by A. N. Wilson
There would be some attempts, after the Chatterley trial, to revive prosecutions for Obscenity. Sir Theobald Mathew set in train an investigation into Mary McCarthy’s The Group, for example, but every indication was that a prosecution would fail. The deliberately pornographic Fanny Hill, written in the eighteenth century, but published in our times by Mayflower Books, was prosecuted. The trial was in some senses a reprise of the Chatterley one, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones prosecuting and Jeremy Hutchinson defending. Fanny Hill and her publishers were found guilty, but the spirit of the times was against the judgement. The last successful case brought was that against Calder and Boyars, for publishing Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1966. The cricketing bishop, David Shepherd, came to give evidence against the book, largely it would seem because it displayed homosexuality in a favourable light. But the conviction was quashed in the Court of Appeal, and thereafter the custom of prosecuting books under the Obscene Publications Act fell into disuse. As Bernard Levin observed, ‘Portnoy’s Complaint appeared unscathed in Britain and no question of prosecution arose…In the last months of the sixties, Fanny Hill was republished, unexpurgated. No prosecution followed; the authorities’ surrender seemed, for the time being at least, to be complete.’5
Among the witnesses assembled to defend Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey in October 1960 was the suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, Dr J. A. Robinson. He believed that the last two pages of Lawrence’s book were ‘a most moving advocacy of chastity’. Asked by the judge whether the novel portrayed the life of an immoral woman, the bishop had replied, ‘It portrays the life of a woman in an immoral relationship, in so far as adultery is an immoral relationship.’6
Dr Robinson was a Cambridge don who had quite recently been lured from the academic life by the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Mervyn Stockwood, to see if there was any possibility of awakening the religious impulses of those who lived in the wastelands of post-war south London. Dr Robinson was on the face of things an unlikely populariser. His work had been chiefly on comparatively obscure themes of New Testament theology, and in particular on the German theologians who had attempted, in the inter-war years, to ‘demythologise’ the New Testament from an existentialist viewpoint. Rudolf Bultmann, in particular, had believed it was possible, if the reader made no attempt to read the Gospel narratives as historical, to be challenged on a personal level by the stories which the Gospels represented. The bishop, a tall, bald man with a parsonical voice, was the son of a distinguished theologian and Dean of Wells. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Church of England man, married to a pretty woman, with one son and three daughters, all of whom grew up to be great beauties. The Chatterley trial awoke in him an addiction to publicity. The following year, this mild-mannered man spoke out against capital punishment. There was nothing remarkable about this; probably the majority of practising Christians at this date opposed hanging. But the bishop chose to time his remarks for the Conservative Party Conference. The Daily Sketch wrote, ‘The Bishop of Woolwich warned the Tories yesterday, “Don’t support hanging. Capital punishment is on the way out,” said the bishop.
‘“There will be attempts to put the clock back–to extend the death penalty–in the motions at the Conservative Party conference this week,” he said.7
At any juncture during our times, the British press has had a small cast of characters whom it can produce when actual news material is thin. There is the badly behaved aristocrat, preferably had up at regular interval for motoring offences involving alcohol; there is the adulterous footballer; the various ‘maverick’ Members of Parliament who have no hope of real political advantage but who regard publicity as a very acceptable alternative to power and who can be relied upon to denounce their party leaders at any provocation or none. And there is the trendy bishop, preferably advocating practices and doctrines which will offend the sensibilities of the more narrow-minded or puritanical church-goer. In his views, there was probably little to separate Dr Robinson from many another mild English churchman who, like the Bishop of Stortford in P. G. Wodehouse, ‘had been thinking of an article…on the subject of Miracles;…the tone he had taken, though in keeping with the trend of Modern Thought, had been tinged with something approaching scepticism’.8 Dr Robinson, however, for all his donnish reserve, happily fell into the vacant seat of the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury (Hewlett Johnson, who believed that Stalin had established an Earthly Paradise) or the prosaically doubting Bishop of Birmingham, Barnes, who once described himself as ‘a troubled theist’–a phrase which a careless but probably accurate sub-editor rendered in the next morning’s newspaper as ‘a troubled atheist’. After a bout of lumbago, the Bishop of Woolwich penned a very short paperback, which gave a distillation of his favourite German theologians, and offered it for publication to the small Christian publishing company of SCM. He wrote a good puff for his own book in the liberal Sunday newspaper the Observer, which bore the provocative headline OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO.
He could not possibly have predicted the result. Three months after publication, 300,000 copies of Honest to God had been sold, and it was being translated into many languages.9 Over a million copies were eventually sold.
Of the hundreds of letter-writers to newspapers, or to the bishop himself, or to the Archbishop of Canterbury, opinion was divided. Many felt Robinson’s attempts to write theology for the masses were sheer heresy, questioning the very basis of what they considered to be Christianity itself. Others, however, felt that the bishop had provided fresh air to breathe: ‘I am an ordinary struggling faithful member of the Church, middle-aged, with no brains. But I found myself overwhelmed with relief when I read Honest to God. Far from having a negative influence it has strengthened my faith in a personal God. I have read the book twice, and I did not find anything in it that could damage honest faith at all. It gave me a wonderful sense of joyful relief at being freed from something unreal and slightly false, something unrelated to one’s innermost being, and unrelated to the created world…I have friends who feel just the same, and have found their faith renewed and strengthened by the Bishop of Woolwich’s book.’ This was only one of hundreds of letters to arrive on the desk of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Among laymen who were obsessed by the book, and who wrote to the Archbishop about it, was Harold Macmillan. ‘What impresses me’, the Prime Minister wrote, ‘with the exception of a few rather cheap witticisms, is the reverent approach which underlies the somewhat H. G. Wellsian style…It is of course very difficult for people of different generations to understand each other’s problems and it may well be that for the youth of today we need different symbols; instead, for instance, of the traditional religious art, whether the grand and terrifying Byzantine mosaic, or the mild beauty of the Renaissance painting. For instance, a modern abstract painting of God might be more attractive to young people than the traditional form. Nevertheless, whichever it is, it is only a symbol, and whether God is represented as God the Father in conventional painting, or as a series of triangles and circles, it is still only an attempt to use the material to represent the infinite.’10
When, however, the Archbishop wrote a short pamphlet denouncing Honest to God, and restating a more orthodox theology, Macmillan wrote again, ‘I think it is a mistake to bewilder people, and I am sure we shall all be very grateful to you for having written this booklet to try and help those who are distressed.’11
The Archbishop summoned the Bishop of Woolwich for an interview. Robinson remembered the Archbishop saying very little except, ‘Well, now! Well now!’ ad infinitum.12 Ramsey’s memorandum of the interview noted, ‘I had a long talk with the Bishop of Woolwich on April 23 [1963]. I was grieved to find how lacking he is in responsibility; indeed, he seemed to me to be adolescent in his failure to grasp that actions have inevitable consequences and make inevitable impressions. He was “surprised” at things which should give no surprise at all to any intelligent adult. I thought he was in a good deal of a muddle spiritually and more in need of help
than he realised [sic]; and his adolescent limitation extends to his own realm of theological discussion where he fails to see what meaning is inevitably conveyed by words and phrases. He did however ask my advice about what he should do. My advice to him was (i) to avoid constant publicity; (ii) to take opportunities of making clear his acceptance of orthodoxy, if he is conscientiously able to do so; but (iii) if he is asked how he reconciles acceptance of orthodoxy with the thesis of his book, I do not know how he can set about it.’
In later years, Bishop Robinson, who returned to Cambridge to become the Dean of Trinity College, so espoused orthodoxy as to become an advocate of the authenticity of the Turin Shroud, and he was somewhat penitent about having written Honest to God. The Archbishop, for his part, repented of having denounced the book, and felt he had panicked about nothing. The Most Reverend Arthur Michael Richard Ramsey (1904–88) was the hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was the appointment of Harold Macmillan. Ramsey was certainly one of the strangest occupants of that office, but also, perhaps, historically one of the most significant. If one of the features of our times is that Britain broke up, that it ceased being a monist society and became a pluralist society, then Michael Ramsey, who systematically and deliberately set in place the means to dismantle the Church of England, must be seen as a key player.
Ramsey was the son of a mathematics don at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the brother of Frank Ramsey, a distinguished philosopher of mathematics who had been one of the early champions of Wittgenstein in England, and who died of jaundice at age twenty-six. The family was Congregationalist, but Ramsey was drawn to Anglo-Catholicism. He always held in balance his academic interests–he was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge–and his priestly role, hearing confessions and offering spiritual advice to a wide range of men and women. A big, burly, bald man, he looked like a mad professor, and was much debilitated by depression. His extraordinary silences made conversation with him disconcerting. When his communist atheist sister was widowed, he drove to Oxford to sit with her and her children for half a day but did not utter a word.13 He had the habit of repeating words or phrases in a trance-like chant. ‘“Baldock”, Michael Ramsey once remarked out loud while driving home the morning after he had dined with the Cambridge Union and taken part in a debate. “Baldock. Baldock”. He had raised his eyes from The Times and spotted the sign-post as he entered this spectacularly uninteresting Hertfordshire town. “Baldock. Baldock”. Again and again, in monotonous tones, the word “Baldock” was repeated. Had it triggered some childhood memory? Was it just the sound of the word he found mesmeric? Was he perhaps a little mad? He must have repeated the word “Baldock” thirteen or fourteen times. Even for someone in his company who knew him well, the experience was strangely unnerving.’14
It is hardly surprising that his predecessor, the brisk Geoffrey Fisher, who had been Michael Ramsey’s headmaster when he was a boy at Repton, should have considered him an unsuitable successor. Fisher told Macmillan so in no uncertain terms. Macmillan replied, ‘Well, Archbishop, you may have been Michael Ramsey’s headmaster but you’re not mine, and I intend to appoint Dr Ramsey, good afternoon.’15
Macmillan told Ramsey this story, and it poisoned relations between the Archbishop and his predecessor. Fisher was appointed to a life peerage and was always known by Ramsey as the Baron. The old Archbishop bombarded the new with letters of admonition and complaint, which Ramsey claimed he put into the waste-paper basket without reading. But he did not destroy them. The whole sorry correspondence is preserved in Lambeth Palace. ‘It is ridiculous (and worse)’, Fisher wrote, ‘that we should be in this situation of frigid correspondence with no friendly correspondence. We ought to be able to laugh ourselves out of it, but we can’t.’16 When Fisher threatened to write to The Times complaining about the modern liturgy (‘Series II’) which Ramsey had allowed to be introduced, Ramsey wrote, ‘It would cause resentment for you to criticize publicly Convocations and advise the House of Laity…Please don’t. Yours etc. Michael.’17 (Ramsey was slightly more tactful with his own successor, Donald Coggan, whom he nicknamed the Cog. ‘I liked him,’ he wrote of Coggan when he was still Bishop of Bradford, ‘and was as yet unaware of his glaring deficiencies.’18
Ramsey was a mixture of the nonconformity of his family tradition, and the Anglo-Catholic priestly piety which had nourished him through a depressive adulthood. With the Church of England by law established, with its liturgy and canons still subject to Parliament, its bishops, clad in gaiters and top hats, still chosen by the Prime Minister, its role as a sort of spiritual topping to the Establishment, he had little or no sympathy. On one foreign tour, when the plane had been delayed, his press secretary found him lying on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head repeating again and again, ‘I hate the Church of England.’ ‘It’s a good job there’s no one but me to hear you saying that,’ his press officer said. ‘Oh, but it’s true,’ was Ramsey’s reply. ‘I do hate the Church of England. Indeed I do.’ When he was enthroned at Canterbury, he said, ‘Here in England, the Church and State are linked together, and we use that link in serving the community. But in that service, and in rendering to God the things that are God’s, we ask for a greater freedom in the ordering and in the urgent revising of our forms of worship. If the link of Church and State were broken, it would not be we who ask for this freedom who broke it, but those–if there be such–who denied that freedom to us.’ When he retired in 1974, he publicly admitted, ‘It would not be a grief to me to wake up and find that the English establishment was no more.’19
These sentiments would not seem remarkable on the lips of a bishop in any period of British history post-Ramsey. But this was a man who, as Bishop of Durham, had stood beside the Queen at her Coronation in Westminster Abbey when she was anointed by Headmaster Fisher. In 1953, it had really seemed as if everything in England was to carry on as it had done before the war.
Ramsey was one of those pivotal figures who saw that everything had in fact changed. In his years as Archbishop, the Established Church continued, officially, to exist. The Queen was still, officially, the Head of the Church of England. But with the establishment of the Church’s own parliament, the General Synod, and the introduction of a wide range of modern liturgies to replace the Book of Common Prayer which had been the one authorised form of worship since the Restoration of Charles II, a very profound change had taken place. The Church of England was recognising that its claim to speak for everyone in England was a fiction. In 1961,605 men were ordained to the priesthood of the Church of England. In 1970, the number had shrunk to 185. On Easter Sunday 1970, out of a population of 46 million, only 1.6 million members of the Church of England received Communion. By recognising the reality, Ramsey helped to speed the Church on its way to oblivion. Though bishops in their seventeenth-century lawn sleeves continued to sit in the House of Lords, and though the monarch continued each Maundy Thursday to go to a different cathedral to distribute Maundy Money, the reality of things was that the Established Church did not really any longer exist. A new sect, Anglicanism, had been born. And its democratic parliament, the Synod, encouraged the Anglicans to divide themselves into sects–Evangelicals, who followed a version of Billy Graham’s American fundamentalism; the ‘Catholics’, some of whom liked the traditions of independent Anglican Catholicism such as nourished Ramsey; and some of whom were crypto-, or not so crypto, Roman Catholics. These things were the consequence, rather than the cause, of society becoming pluralist not monist, but they were a dramatic symptom of it. At the time of the Queen’s Coronation, it still made a sort of sense to speak of Britain as a Christian country. At some stage it became post-Christian, and by the end of our times it was not Christian in itself at all, though there were Christians (and many other faith groups) within it. There was no longer a shared language of ceremony. The Prayer Book words with which English men and women performed their rites of initiation over infants, their marriages and their funerals, had been part of the common t
ongue for three hundred and more years. After Ramsey, this ceased to be so. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’…‘with my body I thee worship’… ‘the High Court of Parliament under our most religious and gracious Queen at this time assembled’…These phrases would soon have no resonance in the English ear. Even the clergy, perhaps especially the clergy, many of whom hated the old Prayer Book, would not recognise them. The cracks had begun to appear in the ice.
Honest to God did not cause the subsequent secularisation of Britain. It was an early signal that this secularisation was already in inexorable progress. Robinson, as a suffragan bishop in the bleak, poverty-stricken south London suburbs, became associated with what came to be known as South Bank Theology. One of the most dynamic young clergymen in the district was an Olympic athlete who was the Rector of Woolwich, the Revd Nicolas Stacey. When he arrived the congregation of the church was fifty. In eight years he managed to double it. He created a housing association; he had a discotheque in the crypt, but the huge majority of the people of Woolwich had no interest in the Church, or in religion. By the end of eight years, Stacey was completely disillusioned and felt a failure. He resigned his living and became the Deputy Director of Oxfam, subsequently doing great work for prisoners and AIDS sufferers. He continued, perhaps surprisingly, to believe in God, and to be a Christian priest, but he did not feel that the Church of England was equal to the task of persuading the people of Woolwich, or the people of Britain, to engage with the Gospel.