At a time when the coronavirus is occupying our attentions, thoughts and prayers, it seems right to turn away completely from the topic. As a regular blogger, I don’t want to run out of coherent things to say about the present crisis when it perhaps has barely begun. Much more may need to be said later in the unfolding drama. Today, for a complete change, I want to share with you a personal story, drawing from my own past. It is deliberately nothing whatever to do with the current crisis. It may, however, remind readers of their own experiences of encounters with strangers which have in some way been blessed. My story is an interconnecting narrative with two parts. Each section of the story has a common theme; the narrative depends on a random meeting with complete strangers. My story took place over fifty years ago. Both of the encounters I describe turned out to have enormous, even life-changing significance in my life. In the second meeting it was the life of the other person that was changed even more.
The story that I want to recount, begins with my looking at a picture posted on Facebook as recently as last Sunday. It was a photograph of a church in a small village in a remote area of Southern Italy. I cannot explain at this juncture why this picture of a church in the Greek Catholic tradition, painted internally by an artist from Crete, should have triggered a powerful reaction in me. You will have to wait until the end of both my narratives to understand the significance of the picture and what it represents.
The first of my stories of chance encounters took place in May 1964 in the railway station at Calais port. A boat train had brought me from Victoria station to Folkestone docks. A boat then transported passengers to Calais to connect with various trains on their way to different European destinations. I was to catch the train that would take me to Rome. There I was to stay with a relative by marriage, married to an Italian. This followed my leaving school three months earlier and after this I had filled some time working as a hospital porter. My plans for Italy were vague but the aim was to fill up a chunk of time I had before going to Oxford in the October to begin my study of theology. As I got into the carriage, I was greeted by two ladies in their late sixties. Both were also travelling to Rome. As the journey was to take the best part of thirty hours, we swapped life stories. It turned out that my travelling companions were two very distinguished retired academics who were sisters and who lived in Oxford. The elder of the two was Jocelyn Toynbee, a retired professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge. Both the women were going to be staying at the British School of Archaeology in Rome. They were going to be visiting a number of early Christian sites and I would be welcome to join them if I were able. I knew then virtually nothing about early Christian archaeology, but with their guidance, it did not take long to become an enthusiast for ancient mosaics, churches and catacombs of which Rome has a wondrous abundance. The highlight was the opportunity to descend under St Peter to view the simple tomb which encloses what are believed to be St Peter’s bones. The Toynbee sisters returned home after three weeks but I was later invited to see them for tea at their home, having begun my course at Keble College. At some point in my second year I discovered that, as part of my final exams, I could take a special paper in early Christian archaeology. Jocelyn was, of course, there to act as my supervisor. I sometimes found her style of teaching above me and more suitable for a graduate student. Once I had to protest once that a article in German she had recommended was completely incomprehensible to me. But the mere fact of doing this somewhat esoteric course opened up doors for a lifetime interest as well as, for a time, the opportunity to travel.
In the first instance, my local education authority, Kent County Council, gave me a grant to make a trip to Italy to view the various ancient sites that were part of my undergraduate study. I was living in the long-forgotten days when such beneficence still existed. Thus in 1966 I was able to return to Rome as well as visit places like Ravenna and Grado in northern Italy. Also, I was, in the following year, able to apply for and receive a scholarship administered by the Church’s Council for Foreign Relations to study and stay in Greece for up to a year. This turned out to be a 10-month period abroad and I began it soon after my graduation. The aim of the scholarship was to become familiar with the Greek Orthodox church and its monastic life. My special focus was to be on Byzantine Christian art and its links with the liturgy. The studies I undertook in Greece were eventually led to my studying for a second degree, a B. Litt., also at Oxford. It was then that I was able to pull together my interest in liturgy and reflect on the way that early Christian art and architecture interconnects with the act of worship. Traces of this interest remain and as recently as 2013 I was invited to give a talk in Crete to a group of contemporary icon painters.
The meeting with two women on a train journey in 1964 thus led to an amazing sequence of events which have greatly enriched my personal life and my ministry. My interest has not profited the academic world in these areas, since, apart from a number of travel articles, I was only ever able to publish a single paper for an academic journal. Nevertheless my passion for Orthodox iconography and the way that the entire early Christian and Byzantine art tradition has fed my soul is something that I am extremely grateful for. In remembering that encounter long ago, I have to ask the question was it somehow meant? Was there some kind of providence at work? We cannot answer that question, but I am still moved to ask it.
In the next part of this reflection I shall continue with the explanation of how a small Church in Calabria came to be an important part of my personal story. It is also part of the story of the artist who decorated it and how our lives intersected long ago in a small village in Crete. There was a meeting; lives were changed for ever and there are physical monuments in Calabria to celebrate this chance, maybe providential, encounter.
To be continued……..
How intriguing! All my life early Christian architecture has fed my soul when visiting France and Greece. Of course in Britain we have so many wonderful sites and we are privileged to be able to explore their mysteries.
( Not at the moment but we do have our memories and photos!)
This is fascinating! Thank you so much.
Have you seen this from the PBA? https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/80p499.pdf
It must have been a fascinating, if somewhat intimidating, journey, what with the Toynbees being at, or almost at, the pinnacle of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’. I have her ‘Roman Art in Britain’, though not much else, alas.
I wonder whether the two sisters said anything to you about her brother Arnold. Around about that time he was laying off being a guru of world history and was delving back into the classical work that preoccupied him in his early career, with ‘Hannibal’s Legacy’ and ‘Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World’ being the most impressive, if often discursive, results (I learnt much from them).
Froghole. You are fortunate to have Roman Art in Britain. The problem about such books is that they are big as well as extraordinarily expensive to begin with. I have other art books of this kind that are heavy and I wonder what will happen to the when I am gone. No, the sisters never mentioned the famous brother Arnold. He would have been worth meeting for a trans-European journey. He represented the ultimate in all-round scholarship. Not that at 18 I would have really appreciated all that. Thanks for the brief memoir. The story I tell is for entertainment to get our minds off the dreaded plague. It seems to have worked in your case for some brief moments.
Thank you very much; it has indeed worked and I look forward to the next instalment!
If you go into the Biographical Memoirs of Fellow of the British Academy online you will find a mass of biographies of fellows, from the early 1960s to 2000, and for the last decade; it’s a really useful resource (for me), and a lot of past volumes are also available in toto and without any paywall.
As to the cost, I have been able to get quite a lot of stuff relatively cheaply via abebooks, and here is a sample of Jocelyn Toynbee’s works, including some quite obscure monographs of hers: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=j+m+c+toynbee&tn=&kn=&isbn=. You are, of course, quite right about the weight of these books and I do fret about what might happen to mine even before I shuffle off; I suspect they would wind up being recirculated in the second hand market or, worse, sent to landfill.
I too am from Kent!
So, are you a man of Kent, or a Kentish boy?
Many thanks! I am merely ‘ish’. I was born at Farnborough Hospital towards the end of 1975 (I don’t pay attention to the 1965 boundary changes); I went to senior school in Canterbury (lots of relatives nearby at the time, now mostly deceased), and have lived most of my life close to the boundary between Kent, Surrey and Sussex (Froghole is a lane in the village of Crockham Hill, near Westerham, where I lived for a couple of decades).
However, I am deeply envious of Stephen being near Penrith. Absent my adolescent dream of being an apple grower in Tasmania or Herefordshire, the area I would most like to live would be north Lancashire or in/near Appleby in Westmorland, though not during the recent floods…
I am also envious of his having lived at Lechlade, where I have worshipped, and which I always associate with Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘Crotchet Castle’ (1831, at ch. 10):
“There is a beautiful structure,” said Mr. Chainmail, as they glided by Lechlade church; “a subject for the pencil, Captain. It is a question worth asking, Mr. Mac Quedy, whether the religious spirit which reared these edifices, and connected with them everywhere an asylum for misfortune, and a provision for poverty, was not better than the commercial spirit, which has turned all the business of modern life into schemes of profit and processes of fraud and extortion. I do not see, in all your boasted improvements, any compensation for the religious charity of the twelfth century. I do not see any compensation for that kindly feeling which, within their own little communities, bound the several classes of society together, while full scope was left for the development of natural character, wherein individuals differed as conspicuously as in costume. Now, we all wear one conventional dress, one conventional face; we have no bond of union but pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking’s sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of the twelfth century.”
However, I am getting off the point of Stephen’s reflections on late antique and early medieval ars sacra…
Froghole: Appleby and the Eden Valley. I was born in Carlisle 1950 and lived until university in Langwathby where the Penrith-Alston road crosses the Eden. Village school and Penrith Grammar. These days, Appleby is the next station south on the Carlisle-Settle-Leeds line. The Eden Valley is an oasis of rolling, gentle, pastoral delight between the “extremes” of the Lake District and the Pennines. It feels quite different now to what it was like in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up. No motorway, spasmodic rail service even to Penrith, isolated for much of the year when Stainmore, Shap and Hartside were impassible. Isolated too in attitudes. Methodists were strong, CofE less so. One beacon of rural Anglocatholicism at Skirwirh (John Bradburne connexion) in the midst of rural low church. I recall in the 1960s the village shopkeeper Mr Sansom barricading the congregation in church and complaining of popish practices. Sansom was (I think) Congregational. Each church/village then had its own vicar. Now one vicar serves up to 10 villages. In those days the villages were liberally decorated with sheep and cow dung. Not now – largely “Cotswoldised”.
😀. Connections! My husband was born in Carlisle in 1952! Last time I saw it, the Eden valley was still very beautiful.
Indeed, and surprisingly “untouristy”. East Cumberland was always a different world. Kingdom of Strathclyde until relatively recently. But as a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out of the stifling anti-intellectualism then prevalent. If you want to read more search for Langwathby on my blog https://ramblingrector.me
Very many thanks, Stanley! That is most kind, and very interesting.
Since I will not be able to see the real thing for the foreseeable future, I will have to make do with the reel thing: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-this-other-eden-1937-online and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq7vXtF2__0
I have meandered up and down the Eden valley, but in terms of services, I have only gone from the Solway Firth up to a line between Nether Denton and Cumwhitton. I should have gone further upstream the last time I was there a year ago: this is because Croglin church has just been closed (it will likely be converted to residential use, along with Warwick-on-Eden and Grinsdale).
It is my painful experience that, absent a few nooks and corners in the post-industrial regions, depressed seaside places, bits of mid-Wales or those parts of the fens given over to industrial agriculture, almost the whole of England and Wales has been Cotswoldified.
Best wishes – and keep safe!
James
James, I hoped the historian in you might have been hooked by the former lonely outpost of rural anglocatholicism in what has always been a low church diocese, except for one church in Workington and one in Carlisle. Skirwith is mentioned in the centenary booklet of the Liverpool AC temple S John, Tue Brook, as being a summer holiday camp destination for a youth group when, I think, one Fr David Hope was assistant curate. Skirwith used to have some fine vestments inc fiddle backs. Now there’s one service a month, if that. The present vicar lives in Langwathby and is sympathetic, but ichabod. Last I heard he was looking after Kirkoswald, Lazonby, Great Salkeld, Edenhall, Langwathby, Melmerby, Ousby, Kirkland, Culgaith, Addingham and Skirwith. He retires soon. The history of Skirwith needs to be set down while it’s still living memory. Perhaps the beatification of Bradburne might provoke it.
Thank you once more!! I suppose that the absence of readily available histories of Skirwith must have something to do with Cumberland county histories like Nicholson/Burn, Hutchinson, Lysons, etc., typically being organised by parish. Skirwith is not an ancient parish, nor even an ancient township or chapelry like Culgaith, as far as I am aware, but was a manor in the parish of Kirkland with a big house which grew into a small village and acquired its own church. So its history seems to be treated as a footnote to that of Kirkland.
Bradburne is certainly a fascinating personality. I now understand that his father was put into the living of Skirwith by the Parkers of Skirwith Abbey (having previously been in Ealing, and subsequently going to Norfolk: Tilney All SS and St Lawrence, latterly Cawston). Of course, a very tragic end, but it seems that a number of missionaries were targeted in the period 1976-80: they were presumably viewed by ZANU and ZAPU cadres (many of whom were mission-educated) as adjuncts of the Smith regime, and so as fair game.
Best wishes,
James
Fascinating, and yes Kirkland is the mother church, as ir were. A tiny settlement now. The boundaries of Kirkland and neighbouring parishes extend to the top of the Pennines, Kirkland including the highest point of the range, Cross Fell. It’s the more recent AC history that interests me – who or what inspired the Parker family? James, I’ve lost your email – if you’re willing to let me have it, please send it to wsmonkhouse@gmail.com
‘It is my painful experience that, absent a few nooks and corners in the post-industrial regions, depressed seaside places, bits of mid-Wales or those parts of the fens given over to industrial agriculture, almost the whole of England and Wales has been Cotswoldified.’
Having spent quarter of a century tramping England with a photographer friend I can vouch that what I most love about this country – rampant buddleia and foxgloves blooming on canal banks beside decayed red-brick backs of factories with the promise of an open dingy High Victorian Gothic church interior and a pint in a Minton-tiled pub, for example – is still occasionally available in the Potteries, in Stanley’s former home of Burton – thank yo for keeping St Paul’s open! – in parts of my native West Midlands, of South and West Yorkshire, the East Midlands and elsewhere; but it is dwindling. Holidays from childhood to today in mid-Wales with a trip into Aberystwyth tell a similar story.
On a more serious note: thank you, Stephen, for constantly bringing to light the woeful deficiencies of the Church to which I’ve given my life in its dealing with those abused by it and making a space for their voices; and for bringing to light the disparity between Gospel imperative and institutional self-preservation, a disparity which sometimes drives me to despair. In the words of a late U S senator, ‘We’re better than this.’ Please, please keep up the good work. And thank you.
Hear, hear! Thank you Stephen. And thank you Fr Rob.
I worked on a till for a number of years. And I once met the man who invented bar codes! He came through my till.
I was rubbish at school history, but I do love the picture of the steam engine!
The train that was waiting in Calais Maritime in May 1964 was a steam one like this. I did not mention it as I cannot load the narrative with too much detail!