English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Of all the rapturous moments he enjoyed in the company of the great, I would pick out his stay at the Habana Riviera hotel in the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was nearly ninety. At a glittering reception (there is a touch of Sylvie Krin about the dean’s memoirs – the receptions are always ‘glittering’, just as the women are always wearing ‘splendid gowns’), he met not only Castro but the ‘strong, vital, buoyant’ Che Guevara and ‘a lady with a sad, beautiful face’, whom he and Nowell recognized as the implacable Dolores Ibárruri, better known as La Pasionaria. He was among his own people, big people.

  His admiration for communism was inseparable from his worship of power. Not for nothing was The Socialist Sixth retitled The Soviet Power for the American market. Nettled by squabbles in the cathedral chapter, he put down the archdeacon by announcing that he was off to Russia because ‘I felt that I ought to use all my spare time for something bigger.’ During the war he consoled Nowell that, if there were an invasion and the Germans were brutal to him, it would be because ‘we stand for something big and Eternal; and it is upon that which is Eternal and upon the Source of all that is big that we can confidently rely’. Stalin, God and the Dean – that appeared to be the command structure of the Big Battalions, but not necessarily in that order.

  For someone of Johnson’s temperament, to be made a dean was both ideal and fatal. It is no accident that all the most vicious feuds in Anglican life should centre on the deanery, as Trollope spotted and as was made manifest more recently in the row over the Occupy encampment at St Paul’s. A cathedral dean, once appointed, is virtually irremovable by either Church or State, as Archbishop Fisher made clear to the House of Lords when backwoods peers staged a debate in the hope of getting rid of Johnson. Archbishop Lang had tried and failed; now Fisher, that flinty disciplinarian, offered Johnson the same deal: curb your public utterances or resign. Hewlett gaily rejected both options and sailed on, loathed by his canons, abhorred by the headmaster of the King’s School, Canterbury, John Shirley, who was as guilt-ridden as Johnson was nonchalant, and eventually by the pupils too, 300 of whom signed a petition after Hungary, saying, ‘We hope that this appeal to your strong humanitarian sense will shatter your misconceived faith in the Soviet Union.’ Some hope. The dean might be ‘blind, unreasonable and stupid’, as Fisher claimed, but nothing except extreme old age could shift him from his little kingdom. And nothing could shut him up.

  What infuriated his critics, from Gollancz on the left to Fisher on the right, was that there was no evidence that Johnson had made any but the most superficial study of the issues that he spouted on with such mellifluous certainty, from famines in the 1930s to germ warfare in Korea. He believed everything his minders in Russia and China told him. It is hard to guess how much Marx or Lenin he had actually read.

  Some reviewers found The Socialist Sixth so incredible that they wondered whether Johnson had actually written it himself. They were nearer the truth than they knew. Butler uses the archive to demonstrate that large parts of that book and of The Upsurge of China (1961) were copied, word for word, out of propaganda supplied by state organizations such as the Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR. The same is true of the memorial address he delivered to the British-Soviet Friendship Society after Stalin’s death, later published as a sixpenny pamphlet, Joseph Stalin, ‘by the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury’. He had no pride of authorship and was as happy as any other Party hack to do anything for the cause. He didn’t have much interest in public debate: he orated, he didn’t argue. Tricky questioners were palmed off with a copy of The Socialist Sixth. His autobiography was entitled Searching for Light, but there was a good deal of humbug in the title, as there is in most titles couched in the participial optative. He had found the light first go, and what the light seemed mostly to illuminate was the persona of Dr Hewlett Johnson.

  Butler expresses some puzzlement that both Stalin and Mao were so willing to grant the dean private but well-publicized audiences. Is this so mysterious? The dean was the prototype of the useful celebrity who could authenticate the benign intentions of the regime and, in particular, rebut accusations that it was persecuting the Church. He was an unguent for internal as well as external application. The patriarch of Smolensk told him that The Socialist Sixth had been of such value to the Church in Russia that he had given a copy to every priest in his diocese. The dean was all the more valuable because his office was so easily confused with the archbishop’s, which further enraged both Lang and Fisher.

  In his last years, when he had become something of a joke, his usefulness to the Soviet bloc diminished, and his prominence probably served only to blight the prospects for Christian socialism in Britain. Twenty years after his death, the members of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas were bewildered to find their report Faith in the City rubbished as ‘Marx in the City’ – a caricature of its mild and thoughtful critique. Johnson had never seemed interested in any varieties of socialism. For him, it was communism and only communism that had recovered ‘the essential form of the real belief in God which organised Christianity has so largely lost’. ‘While we’re waiting for God, Russia is doing it.’ There was no more to be said.

  It was futile for the canons of Canterbury to write to The Times in March 1940 dissociating themselves from the dean’s political utterances but insisting that they too believed it was the duty of all Christians to further social and economic reform. For Johnson, Stalin’s way was the only way. Instead of carrying on the milder tradition of F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, of R. H. Tawney and Dick Sheppard (briefly his predecessor as dean), he obliterated the memory of it, just as Lenin and Stalin had obliterated the social democrats.

  Besides, far from wishing to smooth over any little local difficulties, Hewlett exulted in them, though he pretended not to. He had every reason to oust the egregious Canon John Crum, who described him as ‘a slimy liar’ and boasted in a meeting of the chapter that ‘I always try all the time to pour ridicule and contempt over the dean.’ When the canon was finally forced out, Hewlett wrote to his wife: ‘CRUM IS GOING! How sad that I should have to rejoice but I do.’ More Heepishly, he wrote to Archbishop Temple: ‘My earnest prayer is that this good man’s sacrifice may be used by God to purge me if possible from faults which He alone sees.’ No question of anyone else being able to see any such faults.

  Did he ever pause for a moment towards the end of his long life and wonder whether he might have been wrong about anything? Did he ever have another moment of doubt such as he had suffered in Professor Dawkins’s lecture room? In his summing-up, Butler charitably offers the possibility that ‘perhaps the realisation finally dawned on him that he had reached a point at which he could no The longer rethink his position without destroying himself and therefore had no option but to go on.’ Even that much self-knowledge sounds implausible. Hewlett Johnson was never much given to rethinking. Like many charismatics, he lived in an eternal present, a land of gestures without consequences, never looking back, always on the lookout for the next big thing. He would not have weakened at the last.

  CHARLES BRADLAUGH: THE ADMIRABLE ATHEIST

  He was ‘unquestionably a great and good man’. Who could forget ‘his gigantic stature, his warm temperament, his good health and good humour, his bull-necked obstinacy, his generous and open temper? . . . He had many enemies and fought them all with generosity . . . In the last glimpse of the enormous “Iconoclast”, he is a priest defending an altar.’

  This was the verdict of G. K. Chesterton on the death of Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), atheist and republican, publicist for contraception – and, in short, for pretty much everything Chesterton hated. This genial tribute from the champion of Orthodoxy with a capital O to the self-styled ‘Iconoclast’ (Bradlaugh’s pen name) was not simply another piece of glittering paradox, one more instance of Chesterton’s determination to startle the reader at all costs. On the contrary, that was the way most people saw Br
adlaugh.

  From the moment he burst on to the scene as a teenage preacher to his last days thundering at the Bar of the House of Commons, he struck everyone as enormous: physically so, six feet two, broad-browed, broad-shouldered (in later years elephantine and ponderous of gait) and gifted with a resonant voice which could reach audiences in their thousands without any visible effort; but also eloquent, serious, immensely moral and decent. He was the Gloria Steinem of atheism, an inexhaustible public personality who lent star quality to an unpopular and alarming cause. He defied in his own person the caricature so crudely chalked by Lord Randolph Churchill that the supporters of atheism ‘were for the most part . . . the residuum, the rabble and the scum of the population; the bulk of them persons to whom all restraint – religious, moral or legal – is odious and intolerable.’

  Nobody could possibly say any such thing of Bradlaugh. For one thing, he was a lifelong teetotaller. After he had been sacked as a Sunday-school teacher for pointing out the discrepancies in the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Gospels, he took the Queen’s shilling and was enrolled in the 7th Dragoon Guards, where he was nicknamed Leaves because he preferred tea to alcohol and spent much of the time turning the pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his longtime collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with him), there could be no question of their living together so long as her ghastly husband, the Rev. Frank Besant, was still alive.

  Born poor, Bradlaugh never lost his sympathy for the poor classes he came from. His father was a solicitor’s clerk, his mother a nurse, and he left school at the age of eleven to work as a wharf clerk in a coal merchant’s. Never embittered, never corrupted, he stayed poor. As a teenage soldier in Ireland, he had seen the horrors of the evictions after the Famine. When he became an MP, he was dismayed by how little interest his fellow MPs took in the sufferings and struggles of the Indian people. He was soon known as ‘the Member for India’.

  But his compassion didn’t temper his critique of Christianity. In the first issue of his first periodical, the short-lived Investigator, he set out his editorial aims bluntly enough to satisfy any Hitchens or Dawkins: ‘We believe all the religions of the world are founded on error, in the ignorance of natural causes and material conditions, and we deem it our duty to expose their falsity. Our policy is therefore aggressive.’ And it was.

  It was also unremittingly constructive. Derision and demolition were only necessary preliminaries. Bradlaugh was never more mid-Victorian than in his determination to build an alternative secular society. It was his predecessor George Jacob Holyoake who coined the term ‘secularism’ – ‘the province of the real, the known, the useful and the affirmative’ – in the year of the Great Exhibition, and it was not the least of the achievements of the age. But it was Bradlaugh who, still only twenty-four, became president of the London Secular Society, elbowing aside the more hesitant Holyoake. For the rest of his life, he was the leader of English free thought. Though not always unchallenged, he saw off every challenger in briskly contested elections for any post that was going.

  Bradlaugh believed in the Unchurch Militant. He despised the Beatitudes. ‘Poverty of spirit is no virtue,’ he wrote. ‘Honesty of spirit, manliness of spirit, bold, uncompromising, determined resistance of wrong, and assertion of right, should be taught in lieu of that poverty of spirit which allows the proud and haughty in spirit to trample upon and oppress the highest human rights.’ Here he is at one with Nietzsche, his near contemporary, for whom the worship of weakness was the worst thing about the Christian religion. Indeed, Bradlaugh forms one more link in the great chain that joins Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus for breaking the shackles of superstition and teaching man to stand up, through Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian, to Dawkins’s call for ‘atheist pride’ and Hitchens’s abhorrence of the ‘guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection’. Those who preferred to stay on their knees were literally benighted, crouching in the dark, victims of the ultimate False Alarm. ‘Get off your knees’ has been the humanists’ trumpet call down the ages, and no one has trumpeted it more thrillingly than Bradlaugh.

  He was not so much a philosopher or a writer as a public man, most at home on the platform, in the witness box or hammering on the doors of the House of Commons. Bryan Niblett is a barrister, computer scientist and judicial arbitrator, and he is nicely attuned to his subject. This excellent biography, the first for nearly forty years, makes us understand why Bradlaugh deserves more than a footnote in political and legal history. His contemporaries understood this well enough. Half-a-dozen biographies were published in his lifetime and several more after his death. His funeral procession to Brookwood Cemetery required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh that now hangs in Manchester Art Gallery.

  To the last, Bradlaugh remained a pioneer of customs we now take for granted, his daughter Hypatia arranging for him to be buried in one of the London Necropolis Company’s earth-to-earth coffins made of papier-mâché. Bradlaugh had called her Hypatia after the fourth-century bluestocking who was said to have been the last librarian of Alexandria and who was martyred by a fanatical Christian sect, her body mutilated with pottery shards. He was never less than consistent.

  To later generations, though, Bradlaugh’s impact has faded. His long struggle to be admitted to his seat as MP for Northampton without swearing the oath has come to seem a dusty curiosity, a picturesque hiccup in our seamless progress towards a secular world. It didn’t appear that way at the time. Niblett’s lucid and painstaking account of the saga forms the centrepiece of his book, and is not to be missed. In retrospect, Bradlaugh’s seemingly unpatterned clashes with the authorities look more like a neat row of milestones on the road from the pre-modern polity to the one we now live in. Every battle he threw himself into turned into a test case. He was often rebuffed at first. Yet in the long term he mostly prevailed, and his prevailing unblocked a remarkable sequence of changes in attitudes, practices and institutions.

  As a journalist, he was in trouble from the start. WHSmith, by the 1850s a presence at every large railway station, refused to stock the National Reformer, out of a hostility towards subversive publications which the firm has sturdily maintained throughout the succeeding 150 years. In 1868, the Attorney General attempted to squash the Reformer on the grounds that it had not gone through the hoops demanded by the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act of 1819 – one of the notorious Six Acts enacted during Lord Liverpool’s repressions after Peterloo. The paper in time-honoured tradition carried the banner: PROSECUTED BY HER MAJESTY’S ATTORNEY GENERAL. The jury found against Bradlaugh, but within three months the government passed the Newspapers, Printers and Reading Rooms Repeal Act 1869, which repealed the 1819 Act, and eight more statutes that fettered free speech in one way or another. This was the final extinction of a tradition, dating back to the Middle Ages, that publication was not a right but a privilege to be licensed by the authorities.

  Sometimes Bradlaugh deliberately invited prosecution. When in 1877 he and Annie Besant reissued a pamphlet on contraception, entitled The Fruits of Philosophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married People, he sent copies to the chief clerk of magistrates at Guildhall and to the police, advising them that the book was on sale at Stonecutter Street. The jury found that the pamphlet was obscene and a short jail sentence was imposed, but the Appeal Court found the prosecution defective, and Bradlaugh and Annie were set free. By then, the pamphlet (which had been selling quietly ever since it was first published in Britain in 1833) had sold over 100,000 copies: the topic of family plannin
g could never be effectively suppressed again.

  For Annie, the personal consequences of the prosecution were grim. In a rage, the Rev. Frank Besant filed an action to recover custody of their daughter Mabel. Sir George Jessel, Master of the Rolls and the first Jew to be appointed a judge, said that Annie’s writings in support of atheism ‘must quite cut her off, practically, not merely from the sympathy of, but from social intercourse with, the great majority of her sex’. He did not believe, he said, that ‘a single clergyman’s wife in England would approve of such conduct, or associate with Mrs Besant’. As for The Fruits of Philosophy:

  The pamphlet itself, even if it had been couched in the chastest and most refined language, would be grossly immoral; and it would be subversive of all human civilised society if the female population of our country were once imbued with the idea that they might safely indulge in unchaste intercourse without fear of any of the consequences such intercourse entails upon them.

  After this effusion, surpassing even Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s remarks in leading the prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover eighty years later, it was not surprising that Jessel ordered custody of Mabel to be given to Besant. Annie then launched an appeal for a judicial separation, which Jessel refused. This judgment effectively barred her in perpetuity from petitioning for divorce. She was stuck with Besant until he died, which wasn’t until 1917. Her dream of marrying Bradlaugh was shattered. The only consolation was that Mabel and her brother Digby both opted to live with their mother when they grew up.