds would have taken care of themselves”.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited the new BMC [British Motor Corporation] plant at Bathgate in West Lothian, and hailed it as a new chapter in Scottish industrial life. Alf Ramsey from Ipswich Town became the new England football manager. He was enthusiastically greeted in the Daily Express as “a man with a mind like a combination of a camera and a computer … …a man able to persuade a camel that it is really a Derby winner”. Love Me Do entered the hit parade at number 27, and the Beatles made their first television appearance, shown only on Granada. At midnight on October 22nd President John F. Kennedy announced that Soviet missile sites had been irrefutably detected in Cuba. Two days later 500 demonstrators clashed with the police outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The Cuban Missile crisis seared itself into the memory of young people. “I remember walking to college [Ealing Art College]”, wrote Pete Townshend, aged 17, future rock star, in his diary, “and thinking , ‘This is the end of the world, I am going to die’. I was actually a bit pissed off when nothing happened”. 

The book is David Kynaston’s A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65, which I have been reading on loan from the Fountainhall Road library. Kynaston is a cricket lover and social historian, and the book is one of a series, Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling the story of Britain from Clement Attlee’s election in 1945 to the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The book is a pot pourri of stories and news items culled from a wide range of sources, including unpublished diaries from the period. It revisits familiar events – the Cuban Missile crisis, the Big Freeze, the assassination of JFK – while at at the same time bringing glimpses into the lives of everyday people living through those years. Kynaston traces an anti-Establishment mood epitomised by the BBCs controversial That Was The Week That Was, first broadcast in November 1962, fronted by the [then unknown] 23 year-old David Frost with a classless accent and an ambitious hair-cut. Other recurrent themes include the shifting nature of the Welfare State, slowly becoming more responsive to the needs of its users, and the rise of consumer culture, marked by the arrival of the Habitat chain and of brutalist shopping centres like Birmingham’s Bull Ring [opened in January 1963, demolished and rebuilt in 2003]. 

I was 17 in October 1962, a would-be historian at Christ’s Hospital, acknowledging a poor set of A level results that summer, and working slowly towards Oxbridge entrance exams the following autumn. My history teacher was Michael Cherniavsky, a medievalist, a White Russian, the product of Westminster School and Balliol. He affected double-breasted, chalk-striped suits, spoke with a slight lisp, and gave his historians a great deal of intellectual curiosity. He was a Humean rationalist, and probably voted liberal. Which made him practically a Commie in the eyes of some of his fellow members of staff.

He would have encouraged our enthusiasm for TW3. And he would I think have been sympathetic to the views of Morris Carstairs, professor of Psychology at Edinburgh, whose 1963 Reith Lectures had the overall title This Island Now [taken from an Auden poem]. In his third, Sunday evening lecture Carstairs asserted: “I believe we may be mistaken in our alarm over young people’s sexual experimentation … … It seems to me that our young people are rapidly turning our own society into one in which sexual experience, with precautions against contraception, is becoming acceptable as a sensible preliminary to marriage; a preliminary which makes it more likely that marriage, when it comes, will be mutually considerate and mutually satisfying experience”. Reaction to the lecture was explosive, from both the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council and the Salvation Army, and from readers of the Daily Telegraph. [Morris Carstairs and his wife, who were friends of Susie’s parents, came to lunch with Susie and me in Paris just over a decade later. But I don’t recall discussing any of this stuff.]

Susie and Morris Carstairs, Fountainhall Road, Edinburgh

The 1964 election

1964 was election year. Harold Wilson was the 47-year-old grammar school boy and former Oxford academic who had been one of the youngest ever Cabinet ministers in 1947, and who had easily beaten the impetuous [loose cannon] George Brown to become leader of the Labour Party in January 1963. “Able but dangerous” was Macmillan’s verdict on Wilson.  Macmillan himself was now on the sidelines after prostate problems, and the Tories were led by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, characterised by Wilson as “the fourteenth Earl of Home”, a patrician Old Etonian, landowner, and former cricketer from the Scottish Borders, who had renounced his peerage the previous year and won a by-election at Kinross. Like my brother Paul I was a member of the Putney YS [Young Socialists], a group that had [as I recall] been banned from the party for IS [Trotskyite] leanings. Together we had campaigned, effectively as it turned out, for Hugh Jenkins [not Roy Jenkins] to become MP for Putney. I remember attending an election rally at Wandsworth Town Hall and, when Wilson arrived late as was normal, the YS liaison officer, Tony Booth [father of Cherie Blair] got up and made a wonderfully intemperate speech about hanging bankers from the nearest lamp-posts.

October 1964 began with riots in the television room of Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow, and on the streets of  Belfast sparked by Ian Paisley. Gallup gave Labour a 4% lead in the polls, and a fired-up, semi-sober George Brown made an effective party political broadcast. In Brixton John Major took on speaking engagements for the Tory candidate whose voice had given out. Robert Maxwell roared round the villages of the nascent Milton Keynes in a red Land Rover, telling anyone listening that “I like you am a council house tenant”. In Chester the Labour agent, John Prescott, despaired of his fruity-voiced, Old Etonian candidate Anthony Blond. Nicholas Fairbairn campaigned in Edinburgh Central looking every inch a Tory in a square bowler and a double-breasted waistcoat with a great gold watch fob. The Labour candidate in East Fife was the 26-year-old solicitor John Smith, just two years after winning the Observer debating competition mace. In Poplar the Tory candidate, Kenneth Baker, made the Conservative case to a quizzical docker and was met with the question, “Mate, what have I got to conserve ?” In Smethwick the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, standing against the somewhat aloof Patrick Gordon Walker, put immigration clearly at the centre of his campaign. And stickers and leaflets with the racist message “If you want a n—- for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour” appeared on the streets.

By polling day Joe Coral had Labour at 9-4 to win, and the stock market suffered its worst fall [5.5%] for many years. Turnout was a respectable 77.1%, down on 1959 but up on 1955. Election Specials on both BBC and ITV were overwhelmingly male affairs, and the Canadian analyst Robert McKenzie announced “We’re in for a hard day’s night”. Smethwick went to Peter Griffiths with a 7.2% swing to the Conservatives. Captain Robert Maxwell was in at Buckingham. Harold Wilson had a highly increased majority in Huyton. Shirley Williams was in at Hitchin. Ted Dexter lost in Cardiff. Robin Day interviewing Barbara Castle, hoarse after campaigning, told her that her voice reminded him of Lauren Bacall. At 3.58am there were shots of Wilson going to the Palace to kiss the Queen’s hand. Labour were back in power after thirteen years in political exile. But it was a close-run thing as they finally had an overall majority of only four. 

The end of an era

“Sorry, old cock” were the immortal words of Reggie Maudling to the incoming Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, who discovered a trade deficit running at £800 million, twice what had been expected. A week later Callaghan’s emergency budget increased social expenditure, pensions and benefits, and promised to introduce a corporation tax and an amplified capital gains tax. “I think the most frightening thing”, wrote Virginia Potter in her diary, “is that we have two Hungarians [Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh] as economists behind Wilson and Callaghan – Expect they are Communists !”. Through November 1965 the country moved into a full scale sterling crisis. The threat of devaluation was only averted by a $3 billion dollar credit from foreign central banks. Churchill’s imminent  ninetieth birthday was celebrated by the BBC with a variety programme, scripted by Terence Rattigan and presented by Noël Coward. It was the last classic episode of Wednesday evening’s Z-Cars scripted by the great John Hopkins. Carry on Cleo opened in Leicester Square, and on BBC 2 Terry and Bob made their first appearance as The Likely Lads. A week before Christmas the House of Commons, after an emotional eight-hour debate, voted by 355 votes to 174 to abolish capital punishment for all types of murder.

“Churchill lies dying”, wrote Phyllis Willmott in her diary on Friday, January 22nd, 1965, “And even though I barely noticed the man at his finest hour – he always seemed to overdo things in the eyes of the full-blooded younger me – there is a sense of history’s leaving in his dying.” On Monday 25thThe Times devoted its front page to the news [of Churchill’s death] rather than advertisements for the first time since the Great War, while the Daily Telegraph had black-edged columns. Enormous numbers of people queued in the bitter cold to see Sir Winston’s body lie in state in Westminster Hall before a funeral in St Paul’s cathedral. “I say aren’t they going it for the funeral !”, commented Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, “It’ll be like the Duke of Wellington, won’t it”. Richard Dimbleby commented characteristically [fruitily] on the funeral procession, speaking of “its richness, it’s colour, and its pride, and its intense solemnity and feeling and love.” After the service a launch took the coffin to Festival Pier, from where it was taken to Waterloo station and onwards by train to Bladon, adjacent to Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Why Waterloo ? And not Paddington ? It was said to be Churchill’s own decision, to be one in the eye for General de Gaulle, who was present as one of the distinguished foreign mourners.

The following weekend [Sir] Stanley Matthews, at the age of fifty, played his last match for Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. He was the oldest footballer to play in the First Division. Stoke beat Fulham 3-1, and at the end of the season, 33 years after first playing for Stoke, he reluctantly hung up his boots. “Churchill and Matthews: the passing of two mid-century icons”, writes Kynaston. “The end of a post-war era ? Yes, in some sense undeniably.”

Envoi

I have derived great pleasure from this book. It is short on analysis, and long on memories. It is tempting to try and tie in some of these events with what was happening in my own life; a final twelve months at CH, writing about Anti-Fascism in the English Public Schools, 1933-39 for a Trevelyan scholarship, working for 6 months at County Hall at the south end of Westminster Bridge, hitch-hiking to Istanbul and back, starting on what turned out to be three largely idle and unprofitable years at Balliol. But I threw away all my remaining [and not very exciting] diaries prior to 1988 a year or so ago. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley at the start of The Go-Between. That is not entirely true. Peter Griffiths’ campaign in Smethwick in 1964 finds echoes in the racism of some of the nastier current Tories and their friend the unspeakable Farage. And  the present Labour government’s inability to kick-start economic growth is reminiscent of Labour’s inability to improve the country’s economy in the autumn of 1964.

Here in Edinburgh it is snowing lightly on New Year’s Day. I wonder what the year ahead might bring. And i want to pray for hope and optimism, and for a whole host of people and places.

January 2025