Telling Me The Story

As the diocese digests, as it seems to be, the imminent death of its bishop - things have moved on since the news got to the BBC - I'm conscious that I have been silent lately, but even though my thoughts today weren't connected with the update +Andrew issued they are not a million miles away from relevant. 

I am struggling towards the end of a number of projects, themselves the conclusion of a series which has occupied me really since the early Covid lockdown. I think that, once they're done, I may well have a rest for a while. I find myself writing about something contemporary over which opinion is very divided, to the point that different groups involved seem to inhabit entirely separate mental worlds. I fall more on one side than the other, though I will strive to be fair and at least do justice to both.

As you know I am a historian in a small way: even my holy well compendia are, in a way, gathered stories. When you set out to write history, you almost always have a thesis, a story already vaguely formed in your mind, if only because the smaller subject you're writing about is set within the grander story of humanity and you probably have that pretty much sketched out according to your beliefs. It's rare that you know nothing about your topic in advance. As you do your research, you'll be looking for anything that bears on that narrative, but not only what confirms it; you'll continually be checking it against what you find. It's a process of constant revision and re-evaluation, and to do it properly and honestly you have to be prepared for the possibility you might uncover something that sends you in a different direction from where you thought. It's not an exact business, but neither is it simply a rehearsal of one's own biases. That's how it works.

That's as it may be. As we draw closer to the end of our lives we might wonder how an impossible collection of events and impressions, of memories and experiences, can conceivably be shaped into a story, something we could put into a memoir or tell to a child. It cannot be, really. We don't know where in the human story we are: closer to its beginning or its end, or what that story means, even whether there is one. I tell the good people of Swanvale Halt Church that the story of Christ is the one overarching narrative of Creation in which our individual stories are gathered and made sense of. His is the book of which we are sentences. There is a comfort in that.

Biblical Relics

Anna comes to speak to me about various things, including her old family Bible. None of her family wants it, she says, and she doesn't feel she can look after it. What should she do with it?

It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple). 

The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.

The Hidden Paths

When I moved into Swanvale Halt, I realised on exploring my surroundings that the footpath that ran up the hill between the fields and woods at the back of the Rectory and a 1990s estate was originally a road. Even today it has traces of the white lines down the middle. That has fascinated me ever since, even more so since realising that there are paths between the blocks of new houses, connecting the old road with the new; it's like a hidden landscape secreted inside the obvious, external one. Before the new streets were built, there were big houses here, some of them accommodation for the public school that used to own the area, and even tennis courts. I thought it might be a fun location for a Forest Church excursion, following the paths and reflecting on the way communities change, including the various people we used to know who lived in these cul-de-sacs and roads. Doing my recces I found a lone sequoia tree, and a curious double-trunked oak amid the yews and beeches. If God is to be found in the contemplation of landscape, the way landscapes, habits and memories alter affects our interaction with him as well. 

Today the wind blew and the rain fell, and only three of us braved the venture. I think I'll use this walk for a Forest Church later in the year, but I find myself reflecting that I often put material together that ends up not being used, and have to trust that in some way - divine providence, perhaps - it doesn't go to waste. It also struck me that that desire that the great lumber-box of things we have done and had to relinquish, whether creative efforts, loves and relationships, joys and sorrows, shouldn't go to waste either, has been perhaps more of a driving force in impelling me to investigate faith than I've realised. 

I joke that the great thing about the movies of The Lord of the Rings is that nobody has to read the books again, but I do like the walking rhyme Frodo sings near the end. I thought of it again as we traversed the secret paths on the hilltop.

Still round the corner there may wait
a new road or a secret gate
and though I oft have passed them by
the time will come at last when I 
shall take the hidden paths that run
west of the Moon, east of the Sun.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.

Named in Stone (and glass/brass)

It's the 175th anniversary of the church this year and, for Heritage Open Weekend, I did a short tour of the church and churchyard looking at the memorials and monuments and thinking about some of the people represented. I haven't had time to research in-depth biographies of many of them, but there were enough details to fill a good 45 minutes exploring the nature of history and memory in our small community. We discovered -

- the former slaveowning incumbent of the church and his complex family ramifications

- the beloved parish worker whose life was glowingly written up in the parish magazine and who nobody now recalls

- the Victorian army officer who brought his horse back from the Crimea and buried it at his house when it died

- the lyrically-named lady married to a Quaker papermill master

- the anonymous 16-year-old commemorated in a window, whose face was almost certainly used for St Agnes and was therefore presumably called that

- the militant suffragette remembered in the statue of the Virgin & Child from a London convent

... and we also talked about headstones and footstones, the 19th-century stonemasonry trade, and what happens when monuments are moved around. Ours is a small and pretty unremarkable parish church, and yet look at what it contains. Most of all, what struck me - having not known it until I looked up our burial records - is that during the mere 30 years our churchyard was open more than 420 souls were laid to rest in it. And it's tiny. Half of them were aged 15 or under; 39%, nearly 2 in every 5, were aged 3 or under. That was the kind of place Swanvale Halt was in the mid-1800s: like, presumably, most other such places. 

Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Shades of Netley Abbey

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Revd Richard Warner, a great partisan of the claims to sanctity of the well in the Abbey crypt, which he seems to have been the first person to have recorded as 'St Joseph's Well'. He was a remarkable character whose father had kept a delicatessen in Marylebone, and who might have had a Naval career before becoming curate to the travel writer William Gilpin and eventually attracting controversy for preaching pacifist sermons during the Napoleonic wars, finishing as the pluralist incumbent of Great Chalfield in Wiltshire and Timberscombe in Somerset. Gilpin - an important figure in early Picturesque travel writing and therefore in the history of the Gothic Garden - was a strong influence on Richard Warner who ended up writing accounts of his own walking tours. Another friend was John Losh, uncle of Wreay church's singular architect Sarah Losh. Warner's extensive literary output (his clerical duties clearly left him plenty of time for this) included reissuing historic cookbooks and antiquarian works as well as gossipy fiction about Bath society. But the work of his that I've just finished reading is his Gothic novel from 1795, Netley Abbey. 

I was intrigued enough by the mention of the novel in Richard Warner's Wikipedia entry to look it up and then buy it. Obviously I knew that what would arrive would not be a pair of 18th-century volumes with thick board covers and marbled endpapers, but I wasn't quite expecting an absolute facsimile, complete with long 's's that look like 'f's, contained in floppy covers and printed so badly that in places the reader has to reconstruct the text. In fact, that, and the inevitable temptation to read it to oneself like Nigel Molesworth's take on Shakespeare ("Fie, fir, if I may fa fo"), are the main pleasures to be derived, because it is difficult to express how bad this book is. The majority of the story is reported speech as characters relate to others what has happened to them in very unlikely prose. There is an impoverished good baron and a very wicked one, dashing knights and an evil abbot presiding over a monastery where a maiden in a white dress (very flimsy, one imagines) is confined to a subterranean chamber. (I know, spoilers, but you're not likely to venture further into this text anyway). This could all be exciting or at least camp fun, but most of the first volume is irrelevant and you virtually know what's going to happen before the plot starts. The main benefit is to get something of a feel for what the book's original 18th-century readers might have experienced: the facsimile reproduction, however faulty, does replicate the typesetting with on average no more than 100 words to each of its 390-odd pages. It does make me appreciate far more the last initial-wave Gothic novel I read, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or, The Moor from 1806, which is itself no great shakes as literature, but at least has some flair to it.

And there is also this question that occurs to me. Although the setting of Netley Abbey is medieval, the world it depicts is, of course, nothing like the actual Middle Ages at all. Neither the castle of good Baron de Villars nor that of dastardly Sir Hildebrand de Warren function anything like a medieval household: they are 18th-century aristocratic establishments projected into the past. The hero young Edward de Villars sniffs at the superstitious monuments of the umbrageous Abbey like a rational Georgian Protestant. Now, given that this book was written by someone who fancied himself as a historian, what did Revd Warner believe the past was actually like? His account of St Joseph's Well in his History of the Abbey of Glaston is highly romantic and coloured, and hardly unsympathetic to the Age of Faith and its monastic institutions which he criticises as a Gothic novelist. It's interesting that the same person can adopt both variant modes when writing in different genres.

Sham Rock

Years and years ago I may have railed about the nonsense pedalled by pagans (and some Christians) about Easter, but I hadn't any idea that St Patrick's Day was the subject of similar balderdash until a friend of mine posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday. I should resist going down these kind of rabbit holes, but here's the original statement, with my own responses interposed.

"St Patrick's Day - a very very bizarre celebration indeed. A British and Roman priest

That’s the last accurate statement in the passage.

"who attempted to annihilate the Druids,

There’s no evidence of anything approaching this. All the evidence (as opposed to later mythologising) suggests that Patrick’s mission was relatively limited. His Confessio makes it clear that he was highly dependent on the goodwill of the powerful in Irish society, and instead (very, very rarely among Christian missionaries) he says ‘towards the pagan people too among whom I live, I have lived in good faith, and will continue to do so. God knows that I have not been devious with even one of them, nor do I think of doing so, for the sake of God and his church. I would not want to arouse persecution of them and of all of us’.

"conducted exorcisms to banish the great Irish faery deity Ainé, who told lies about the faery,

The only information we have about pre-Christian Irish deities come from later sources produced within a Christian context, such as the Book of Invasions. But Ainé doesn’t appear there: she occurs in the 11th-century The Fitness of Names. There, she isn’t treated as a goddess, and isn’t a supernatural personality, just a powerful woman. In Limerick folklore, she becomes ‘an old woman who was in with the Good People’, not ‘Queen of the Fairies’ as old-style mythologists such as Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend (1919) claimed, or the ‘goddess of summer, wealth, and sovereignty’ as she is now described. There is nothing that links St Patrick with any supposed worship of Aine and his own writings do not mention her.

"who claimed he threw Pagan women who would not convert into the ocean

He doesn’t. We have all the words Patrick wrote about himself in his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and that story isn’t in them.

"and they became mermaids,

This statement sounds like it might have come from later hagiography of Patrick, but it seems to be derived from a garbled amalgam of folk stories. I tried to chase it down. In Legends and Superstitions of the Sea (1885), FS Bassett refers to a legend of people who dwelt under the sea (not strictly mermaids) in Wales because their ancestors had refused to believe St Patrick and so had sunk beneath the water, but that’s the closest I can get to any old source for this story. It’s not Irish, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the historical Patrick. I came across references to ‘old women being thrown into the sea on St Patrick’s Day and becoming mermaids’, but they’re all from modern sources.

"who "drove out the snakes" (the Pagan ways)

Indeed an older generation of writers accounted for this legend, which doesn’t date any earlier than the 11th century, by claiming it referred to Patrick exterminating paganism, and therefore by extension pagans themselves. You come across more elaborate versions such as the claims that the Druids had snake tattoos, or revered snakes because they represented the circle of life (that seems especially odd, as snakes don’t naturally curl into circles, and the Druids couldn't have revered animals that weren't around in the first place). There is no evidence for any of it. Today most commentators accept that it’s a ‘just-so’ story concocted to explain the fact that Ireland has no snakes, in the same way that by the 6th century there was a legend circulating that St Hilary had driven the snakes from the island of Gallinara in Italy. The snakes in the story aren’t druids, or even paganism more generally: they’re just snakes.

"and attempted to turn the great bright god Lugh into Lugh-chromain (Little stooping Lugh)

Apart from Lugh being a genuine deity who appears in the Book of Invasions and versions of whom are attested in Britain and Gaul, similar remarks apply to him as to Ainé. There’s no record of St Patrick having any dealings relating to him, and there’s no evidence that the holy mountain eventually called Croagh Patrick was a sanctuary of Lugh.

 "which would become "lephrecaun".

Etymologists now derive leprechaun from the pagan Roman feast of the Lupercalia, so this name for Irish fairy people dates from well into the Christian era of monkish writers who knew what Lupercalia was. It’s nothing to do with Lugh.

"I adore the Irish. I revere Ireland. I have that old blood singing within my veins. But this day is a day to celebrate the survival of the Old Ways despite what this "Saint" represented and the cruel action he took. Today, I wear the green, for the fae, for the Old Ways, for the shining ones and the deep love of the land. Blessings to you all my friends. A blessing on the survival of the old ways, and of the Truth emerging from the distortions of history."

One despairs at people's willingness to take garbled misunderstandings, utterly ahistorical garbage, and other guesses and falsehoods, which could all be corrected with a modicum of curiosity, and call them 'Truth'. At least thoughtful pagans aren't taken in.

Moving In the Past

I have no idea why my Mum decided to use a recent letter to describe how it was that she and Dad came to live in the house in Bournemouth that she still occupies, but it seemed worth recording for posterity. Here's what she said, with her own approach to capitalisation as that seems important to me, too: 

I was 26 years when we moved in. We had a Cooker a Bed an old TV & Settee. Mum & Dad [hers] Bought us the Table & Chairs. Dad [mine] laid the Paths all round & mixed cement & Carried it in a Dustbin Lid haha Couldn’t afford a WheelBarrow.

We had £200 put Back to Buy things But. They charged us £200 for Road Charges So that was that. Still we got there in the end. I’ve bought a New Washing Machine cum Tumble Dryer. I’ve got to laugh as it was a quarter of what the Bungalow cost, 8 Times Dad’s Wages.

Before this, Mum and Dad had had a caravan in New Milton, their home from their marriage in 1962 until the bungalow came up. In the past Mum's related how Dad's employer agreed to inflate his wages so they could successfully apply for a mortgage, and how because the street was newly carved out of a chunk of waste land the gardens of the bungalows were an expanse of mud and the road hadn't been properly laid out, hence the 'road charges'. The 'table and chairs' are an Ercol set which is still serviceable 57 years later.

Of course these are all challenges and delights that modern couples in their 20s are never likely to encounter at all ... !

Goth Walk 37: Cocktails With Elvira

Curiously I found out about the 1932 Elvira Barney murder case through my investigations into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism. The Sisters of St Mary at Spelthorne once ran the only sanatorium in the UK for women alcoholics, and one of their celebrity patients was an actress called Brenda Dean Paul. Through her I discovered Elvira Barney née Mullens, a knighted stockbroker's daughter acquitted of murdering, and even of manslaughtering, her lover Michael Scott Stephen at her apartment in William Mews, mainly, it seems, because nobody liked him very much. Her defence counsel, the former Attorney General Sir Patrick Hastings may have had a bit to do with it;  she may, so one story goes, have repaid the debt by nearly running him down driving on the wrong side of the road between Paris and Boulogne later in the summer. She definitely did crash into the wife of the ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Count Karolyi in Cannes, a sentence which could only be written in the 1930s. These events all have a dark humour about them, but there's no fun to be got out of Elvira's own death in a hotel room in Paris in 1936 from an apparent cocaine overdose. I did find myself, for the first time ever, quoting Barbara Cartland: her novel A Virgin in Mayfair describes the milieu of Elvira and the Bright Young People, and includes, in a description of a Soho nightclub, one sublime line: 'everyone kept saying how thrilling it was to be there, and how they ought not to have come'. As Mr Gloommovie said, how good a quiz night question would that be - Who wrote this, Oscar Wilde, PG Wodehouse, or Barbara Cartland?

There were very few of us on the Walk, fewer than half the people who'd actually confirmed they were coming. I picked up doing the Walks from the Young Lord Declan back in the old days when we might get thirty or forty participants, and the old London Goth Meetup group used constantly to get new blood (as it were) passing through. Now it seems as though I'm doing them for a loyal but tiny group of people I've known for years and that's not as fun. I don't have another topic immediately in the pipeline, so perhaps it's time to call a halt. 

Even my one photo was rubbish! Instead I took this along the King's Road in Chelsea.

Layers of History

Strangely, perhaps, for someone who has such an interest in history, I rarely look back at my own, or devote much time to thinking about it. But the interlinking of personal and wider history is a different matter. My elder niece has not long since started studying at Sheffield University and is based in the university halls at Endcliffe. On her way to the city centre she walks past the house where her great-great-grandmother was in service, while a couple of miles away is the rather more modest house in Industry Street where her great-grandmother and namesake Grace was born.

Meanwhile, my mum's side of the family came from Somerset. Her grandfather owned Royal Oak Farm at Clanville once upon a time, a building now worth getting on for £850K, quite a far cry from Industry Street, Sheffield. Here it is, as revealed by a popular mapping app. Of course, although these old buildings are part of our history, they're also embedded in other peoples', one of the ways in which lives cross over one another, link, and construct a wider human narrative. 

Among the Archives

For the last several months I’ve become something of a weekly fixture at the History Centre in Woking, working through first wodges of service registers and more recently copies of Crockford’s to investigate the clergy who have served churches in the diocese at the Catholic end of the spectrum. I can’t find any indication that I’ve mentioned it here before, so I admit now how crushingly dull a lot of this has been. At the History Centre you can order up to ten documents from the stacks in advance, though you can request more once you’re there. Oh dear, I thought before I started, how restricting that will be, but I discovered that working through ten old service registers over the course of three hours or so was quite sufficient to exhaust and render me almost incapable of speech. I rarely saw a church in the middle of a transition from one way of doing things to another, though here and there you could tell when a new incumbent had brought a sudden change of direction. I found books where clergy doggedly recorded every time they said Morning or Evening Prayer, even when alone, and ones where they listed the times of services but not what they were. I found churches which helpfully recorded numbers at every service, but this was rare: most of the time, until priests became defensive about how many people were turning up (or weren’t), only totals of communicants were noted down. I discovered the odd rude remark scrawled in a margin by a frustrated incumbent. I recoiled from the aroma of mould and marvelled at teacup rings or mice nibblings.

Going through the lists of clergy uncovers a couple of very late exchanges of livings, some interesting connections between churches, and several clergy passing through the big mission parish of St Mary’s Portsea. Few of them go on from serving a Catholic parish in Surrey to anything more high-profile, but given the career structure of the Church of England this is no great surprise and you could probably say the same of any sample of incumbents. It’s very clear how the turn into the twentieth century leads to the increasing dominance of theological colleges in the training of curates: go back before WWI and it’s rarer and rarer for a priest to have been to one, and before 1900 it’s extremely uncommon. But I did find that Fr Lushington, who caused such ructions at Thorpe, had been trained at Sarum College in the 1870s; and, even more strikingly, Vincent Musgrave of Hascombe had attended Wells College as far back as 1853. That would have made him exceedingly unusual: there were only about 15 students at Wells then and none of the other colleges would have had many more in an age when there were far, far more clergy about. Gems, my beloveds, gems. 

Rotherhithe at Night

Katrin my god-daughter shares a house with two friends not far from the Thames in Rotherhithe, commuting from there to the Treasury where at the start of the year she began working in a department so obscure that even Dr Abacus hadn't heard of it despite working in the same building for many years. Monday was my first chance to see her since she started. She took me for a meal at the Mayflower, a clambering old hostelry overlooking the river which plays on almost certainly non-existent connections with the Pilgrim Fathers and contains the scrapings of several junk shops scattered over the walls, shelves and windowsills. The food was good but it was just as well Katrin had booked. 

Katrin led me around the area pointing out as much of its history as was visible in the dark: a pavilion in the park which had been located in several places before ending up where it was, a former workhouse now inevitably converted into a café, streets on the sites of wharves and docks, one lonely Art Deco building soaring upwards in amongst the converted warehouses and modern developments along a side street. We bought ice cream at her favourite gelateria but were thrown out as they were about to close, and finshed our desserts looking along the river. 'I think this is the best view of the river in London', Katrin said. 'I'm lucky to be here'.

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Secrets of the Pharoahs

This is a propos of nothing, but it was where my mental travels took me yesterday. My fascination with Ancient Egypt goes back to my childhood where there was a half-shelf of books on the subject in our local library where (as a special privilege) I had an adult reader’s ticket from the age of about 9. I was captivated by them, even as I was slightly terrified by the photographs of mummies. The spell has never quite been broken.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy Eady who fell down stairs at her home in about 1907 and was taken as dead before reviving, and thereafter increasingly identified with the Egypt of Seti I, the pharoah who came to visit her in her teenage dreams. It is worth saying that there was never any independent witness of any of these events so we will never know the truth of them. Dorothy became an entirely self-taught Egyptologist, and moved there in 1931, eventually living in a tiny adobe house in Abydos, worshipping the ancient gods, dreaming of encounters with Seti whose lover she was convinced she had been in a past life, and acting as a consultant to more orthodox students of the subject. She had a son who she insisted on calling Seti, hence her adopted name of Omm Sety, ‘Seti’s mother’. Despite being clearly quite odd, she had an unerring feel for Egyptian folkways and habits and her predictions of what features might be found in a particular place usually proved uncannily accurate when a dig was eventually carried out.

Omm Sety reserved an abiding hatred for the ‘heretic pharoah’ Akhenaten who had turned the kingdom away from the old gods she and her spectral lover revered. She claimed that she knew where Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti was buried, and that it was ‘in a very obvious place, yet where nobody would think of looking’. But why wouldn’t she reveal it? Although Omm Sety conceded that Nefertiti must have been ‘a very courageous woman’ for sticking to her principles, however misguided, she quoted what her beloved Seti had told her - ‘We don’t want anything more of that family known’. The location was near the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, she maintained (against all opinion at the time, that no tombs remained to be found there), and that was the most she would give away: ‘you’d never believe it if I told you’, she chuckled to her collaborator Hanny el Zeini.

It was known since 1976 – when Omm Sety was still alive – that there were two anomalies, empty spaces, beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber; a radar scan in 2000 suggested that these were rooms, and five years later an unrelated excavation broke into one, finding mummification equipment relating to the period, but no human remains. So what is the other void space?

Nicholas Reeves, late of the British Museum and many other places, adamantly holds that that space is the tomb of Nefertiti. In 2015 he wrote a paper arguing that newly-released high-resolution photographs of the north wall of the tomb suggested that it was at least partially not natural rock but a construct to close off whatever lay, and still lies, beyond it, and that the form of Tutankhamun’s tomb is one more associated with a queen than a king; he also argued that the most charismatic artefact we have from Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun’s great gold burial mask, was in fact made for Nefertiti. Then there is the decoration of the tomb’s north wall. The traditional interpretation of the figures is that they show Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth on the boy king’s mummy; not surprisingly, because this is what the hieroglyphs on the wall say is going on. But it’s always been a bit funny. Ay was a man in later middle age when he succeeded, and this figure is very youthful: even by the stylised standards of Ancient Egyptian art, that’s odd. Dr Reeves points out that the subtle distinctive features of these figures suggest that what we think is Tutankhamun is in fact Nefertiti, in male garb as a female pharoah would be, and what we have taken to be Ay is Tutankhamun. The strongest argument against all this is that it requires we assume Nefertiti did reign, jointly with Akhenaten and then as pharoah in her own right, disguised beneath the name of the hazy Smenkhkare, a title in the king-lists and little else. That’s a plausible interpretation of what we know, but not the only one.

Of course, he may just be seeing things that aren’t there, convinced by his own conviction. A crack in a wall, a different sort of plaster here or there, the curve of the jawline of a painting, the shadowy hint of pictures beneath pictures: it’s not a watertight case, and never will be proved until that void space behind Tutankhamun’s north wall is opened. And you can only open it by burrowing down through the rock from behind. In 2018 another radar study reported there wasn't a space behind the wall at all. Despite conceding right from the start that he could well be wrong, Nicholas Reeves isn't ready to give up yet; late last year there was a bit of a flurry of media coverage when he announced that close examination of the names of the figures showed that they’d been repainted, confirming his identifications. We're all a little like this: we start out open-minded about our ideas, and gradually they become part of who we think we are.

Yet what a thing it would be if the heretic Queen is there, waiting beyond a few inches of wall, wrapped perhaps in her thirty-two-century-undisturbed splendour: as Omm Sety hinted, hidden in plain sight? I don’t think it’s just the glint of gold that’s so attractive in that idea, nor even the romance of what she was and stood for, but that suggestion that something very powerful is just a tiny distance out of reach. At any moment, we could break through a wall into a different reading of what is real.

To Bury Caesar

Fr Donald the ex-hospital chaplain was very exercised the other day about The Times's scraped-together survey of Anglican clergy who were, to a person it seemed or was made to seem, exhausted, despairing, and convinced the UK can no longer be described as a Christian country in any sense of the term. 'Just selling newspapers', he fumed, though why the paper should have thought what the Anglican clergy think about themselves or anything else is a matter anyone outside the Church of England should be interested in, I'm not sure. I don't feel particularly overworked and I suspect my moments of despair are to do with my deplorable character rather than my circumstances, but the state of the nation's faith is nothing more than obvious: unbelief triumphant, it seems.

In the Co-Op that evening I met Ella the Rainbows unit leader who runs an engineering business with her husband in town, who described a work event - and I can't recall the context, it must have been rather specific - in which it became apparent that 'our millennial junior staff' didn't know who Julius Caesar was. 'Wasn't he sort of a Roman?' was the closest any of them got. I tried the question on the young lads who I turfed out of the church porch when I locked up this afternoon, and they looked at me blankly. Clearly no point advancing any further into Classical history there. 

Now, lay to one side my feelings about my priestly ministry - as a historian I find the idea that young people don't know who Julius Caesar was deeply depressing. We live in a time in which vast areas of human knowledge and experience are there for the looking-up, easily available in almost everyone's home - in almost everyone's hand, for heaven's sake - and yet very, very basic things that frame the mental landscape of humanity are mysteries.

Could it be, then, that the advance of unbelief in the modern West is not due to increased human knowledge, but the lack of it? I was reluctant to accept it, but perhaps it's the case. Atheists might fondly imagine that millions are disconnecting from religion and religious awareness because they have taken conscious decisions to do so, analysing the claims of faith and finding them wanting, whereas in fact they're just falling into line with the people around them. A triumph, not of progress, but of ignorance.

Who Peeps From The Unhewn Dolmen Arch?

A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5^th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. Every document claiming to be prior to the 12^th century is a forgery. 

At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012), a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were, even if it doesn’t work in detail (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). Meanwhile, this elderly website promoting the book does so in rather a light-hearted way, suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed, aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them; and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs.

The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it; 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes; and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently.

I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake.

As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12^th century and the 16^th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake.

Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. The rules boil down thus:

- If the truth is not simple, prove it!

- If what was differs from what is, prove it!

- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it!

I’m not clear where these dicta come from, and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one, but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. The AEists don’t often stick to them, though, because there are other motivations operating. It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud.

In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. Mr Harper says:

    an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'.
    To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought.
    Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original.

This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all, but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop.

No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist, lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth), ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture), and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous?

My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises.

Clerical Cavalcade

When I wandered into St Mark’s Farnborough South a little while ago, I wasn’t expecting the Anglo-Catholic adventure playground I discovered there. As I begin compiling lists of clergy I discover that those who’ve served St Mark’s are also more remarkable than you might expect for this unreported, uncelebrated suburban parish.

During my visit, the good folk of St Mark’s alleged that the church ‘had never been forgiven’ for going Anglo-Catholic at some point, but I’m not yet sure when that point was. Looking at the clergy I know about so far, L.G. Tugwell (1904-11) served curacies at St Saviour’s Battersea and Holy Trinity Guildford before becoming Anglican Chaplain at Frieburg, all appointments you might expect of a High Churchman. Basil Philips (1911-23) studied at Keble College and Wells Theological College and had done his curacy at Dorking before coming to Farnborough, and was briefly succeeded by the celebrated Bernard Keymer (1923-5). Now Keymer had been curate at the moderately Anglo-Catholic St Mary’s Portsea where future Archbishop Cosmo Lang was vicar (mind you, there were a dozen curates in the parish at that stage), before becoming Vicar of Eastleigh and then a military chaplain. His war service was heroic as he won the MC for rescuing soldiers trapped in barbed wire, and after the Armistice was appointed the first chaplain of the RAF college at Cranwell. Presumably it was St Mark’s connections with first the RFC and then RAF that led to him moving there.

Frs Tugwell, Philips and Keymer all have the stamp of moderate High Church clergy, but I think it was their successors who took St Mark’s to the top of the candle. The next vicar after Mr Keymer was – take a deep breath – the Revd the Viscount Mountmorres. William Geoffrey Bouchard de Montmorency came from Irish aristocracy, and succeeded to his title unexpectedly in 1880 at the age of eight, after his father, the 5^th Viscount and a magistrate, was assassinated in the midst of the Irish Land Wars. Unlike the rest of the family William went to England for his education, firstly at the Anglo-Catholic Radley School and then Balliol. After graduating he travelled and became an expert in ‘tropical economics’, the tropics in question being mainly in central Africa. In 1904 Montmorency took part in an expedition to the Congo with the journalist Maurice Dorman and both wrote up their experiences, his Lordship in The Congo Independent State: a report on a journey of enquiry, and Mr Dorman in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State. The Viscount reported quite favourably of some at least of the people he met (the Bonjo and Dongo tribes, for instance, were ‘a splendid, intelligent, and fearless race’), but his journalist companion dedicated his book to the ruling Belgian authorities and devoted it to refuting reports of the Belgians’ ill-treatment of the natives – it is ‘distressing to read, showing a complete lack of sympathy with the Africans’, says the British Museum, to which Montmorency sold his collection of African artefacts in 1911. He’d also dabbled in politics, sitting as a Moderate Party (that is, Conservative) member of the London County Council for Tower Hamlets from 1894 to 1898, and finally in 1911 could be found lecturing in an Edinburgh cinema to accompany a film about the lives of the late Edward VII and George V: ‘he possesses the gift of vivid description’, reported The Scotsman, ‘and his running commentary on every depicted item … is not only happily phrased, but always interesting and instructive’. By then the Viscount had probably already decided to follow a clerical life: he went to Cuddesdon college and was ordained in 1913, serving his title at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, an advanced Catholic parish, before moving to Swinton in Lancashire as Rector in 1917 (he was also a Royal Navy Reserve chaplain). 1925 was the year he relocated to Farnborough, and remained for ten years, before leaving for St Paul’s, Wokingham, but he was only able to enjoy those grander surroundings for a year until he died. Despite two marriages Montmorency only had a single daughter, so on his death the titles passed to his cousin Arthur, the incumbent of St Modoc’s, Doune, in Scotland, who thus became the second ordained Viscount Mountmorres in a row. There’s an interesting character.

For William Montmorency’s last two years at St Mark’s, his curate was Cecil – or Charles, sometimes – de Lyons-Pike. Under normal Anglo-Catholic circumstances I would suspect him of having invented the double-barrelled name, but his father Charles, a Shropshire-born solicitor who practised in Bloomsbury, also used it so Cecil/Charles is not to blame. He began his professional life as a schoolmaster, eventually (after being rejected for military service) becoming head of Holland House School in Hove. One pupil at the time was the future author Patrick Hamilton who ‘remembered de Lyons-Pike as being a young, bespectacled man who was extremely High Church. On one occasion he shocked the school assembly by saying to a boy “You’re the one who called Walker’s cousin a damned bloody fool”. After he had doled out a thrashing, he commented “You didn’t expect me to repeat that, did you?”’ In 1922 de Lyons-Pike moved the school to Burgess Hill, renaming it St Peter’s Court, and left in 1927 apparently after deciding to be ordained. He attended the theological college at Ely and was deaconed in 1928. St Mark’s was his first appointment, where he moved smoothly from curate to vicar in 1935 after Fr Montmorency moved on. Fr de Lyons-Pike stayed until 1952 and I will tell you what happened to him next in a minute.

His successor was Francis Wheeler. Mr Wheeler was yet again a non-standard figure having been ordained in Accra in 1926, an outpost of the Anglican Church where anything other than Anglo-Catholics were thin on the ground. He was principal of St Augustine’s College at Kumasi, and served three English curacies at St Michael’s Shoreditch, Christ Church Woburn Square, and St Michael’s Paddington, before becoming priest in charge of Holy Trinity, Marlow, Vicar of East & West Hanney, and finally incumbent of Wheatley in 1944. Somewhat over 30 years before, Mr Wheeler’s predecessor there had been burned in effigy in his own garden after trying to introduce a Sung Eucharist to the parish church, so, for a priest who believed schoolchildren should be ‘taught to sing the Mass, starting with the Kyries and the Sanctus’, it might be wondered whether this Oxfordshire village was really the right place. According to the history of the Church in Wheatley (written in 2006, coincidentally, by John Prest who was my tutor at Balliol), Fr Wheeler certainly doesn’t seem to have been that happy. Having already written a book entitled Modernity (1929), which concluded that Modernity was generally to be regretted, his Primer of Pastoral Theology (1948) finds reason to denounce lipstick, the cinema, and jazz (‘negroid in origin’), and assumes that the modern clergyman’s work will largely be confined to a small and dwindling group of committed people: ‘the flock is far less biddable, far less disposed to listen obediently … The influence of the pulpit has waned until it has become practically negligible … You may stand at the door of the fold and call persuasively “The Bible says …”, “The Church teaches …”, but there will be little or no response from the majority. They have never been in the fold, they feel no need of its security, and as for the shepherd, he is superfluous’.

Mr Wheeler lists his pastoral, theological and devotional works in his entry in Crockford’s; he doesn’t mention his novels. These were a string of thrillers set before, during, and after the War with European conflict as the backdrop; the exception was the fourth, the supernatural chiller Unholy Alliance (1951), which included a depiction of a Black Mass so lurid the Vicar of Wheatley had to deny he’d actually been to one.

By 1952 Francis Wheeler had stuck it out in uncongenial Wheatley for eight years and decided on a move. He went to St Mark’s, and remained there for thirteen uneventful and, one hopes, less frustrating years. The good folk of the Oxfordshire parish found that their new priest was none other than Fr C.R. de Lyons-Pike, swapping livings with Mr Wheeler in what must have been one of the last arrangements of its kind. Perhaps Wheatley had become more accepting of Anglo-Catholics, or time had rubbed off some of Fr de Lyons-Pike’s sharp edges in the decades since Patrick Hamilton encountered him at Holland House School, but his six years there seemed rather happier than his predecessor’s time. At least, John Prest says, a widower when he arrived, he ‘lost no time in marrying his housekeeper’s daughter’.

Fr de Lyons-Pike is (I think) the figure on the left of this picture, and I suspect that’s Fr Montmorency in the middle – not sure of the chap on the right. That’s enough clergy!