Letters to a Sister

by Constance Babington Smith

  157 John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Royal Court Theatre.

  158 Anthony Eden had just undergone a serious operation.

  159 A service said on the last three evenings of Holy Week.

  160 See The Times, 27 April, 1957: ‘… Survival of death, if it be a fact, is immeasurably more likely to be a God-given attribute of man’s nature than either a reward of his virtue or dependent upon acceptance of any form of orthodox belief—to be a fact no more determined by such considerations than is birth into this life. Herein the Christian tradition, as against theories of “conditional immortality”, is sound in insisting that it is not survival but the nature of the life which survives that is determined by earthly probation.’

  161 The Anglican Bishops of South Africa had issued a formal protest against a new law prohibiting Church attendance by Africans in white Urban areas. They thereby risked liability to a fine of £500, 5 years in prison, or whipping.

  162 A broadcast discussion between Bible scholars as to what the New Testament writers really meant when they spoke of ‘Jesus Christ being raised up’.

  163 A discussion between Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, and Prof. P. B. Medawar.

  164 W. E. Purcell, Onward, Christian Soldier (1957).

  165 Postcard.

  166 Pensione La Calcina (Ruskin’s House).

  167 ‘The month of Mary’.

  168 A letter appealing for funds to provide aid for those accused in the South African Treason Trial (signed by R.M., Canon Collins, and eighteen others) was published as an advertisement in The Observer on 12 May.

  169 A letter from John Mannering deploring that ‘there are not more Church leaders like Canon Collins who are prepared to condemn this crime against all creation’.

  170 The appointment of Rt Rev. Joost de Blank, Suffragan Bp of Stepney, as Archbishop of Cape Town had just been announced.

  171 There were rumours of an impending amalgamation of the News Chronicle and Daily Herald.

  172 W. H. Macaulay was Tutor at King’s College, Cambridge, 1902-13.

  173 Miss Peggy Guggenheim.

  174 In May and June 1957 three British tests of ‘nuclear devices’ (hydrogen bombs) were carried out, all in the Pacific.

  175 Rt Rev. H. J. Carpenter.

  176 Very Rev. John Lowe.

  177 The Church of the Gesuati (Santa Maria del Rosario).

  178 ‘Laborare est Orare: Sanctity in the Secular’ (The Times, 6 July, 1957).

  179 ‘The Redemption of Nature: Glory in the Coming Age’ (The Times, 13 July).

  180 Her cousins.

  181 Alfred Conybeare, Dorothea’s brother, who was an Eton master.

  182 A drapery shop where R.M.’s mother often bought clothes for the Macaulay children when the family lived in Oxford.

  183 R.M.’s birthday.

  184 An evening service at the Abbey of lona (St Mary’s Cathedral) conducted by Rt Rev. George MacLeod, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and leader of the lona Community.

  185 ‘I say—Drop that ban on women as Priests’, by Lord Altrincham, Sunday Express, 28 July, 1957.

  186 The Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace.

  187 John Baillie, A Diary of Readings (1955).

  188 In the annual report of the London and Home Counties Traffic Advisory Committee.

  189 An official journal of the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg.

  190 Rt Rev. Ambrose Reeves had recently been speaking at a meeting of the South African Church Institute, also preaching at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

  191 Allan Warren, aged 7, whose body had been found at Loughton, Essex, on 11 August. On 25 October H. H. Edwards, of Wanstead, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  192 The bodies of Royston Sheasby (aged 5) and his sister June (aged 7) had been found near the Bristol Mental Hospital on 1 July. On 13 September, at the resumed inquest, a verdict of murder by some person or persons unknown was recorded.

  193 Sir Arnold Lunn, Enigma: A Study of Moral Re-Armament (1957).

  194 The second of three extracts from On Growing Old by Sybil Harton. The theme of the second instalment (Church Times, 23 August, 1957) was that old age should be, above all, a time for prayer.

  195 The 10th anniversary congress of the Liberal International was to be held in Oxford on 29-30 August.

  196 Maisie Ward, Insurrection versus Resurrection (1937).

  197 Wilfrid Ward.

  198 Maurice Nédoncelle, Baron Friedrich von Hügel; a Study of his Life and Thought (trans M. Vernon, 1937).

  199 Nédoncelle, in a foreword to the English edition, states that it is ‘almost identical with’ the French one. A 26-page section of his first chapter, on Von Hügel’s life and work, is headed ‘The Modernist Crisis’.

  200 ‘The Future of the Public Schools’, a broadcast conversation between Anthony Crosland and Sir John Wolfenden.

  201 Rev. Nathaniel Micklem.

  202 The Swiss headquarters of Moral Rearmament.

  203 A Father and his Fate.

  204 Dame Edith Sitwell gave a poetry reading in aid of the Stonor Chapel Restoration Fund on 4 September, 1957.

  205 The Congregational church in Duke Street, W.I, not far from R.M.’s flat.

  206 Congregationalism came fully into being during the years following 1640; its early beginnings can be traced back to the middle of the 16th century.

  207 The report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual offences and Prostitution, published on 4 September, aimed at ‘cleaning up the streets’ of London and other big cities by greatly increasing the maximum penalties for soliciting in the streets by prostitutes.

  208 The report proposed a relaxing of the law on homosexuality, and urged that there should be no penalty for consenting adults.

  209 See Religio Medici, II 9: ‘I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.’

  210 The Sunday Times was running a series of articles on ‘The Mystery of Life’, and R.M. had sent the second, ‘From the Atom to the Saint’ by the Archbishop of York, Dr Michael Ramsey (20 October). Inset in the article was the Sunday Times’ usual poetic item, on this occasion Byron’s ‘Juan and Haidée’ from Don Juan.

  211 The ‘jazz’ setting for the service of Holy Communion, composed by Rev. Geoffery Beaumont, was much in the news at this time.

  212 Philip Carrington (Abp of Quebec), The Early Christian Church (2 vols, 1957).

  213 This exhibition of paintings by two chimpanzees (Congo, of the London Zoo, and Betsy, of the Baltimore Zoo) was held at the Gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, not at the Tate Gallery.

  214 By Ivy Compton-Burnett (1947).

  215 Geoffrey Faber Jowett; a Portrait with Background (1957).

  216 ‘Dick Sheppard, The Human Parson’, a programme broadcast in memory of Canon H. R. L. Sheppard (d. 1937).

  217 See above, p. 95n.

  218 The Dean of St Paul’s.

  219 See Ps. 91, 5-7: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid... for the pestilence that walketh in darkness... A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.’

  220 After a Retreat at Pleshey conducted by the Bp of Tewkesbury.

  221 Evidence in Camera; The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II (1958).

  222 Canon W. Warren Hunt, Vicar of Croydon, who was giving the current broadcast talks in the ‘Lift up your Hearts’ programme.

  223 After the second Soviet satellite, carrying a dog named Laika (‘Little Lemon’) was launched on 3 November, officials of the National Canine Defence League made an official protest to the Russian Embassy in London, and called for a minute’s silence daily on behalf of the dog in the satellite.

  224 Rev. R. M. Jeffery, who had worked in South Africa from 1946 to 1955, became Principal of the Grace Dieu School, Pietersbur
g, in 1958.

  225 The opposition to Essays and Reviews, a collection of essays by seven authors (including B. Jowett), who believed in the necessity of free enquiry in religious matters, culminated in the synodical condemnation of the book by the Church of England’s Lower House of Convocation in 1864.

  226 See The Tablet, 2 November, 1957.

  227 A letter from Canon C. B. Mortlock headed Anglicans and Catholics had been published in The Tablet of 26 October. He did not write again, but the correspondence continued until 14 December.

  228 Postcard.

  229 The Dale family in the broadcast serial story ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’.

  230 James Lewis May, The Oxford Movement, its History and its Future: a Layman’s Estimate (1933).

  231 The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, edited by Frederick Mulhauser, reviewed by R.M. in The Listener (5 December, 1957).

  232 £50,000 or more was the target for the appeal launched by the Community of the Resurrection in May 1957 to provide education of a higher level at its mission schools in Penhalonga, Southern Rhodesia.

  233 The B.B.C. Sunday programme ‘Meeting Point’ (1 December) consisted of the second of ‘Two Christian Portraits’, in which Christopher Mayhew interviewed Rev. C. C. Pande, Methodist Minister of Bankura, West Bengal.

  234 E. Moore Darling, Highways, Hedges and Factories (1957).

  235 A ‘Christian Forum’, in the B.B.C. Home Service series ‘The Way of Life’, broadcast on 1 December.

  236 ‘Saturnalia’, see The Spectator, 22 November, 1957.

  237 Oscar Hardman, But I am a Catholic (1958).

  238 See The Tablet, 30 November, 1957.

  239 R.M. is referring to a broadcast on the Orthodox Church and Divorce, by Iulia de Beausobre (Lady Namier). See The Listener, 12 December, 1957, ‘A Religious Justification of Divorce’.

  240 See above, p. 244.

  241 Tarzan and the Lost Safari.

  242 In the 1958 New Year Honours List R. M. was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire. When this letter was written she had just been invited to accept the honour.

  243 See ‘His Majesty’s Declaration’ preceding the Articles of Religion in the Book of Common Prayer.

  244 W. H. Mallock, The New Republic (1877).

  245 A daily broadcast programme.

  246 Mr Malik was guest of honour at a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon in honour of Russia’s scientific, artistic, and literary achievements.

  247 Raymond Mortimer, Edward Sackville-West, Eardley Knollys and Desmond Shawe-Taylor.

  248 The Epistle for the Second Sunday after Christmas given in the 1928 Prayer Book consists of one verse only, II Cor. 8.9.

  249 A meeting held at the St Pancras Town Hall on 15 January in connection with the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

  250 Rev. R. V. Spivey.

  251 Rt Rev. Ivor Watkins, Bp of Guildford.

  252 Rev. S. Austen Williams.

  253 Michael de la Bedoyere.

  254 Dorothea Conybeare had maintained that no Roman Catholic priest has a right to ‘turn anyone back from the altar’, whether a heretic or a ‘notorious sinner’.

  255 ‘Personal Questions’ were put to Lady Violet Bonham Carter by John Connell, Margaret Lane and Anthony Wedgwood Benn in the broadcast programme ‘Frankly Speaking’ on 21 January.

  256 ‘He is the Great Reconciler’ by Geoffrey Murray (News Chronicle, 21 January, 1958).

  257 It had just been re-issued as a Penguin.

  258 The other ‘Critics’: E. Arnot Robertson, Harold Hobson, Stephen Potter, and David Sylvester.

  259 Louis Bouyer, Newman, His Life and Spirituality (trans. J. Lewis May, 1958). See R.M.’s review in The Spectator, 31 January, 1958.

  260 From the British Weekly.

  261 The investiture when R.M. received her D.B.E.

  262 S. C. Roberts.

  263 Rt Rev. W. M. Askwith.

  264 Abbot Extraordinary, Peter Anson’s memoir of Aelred Carlyle, for which R.M. was writing a foreword.

  265 Robin Denniston.

  266 Peter Anson comments that in his own view R.M.’s foreword lays undue emphasis on the Abbot’s eccentricities and shows little appreciation of his good points.

  267 In the ‘Benedictine Community’ on Caldey Island.

  268 According to legend, T. B. Macaulay’s sister Fanny and John Cropper, a Quaker who was connected with the manufacture of paper and also of gunpowder ‘for industrial purposes’ had been discussing the ethical problems involved in the latter case.

  269 Rt Rev. Cyril Eastaugh.

  270 Details of an Anglo-American agreement on the establishment of missile sites in Britain were published on 24 February.

  271 Christ’s acceptance of war was what I meant; see Mark 13.7, ‘And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be.’

  272 Abp Joost de Blank, Uncomfortable Words (1958).

  273 A meeting at the Holborn Hall on 24 February, when the Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr Henry Brooke) was to speak on the new Rent Act, had ended in uproar and brawling.

  274 A very small scroll inscribed with the ten commandments.

  275 A Roman Catholic authority comments that R.M.’s rendering of her friend’s remarks is open to serious misunderstanding.

  276 This was a letter from C. S. Lewis to Dorothea Conybeare, who had asked him to explain the title of his book Till We Have Faces. He pointed out that it was a quotation from a remark in the book itself (p. 305), ‘How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces?’ ‘The idea,’ he continued, ‘was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil or persona.’

  277 A weekly religious broadcast programme.

  278 The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.

  279 David Trevor (Orthopaedic Consultant Surgeon to Charing Cross Hospital and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital), who had operated on R.M.

  280 Mary Anne O’Donovan.

  281 Rev. Donald Mason.

  282 Sir Charles Wheeler.

  283 John R. Dummelow, editor of A Commentary on the Holy Bible (1909).

  284 Selina Dummelow became a Deaconess and was one of Margaret Macaulay’s friends.

  285 A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, edited by C. Gore, H. L. Goudge and A. Guillaume (1928).

  286 A new high altar at St Paul’s Cathedral, to replace that destroyed by bombs in 1940, was consecrated by the Bishop of London on 7 May.

  287 Guido Reni’s ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’ was bought by the National Gallery in 1957; Nicolas Poussin’s ‘The Adoration of The Golden Calf in 1945.

  288 ‘Square Search’, a broadcast play by Redmond Macdonogh.

  289 A Mass Rally of the Layman Trust Society on 15 May. The purpose of the society is ‘the linking of citizenship with Christianity’

  290 Rev. Jonathan Graham, who had succeeded Rev. Raymond Raynes as Father Superior of the Community of the Resurrection.

  291 On 17 May outdoor processions were part of the annual festival of the Society of Mary, an Anglo-Catholic organization.

  292 Janet Lacey, of the Inter-Church Aid and Refugee Service Department, British Council of Churches.

  293 A bus strike which had begun in London on 5 May did not end until 21 June.

  294 Lady Juliet Duff.

  295 R.M. was planning to go on a cruise to the Greek Islands and the Black Sea in August.

  296 This correspondence originated in comment on a leader about relations between the Churches of England and Scotland in The Times of 17 May. A letter from Peter J. Harrison (22 May) was chiefly concerned with Intercommunion, and others on this subject followed.

  297 A letter from E. B. Sims, whose views on Intercommunion coincided with R.M.’s
.

  298 This was just before General de Gaulle was voted back to power (after the Algerian insurrection and the Corsican revolt had led to the resignation of the Prime Minister, M. Pflimlin).

  299 The Times published three letters in favour of Intercommunion on 29 May.

  300 The ‘Bishops’ Report’ (which examined ways of bringing together the Churches of England and Scotland, and recommended the appointment of ‘Bishops-in-Presbytery’) was debated in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on 27 May.

  301 Rt Rev. G. F. B. Morris, Bishop of the Church of England in South Africa (elected in 1955), had protested against the invitation of Abp Makarios to the Lambeth Conference, on grounds that he was associated with ‘violence, treachery, and murder’.

  302 Major Gen. Sir Edward Spears had written to the Abp of Canterbury protesting against the inviting of Abp Makarios, adding that if the Abp came, he hoped to help relatives of men who had been murdered in Cyprus to arrange for his arrest.

  303 R. M. here re-echoes her misconception of the English reaction to the visit of Nicholas I of Russia in 1844, see above p. 184n.

  304 The final letter in a correspondence on ‘Everlasting punishment’ was published on 1 June.

  305 A broadcast programme of Evening Prayers conducted by Rev. Ronald Falconer.

  306 ‘The Church and England’, a talk by Rev. Joseph McCulloch.

  307 On 17 June, 1958 the Abp of Canterbury (Dr Fisher) admitted, during a debate in the Church Assembly, that the Church of England Enquiry Centre had ceased to function owing to financial difficulties.

  308 This comment was made by Rev. Prof. W. R. Forrester of St Andrews in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on 27 May.

  309 Rt Rev. E. K. C. Hamilton, (1890-1962).

  310 R.M. was on the way back to London after a week-end at Long Crichel House.

  311 A Christian Action conference held at Westcott House, Cambridge.

  312 This is à propos of Seven Years Solitary (1957) by Edith Bone, a former Communist who was imprisoned in Hungary for seven years.

  313 Two Anglican Essays (1958).

  314 One Army Strong? (1958).

  315 R.M. was probably thinking of letters from Margaret Knight and Colin McCall (Secretary of the National Secular Society) in the recent correspondence on ‘Everlasting punishment’ in The Observer.