Dorset Music

Something, hopefully, uplifting for the end of the year! It came to the attention of folk on the PJ Harvey fan boards that back in the early 1990s she'd taken uncharacteristic part in an overtly feminist music project, the Brilliant Birthdays choir, based in Salisbury. The organiser was Sammy Hurden, who you can see in the only photograph of the choir publicly available, holding the guitar, with the young Polly to the right of the girl in the stripy top. Ms Hurden and PJH obviously kept in touch with one another, because she appears among the voices on 'The Colour of the Earth', the last track from the mighty Let England Shake, and, so the sleeve notes imply, organised the other voices. 

Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Ms Hurden hasn't moved very far from West Dorset, so she would have been around for that very Dorset-based recording. Her website relates her ongoing work with community choirs, gathering and coaching people to sing pieces that evoke the landscape around them. 'The Chalk Legends', part of the cultural side of the 2012 Olympics for which Weymouth was one of the locations, took singers and musicians to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury and the church of St George Reforne on Portland. 

You can't get more Dorset than The Hare and the Harp, though. It was inspired by a medieval carving in the County Museum in Dorchester, and was performed in Powerstock church - the piece is in the key of the bells which are rung in the background throughout the songs. It's not just the beauty of the landscape and the woven depth of history which makes this piece so moving, though, but (despite the bolstering presence of a few professional musicians) the commitment you see here to getting ordinary people to make music. A very happy new year to you all.

The Unmaking of the English Working Class

Jan from the congregation told me that over Christmas dinner she and her family had avoided talking politics but eventually couldn’t keep entirely away from the subject of the election. Her great-nephew’s partner, she avers, is ‘a bit slow on the uptake’ and at one point to everyone’s confusion asked ‘So the election, who was it won in the end?’

I doubt most of us will ever attain that degree of merciful amnesia, but the feather-spitting rage some of my best friends have expressed at the result seems to be receding a little, a couple of weeks after the event. It was so very different from the disappointment those of us from the progressive side of the equation find ourselves very often feeling at the result of elections (I can’t recall ever voting for a successful Parliamentary candidate since I first cast a ballot in 1992), and I suspect arose from the unacknowledged realisation that this was the last possible throw of the dice to reverse the 2016 Referendum on the part of those who couldn’t accept that it had gone the way it did.

But there is still much anger, and I do hope that some of the terms people have used about former Labour voters who switched to the Conservatives are not representative of Labour members, or much more sorrow lies ahead. This video commentary by George Monbiot seems a little more positive:

I’m not convinced by all of the analysis, as I would tend not to be by anything Mr Monbiot produces. The disruptive political figures he mentions in support of his thesis are certainly all nationalists, but not all ‘clowns’ in the Trump & Johnson mould: you can’t say that of Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro. Nor are these disruptive nationalists all necessarily right-wing, as the Five Star movement in Italy, and Volodymyr Zelensky whose only qualification as President of the Ukraine was playing one in a TV show, demonstrate. The picture of a few wealthy men manipulating public opinion may make left-wingers feel better, but it ignores why those manipulations resonate and succeed. Nor has Finland, despite its campaign to educate its citizens in resisting online nonsense, avoided the wave: it may have a 34-year-old female Social Democrat PM but she has had to cobble together a five-party coalition to fend off the second-biggest party in the country, a nationalist climate-change-sceptic outfit. But Mr Monbiot’s emphasis on the development of local democracy, education and citizens’ involvement seems a plausible response to the inadequacy of national elections at providing ways of dealing with the challenges societies face.

I think there are slight signs that some folk on the progressive side are starting to think historically, and face up to the slow and epochal detachment of elements of ‘the working class’ from political parties they used to support; I’ve also just finished David Cannadine’s sparky 1998 book Class in Britain which examines the historical development of the term, and that has made me contemplate the same themes. Communities in the UK where people worked with their hands and could directly see how their labour supported the income of others, the business owners, attached themselves to the Labour Party as a result of that shared experience; take away the shared experience, and the sense of belonging to groups of human beings who are subject to the same forces, pressures and circumstances weakens, and the conservative worldview that instead stresses independence, autonomy and the rightness of inequality becomes more plausible. Professor Cannadine points out that in her 1989 book The Revival of Britain Mrs Thatcher claimed that she had brought about ‘an irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their families’ during her premiership, a phrase almost the same as one in the Labour Party manifesto of October 1974. Of course the two texts meant something very different by ‘working people’: they referred to sets of voters motivated by entirely separate experiences, the one of manual labour supporting those who did not work manually, and the other of property ownership and self-reliance.

Even Karl Marx had to admit that there were categories of workers who didn’t comfortably fit into his class analysis, Dr Cannadine points out, and it’s arguable that his attempt to make ‘working class’ into a scientific description of the role of an actual group of people in the process of production was always misjudged. It certainly is now. But if it ever made any sense at all, as summarising an experience of manual work supporting business owners, it now exists only as a memory of members of one’s family having had such an experience in the past. Hardly anyone’s work is like that now, and the processes of ownership and exploitation are far more obscure. The English Working Class, pace EP Thompson, has been unmade. There are poor people, but they aren’t a class any more.

Christmas 2019

As usual, the carol service at Smallham (altar pictured left) concludes my Christmas duties. The little chapel was packed again this year. As for Swanvale Halt church itself, the Crib Service recovered from its noticeable decline in numbers in 2018, and every seat was occupied although it was my turn to lead the children with the wooden crib figures up towards the crib, and for some reason I forgot where 'the south aisle' was. The Midnight was a bit down, as was the 8am on Christmas Day, but the 10am was up. None of this really means that much, on its own!

I am getting quite bored with doing the Christmas Day 8am according to the Prayer Book: all that business of praying repeatedly for the Queen and Humbly Beseeching Thee over and over again is starting to grate a bit. I don't think any tears would be wept if I abandoned it as it was my choice to start it. This year a young couple arrived who I instantly and accurately guessed were Roman Catholics who'd turned up early for their 8.45am mass. They didn't know what was going on.

But that's not as boring as keeping the church locked outside service times this Christmas. The troublesome youngsters have been orbiting around constantly, when they should have been tucked up in bed sucking their thumbs and wondering what Father Christmas was going to bring them, and I didn't feel as though I could risk the security of the Crib; justifiably, I think, as the ecumenical Crib which has stood unmolested in Hornington High Street for twenty years was smashed one night. I loathe locking the church against the world outside, but I hope next year we will be back to normal. 

Holmbury St Mary

I am not the only clergyperson to find Advent wears one's faith a bit thin and certainly it seems to have left me with less brainspace to blog. I have additional thoughts about the recent political discombobulations but they will have to wait until I can think. However I did have time last week on a semi-day off to drop in at the church of Holmbury St Mary where I discovered another unsung Victorian gem. 

There was no church here until 1879: in fact, very oddly, the village came to be named after it. Before then it was Felday, its only place of worship being a little brick Dissenting chapel. In 1874 the Gothic Revivalist architect GE Street came here with his wife Maraquita and both were captivated by the remoteness of the landscape so near London. Maraquita died soon after they moved to Felday, and although Street married again his new wife Jessie also died very soon: the church is a sort of memorial to them both. Street was a convinced Anglo-Catholic who served as churchwarden at the Ecclesiological Society's model church of All Saints' Margaret Street, and it's no surprise that Holmbury, while not as lavish as that London jewel, is firmly in the same camp. It has a chancel screen (presumably Bishop Wilberforce was less outraged by such things than Bishop Sumner had been a few years before) and a genuine 14th-century Italian triptych as its reredos which Street always intended should go into the church and which - notwithstanding all the new chairs in the nave - renders the view along the church into something magical. 

Holmbury's tradition is watered-down nowadays as it is part of a team with churches that come from a different viewpoint, but as so often happens all the fittings are still there. I'm not sure when the Sacrament began to be reserved, or when the nave was reordered, but at least they resisted the temptation to install an unnecessary nave altar. And those are really the only changes from the church Street would have been familiar with.

The Sunday After

Turning up at the polling station on Thursday rehearsing my internal monologue about the weird sociopathic qualities of the leader of the Conservative Party, I was confronted with Selma from the Swanvale Halt congregation, wearing a blue rosette alongside her fellow tellers from the other parties. Selma lost her husband a couple of years ago and has early-stage dementia so she can be a bit forgetful. I wasn’t going to say anything rude to her, was I, or even think anything.

Which is why it’s a struggle to read the LiberFaciorum feeds of the overwhelming majority of my friends who are unimaginably enraged by the result of the election. When it was called, I scribbled a scratch forecast of Parliamentary seats on the back of an envelope, which turned out to be almost precisely what happened; and you tend be less angry if you’re not caught out. It strikes me as ironic that the Left has an ideology that declares the equality and dignity of all human beings, but when any actual human beings disagree with them in practice, those people become stupid, ignorant and selfish. It’s not a good position from which to win their votes the next time round: ‘we despise you, can we count on your support?’ Progressive people also tend to see politics in very moral terms. Electoral success should be a reward for virtue, so if a manifestly unvirtuous person wins an election it's deeply shocking. I am absolutely sure this is an unrealistic approach which underestimates the pragmatic way most people cast their votes, in favour of which political grouping they think will be most practically effective.

I’ve never thought that the media manufactures opinion: people develop their fragmentary, contradictory, often incoherent and inarticulate opinions mainly from their own lived experience. Often that experience is quite narrow, and very few people go out of their way to seek anything beyond it: they’re too busy, and haven’t the time and mental bandwidth. What newspapers (and so on) can do is to make articulate what people feel without necessarily being able to express clearly. So the individual criticisms in the media of a particular politician (for instance) may be quite unjust, but they can express an aspect of their character which is true enough: they become untrue symbols of true things, and if they don’t resonate with anything true, they won’t stick.

I’ve also been struggling with what basically separates people with progressive views of the world from those who see things from a conservative perspective. I wonder whether it is at least partly this. A quarter of a million years ago, we human beings were trying to survive on the steppes of Africa. Our brains, remember, are still there: that’s where we evolved and where we remain in our root responses to things. It was tough work and our basic attitude towards the world would have been insecurity and fear. We didn’t know where our next meal was coming from or whether what security we had would be taken from us at any moment. If you manage to survive in this environment, you can draw two conclusions. Either you have been lucky or skilful. You can emphasise to yourself the role of circumstances and other people in keeping you going, or you can focus on your own abilities and aptitudes in securing your survival. This is nothing to do with actual facts: it’s a story you tell yourself, a way you interpret your own experience.

As society becomes more complex, this root division over how far individuals affect their own fate ramifies, and it replicates in the changed circumstances of history. If you believe that peoples have a lot of control over what happens to them, you’ll be more inclined to support the existing social order as it reflects the natural distribution of ability and effort, and less inclined to take complaints of structural inequality all that seriously. Conversely, if you see individuals as relatively constrained by their environment, you will be sceptical of the claims of natural justice and more likely to accept that people will need help to survive and flourish. Now, most of us can see the virtue in the other side of this divide whichever one we mainly fall on, and we appreciate that it’s not all one or the other. Few of us are so far at either extreme that we could never be attracted by a conservative or progressive party: there are some who are, but not a huge number. Even less does a person's position on this spectrum infallibly determine how they might vote on particular occasions because so much else feeds into that decision. But the basic separation, it seems to me, rumbles below almost everything else, two divergent models of human life.

The point of churches is that we do not, beyond a certain point, choose our fellow members. We are brought together with people whose backgrounds and life-experiences should be quite divergent from our own: they are more like family than freely-chosen friends, although we tend to share more basic assumptions and attitudes with our families. The people in the pews around you will fall on different sides of the control-constraint line, and you might find yourself discovering what your fellow-members in the Body of Christ feel about things in very discomforting ways.

This morning I found myself praying at the 8am mass for both those who were excited by the result and those who were anxious about the future, and lo and behold Marion mentioned the same theme in her sermon at the 10am service. If both of us could come up independently with the same thing, it is probably limply mainstream, but wet though it might sound, a Christian community is given no alternative but to attempt to understand everyone who belongs to it.

And In Other News

As the wind and rain raged around Swanvale Halt church yesterday, the old stones rang to the songs and dances of the Infant School Christmas Production, done this year, for the second time, in two separate chunks for Reception year children and the rest. 'A logistical triumph', I described it in my introduction to the later event, and so it was. This year, the headmistress decreed that the children's costumes should not include tinsel or cotton wool, thus reducing the clearing-up quite considerably. Umbrellas were a necessary defence in the face of the inclement conditions outside (though they are not sure against everything). 

Partisanship

My friend Fr Thesis in London said on LiberFaciorum the other day:

All Masses over the coming next days will be offered for the political life of our country as we approach Polling Day. Join with us in praying for all candidates standing for election, and for wisdom and insight for those casting their ballot …

To which a chum of his commented:

I always remember Fr Holroyd at St Bart's, Brighton, announcing that he would as usual be saying a Votive Mass for a Conservative Victory on election day …

Often after Morning Prayer we find ourselves touching on political matters, it must be said, and the General Election campaign has appeared, as neutrally as Fr Thesis expresses his intentions, in my prayers when I lead them and in the intercessions when others do. But I would never dare to offer a Mass, or even express a desire, for the hegemony of my preferred party.

This is partly because I am aware that as a parish priest I have a sort of representative function, in a community – thinking of the Church community specifically rather than the wider one – which bears a variety of different opinions. I am reluctant to rope my flock in to my own views, given that the Church as a whole does not express any in this matter. I am still more reluctant to imply that God thinks the way I do: nay, I tremble in case I might speak falsely on God’s behalf, as blessed Paul fears to do in 1Corinthians 14. It could be that in divine providence, there is a point, at this stage in history, in having a truly awful individual leading this or another country: it may be that good may come of it that could not come any other way. Absent a prophetic revelation, I must leave that to the Father.

Yet in many respects we are encouraged to tell God whatever might be on our minds, to share our hopes and desires with him, and then to leave him to enlighten us wherever we might be mistaken. I cannot get past the idea that offering a Mass for a particular election result is tasteless and leaves insufficient space for conscience and disagreement, but perhaps I am being too squeamish. If the State were really under threat of being taken over by an organisation whose aims and methods were clearly unchristian, would I really be so reticent? How far would we have to advance down that road before the matter became clear?

Do go to vote tomorrow! Unless you’re voting for the wrong candidate, in which case stay in bed.