by Charles Foster
At the revue at the end of the Iwerne camps we sang a sentimental song:
‘Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, at Iwerne Minister with [David] Fletcher & Co….It won’t be long before we all pack up and go.’
Our wistfulness was misconceived. We never did pack up and go. Or, rather, the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer went with us wherever we went, as the Ark went with the Israelites.
That’s how we liked it. Iwerne was great. We were fed lasagne by willowy lady helpers, from whose ranks we were expected to select our brides – the dams of the next generation of the Elect. And the senior officers fed us with a few theological formulae – mostly from 19th century America rather than 1st century Palestine.
For budding boys wrestling with the complexities of evolving personality and sexuality, and fearfully though dimly aware of a seething jungle of nuance outside the camp gates, the simplicity was intoxicating. Assent to A, B, and C, stay out of your girlfriend’s knickers, never, ever stray beyond the camp gates, and all would be well in this world and the next. Iwerne would look after you. It held the keys of death, hell, and the merchant bank of your choice.
No wonder we stayed. It looked like a fantastic deal. We treasured our badges of membership: the inflections of the voice, the uniform, the allusions, the delicious acronyms which confounded the state-schooled heathen. We listened to camp talks every Sunday in the Iwerne churches. Whatever the season, and whether the church was in London, Oxford, Cambridge, or beyond the edge of the mapped world in somewhere like Durham, the sermon was always really in summery rural Dorset, because our God could do what He liked with time and space, and His throne was near Blandford Forum and his season was the summer. Every week, happily and wonderfully, we heard the same talks, by the same people, using the same illustrations and the same jokes, all delivered by voices just like ours. We no more expected the content of a talk to be altered than we expected the text of Mark’s gospel to be updated. We believed in the infallibility of the talks as originally given. We’d have been outraged by any change.
What was being preached, of course, was The Gospel. We knew this because we’d been told it, with unimpeachable authority, in Dorset. We knew too that whatever was not preached by one of us was not the Gospel, and therefore suspect. We alone, having received the Gospel at the Dorset well-spring, were its true custodians. We alone knew how to enunciate it.
How did one get to see God? By listening to the pastiche of the Bible encoded in the formulae, which in turn were encoded in us and in our culture.And here the real danger began, for, we came to believe, one could not distinguish between message and messenger. As individuals we fell short. But the culture of which we were part did not. How could it? It was part of the Gospel itself. So if and insofar as we were good, enculturated Iwerne chaps, to see God we had only to look in the shaving mirror.
‘Iwerne is my church’, Jonathan Fletcher is said to have said. Everything about Iwerne’s self-containedness and suspicion of non-Iwernism suggests that by this he really meant ‘Iwerne is the church.’ Think about that. The church isn’t the eternal community of the redeemed, serenaded and guarded by hosts of angels and archangels, the bride of Christ, boasting of its extravagant poverty, its hospitals, and its martyrs. It’s a set of boys’ camps and the middle class cabal to which campership gives life membership. If you’re a leading light in that church – as Jonathan Fletcher certainly was – what are you saying about yourself by saying that Iwerne is the church?
Twitter now knows the culture as #Fletcherculture, and uses the word ‘narcissism’ to denote one of its most toxic components. That usage is accurate, but it should be understood that at the root of the narcissism is a conflation of Gospel and Self which occurs because of a conflation of Self and culture. The victim-blaming we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Fletcher scandal occurs at least partly because to criticise the person is to criticise the Gospel/Culture embodied in that person. Mock the plummy inflections, and you’re mocking the voice of God. Criticise his anointed, and you’re denouncing Him.
Yet more fundamental than our tribal and theological loyalties was our loyalty to the innocence of the Dorset summer, in all its suffocating, liberating simplicity. To betray the culture was to betray the Gospel, and so to be damned. It was also to betray our own childhood. To live in the Iwerne culture was consciously to hang onto childhood; to make a daily decision to arrest our theological, spiritual and intellectual development. And to do so in the name of God, because God met with us in Dorset in an unmistakable, unmediated way, handing each of us our life-plan. We followed St Paul, choosing to remain in the state we were in when we were called. Paul was talking about matrimonial status: we took him to refer to childhood. We were theologically infantile because we were actually infantile, and remained actually infantile because we were theologically infantile.
All this came naturally to us, for the catastrophe of boarding school had left us all emotionally stunted (see Mark Stibbe’s brilliant and heartbreaking Home at Last on this, and Joy Schaverien’s more academic Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child). We were only too glad to hear not only that our stuntedness was not pathological, but that it was what God decreed.
I feel sorry for the Iwerne-ites, and for myself as one of them. But I feel even more sorry for the non-Iwerne-ites who go to their churches. It’s one thing to be fossilized in one’s own past; it’s quite another to be fossilized in someone else’s – to live, vicariously and unconsciously, the perpetual childhood of your vicar, without even having the genuine comfort, enjoyed by him, of remembered cream teas. If you’re in an English Anglican Conservative Evangelical church there’s a sporting chance that, whatever your age, gender or background, you’re really a rather lost, constipated public schoolboy, but without the perks.
The senior officers were fond of quoting Luther’s alleged words at us: ‘Here I stand….’ But where were they urging us to stand? In our own childhood, of course. In Dorset. Inside the camp. To this day our cosmic dramas are played out against a mental backdrop of leafy lanes, windsurfing in Poole harbour, tennis with the eternally bronzed Jonathan Fletcher, earnest walks round the playing field with the dormitory officer, games of ‘ragger’ (a game unique to Iwerne, for the unique Iwerne people we are), and the tuck shop (known, masonically, as the ‘Old Firm’). All our prayers are tightly focused, barked out in a martial voice, and kept short because David Fletcher hated long prayers.
The injunction ‘Stand!’, I now see, is, like so much Iwerne-speak, theological window-dressing for a defence of the culture: for a defence of ourselves, just the way we are. It’s engendered by fear. The status quo is fragile. Dissenters need to be vigorously suppressed. Iwerne Christianity is at its most muscular when it wields its cold shoulders. The culture and theology, being inseparable, are sacred. The childhood Gospel – the childish Gospel – must not be challenged. If it is, we know at some deep, unexamined level, it will fail. The Gospel is not a lion that needs to be unleashed, but a sickly pussy-cat that needs to be nursed.
Stand! You don’t go through the door of a Iwerne church wondering nervously where the tsunami of the Holy Spirit is going to leave you at the end of the service. If you’re doing the right thing you’ll be standing in exactly the same place at the end. Stand! You don’t expect a mystical, transformative encounter: you had that encounter once and for all, in person or by proxy, years ago in Dorset.
Stand! Stand in the camp, because if you don’t you’ll be like one of the ones outside; the outside where time flows, minds change, people grow up, and where there is real love, grief, mess, contingency and joy; where nothing worth having fits into a formula.
‘All reality is iconoclastic’, wrote C. S. Lewis. ‘The earthly beloved, even in this life, continually triumphs over your mere idea of her.’ Reality, that is, is process. It is an unfolding, as our lives, if they’re real, are meant to be an unfolding.God, as the ground of all being, smashes up the laughably inadequate ways in which we frame him or her (including the pronouns we use). This is wholly uncontroversial in all the historic Christian traditions – and (it sadly needs to be said) doesn’t begin to mean that one has to deny (for instance) the historicity of the resurrection, the literal, biological understanding of the virgin birth, or the possibility of immutable ontological facts or moral truths. But it is the antithesis of much conservative evangelical theology, whose connection with historic Christianity is often slender. It is particularly the antithesis of that iteration which whispers that God, like the dinosaurs in the cliffs of the Jurassic coast very near Iwerne, is petrified in our childhood, and that we therefore have to live in our childhood or our vicar’s in order to live a godly life.
Fletcherculture is a disease of both theology and psyche. But it doesn’t have to be terminal. Get the theology right, and the peculiar, peculiarly dangerous, and downright sacrilegious narcissism of Fletcherculture is much less likely.
[this should be read in conjunction with earlier article by Charles http://survivingchurch.org/2019/11/26/smyth-fletcher-iwerne-and-the-theology-of-the-divided-self-charles-foster/ ]
Thank you, Charles Foster. As a girl, I was only allowed to cook. I can now read your excellent piece and smile wryly. But then it all seemed real. I hope I have the space here to tell you a funny story. I was going from ‘camp’ to stay with a friend and her parents and at the last moment was told I needed a cocktail dress (remember those?) So I rang home and asked for one to be sent to me. Because I had to describe the one I wanted, I clearly had more than one. This was a faux pas and I was treated to a lecture on purity etc etc etc. A couple of days later two police officers came looking for me and said I had to go to the police station with them. Bear in mind this was almost 60 years ago. It transpired that my mother had wired me some money, as I had run out, but I had rudely neglected to say thank you. She had met her local Chief Constable at a party who had asked after me. My mother told him she was fed up because I had not thanked her. “Don’t worry, I’ll sort her out” he said. Hence the two police officers. When I got to the police station, I was handed the phone and told to ring home, to say thank you. Nobody back at the ranch believed me when I told my story. I was not invited to cook again!
Lovely story. Oh for the days when police officers had the slightest connection with Christian morality – it’s a nightmare these days.
Wow. Exactly this. The best article I’ve ever read on Iwerne.
I first encountered the horrendous Iwerne culture when i landed at university. A Christian since childhood, raised in a loving reformed Christian home, I was perplexed to be treated as a complete heathen by these plumby upper class, acronym-loving, secretive exclusive Iwerne people. It was clear that they had some private in-club, but they kept it from the likes of me. The whole thing was so confusing to me as a state school fresher who didn’t even know what a public school was. When i eventually discovered that their ‘in club’ was their public-school only summer camp, I was appalled at the very notion … how could anyone who claimed to be a ‘sound Christian’, seriously believe such a thing was acceptable? It is the definition ‘unsound’. Did they ever read the book of James? (No, as it turns out. They gloss over and spin the glaring hypocrisy of how they operate – elitism and favouritism being ESSENTIAL in their churches). But as a fresher, new to this Christian sub-culture, I just couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand why people whose only experience of Christianity was their boarding school CU and their summer camp (having literally NEVER been members of a real church their whole lives) were ushered into all the CU rep roles in the colleges and all the exec roles in CICCU. Whereas, those of us who had real church experience (baptised active members in our home churches since our teens) were sidelined and treated like unbelievers. I couldn’t understand why they all commended sermons (well they weren’t sermons – they were in fact dull ‘talks’) as being “brilliant”, when they were patently dull as dishwater and lacked any power. Despite this, regretfully, I still spent much of my 20s in their churches – both as a student and a young adult in London (believing their spin, that their churches had “the best teaching”, despite all obvious evidence to the contra: Those men can’t PREACH for toffee). In their churches, it was more of the same: Immature infantile vicars, delivering the same dull talks with the same illustrations, the same jokes, the same formulaic message, the same application (make sure you do your Quiet Time, bring your friends to our events and keep coming to church even when you don’t feel like it), the same lack of emotion, lack of power, lack of anything that would move you to actually GROW as a Christian. Only as I reached my 30s did i realise this all stemmed from the same cult-like Summer Camps. Only then did i have the courage to walk away from it. I escaped… back to solid, reformed non-conformity… but not before a decade of my life utterly wasted in their dire churches. When the 9:38 Review looks at the damage of this culture – will they be looking at the damage done to the many people who would never be welcomed through the gates of Camp, but are abused their whole lives by their snobbish quiet exclusion,…
Would anyone else, male or female, who was (or is) part of Iwerne care to confirm the accuracy or otherwise of this article? I fully understand if you need to write under a pseudonym, but it would be so valuable to gain data from a broader sample.
It seems pretty much on the nail to me (at Iwerne 85-87 -encouraged to leave for no stated reason, but I’m guessing I was too obviously gay and at the wrong university – Leeds, for crying out loud)
Thanks Henry for your contributions. Sexuality and Iwerne’s manner of thinking hasn’t been completely unpicked here, and it would be a hefty work to synthesise all the ramifications. But an important work nevertheless.
cheers Steve – I’d be interested to see some more thoughts on this – it was a fairly tangled mess!
I’m surprised and pleased we had as many responses as we did Henry. People still involved with the Iwerne centred churches will find it very difficult to speak out, even anonymously, about any concerns they may have, for fear of censure or job loss.
Regarding sex, if I may be permitted to observe, I think they’re scared of it. In shutting down discussion, they’ve encouraged the very things they’ve most feared to happen: sexualised abuse by leaders of their charges.
I also believe the con-evo constituency in general takes a great deal of its identity from its approach to sex, whilst the liberal wing turns a blind eye, knowing that anything goes. If you strip away the sexual abstinence (which we now know is anything but) what do the Iwerne set have left to define what makes them unique?
There are an increasing number of walks of life where no one cares which fancy school or college you went to, if you can’t deliver whatever it is that you do for them.
Instead of attendance at Iwerne being a prerequisite for advancementin the Church world, the converse must surely be coming into reality.
In public life it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one cares if you’re gay or straight, celibate or active. But they hate hypocrites and abusers.
“Would anyone else, male or female, who was (or is) part of Iwerne care to confirm the accuracy or otherwise of this article?”
I’ve only just read this: apologies for the late reply.
I was involved in Iwerne throughout the 1970s: coming to faith in 1971 through the ministry of Jonathan Fletcher (whom I knew well and to whom I owe a lifetime’s debt of gratitude), attending Iwerne throughout my time at school, and keeping more loosely in touch while at university – where I was ‘president’ of the Christian Union.
I would say that the article is profoundly true psychologically, if a little jaundiced. The system’s strengths (simplicity, clarity, zeal) were also its weaknesses (anti-intellectualism, moral naivete, coerciveness). In my opinion, many of those in its leadership were significantly flawed, as much as (though perhaps a little differently from how) I am ; they were also significant channels of God’s grace.
The prized childishness continued at theological college. But then if you are not a child you have grown up and you have to deal with things like sex, which were too difficult. Thinking was also very dangerous. Historical-critical readings of the Bible were especially bad. I remember the Iwernites roaring with laughter when one of their number said that in an essay on Sources of the Pentateuch (JEDP in the theories of the late 19C – now rather differently viewed) he said that he had written about SPC and K.
But while that coterie were small compared to the student body as a whole, they kept themselves somewhat apart, and all knew where their curacies were going to be. Their influence on the Church of England has been out of all proportion to their size. They number bishops among them still. Did they truly recover from the damage that Iwerne did? Did they grow up? Did they learn to think?
I’ve recently reread David Watson’s autobiography You Are My God, and am now reading a biography of Watson by Teddy Saunders and Hugh Sansom. Watson attributed his conversion at Cambridge to evangelist John Collins having spotted his old school tie (Wellington), and he was quickly drawn into Iwerne circles where he became very close to founder Bash. They became estranged when Watson had a charismatic experience – Bash couldn’t bear expressions of emotion.
One of the things that strikes me in Watson’s book, and even more so in Saunders and Sansom’s, is the very uncritical assumption that a thorough background in Bash camps was the best possible training for ministry to anyone, anywhere. But how could leadership in that hermetically sealed world prepare a man (and of course they assumed it would be men) for ministry in ordinary parish churches, where there are actual women and children who go to state schools? Collins seems to have been successful in working class Gillingham, but Watson’s ministry in York was to the middle classes. The 1977 ACE report on St.Mike’s noted that for all Watson’s success in evangelism, York’s working classes were practically untouched.
The unreasoning, unquestioning, almost adulatory attitude towards Iwerne is manifestly unhealthy.
” Iwerne Christianity is at its most muscular when it wields its cold shoulders.”
This is so accurate. At the time I was confused and upset as the Iwerne cold shoulder pointed me firmly to the door – but now, what a relief! I never found out exactly why I was deemed so ‘unsound’, but I’m guessing I was too obviously gay and worse still… at the wrong university – Leeds! (for goodness sakes!)
I’m glad I left. I have read with horror (but with insufficient surprise) some of the stories of survivors of Jonathan Fletcher’s abuses. Now I know full well that not every Iwerne man was so treated by him, but I count his activities as part and parcel of the wider Iwerne culture – just as a toadstool is the natural outcrop of a much larger hidden web of mycelium.
I encountered the Iwerne crew again at theological college. They were a bright and talented group of men (and I mean men, not women), whose resources were being syphoned away from the wider church to fuel the Iwerne/Titus Trust machine. Instead of being fun, life affirming, warm-hearted, engaging people, they were insular, predictable, unimaginative, homogenous and defensive. What a waste. What a gift they could have been to the wider church had they not been so entangled in that net.
Many thanks, and also the leaflet from 1983 in the illustration. This, alone, appears to tell you a lot about the Iwerne cast of mind. Beneath the list of ‘leaders’, it itemises a number of ‘referees’, almost all of whom have titles. This, evidently, was a culture in which Rank mattered.
However, that was evidently not enough for the author of the leaflet: not only must most of the referees’ titles be provided in full, but also all of their post-nominals – every GCMG, KCB, OBE, DD, FBA, QC, etc.
Rather odd, even for 1983. Perhaps they ought to have applied for a royal warrant whilst they were about it.
Note also the list of names in the leaders from this *1983* Camp…
Rev. SIMON BRIGNALL
Rev. WILLIAM TAYLOR
Rev. MIKE NEVILLE
1983. (The Ruston report is dated 1982).
The leaders remained much the same year on year.
Sorry to be slow, but can you explain the significance?
The significance is that William Taylor (at least) is part of those who ‘managed’ the Fletcher situation. There are those who are trying to say that the two are not connected, and that those involved in the Smyth situation are no longer in ministry, and a ‘past’ generation. That’s not the case. It’s all interlinked.
Thanks. Obviously it’s all connected, the denials are not convincing.
This significance is that these men have refused to publically state what they knew about Smythe. Mr Snell helpfully points out that leaders remained the same year on year… So Taylor may well have been there in 1982 as well. Either way – do we really believe that no one was talking about where the leader of the camp (Smythe) had gone when he was completely absent in 1983? I cannot imagine it being a topic which was not discussed in the leaders room that year. They claim to have been surprised by Fletcher’s almost identical pattern of abuse. I find that unbelievable too. The reality is that being so within the inner core in the early 1980s and since, it’s highly doubtful that Taylor, Nevill and Brignall were ignorant of what was happening to men associated with iwerne and were unaware of the beatings culture (“a deep work in a few” was the term I heard to describe the work of Iwerne in my 20s). It’s high time they (and others – Payne & Roberts) answered questions about it. Under oath and under cross examination ideally. Any minister who has stayed silent about this for 40 years and continued to enjoy the rewards of secrecy of the club needs to repent – publicly. I’m very glad not in this world any longer, but I’ve been appalled these last two years by all I have read, as it makes sense of so much.
Spot on Froghole! Hardly an advert for the suffering servant
Can I reprise from Nov 2019 http://survivingchurch.org/2019/11/26/smyth-fletcher-iwerne-and-the-theology-of-the-divided-self-charles-foster/ ?
The two articles belong together. Thanks for bringing that up.
Personal reflections on Iwerne
I attended Iwerne summer camps just twice, as a senior camper, having left Charterhouse, in 1970 and 1971. I also went on two Iwerne sixth form conferences at Oxford and Eastbourne. I was invited to be an officer at Swanage, the prep-school arm of Iwerne, from 1972 – 1977. They were happy years. My involvement with the movement had begun in 1965 on a Falcon Cruise on the Norfolk broads where the skipper of our boat was a Iwerne officer and a master at Charterhouse. I attended the weekly school meeting which he ran from then on, which had Iwerne speakers.
Positive. I gave my heart to God when getting confirmed in November 1968, and finally decided as a CICCU college rep in 1971 that the Bible was the word of God. I would not have done either if it had not been for the influence of the movement. I went on to learn Biblical Greek and Hebrew when at Trinity College Bristol training for ordination in the C of E, ending up with a ground-breaking PhD in the Book of Judges (now on academia.edu). Although I left parish work in 1993 for personal reasons, my life long aim has continued, namely to obey Jesus. I owe the Iwerne movement a great deal for which I am profoundly grateful. One emphasis which helped me was that one has to make a clear decision to follow Christ – being vague won’t do. Making that decision has been the best feature of my life by a long way.
Negative. I absorbed the culture of the movement through which I found Christ. Who wouldn’t? While some of it was helpful – I still admire the writing of Torrey – some held me back. I had to learn to handle emotion and get in touch with my sorrow and pain. It took me a long time to grasp that love meant doing practical things for hurting people, not just looking for opportunities to talk to them. The teaching that one should marry as late as possible troubled me. I had a long struggle to get over my dislike of the charismatic movement which I picked up from them, but I got there in the early 1980s and have delighted in the spiritual gifts ever since. I am keen to hear the voice of God and to prophesy.
Neutral. The acronyms don’t bother me. I remember Bash once asked me about Bishop John Robinson of Honest to God fame, who was our dean of chapel at Trinty College Cambridge “but is he B.A?” “Oh, I think PhD” I replied. I was then told that B.A. stood for born again. This was fun. I replied that I did not know. (Incidentally, I regard Bash as the most humble man I have met like Moses in his day, Numbers 12:3). I can also see that being a boarder at two boys schools from age 8 to 18 had a profound effect on my development in many ways, some of them stultifying, and it would be wrong to lay this handicap at Iwerne’s door. Indeed, through being run by public school boys for public school boys, Iwerne understandably picked up much of the stiff upper lip culture that was drilled into me.
Reflection. I am pleased with my Iwerne involvement. God used it for good…
Thanks for your reflections.
I’m pleased for you that it had some role in helping you… Altho I do wonder if Hod might have used something else (and better – like a real church), has Iwerne not been there. What troubles me in what you say (and underlines my complaint about the much wider damage the movement did) is that you state that you “finally decided as a CICCU college rep in 1971 that the Bible was the word of God”… after you were made college rep? When I was at CICCU it was exactly this sort of thing that was so awful and ungodly. No doubt there will have been godly state school believers who were firm in their faith overlooked for the role of college rep (as happened to me) … but these roles always went to a iwerne chap or Lymington girl – regardless of whether he/she was actually deeply converted and walking with the Lord at the time. Like you, their experience of actual church, real christianity and the wider Christian world at this stage in their lives was non-existant and therefore it has a damaging impact on other Christians who were not in the club and were either excluded or forced to confirm. People speak of the good it did for some public school folk which is widely acknowledged – but it’s time the deep harm was widely acknowledged too… Not just the abuse, but the deep harm and hurt caused to the born again believers arriving at university which it cast aside, marginalised, trampled on and labelled as “unsound”. My charismatic friends at university received the worst of this sort of treatment.
And John Collins (and initially David Watson) went to Iwerne for their curates. The incestuous nature of this doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Nor did they think that having a variety of backgrounds and approaches on their teams might be healthy, or that perhaps it would be a good idea to give an opportunity to someone from the lower orders.
To me this in incomprehensible and just plain wrong.
Similar experience to Harry here. State educated, welsh speaking from working class background required remedial treatment and assignment to the beginners class when I joined. This notwithstanding a lineage of non-conformist ministry on one side, deep personal faith and active work in school Christian unions. I had read the wrong books (i.e non-conformist theologians like Moltmann, Lesslie Newbiggin) and so I had to be reprogrammed. Like you I carried on until the dissonance became too great.
Thanks David from Wales. The idea of “reprogramming” is central to this discussion about Iwerne and the like. Many, later, appear to have experienced some dissonance too.
David,
Sadly it rings so true. That’s how they treated all reformed non conformists, Baptists, charismatics, pentecostals and the like. Their judgement of soundness was based on social class and whether you were “known” prior to arriving. They had no measure for true Christian maturity…. Their only assessment was whether you were in the club (and could be trusted to keep the CU under the control of Iwerne) or out of the club (an unknown commodity). I’m convinced they actually deliberately avoided state school chaps and girls who were mature in the faith as (heaven forbid!) they might find such people think for themselves and make their own decisions … Without deferring to the Iwerne workers for decision on next appointments.
I’m thankful there were no Iwerne men at Sussex Uni in the 70s! Or if there were, they kept their heads down.
Yes Janet. Do be very thankful. Unfortunately this treatment was largely reserved for lower class / non conformist students unfortunate enough to find themselves at CICCU, OICCU and DICCU. I’d be interested to know where David studied…. It may have been similar at other universities.
David Watson studied at Wellington and Cambridge. Sitting duck.
I was conservative evangelical, nonconformist, and we’d just returned from the States. But Iwerne weren’t interested in Sussex anyway.
Harry, thanks. To clarify. I had carried on since 1968 in the belief that God spoke through the Bible, in a pencilled decision as it were, but finally inked it over as it were in 71. This was a big decision for me – if it really was the word of God, then the rest of my life was going to be ruled by it with no wavering.
In my case there was no knowledge of any connection with Iwerne when I was asked to be a college rep: the people making the request did not know about it. I was asked because I showed up to all the meetings and was keenly involved. I don’t think I ever spoke about Iwerne to anybody in all my years in Cambridge. I attended the once termly Iwerne get-togethers: I used to attend meetings of one kind or another almost daily. I went to church five times on Sundays! I would only grasp that following Christ is about showing love to people long after graduating.
I hope that is helpful.
So the people who asked you (presumably the previous year’s exec; that’s the way it was done at Sussex) had no connections to Iwerne?
I agree that following Christ is about showing love to people. It’s a pity that many of us grasp that only as we get older! But I suppose that’s what ‘growing up into Christ’ is about.
Janet, I was asked to be coll rep by the two previous coll reps, Justin and Bill, neither of whom was on the exec or had any connection with Iwerne.
I think the Iwerne presence was strongest, as has been mentioned earlier, in the top universities Cambridge, Oxford and Durham.
Among these, the history by Oliver Barclay of CICCU reports a very mixed picture concerning the relationship between Iwerne men and CICCU office. The late 1930s saw 3 consecutive presidents Argyle, Eddison and Knight (the latter 2 stalwarts of Iwerne and its sister camps, and both recipients of Ruston Report), but given the quality of the men in question this was unsurprising. This (long ago, of course) was abnormal, and at some other times Iwerne men have led a parallel existence, even being less likely than most to be on the exec at some times.
I think ‘oldest’ might be a better description than ‘top’ for Oxbridge and Durham.
Different universities were and are good in different areas. Sussex in the 60s and 70s had a brilliant staff and an excellent reputation. I’ve no idea what its reputation is now, but I do often see research from Sussex mentioned in the press.
Manchester has also had a good reputation, as have Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Dublin – the latter of course being very old.
Indeed. I studied at Manchester in the 90s when my department was at least as good as Cambridge and better than Oxford for both research and teaching. Similarly with recent doctoral work at a Scottish university…
What’s a college rep? We just had an exec.
Oxford, Cambridge and Durham have different colleges of c. 200 – 600 undergrads. Each of those had their own college CU meeting in addition to the meetings held centrally for whole University. (In my time in Oxford it was 10 – 20 students ). There were led by a pair of college reps who were overseen by an exec member.
The college meetings were the main strength of the CU for me being much more familiar than attending a meeting of more than a hundred. Many people would attend these and only sometimes attend the central meetings.
Thank you.
Thanks David, iwerne, and its connection with and base in the wider church seems to have been all-embracing. I didn’t attend myself but growing up in a conservative evangelical tradition I shared some of the emotional hurdles you touch on.
The childish element is so true. I remember at Durham when the rest of us were going to bars the CU lot and their entourage spent evenings literally playing in a play park. Very strange. I think about them sometimes and wonder if they ever grew up.
Thanks for this Penguin. Locking people into a state of “not growing up” seems like a form of cruelty really. Speaking from experience they probably felt special whilst others saw them as odd.
The idea that onlookers would somehow be drawn to the faith, seems now ridiculous in retrospect.
This is the part that’s hard to understand. Students’ behaviour in bars was anything but mature – in fact, if one wanted to see the least mature side of students that would be where one would head. It is therefore an odd thing to0 equate with ‘growing up’. Some people didn’t need to drown their sorrows because their happier upbringing and training meant they were less likely to develop sorrows in the first place.
Chris, come on. Not everyone in a pub is drowning sorrows! I’m guessing most people of around 19/20 ish are pretty childish. I never bothered with CU because they were so naive. But I’ve been to a play park, with my flatmate and friends from my (Baptist) church! Until Annie fell off the roundabout! I think sometimes we all need to contact our inner child. But I do know exactly what people mean about being infantilised, in many ways, not just theological. If the “young adults” never grow out of trying fancy tricks on roundabouts , your organisation has a problem.
An outstanding feature of our age is the introduction of teaching about drugs and sex at earlier ages, whereas the many generations that did not have that inappropriately foisted on them so soon (the former being unheard of and the latter marriage-related) obviously succeeded where ours failed.
In the light of that, it is heartening to see people who feel no need to forsake family-related activities, and of course the childlike heart (as opposed to silly ass behaviour) could not be more central to Jesus’s teaching.
Unfortunately, teaching people that drugs are bad, for example, becomes essential when they can learn about drugs everywhere. I worry that sex has almost become compulsory, as soon as you have a snog! But not teaching about it simply means there are no contrary views expressed.
There has never been a time when drugs were unheard of and no one had sex outside marriage. Queen Victoria smoked marijuana with her ladies in waiting on picnics; opium dens and gin palaces plied their wares in the 18th and 19th centuries; novels written in the 1920s and 30s feature cocaine addicts and dealers. An over-the-counter remedy containing opium was available into the 1970s, and Coca-Cola’s original formula contained coca.
As for sex, the Bible provides ample evidence that people indulged outside marriage.
I think educating children about sex and drugs is a positive.
I remember them ‘wrestling’ after church.
I can go further than that and attest to pressure being put on to make a iwerne boy diccu president who attended, even though he attended hardly anything and was unknown to the exec. (note the pressure was from outside church workers who I suspect were in Durham to ensure things stayed in the camps)
Oh yes. The “church workers” who didn’t care about you if you were from a state school, but had a schedule of 121 Bible readings set up for you before you even arrived if you were from the right school and camp. Did they ever read James 2, I wonder?
Thanks Durham Damage. Selective use of scripture and avoiding other bits that do not fit seems to be a regular feature of the approach
Thinking of Harry Houdini’s and Chris Tinker’s comments in particular and thanks for these, there seems to be a strong sense of ambivalence about the centrality of Iwerne network and preferment of its alumni. On the one hand I’m thinking I had a lucky escape, but on the other hand there’s resentment about ministry opportunities missed for example, because someone else was unfairly given the nod.
Exactly. And the sad thing is I’ve seen their types taking over FIEC churches too in recent years. And Alisdair Payne, Vaughan Roberts sister and Hugh Palmers daughter are all now on the Keswick convention committee now too (AP wangled being made chair) …along with other useful folk under their control. All appointments associated with the Pencil Factory money loaned to them by the CE elite wishing to bringing Keswick under their control. Many reformed non conformist organisations I have loved are now in their clutches. The ambivalence about this take over is so sad. People just don’t realise.
A very good description from Charles. So a plea to the brothers: as Charles describes, there’s been an awful lot of ‘standing’ over the years. The standing has been on two main pillars, which unfortunately come down to this: social elitism and sexism. Some of the standing on these has been unconscious, and is still unacknowledged, unowned and unrepented.
Both pillars of social elitism and sexism have then been used by some warped individuals to control things and feed their own purposes. Unable to cope with their own sexuality and/or their ambition, they’ve have used elitist social control, and also resolute exclusion of women, to build their empire and web.
Bros, you have always ‘stood’ on your claim to be strong defenders of truth. But what do we see, now, at the time of testing? Sadly a big disappointment. Instead of admirable leadership by fearless, strong, humble servant-leaders, you appear to be hiding behind nanny’s skirt. Let the strong men ‘stand’ up, tell the whole truth, publish the actual reports, the letters, the timelines, warts and all. This will then be a genuine open confession, pleasing to God and the wider church.
And then take action. Get together. Announce what you will do and do it. Apportion responsibility as best you can. Properly compensate those badly hurt by the system you developed. Up till now The Constituency has operated like a secret men’s society. Let it now prove its strength, virtue and honesty by becoming brave, fair, just and open, doing the right thing and being seen to do it, engaging truthfully with the wider church.
One important part will be publishing details of levels of compensation paid to date to the victims of both main abusers, and the further sums still needing to be paid really to put things right (not naming individuals, but giving amounts for numbered groups of individuals, so that all can see that the amounts are actually appropriate and not derisory).
At the moment the only strong, brave contenders for truth that we are seeing are those holding The Constituency to account. God bless them.
Thanks Anon. Many, many will appreciate this leadership response.
This long list of repentance actions is exactly what most victims/survivors want to see. Not just Iwerne old boys.
The point has been made on an earlier thread that Iwerne’s anti-intellectualism is nuanced at the least. They ran December 6th form conferences featuring professors like Oliver O’Donovan and RJ Sam Berry the biologist. And majored on Oxford and Cambridge students.
I find this all very intriguing. My Uni was Southampton (1971-74) and, although most of us were predominantly and unsurprisingly middle-class, I can’t remember any class politics being played out in the CU, which was about 140 strong in those days. What I certainly can remember – and I think that this was unusual – is that there were quite a distrust of Anglicans as being potentially “unsound” – the “soundest” were considered to be the Reformed FIEC types. This was possibly, but not exclusively, due to the popularity of Above Bar Church and its minister Leith Samuel. Indeed I, from a CofE and Crusaders Union background, was felt to be a bit “suspect” – the thing to be was National Young Life Campaign! During my time there was a huge split between these folk and the charismatics, most of whom went to a Pentecostal church in the city. Many of these remained in the city and went on to form what I think became known as the Cornerstone church. So clearly a very different experience to OICCU/CICCU.