I was recently given a copy of Nobody’s
Friends 1800-2000, a biography and historical diary of the Lambeth Palace dining
club which featured in the Peter Ball hearings at IICSA. It emerged at the
Inquiry that Lord Lloyd of Berwick had cited their mutual membership of the
secretive club to Archbishop Carey in one of many ‘letters of influence’ in
support of Ball. Nobody’s Friends is a gathering which quietly fosters
establishment links between church and Westminster (mostly the Tory bits of it)
and meets in the Guards Room at Lambeth Palace. Newly elected members ‘justify’
themselves during congratulatory speeches which honour any advancement in the
various pecking orders (episcopal, judicial, political) of its members. It
undoubtedly offers a fulcrum of patronage to any senior cleric lucky enough to
be elected member, who might aspire to a mitre.
Membership has included many bishops and archbishops, headmasters from a sprinkling of top schools, various Archbishop’s Appointments Secretaries, Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretaries, Leaders of the House of Commons and House of Lords, Tory peers, Admiralty figures, judicial figures and church lawyers. Such heavyweights as Sir Michael Havers (later Lord Chancellor), Lord Pym, Douglas Hurd, Lord Justice Bingham (former Master of the Rolls) have graced its tables. Several of the senior clerics on the board of Ecclesiastical have also enjoyed membership, and one of the headmaster directors of the church’s insurer. The current club President is believed to be Sir Philip Mawer, who was on the directors board of Ecclesiastical when he was also at same time Secretary General of Synod.
Jonathan Fletcher, Archbishop Welby’s friend and a regular participant at the Iwerne camps from the early 1950s has been a member since 1983. His father, Lord Fletcher, was also a member. The club seems to have had a culture of nepotism in which the scion of ennobled members themselves become elected members.
But another name kept ringing bells. Sir William Van Straubenzee, Tory minister in Northern Ireland under Heath and later a prominent Synod member and Church Estates Commissioner, became a member in 1973. In 1988 he was elected Vice President of the club, and in 1991 elected President of Nobody’s – a position he held until his death in 1999. Clearly very well connected, his London home was a grace-and-favour apartment in Lambeth Palace in the Lollard’s Tower. This pied-à-terre gave name to a group of Tory wets, the Lollards, who met there during Thatcher’s premiership.
Straubenzee was cited in government files in relation to abuse at the Kincora boys home in Belfast. Sir Anthony Duff sent an MI5 dossier on Straubenzee to Sir Robert Armstrong (now Lord Armstrong) in 1986. Kincora may have have been run under the watchful eye of the secret services who used it as a ‘dirty tricks’ blackmail operation, although the findings of the Hart report (Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry HIA Inquiry 2014-2016) disputed this. The involvement of MI5 in Kincora has never meaningfully been investigated. And although three men who shared in the running of the home were prosecuted and jailed in the 1980s – figures from the political and establishment worlds named in connection with the abuse and trafficking of boys from this and other homes in Belfast did not face questioning.
Armstrong himself was also a member of Nobody’s from 1984, and may be still as far as anyone knows. It’s unlikely that other members had awareness at the time when the senior mandarin from Number 10 received this intelligence from MI5. Armstrong appears to have remained tight-lipped, although it is recorded that these files were passed to the Prime Minister. So two men, one of whom had grounds from the security services to suspect possible abuse activities by the other – both toasted the club’s customs and membership alongside assorted archbishops during coffee and mint thins. It’s a disconcerting image.
Equally as disconcerting, there seems to be no indication that the Church of England shared this information with IICSA. Nor following the Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam QC Review when the material from the Cabinet Office first came to public light in 2015 after their report.
Despite judicial interest in these matters, the suffering of victims and survivors, and the need for transparency – the Church of England did not seem to offer this information to these inquiries? Presumably many current Nobody’s Friends, including many bishops, have copies of this rare publication. It did not occur to any of them, nor to the club Treasurer, that this might be helpful information – not least because it might shed light on the culture of protectionism afforded by these private clubs.
Another Lambeth Palace dining club offers a deeper picture of privilege and protection. In 1993 a former chairman of the Nikaean Club and head of Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge went to court for abusing a boy between the ages of 14 and 16. Canon (later Bishop) Christopher Hill, also a member of the Nikæan Club, accompanied Patrick Gilbert to court. Gilbert was also able to brandish a character witness letter from another Nikaean member – former Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan. Gilbert, who was also secretary of the wine committee at The Athenaeum, admitted a previous conviction for indecent assault on two 13-year-old school boys in 1962. Despite this and despite the seriousness of the charge, and almost certainly owing to the protecting influence of a Lambeth Palace dining club, he received a suspended sentence and sympathy from the judge for the considerable stress he had endured. As the judge explained, he decided not to jail the bachelor because of his health and ‘very severe punishment’ he had already undergone through loss of reputation. Both Hill and Coggan were also members of The Athenaeum. It’s not who you know… but who you dine with.
Returning to Nobody’s it is oddly disturbing that its members are likely to have their own copies of this book, and many older members will remember Straubenzee as President of the club. They will have presumably been aware of media reports in recent years of the mention of Straubenzee in secret service reports to the Cabinet Office.
A culture of ‘say nothing unless asked’ is a culture still reluctant to move on from subtle complicity and subterfuge. This mindset has already led to the current existential crisis of the bishops and senior ‘management’ of the Church. The time for keeping of secrets Luca Brasi-style to protect the reputation of a Lambeth Palace eliterie should long be over. The Church should no longer entertain disposition to this kind of omerta. A church with secrecy riven in its bones is not a church with a healthy and redemptive future. It is hardly worth the candle.
Incidentally I was interested to find that two senior figures I had told of my abuse – were both members. Stephen Platten, former Bishop of Wakefield, and John Eastaugh, former Bishop of Hereford.
With no little irony, I give the last
word of this essay to Lord Lloyd. When questioned at the Inquiry, his
description of Nobody’s Friends was that it was a “perfectly ordinary dining
club”.
Gilo
CoEditor, Letters to a Broken Church (Ekklesia 2019)
There must surely become a time where membership of clubs like “Nobody’s Friends” is a millstone rather than a route to advancement?
Anachronistic, nepotistic, seedy. It’s hard to imagine anyone would want this on his CV.
Ditto Iwerne. Is anybody boasting about having attended there now?
It was a good place to attend. I was fortunate enough to be around during great days of Westminster Abbey, St Aldate’s, OICCU, SPCK, Kensington Temple, Westminster Cathedral – not to mention stellar theological faculties. Iwerne ranks extremely highly – I personally put it highest in certain important ways, largely the character of its output and also its organisation.
The tabloid press abides by the rule that everything and everyone must be judged by their worst moment in a long lifetime. That is mathematically and logically hard to justify. So many otherwise intelligent people are falling for the line ‘they’re all at it’, ‘these people!’ – vast sweeping generalisations – and about subject matter they are unfamiliar with. In so doing, they fail to obey the first rules of the honest and the academic – namely to see the maximum possible number of angles (i.e. try to be comprehensive) and be proportional – as well as showing an irrational preference (which is where the link with the tabloids comes in) for the bad news, however small or large this is in proportion to the whole. In this case, 4 years out of 87 during which to our knowledge only one grown adult was aware or culpable, given that no Iwerne-related matter is included in anything that may be held against J Fletcher.
Comprehensiveness and proportionality.
With regard to Iwerne, it’s not just a case of Smyth being the one bad apple. We don’t know if Jonathan Fletcher abused any men (young or otherwise) whom he knew via Iwerne, but we know that Iwerne was a big influence on him and he in turn was very influential in Iwerne. And besides Smyth and J. Fletcher, we know of 3 other abusers at Iwerne. So we can say, at the least, that Iwerne provided an environment in which abusers could operate and recruit their victims.
We also know that in the early 1980s a number of leading figures at Iwerne became aware of Smyth’s extreme violence against young men but chose not to make it known. Further, they facilitated his move to South Africa where he could and did continue his abuse. And they enabled him to escape justice.
Some young men are indeed grateful to Iwerne for the training and network of contacts they received there. Others are much more aware of the damage it did. Many, even if not actually beaten or abused, found Iwerne teaching on sex and marriage a real hindrance to their forming healthy relationships.
Iwerne’s legacy has been very mixed, to say the least.
I heard Andy Morse on twitter saying that, and anything may be true or false, but it is very necessary to have in mind two differences: (a) between allegation and fact, (b) between getting a subjective feeling about someone and their actually doing anything. ‘We know’ is a strong and unnuanced way of asserting things so it needs to be well founded. Thirdly (c) the common denominator is perhaps one person’s experience or perception.
(d) When an organisation is very large, then it is a given that there will be certain statistics, but how does that impact on the identity of the organisation? Most corporations and schools could say the same.
(e) This is not ‘Iwerne’ we are talking about but the small minority of Iwerne’s 87 years within which one person visited it.
There is more I could say, but better not.
It is therefore not clear whether your comment passes the 2 tests of comprehensiveness and proportionality.
I have more than one source but of course I cannot disclose them for reasons of their confidentiality. Nor can I be more specific about the other abusers, for legal reasons.
Much of this will be revealed in due course.
Fine – but it is clear that ‘abuse’ is a very wide term. Secondly, it is a malleable term.
People must certainly accept what is said if there is no recourse to this breadth and malleability.
Do you see nothing odd, or wrong, in the fact that Iwerne leaders covered up Smyth’s savage abuse of young men he was supposedly mentoring, and enabled him to escape the consequences of his behaviour?
A broader question is the amorality of the press in all such stories as this, printing exaggerated, spun, and spiced up versions (as I have again ascertained in the past week) and endlessly repeating things without caring about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and seriously damaging people, families, and institutions that do much net good. The effect of this press approach is much net harm. No wonder in such circumstances people aim to minimise. Again, the ”approved” angle of looking at things is ”cover up!”, whereas the angle ”what harm the press can do” is barely mentioned. But it is just as real, and may be more apposite.
Out of interest, what was Iwerne’s teaching on sex and marriage? I never heard anything that was not normal orthodox Christian – and also socially standard in Britain outside the harmful sexual revolution.
In 1982, David Fletcher responded to a question about ‘onanism’ that although many things are listed as sins in the Bible that is not one of them although of course fantasising about a particular person against their will cannot be something without effect on anyone. In a second question in the same question time (on unforgivable sin) his specific example was that if one of us boys and one of us girls should sleep together at the conference that was in principle forgivable unlike the sin against the HS.
There is so much stereotyping going on, and therein lies inaccuracy.
Iwerne men have told me, and I have also read, that they were taught at Iwerne:
1) they should not marry unless they couldn’t control their sexual urges: ‘it’s better to marry than to burn’
2) in marriage, men want security and women want significance (I think that was the phrase – it struck me as odd)
3) the rigid segregation of the sexes at Iwerne, as described by Ann Atkins among others, made it difficult to be relaxed and on easy terms with women.
I don’t know when you were there; it may have changed of course. And different leaders may have had rather different emphases – by all accounts Smyth’s concern about masturbation amounted almost to an obsession.
(1) sounds suspiciously like St Paul not Iwerne.
(2) is not obviously untrue, and still less harmful. It is a given in biology and romance that men and women are in general terms different (it is amazing how often one has to say something so obvious) and biology and romance in turn impact and are interconnected with all other aspects of life. Preachers and self help gurus delight in theorising on the details.
(3) Most successful close-family societies somewhat delay the intermingling of the sexes, which is probably why their marriages are so much more enduring than those in sexual revolution Britain. Speaking as a man, had anything else been allowed at that age, many would have spent the camps doing nothing else, which is distant from their purpose. But again this point is obvious.
1982-91.
I doubt saying it was an obsession (a cliche) gets to the heart of it. It was standard to view it as selfcentred and debilitating and exceptional (however accurately) for many years. It may have seemed an anomalous behaviour to ordinands. It may have been the experience in the Winchester revival that behavioural change among converts was gloriously possible in general, with one main exception. Given the ages of the victims (not all under 20) preserving virginity and/or purity may have been quite an internal battle. There are all sorts of key factors, of which the same one keeps on being trotted out. It reminds me of when I was listing the highrisk factors in AI and Bp Wilson accused me of being obsessed with the behaviour rather than with its prevention. Yes, like all half decent people I am very obsessed indeed with the prevention of potentially fatal behaviour. But I don’t find that strange.
I think I understand what you mean about proportionality. But there are some things you can’t really offset against something rather better. If you’re talking about the quality of someone’s sermons, of course, one or two bad ones can be offset against the rest that were good. On the other hand, if someone is a thief, you can’t make that a little less bad by offsetting it against the fact that they’re good to children animals. They are still a thief. Of course, you can say that they are obviously not a monster. So it may moderate one’s view of their character, but not of their crime.
OK. That was not what I was meaning by proportionality.
What I meant was seeing a situation in the round. Pravda for example had one ‘approved’ angle of looking at things, whereas *all* angles exist. The academic and proper method of looking at things is the comprehensive one – trying to see all the angles that one can. This is because in reality there are all the angles, so what is the world where only the one approved angle exists? There is no such world.
Often people look at things in a binary or polarised way – there are 2 ‘camps’ – those with emphasis A and those with emphasis B. The best thinking, the academic thinking, that which is most needed, which says – wait a minute, there is not one angle, not even just ten, but many more than that – is therefore screened out. For example, when Abp Rowan spoke of sharia law, it was because as an academic he had to look at all angles and do them justice, not because he had a particular position, because one can only arrive at a position at the end of one’s thinking unless one is an ideologue. Likewise Tom Wright on justification – he agrees with his so-called opponents but places their points in the necessary wider context. That is what I mean by proportionality. See the whole picture and view its component parts proportionally. Otherwise you end up with the tabloid lies and they are large lies. Everything bad is real and to be endlessly magnified and repeated and squeezed for juice. Everything good – oh, we haven’t researched that. How foolish to fall conformingly into their trap.
The same is true in spades when those familiar with the topic and the people are the interlocutors of those who are not.
If marriage were a problem, for example, that would manifest everywhere and at every date that marriage is found. But it doesn’t. (Marriage is the main correlate for happiness and health.) It follows that some cultures are the problem, not the institution of marriage. If Iwerne were a problem that would manifest throughout its 87 years. But it doesn’t. It manifests in the (yawnfully predictable) years of 1978-82. Again and again we get 70s and early 80s coming up in abuse. It is they that are the problem rather than any institution – very many institutions were affected. They are the time when the authorities and media (Roy Jenkins, Hugh Carleton Greene, pop stars) presented such behaviour as normal, natural and commendable. The common denominator is the 1970s and early 1980s.
I am aware of elements of this essay from having met with the human debris that resulted from what is referred to. This is a courageous and honest attempt by an intelligent and articulate observer, to encourage the Church to look into a mirror and consider it’s reflection. It continues to amaze me that there appears to be many that still cannot see the ugly reflection to be found there. Its inability to see itself as it is, is a terrible witness in this modern and troubled world. Congratulations to Gilo for having the courage to speak out and for his continued encouragement for others to follow his example.
Spot on, Ian.
Quite right Ian.
I first learnt of the Smyth/ Iwerne story when I turned up at a small demonstration of victims outside Canterbury Cathedral in October 2017. had corresponded with a few and wanted to take the opportunity to meet and talk personally. It was relatively local to me.
Within 10 minutes of talking to one and hearing his story I was appalled and thought “something must be done about this”. I am not being holier than thou” I think it was a normal human reaction especially for anyone with any position or influence in the Church.
So my question is this.
“What exactly is wrong with all those who knew more, for longer, and did nothing?”
Answers on a postcard.
The Gilo piece is not about Iwerne camps so can I ask that future comments keep broadly to the points he is making. There are plenty of other posts that cover the Iwerne camps etc and the personalities involved there. That is the proper place for those discussions. I shall remove any comment pieces that are not broadly on topic.
Sorry I didn’t see this. Will do.
So do you know of any women in the dining club Gilo?
I was talking to my therapist last week who said if Bishops had to actually apply for jobs it would at least begin to honour transparency which may then start to filter down the infrastructure. It would seem that while clubs like this exist the need to fill in an application form will remain unlikely.
Do you think if the church was disestablished Bishops would not be such welcome members?
I understand that there are two women members of Nobodies Friends
Bishops do fill in application forms. The process isn’t transparent; there is still a large element of shoulder tapping involved for being considered in the first place. But would-be bishops fill out extensive paperwork to be eligible for consideration as bishops (after being invited to do so by the Appointments Secretary) and then go through a full recruitment process including application forms, references and interviews, if they are interested in any particular post.
Organisations sometimes behave like organisms.
They can appear healthy but actually be diseased. Does this matter?
Well yes it does, because sometimes there is a malignancy within, which can take the organisation down.
Is “Nobody’s Friends” and its network of Society and Church connections entirely healthy?
Many many organisations, staffed by thoroughly good chaps have been decimated by the nefarious actions of a poisonous few, or simply by ignorance and neglect.
Even knighthoods have been lost illustrating these ideas.
No one is suggesting the thousands of people losing jobs in the financial crisis of 2008 were responsible for the mistakes of the top few. But they were casualties, in my view, of not taking action earlier.
In the banking sector, as in the churches, senior people fail to act early enough to expose wrongdoing.
Good people are tainted by doing and saying nothing. Complicity leads to culpability.
Examination needs to be internal, but has to be external, for a healthy society. Companies need auditors. Auditors need independence and teeth. Wider society including the Faith sector needs regular scrutiny too.
A healthy “Press” plays a part in this as does Social Media.
Sometimes the signs of disease may be small. But it would be careless physician to ignore them. Other times the indicators of corruption are so great, it would be negligent to do so.
Thanks Fred, so are Area and Diocesan Bishops jobs advertised or can someone only apply if they have been encouraged to do so?
Are the people on the selection committee all from within the church or are other services represented?
There will be an announcement of a vacancy in See in the Church Times at least, I don’t know of any other publications, but they probably exist. This announcement asks for suggestions, apparently from anyone! I should think some people’s suggestions are taken on board more than others, but that won’t necessarily be sinister. But it does give an opening to shenanigans. Things have changed, but I believe the candidates are taken from a very long list of people who have already been interviewed as to their suitability. I believe they can and do put themselves forward, and/or be put forward by someone else. And they can be interviewed more than once. The long list is taken from this longer list! They consider the Archbishops’ preferences as to the balance of churchmanship in their Archdioceses, and other things. Then things like the numbers of academics as against parish priests and so on. These days including the number of women. There is a meeting or meetings within the diocese to establish what the plebs think. And each Diocese has a vacancy in See committee chaired by a senior cleric. After that, it’s all a bit cloudy. The men weren’t supposed even to tell their wives! You’ve no way of knowing the pulling and shoving going on behind the scenes. And no idea who’s on the very long list at any one time. Much more open than it used to be, but still plenty of room for Yes Prime Minister.
A notice will appear in the Church of England Newspaper too. CEN is the evangelical equivalent of the Church Times.
Senior appointments are managed by the Crown Nominations Committee which is so secret nobody is supposed to know who’s on it, and members are allowed to tell nobody when they meet. Must be rather awkward to keep disappearing for days at a time and not tell anyone what you’re doing or where you’re going! And that factor alone must limit the membership to those who have considerable autonomy. Even as a parish priest it would have been difficult to take keep taking time off without telling churchwardens, archdeacon etc that I was working, and where I was going. Imagine trying that if you have an office job, or are in education and need to disappear in termtime?
I think it’s here.
These are the people of power… although one of the structural realities survivors often come up against is that the senior layers are full of people who claim to have no power.
http://peterowen.org.uk/articles/abscl.html#appt
Good, it looks rather less secretive than it used to be. That’s a little progress. Though I’m very suspicious of the process, introduced fairly recently, where ‘likely’ candidates for senior positions are identified and put through a formation process. I’ve forgotten what they call it, but it sounds like a sausage machine where everybody comes out the same. Libby Lane was one of the first to benefit from it – if you can call it a benefit?
And no, it’s purely a church matter.
Re appointments of Bishops, my understanding is that this is the demesne of Caroline Boddington, Archbishop’s Appointments Secretary.
The influence that Boddington and an assortment of allies wields in the senior layer of the Church is enormous… and some say distinctly unhealthy. They are the main architects of the current hierarchy and its values and pre-occupations. Perhaps their values are represented in a generally low-grade culture in the House of Bishops. When did you last hear a diocesan Bishop speaking authentically and openly about the problems facing survivors, or taking any ownership of the structural dishonesty inherent in the Church’s response? They toe the party line and run collectively for the hills at every opportunity.
It is slowly changing. Senior figures in Blackburn Diocese courageously broke ranks and delivered a letter which was turned down for debate in Synod despite calls for this to happen. And Bishop Alan Wilson has been a consistent ‘voice for survivors’ but probably pays a price for this in terms of marginalisation within the structure.
It would be good to hope that one or two diocesan bishops might speak out with real honesty. But witness what happened with Bishop Mullally after a powerful mandate. Mullally was very quickly hoovered up into the institutional matrix and never found any sort of effective voice. Her response to the Elliott Review was lacklustre. She wasted a golden mandate and even allowed Ecclesiastical to repeatedly rubbish the findings of the review without making a whisper.
It’s a poor senior culture. And at a time when their Church is devoid of genuine leadership, with both Archbishops having taken up lodgings up cul-de-sacs of denial.
Yeah. She’s the appointments secretary on the church side, and then there’s the Secretary on the government side. She’s been there for ages!
An assortment of successive Appointments Secretaries (both of Archbishops and Prime Ministers) have been members of Nobody’s. This would indicate that it’s a bishop factory where clerics are ‘spotted’ prior to elevation to a diocese. It’s essentially a patronage club – and carries with it all the embedded and layered loyalties and deferences that have been such a major part of the abuse scandal and cover-up in the Church of England across the years.
Also worth noting that Sir Michael Havers (Attorney General at the time) who was also a Nobody’s Friends member from 1979 – played a major role in suppressing any meaningful investigation into Kincora. He restricted the terms of reference in a 1984 inquiry and blocked Judge William Hughes from investigating claims that high-profile politicians visited Kincora. The terms excluded individuals not officially connected to Kincora and events outside the premises. Thus, victims’ claims of being trafficked elsewhere for abuse, allegedly sometimes by prominent individuals, were declared off limits. Many potential witnesses were never summoned.
It’s a powerful picture of a Westminster elite working to cover up a major scandal in which many lives were shattered.
A few trivial comments:
Michael Havers was never LCJ; he was, as noted in the comment, AG, and was briefly lord chancellor in 1987, resigning on account of ill health and dying not long thereafter.
Tom Bingham was, as noted, master of the rolls, but he was – rather more significantly – LCJ and then senior law lord.
Antony, not Anthony Duff (or Tony Duff to the people he served in the soup kitchens at which he worked).
As to the Athenaeum, I suspect that membership (once par for the course, and offered to every bishop and dean automatically) is at its lowest ebb. Indeed, the current bench is probably less clubable than it has ever been. I have searched on Who’s Who, and the results for diocesan bishops in England and Wales are as follows:
Bishop of Birmingham: Athenaeum
Bishop of Carlisle: Athenaeum
Bishop of Ely: Athenaeum, Nobody’s Friends
Bishop of Hereford: MCC
Bishop of Lincoln (suspended): Athenaeum, Garrick, RAC, MCC and Castle Hill (Lincoln)
Bishop of Norwich (Graham James, now retired): Athenaeum
Bishop of Peterborough: Farmers
Bishop of Worcester: Athenaeum, Farmers and Worcester CCC
That is the sum total of club memberships amongst diocesans on the bench. Club memberships do make sense for bishops who must travel far to attend committees at Church House or who sit in parliament, because of the accommodation on offer. So, the paucity of memberships is relatively surprising for that reason, but more generally few people join clubs these days, partly because of the decline of ‘homosociality’ and the belief that there are better things to do in the evenings. Accordingly, the criteria for joining has often been heavily diluted (City lawyers are now members of the Athenaeum – a category that would scarcely have been considered a generation or two ago).
As to Nobody’s Friends, it is a dining club (much as the Beefsteak or Pratts are dining clubs, though it is not nearly as much of a crust club). The only ‘establishment’ figure of note alive at present and identifiable via a Who’s Who search is Stephen Lamport, the ex-diplomat and, until last year, receiver-general at Westminster Abbey. Another is the provincial registrar, John Rees.
It is possible that there was a nexus of sorts between senior government figures and churchmen as late as the 1980s (one which, I suspect, can be overplayed). It is also possible that there might have been some baleful aspects to that connection. However, to suppose that there is still any connection of significance, when the so-called establishment (whatever that means these days) is overwhelmingly atheist, agnostic or simply indifferent to the Church, and has been for at least a generation, strikes me as relatively improbable.
Then I don’t think you need to worry too much. For many years demonstrations around Synod in Dean’s Yard, for which the buck stopped at Sir Stephen Lamport, were universally for causes normally labelled ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ (would that they were…). Proposals for other demonstrations were vetoed.
I am an exchorister of Westminster Abbey and spent 5 years in Dean’s Yard. That did not stop me being escorted by 2 heavies out of the Yard (a long distance) for conducting a protest (one-man so hardly dangerous) on a non-approved topic.
Few bishops list their membership of Nobody’s online – it is a private club. I have been reliably told that one woman bishop is a member. I think if you asked the House of Bishops and received an open and transparent answer, you’d find the number of Bishops is far higher than you’ve assumed. I know of several diocesan bishops who are members.
John Rees, Archbishop Welby’s provincial registrar and Oxford Diocesan Registrar (among other dioceses) is currently subject of complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. He once served as curate in a Leeds parish where an abuser was Priest in Charge. Rees did not disclose this when handling CDMs against bishops (including the current Bishop of Oxford) who did nothing when told of the abuse. It should have been obvious to a very senior Church legal figure that the multiple conflicts of interest made his involvement untenable.
Many thanks – and not only thanks for your piece but for all the work you have done to bring these matters to the attention of the public.
As you probably know, entries in Who’s Who are composed by the people whose biographical entries are being recorded, so you are quite right that some individuals will be chary about giving much, if any, information. On the whole, however, I do think that most people are relatively candid about giving information about their club memberships.
There are precious few entries for Nobody’s Friends, and I suppose that this might be a function of it being perceived as a dining club, which meets by convention at Lambeth, but which does not have a building devoted to its activities, like the Beefsteak, for instance.
The only point I was making, really, is that the Church is simply not an especially important factor in public life. It is, at best, marginal. Whilst it might have been the case a few decades ago that there was a residue of throne-and-altar sentiment within some quarters (within the civil and armed services, and in sections of the Conservative party), this is surely no longer the case, except amongst a very small number of political cranks. I think we need to be circumspect about supposing that Church officials have the ability to pull strings in the way it might have been possible a few decades ago: this is a barometer of the wider decline of the Church. Few people in positions of power will pay much attention to what it has to say.
Also, certain professions have become rather more compartmentalised than before. For instance, there used to be a steady stream of barristers being elected to the Commons (it was perceived as a useful way to build up a practice, to take silk – it was offered to MPs for the asking, and to stake a claim for some of the ‘glittering prizes’). No more. Any attempt by a politician or official to influence a judgement, even obliquely, would be seen as scandalously improper and would probably result in some sort of investigation.
Standards *in certain quarters* have long been high, but in some fields I would suggest they are often very high and might have become more so in the recent past as greater accountability has nixed attempts to exert various forms of subtle backstairs influence.
What is a ‘crust club’? Indeed, what exactly is a dining club? It sounds very much an exclusive and arcane world.
A crust club is one of the more exclusive gentlemen’s clubs: Brooks’s or White’s, for instance. It is one in which there is still a significant landed element, though this will have faded significantly even in these last redoubts. A small number of clubs are devoted to eating, and lack many other facilities (extensive reception rooms, libraries, bars, etc.). The Beefsteak and Pratt’s are notable examples of this. However, they do have permanent establishments, which some other dining clubs will not.
In any event, many clubs are nowhere near as important as they once were. A number, like the Athenaeum, the Reform, the Oxford & Cambridge, etc., now admit women (which has, perhaps thankfully, changed their ethos). Some are barely subsisting, and have therefore relaxed their entry criteria and reduced their subs. Relatively few parliamentarians, judges or senior civil servants are club members these days. The Athenaeum, one of the most exclusive, used to be packed with prelates, but many would now be stretched to afford the subscriptions and would not see club life as being for them. These and other developments have resulted in the erosion of the traditional concept of the ‘establishment’ (as conceived by the likes of Anthony Sampson or Noel Annan).
If there is an establishment at present it is one built around fund management firms, banks, wealthy charities (like the Wellcome Trust), ‘magic circle’ law and accountancy firms, management consultancies, advertising or software companies and their various trade associations, with sporadic links to certain university faculties and think-tanks. The Church, by contrast, is part of a ghost establishment of yesteryear, preaching to a small and fast disappearing demographic, which has virtually no power and to which no one of influence pays much, if any, attention.
I am not, and have never been, a member of any club, and to paraphrase G. Marx, would look askance at any one that though me eligible for membership.
This pingback to Archbishop Cranmer is thoroughly well worth reading.