Letters to a Sister

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Letters to a Sister Page 30

by Constance Babington Smith


  316 See News Chronicle, 10 June, 1958. James Cameron’s article was entitled ‘A tough baby lands in Mr Lloyd’s lap’.

  317 R.M. means the Liturgical Commission for the Revision of the Prayer Book, which is not concerned with the revision of the Canons.

  318 Rt Rev. G. E. Ingle.

  319 Rt Rev. R. A. Reeves.

  320 A meeting organized by Christian Action.

  321 Rev. Thomas Corbishley, s.j.

  322 See above p. 266η.

  323 See above, p. 272n.

  324 Venice Besieged.

  325 The Prime Minister was to present the British plan for Cyprus to Parliament that afternoon.

  326 Interruptions by hecklers when the Bp of Johannesburg addressed the recent Christian Action meeting were reported in detail in The Times.

  327 Two Anglican Essays, see above p. 272.

  328 The Leper missionary (1840-89).

  329 The Bp of Rochester, Rt Rev. C. M. Chavasse, preaching on 13 July at a Territorial Army jubilee service at Rochester Cathedral, had said that total destruction and possibly a lingering death for any survivors would be a lesser evil than serfdom under a totalitarian domination. He said pacifists preached that it was best to save one’s skin at any price, and attributed to them the responsibility for the ‘stupidity and iniquity of the second world war’.

  330 A letter from R.M. to The Times in defence of pacifism was published on 15 July. She called the Bp of Rochester’s accusation about ‘saving one’s skin’ ‘an exact reversal of the fact’.

  331 Jean Macaulay had sent a cutting from the News Chronicle of 14 July, reporting that the Rev. R. C. Gaul, of Rand, Lincs., had said from his pulpit that ‘the Bishop of Rochester is bloody-minded enough to see no difference in principle between bows and arrows and the H-bomb.’

  332 In The Fearful Choice: A Debate on Nuclear Policy conducted by Philip Toynbee (1958) Abp Fisher had commented that he was convinced it was never right to settle any policy simply out of fear of the consequences. He said that for all he knew it was within the providence of God that the human race should destroy itself by means of nuclear war, adding that there is no evidence that the human race is to last for ever and plenty in Scripture to the contrary effect.

  333 After the Army revolt in Iraq, President Chamoun of Lebanon had appealed to the U.S. for forces to help maintain security, and 1500 marines landed at Beirut on 15 July.

  334 In The Observer of 6 July ‘Pendennis’ had written of Abp Fisher ’… he is unexpectedly self-critical, and (unlike Canon Collins) often admits he is wrong.’ The following week a letter from Lord Pakenham was published saying of Canon Collins ‘I have found him very different from that, and full of Christian humility.’

  335 A dinner given by the Grocers’ Company.

  336 Canon E. G. de S. Wood, Vicar of St Clement’s, Cambridge from 1885 to 1931, was an Anglo-Catholic who advocated the daily Eucharist.

  337 The Bp of Rochester (Rt Rev. C. M. Chavasse) at a recent Diocesan Conference had recommended twice-monthly celebration of Holy Communion, once in the morning and once in the evening.

  338 Rev. K. N. Ross, Vicar of All Saints’, Margaret St.

  339 R.M. had been interviewed in this programme on 20 July.

  340 William Clark, Nicholas Fenn, and Alec Robertson.

  341 ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’ by H. A. L. Craig, a ‘dramatized reconstruction of some events in Darwin’s five-year cruise’, was one of the broadcasts to mark the centenary of the theory of evolution.

  342 The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, which R.M. had given her.

  343 R. A. Knox, in his translation of the New Testament, renders this passage as follows: ‘the man who puts away his wife (setting aside… unfaithfulness) makes an adulteress of her’. In a footnote he comments, ‘The Greek word here translated “setting aside” has commonly been taken as meaning “unless she is unfaithful”, but it can also be interpreted as meaning “whether she is unfaithful or not”.’

  344 Postcard.

  345 R. H. Macaulay (1858-1937), R.M.’s uncle and godfather.

  346 Postcard.

  347 Rev. G. R. W. Beaumont.

  348 The Resolution on Family Planning (in the Report of the 1958 Lambeth Conference) asserted that the responsibility for deciding the number and frequency of children has been laid by God on the consciences of parents. This ‘requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society’.

  349 Postcard.

  350 See The Queen, 30 September, 1958, ‘The New Argonauts’. 287

  351 The News Chronicle (22 September, 1958) reported that members of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War had been picketing the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston for 9 weeks continuously.

  352 Jean Macaulay had enclosed a leader by James Cameron (News Chronicle, 22 September) on a ‘new order for teen-agers’ in Communist China: ‘Youth to work by day, study by night.’

  353 R.M. means St Paul’s, Portman Square.

  354 Gerard Irvine points out that the observation beginning ‘or else’ is an addition by R.M. to what he had said.

  355 Helmut Rueckriegel.

  356 Rev. F. E. P. Langton.

  357 One of R.M.’s godmothers.

  358 When R.M.’s flat was bombed.

  359 The missionary hospital in the Transvaal where Jean Macaulay nursed in 1938-9. Subsequently she was always a keen supporter.

  360 A. S. C. Ross, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, ‘Strix’ [Peter Fleming], Christopher Sykes, and John Betjeman, Noblesse Oblige (1956).

  361 Abp Fisher, when asked (in a television interview on 25 June) why Abp Makarios had been invited to the Lambeth Conference, replied ‘He is by tradition one of the officials invited... I had to invite him... I know as well as anybody what a bad character he is…’ Later, after leaders of the Greek Orthodox Church had protested against the reference to ‘bad character’, he sent a cable of apology.

  362 A newspaper for ‘Anglican Catholics’.

  363 St Paul’s, Portman Square.

  364 Margaret Cropper, Evelyn Underhill (1958).

  365 One Englishwoman was killed and another seriously injured by Eoka gunmen in Famagusta on 3 October. The subsequent search for the murderers was carried out by British troops who (according to the Times Cyprus correspondent) ‘were in the grip of sheer cold rage’.

  366 Rev. Donald Soper, Methodist minister.

  367 Abbot Extraordinary.

  368 The Tablet, 4 October, 1958.

  369 In a letter to The Times (13 October, 1958) on the Revision of the Psalter, Rev. Andrew Duncan-Jones pointed out that a knowledge of the Bible is of much greater importance than ‘leaving out the bits we don’t like’. R.M. then wrote to him asking about the interpretation of one of the Psalms.

  370 ‘Nevertheless, when they were sick, I put on sackcloth, and humbled my soul with fasting: and my prayer shall turn into mine own bosom.’

  371 When she answered his reply to her enquiry.

  372 Protesting at the ‘non-interfering* attitude towards apartheid which Great Britain had adhered to in the voting of the political committee of the U.N. General Assembly.

  373 ‘Conversation with Aldous Huxley’ by Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times, 19 October, 1958.

  374 R.M. was to give this talk to Cambridge undergraduates on 6 Nov.

  375 See Gilbert Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925), chap. II.

  376 R.M. has abbreviated the quotation as given by Gilbert Murray.

  377 The notes for R.M.’s talk suggest that this is a quotation from Erasmus.

  378 R.M.’s first cousin.

  379 Jessie Boy dell.

  380 This was a ‘Christian Town Forum’, organized by the Bognor Regis Christian Council, which took place on 7 October, 1958. The Question Master was Adrian Hill, of the B.B.C. Television Sketch Club, and the team consisted of the Bp of Chichester
, R.M., a Methodist and a Presbyterian.

  381 Rt Rev. Roger Wilson.

  382 Rev. Kenneth Slack.

  383 Dr Harold Roberts.

  384 From the stove in the Sistine Chapel, the traditional signal that the election of a new Pope has been made.

  385 Cardinal Celso Costantini died in Rome on 17 October, just befor the Conclave, and Cardinal Edward Mooney on 25 October.

  386 Cardinal Roncalli had been elected Pope John XXIII.

  1 After these two quotations R.M. had jotted down, ‘Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1860s)’ and ‘Ingoldsby Legends’.

  2 This refers to Tintoretto’s painting of the Last Judgment in the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto.

  3 See Horatio Brown’s Life on the Lagoons (1884).

  4 Pépin (777-810), son of Charlemagne and King of Italy.

  5 ‘Posts’.

  6 See Horatio Brown’s Life on the Lagoons.

  7 ‘Snub-nosed, Snub-nosed’. According to Pliny the Elder (Natural History, IX, 7-8) dolphins particularly liked to be called ‘Snub-nose’, and some became tame enough to allow boys to ride on their backs.

  8 See Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis (trans. B. Battershaw, 1957), p. 166.

  9 See Art in Crisis, p. 187.

  10 Henry Vaughan (1622-95).

  11 Johannes Scheffler (1624-77), mystical poet and controversialist.

  12 This is a free rendering of a passage from C. G. Jung’s Psychology and Religion, as quoted by Hans Schaer in his Religion and the Cure of Souls in Jung’s Psychology (trans. R. F. C. Hull; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).

  13 Protestant theologian, b. 1887.

  14 Hans Schaer quotes this from Kurt Leese’s Die Krisis und Wende des christlichen Geistes (1932).

  15 J. C. Hobhouse, Baron Broughton (1786-1869).

  16 ‘Baron Corvo’, the pseudonym used by F. W. Rolfe (1860-1913).

  17 J. H. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), essayist, critic, and poet.

  18 Marguerite, Countess of Blessington (1789-1849), authoress.

  19 H. R. F. Brown (1854-1926), historian of Venice.

  20 R.M. probably means Lady Layard, wife of Sir Henry Layard (1817-1894) who became the grande dame of the English colony in Venice.

  21 Augustus J. C. Hare (183 4-1903).

  22 Bartolommeo Colleoni (1400-1475), Italian soldier of fortune.

  23 William D. Howells (1837-1920), American man of letters, and U.S. consul in Venice 1861-65.

  24 In 1818 Byron lived in one of the three adjoining Palazzi Mocenigo on the Grand Canal which are known as Casa Nuova, to distinguish them from Casa Vecchia, the nearby palazzo originally belonging to an older branch of the Mocenigo family.

  25 ‘The Mocenigo Palace at Venice’; see English Ballads and Other Poems by Lord John Manners (1850).

  26 See Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’.

  27 John Cleveland (1613-58), Royalist poet, see R.M.’s They Were Defeated.

  28 See Francis Thompson’s sonnet ‘Correlated Greatness’.

  29 The following notes are based on passages in Venice by Beryl de Selin-court and M. S. Henderson (1907).

  30 The Republic of Venice was abolished by Napoleon in 1797.

  31 The Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

  32 From ‘The Latest Decalogue.’ by A. H. Clough (1819-61).

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © Rose Macaulay, Constance Babington Smith 1964

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