by Edmund Weiner
Most of the recent interest in the Iwerne camps has focussed on the period from the late 70s onwards when John Smyth and the Fletcher brothers were prominent in the camps and their organisation. It is easy to forget that there was an earlier, perhaps more innocent, period in the history of the camps. Here is a personal account by Edmund Weiner who remembers the founder, E J H Nash (Bash) and the impact he still had over the boy campers in that period. From this time, the early 70s, we have some intriguing memories of both Fletcher brothers, particularly Jonathan. Jonathan was then emerging into a leadership role. This piece helps to give us some feel for the personalities of both brothers when they were themselves young(ish) men.
In the summer term of 1969 I was in my first year at Christ Church, Oxford. I had just been ‘converted’ to evangelical Christianity through the college Christian Union group, which was very vigorous and contained several associates of VPS (Varsity Public Schools), then the proper name for what was informally called ‘Iwerne Minster’ or ‘Iwerne’ (though the actual venue was the nearby Clayesmore School). I presume that my public school background had been noted, since I received a visit from David Fletcher, the ‘Commandant’ of the Iwerne Minster camp.
DF invited me to come for a week to Iwerne Minster in the vacation, as a ‘Senior Camper’, which I duly did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Senior Campers worked extremely hard doing various daily chores. One of mine was making up dozens of bottles of orange and lemon squash for outings. Another, a group activity, was making hundreds of sandwiches for packed lunches. We laid tables and did a certain amount of cleaning. We rushed from our chores to prayer meetings and bible studies with the officers that were held in addition to the talks laid on for the junior campers. We also paid a fee for the privilege of being there!
At that time, ‘Bash’, the Revd E. J. H. Nash, was still active. He wasn’t seen much during the early part of the programme, which consisted of a series of talks from officers, gradually building up to the evening when campers were challenged to make a commitment to Christ. The key talk on that evening was given by Bash. I think I only met him once and wasn’t especially impressed, whereas there were other officers, such as DF, whom I liked very much. I also remember being in a meeting where John Smyth was present, possibly only for a short visit, but I don’t know if I actually met him.
I loved the camaraderie and eagerly absorbed the teaching. I attended (I think) two more camps during my undergraduate years. I was also invited to a largeish gathering of officers and senior campers in Eastbourne, where there were again bible studies and prayer meetings. I can remember little about it, apart from walking along the Seven Sisters.
I was told that I was one of the few participants they had ever had from Westminster School, which I think they regarded as a future mission field, as it had no Christian Union. Possibly it was hoped that I would be able to assist with outreach there. The background to this, if I am not mistaken, is that a boy’s participation in a camp was by invitation, and that depended on there being a VPS staff member teaching at their school and running a Christian group which they attended.
After attending these camps, I was invited to join a few handpicked VPS men for several days at a kind of retreat (I’m sure that wasn’t what they called it!) in Cumbria. I think this must have been the summer of 1970. Jonathan Fletcher kindly drove me and C (later to become a bishop) from near our homes on the outskirts of London to this event. I had met JF before; in fact I think he may have visited me in college in his brother’s company. But I got the impression that he was very much the junior player while DF was the big noise: I think he was not long out of theological college.
The ‘retreat’ took place in a guest house in the country, I think in Broughton, near Barrow in Furness. We met each day in a chintzy parlour containing a harmonium, which accompanied our singing of the good old CSSM choruses familiar from Iwerne. The leader of the gathering was David Fletcher. I suppose JF assisted. I think the purpose was to train us to become officers — leaders at Iwerne or the associated camps. We were about half a dozen, all undergraduates. Apart from C and myself, there were at least three Oxford men, who later became evangelical clergy, and a single Cambridge man whose name I’ve forgotten. Three of those present were from my college.
I can remember very little of the programme, except that towards the end we each had to write and present a short evangelistic talk of the typical VPS kind. I walked round the garden in a somewhat desperate state trying to manufacture something suitable to put in my little filofax-style book, which was standard equipment. I think I knew in my heart that I was not VPS officer material, and didn’t particularly want to be. I am still a lay Christian (now very much not evangelical), and thankful for it.
What I remember much better were the leisure activities, several of which had slightly disturbing aspects. On one afternoon we had a hill climbing expedition. We parked in a field and proceeded up into the fells. The walk was fine until we reached Striding Edge. No one had prepared those of us who were not familiar with the Lake District for this. It is a path where fatalities are not infrequent. Of course, there was no compulsion to tackle Striding Edge, but some on the walk did so. The rest of us descended via an extremely precipitous scree. My apprehensions about this were assuaged by the calm support of C, who was an experienced hill walker. As far as I can remember there was no mention of special equipment or safety precautions at all. When we met up at the cars, we were faced by an irate farmer: the vehicles were illicitly parked in his field. An unedifying confrontation was in progress. It disturbed me that Christians who were apparently familiar with the area should show such disregard for private property.
On another day we drove into Barrow and had a look around. I was in JF’s car. On the way JF indulged in a little prank. This consisted of pulling up near a person walking along the road, winding down the window as if to ask for directions, calling out ‘Straight on?’ in a questioning tone, and then driving off. On our way home through the suburbs, JF instigated another prank. P, the smallest member of the party, was dropped off to join the tail of a long bus queue. We then drove round the block and back to the bus queue, where we screeched to a sudden halt. Two big members of the party leapt out of the car, seized P, and bundled him, pretending to protest, into the car, which then roared away, leaving the bus queue wondering if they had witnessed a kidnapping. Neither prank seemed at all funny, and even if they had been, they have always struck me as inconsistent with Christian behaviour.
In 1971, at the end of my last term as an undergraduate, I was again offered the chance to attend a VPS camp during the summer vacation. I cannot now remember if this went with a change of status up to officer, but I have a vague memory that the camp might have been the Lymington one rather than Iwerne. As it happened, my parents had planned for us to spend the whole summer with my sister in Cyprus, and as this clashed with the VPS camp, I declined the offer. And that was the end of any invitations to be involved with VPS.
An important point to make is that I never witnessed improper behaviour or improper suggestions of any sort. But I do think that the conduct of the ‘retreat’ points to a certain recklessness and a cavalier attitude to the concerns and rights of other people, which can be encountered quite widely among conservative evangelicals with a public school background.
While I hold no brief for Smyth, the VPS, or the evangelical wing of the C of E, I would like to point out that the Guardian review of Andrew Graystone’s book strikes me as over-sensationalized. The VPS camps were not ‘military style’. It’s true that the Revd Nash introduced some absurd military labels for the staff, but they didn’t mean anything. There were absolutely no military style activities, only lots of sports, games, and expeditions, plus the services at which the evangelical version of the Christian faith was presented. Nor was there, to my knowledge, any undue pressure to be converted: I’m quite sure that a 16 year old presented with an ideology is mature enough to make a choice (or was in the 1960s — I first chose to become a Christian on my own at 15).
Talk about ‘recruits’ is also silly. Commitment to Christ was, obviously, a qualification for being on the staff (many of them were clergy or ordinands), but the public school boys who attended were just children attending a camp. I’m not aware that there was an emphasis on, or indeed any teaching about, ‘purity’ (if that refers to sexual behaviour). By far the most important thing about a VPS man was that he should be both ‘keen’ (i.e. dedicated to ‘witnessing’) and ‘sound’.
It’s also really silly to describe the VPS as a ‘cult’. A cult is a church-like movement which takes over both individuals and families, brainwashes them, and controls their lives. The boys did not become cult members — they went back to their rather privileged homes and schools and carried on just as before, except that some of them began to practise Christianity. As regards the staff, clearly they were and are part of an organized pressure group within the church that requires strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism, but membership is entirely voluntary.
This is not to say that the VPS wasn’t or isn’t sinister, in the same way that all the para-church groups operating behind the scenes in the C of E are sinister. The VPS network operated in a semi-secret way. It heavily influenced the University Christian Unions (at least at Oxbridge) without openly declaring itself. Back in the 1970s, my fiance and I dropped in on C at Wycliffe Hall for a cup of tea; C suddenly became sheepish and apologized for having to rush away to a hush-hush prayer meeting (a VPS one).
The other unpleasant aspect of VPS, correctly identified in the Guardian, was its concentration on privileged young people, aiming with great success at getting public schoolboys to become the future leaders of the C of E. In this it resembles the now moribund Moral Rearmament movement, which targeted ‘key men’ who might be expected to become political leaders. Frank Buchmann, MRA’s founder, of course, was greatly influenced by the Keswick movement, which also underlies the evangelicalism of the VPS.
I hope what I’ve written corrects some false emphases in the presentation of ‘Iwerne’. Its badness is a little more subtle than the picture painted by sensationalistic journalism.
This is a very interesting and useful contribution to understanding what went wrong at Iwerne. I accept this account without cynicism. Where I think the writer needs to refocus slightly is that the Graystone book is not, in my view “ sensationalist “, it has painstakingly gathered the evidence which it presents in a readable and accessible way.
One thing we have learned about manipulative narcissistic abusers is that they work within the context in which they can prosper, and some of the attitudes identified here as unhealthy were amplified by Fletcher and Smyth. That they were able to prosper and cover up also comes out of the context. Without Bash there could have been no Smyth or Fletcher abusing many young men, directly and indirectly.
As one moved up the organisation one might be admitted to ever more closed rings of confidentiality. Smyth told his victims they must tell none of the others. Extraordinarily, he warned one of his victims to stay away from Jonathan Fletcher who , he said, was dangerous. I understand JF has referred to the hierarchical way in which he treated followers – two were openly told they were “ D-listers”.
So, yes Edmund and others were winnowed out and were of no interest to these project leaders, but others were not, and became more and more part of a toxic freemasonry. It is that minority that “ Bleeding for Jesus “ examines, who they were, how they operated, and how they escaped detection.
You have to read it to understand why this is important to the CofE.
If I may make an extreme comparison, the Nazi War criminal Josef Mengele retuned from Latin America for his father’s funeral in Germany and friends and neighbours did not turn him in m even though the horror of his crimes were known. Many complicit in similar crimes have been shielded by an omertà culture.
There is a group tendency not to betray, and this we have a list of about 125 ordinary folk associated in various ways with Iwerne who knew or suspected what had been going on for years and said nothing. For such silencing instincts to predominate in a Christian context is profoundly wrong. The vast majority of Iwerne attenders did not know, but plenty did and the culture that kept them in polite denial needs to be explored as the book does.
I hope our conservative Evangelical friends take the book seriously; denial is tempting, but proper engagement is best for everyone. That said, thanks Edmund for encouraging proportionality.
Very important point. I identified a cabal of three leaders deliberately covering up abuse after moving to a new church. I was wrong. The cabal was much larger with more parish leaders involved, and extended to Diocesan personnel. This is without counting pcc members who politely ignored shenanigans. Nobody put victims of abuse first. I wonder how often this is replicated in the Church of England.
Thanks Edmund, that’s an interesting account.
One thing that intrigues me is how the other members of the Christian Union knew you’d been to Westminster School? Did they recognise your school tie, or did they ask? I was at Sussex Uni in the 70s, and can’t remember there was any discussion of which schools CU members had attended. Of course, that was Sussex (possibly not a Iwerne recruiting ground), and I was female, and my school days had been in the USA.
But though there were certainly public school alumni at Sussex at that time, I didn’t encounter any Iwerne men until I went to Wycliffe in 1984 to train for the ministry. They were a very noticeable group at Wycliffe.
Edmund, I think you underestimate the militarism of the whole public school system. We were being formed as *officers* as well as gentlemen and taught to give and take orders unquestioningly. It was so pervasive as to be invisible except in hindsight.
I was taught to shoot at my prep school, where the dormitories in one house were named after notable battleships and aircraft carriers; at Marlborough there was still an Officers Training Corps, though it may have become a Combined Cadet Force, in line with the shrinkage of the armed forces.
Neither Harriet Sherwood nor Andrew Graystone (who also calls it a militaristic cult) were educated in this way, so I don’t think their reaction to Iwerne was surprising.
I can support Edward’s account from my own experience of being a senior camper at Iwerne. I first attended in 1970. His account hits the right note. Thanks Edward.
I agree with Andrew Brown. My prep school in the early 1950s was definitely about forming an officer class. The Christian Union organised a series of camps for boys from minor public schools and grammar school oiks (of whom by this time I was one) to which I was despatched about 1957. I remember being surprised at how militaristic it was and how authoritarian the Commandant – The Rev Leslie Lawrie – was. It was, of course, the period of National Service, which was used to prop up the crumbling Empire. Definitely the Church Militant .
I suspect that the reasons why Westminster and some other inner London schools were not viewed as fertile ground for Bash camps and other forms of evangelical endeavour were:
(i) The cramped physical site and lack of space of sports facilities (except in Vincent Square and on the river, at Wandsworth after 1872, rather that ‘at water’) meant that it never developed the same overwhelming cult of sportsmanship/’manliness’ evident at other major private schools and, as such, the OTC/CCF did not develop quite the same prestige as elsewhere. Soccer, cricket and rowing (but also individualistic sports like fives) were evidently treated seriously, but not at the expense of other attainments.
(ii) After a period of deep decline, the mid/late-nineteenth century headmasters, Liddell, Scott, Rutherford and Gow, revived the school, but the revival was less on the sports field or river, as in the massive emphasis on the classics – harking back to the golden era of the school under Camden and Busby. Liddell, Rutherford, Gow, Christie, Hamilton and Spurr were/are serious classical scholars.
(iii) The lack of space also meant that the school, which had little in the way of endowments like Charterhouse, Christ’s Hospital, Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Merchant Taylors’ or St Paul’s (those schools all quit London to get more space for sports), had to depend on day pupils for much of its income. The religious outlook of that cadre would therefore depend upon that of their parents, to a greater extent than in other ‘great schools’, meaning that they stand a better chance of being more secular-minded. The day pupils were also allocated to boarding houses: the effect was that no boarding house could easily become a Christian kraal.
(iv) The last clerical head, Costley-White, finished in 1936 (that was quite late by the standards of most great schools). Most subsequent heads have not been ostentatiously pious: indeed, in 2004, John Rae completed a book about his agnosticism.
(v) Even before the last war there were increasing numbers of pupils who were from other faiths, notably Judaism, but mostly from none. Unlike, say, Cheltenham or Clifton, there was never a separate ‘Jewish’ house: such ‘integration’ made the school ‘cosmopolitan’, and this tendency increased markedly from the 1950s. Similar changes occurred at other ‘central’ London schools as University College School (secular), Highgate, Emanuel, City of London, etc. The parents increasingly became bien-pensant professionals for whom anything smacking of evangelicalism would have been alien, if not repugnant.
Strange, though, that a school in the lee of the Abbey and Church House should not be fertile ground for the faith. The great late Theo Zinn here gives an excellent flavour of the academic atmosphere of the school in the early 1970s, with the famous Play (Terence’s ‘Phormio’): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eUsTqQI0Gg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UkNDbYb8O4&t=23s.
Great analysis FH. One possible query, re. “The religious outlook of that cadre would therefore depend upon that of their parents, to a greater extent than in other ‘great schools’, meaning that they stand a better chance of being more secular-minded.”
That depends entirely on which side is more secular to start with. In principle it could be the reverse. A good example would be certain northern city schools where a large Muslim parent contingent is able to restrain the social liberalism that would otherwise be taught within.
I’m reminded of C S Lewis’ concluding remarks to “Fernseed and Elephants”:
“Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the vicar; now he tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more.”
I am very grateful for all the replies to my post. I accept the various corrective points made.
Re identification: the fellow student who had a hand in my ‘conversion’ would have learnt which school I attended in the natural course of conversation. He was a VPS man who would have been on the lookout for suitable ‘recruits’.
Re Westminster: I realize now that it was not a typical public school. It was very cosmopolitan and full of the sons of people prominent in the arts and sciences. The cadet corps was abolished in my second year. The only thing that it was respectable to show enthusiasm about was drama. Worshipping daily in Westminster Abbey set us apart, though probably most people found it a bore.
Re the ‘omerta’ of VPS: while I agree that this may owe a lot to the public school military ethos, I would point out that a similar (if less disciplined) ethic of pseudo-loyalty and secrecy permeates much of the evangelical establishment, even where VPS influence can be discounted. There must be a link between the ethos and the theology!
Re sensationalism: I did not intend to imply that Graystone’s book is sensationalistic, only that the Guardian reviewer was reaching too readily for journalistic memes.
Thank you, Edmund. I’m still interested that the school attended would naturally come up in the course of conversation. I can’t recall ever having that conversation with anyone. It wouldn’t strike me, or most of my friends, as having any relevance.
At Sussex I had a tutorial partner who’d been to Benenden. I only knew that because our tutor, who had presumably read her file, asked whether Benenden hadn’t taught her not to plagiarise. It stuck in my mind because it was so unusual to hear someone’s school referred to, even if they had only recently left it.
It confirms to me the foreignness of the VPS/public school mindset.
Thank you Edmund.
Janet, as a grammar school boy from a economically poor family at Oxford in the ‘70s I can say ones pedigree in terms of schooling was very much to the fore. In part it was about who knew who, in part intuitive, in part checked out. it was talked about because to some it mattered. And in the Iwerne VPS circles subset in OICCU it mattered.
Interestingly, it was not necessarily totally determinative. Edmund’s experience is proof that with the wrong public school background one could make it. The “process of redemption” (if i could misappropriate the word) he describes through serving as a senior camper and attending a training houseparty was one that was offered to me as well, despite my even humbler background. I knew my Bible and wanted to share my faith (ie I was keen and sound!) and Importantly for a time as a charismatic I was willing to play the conservative evangelical game. So I was taken in hand, introduced to the right people and invited to participate in Iwerne – by Smyth. However the idea that my humble background of which I was proud was to be made good repulsed me. I roundly rejected it, and quickly stopped playing the conservative evangelical game. The journey worked for some; a colleague from a similar school background took that journey, thrived in it and is now a key player in the emerging story.
That’s very interesting. I haven’t before heard of a lad from a humble background being invited to Iwerne camps. But, good for you for not wanting your roots to be ‘redeemed’ by Iwerne.
Thanks Janet. It was a hard choice, and to be honest I didn’t handle it well. But was always grateful I’d made it, and not least as the truth has become public over the past four years.
As for the fact of them reaching out to people not in their normal vein, I’m not sure how much that happened. We will see.
Janet
Maybe it was an Oxbridge thing (identification of school attended), when I belonged to a Cambridge CU in the 70s I remember discussion of schools – mainly Sherbourne but perhaps that’s because a few from college came from there. The context in which I remember it was a college CU pre-term conference away at which Hugh Palmer and (I think) JF were present
So maybe it was in fact a particularly Iwerne thing?
I must thank you for writing your piece, which I much enjoyed. Personally, I think that the comparisons with Buchman are apt: the need to ‘shore up’ both the class system and its twin sister, ‘traditional’ Christianity, had been heightened by the rapid changes which occurred after about 1963-65. By the late 1960s there would have been an added urgency, with all the established norms and verities dissolving. That might account for the almost comical emphasis on ‘soundness’. If Nash and his collaborators knew anything, it was that systems of class power and belief are undone as surely from inside as by any external force, and there were too many signs of that happening. ‘Something had to be done’ to stop the fish rotting from the head…
I should add that I have watched part of the Phormio again: it exemplifies the best sort of liberal humanism that may be associated with Westminster (I mean a scholastic rather than philosophical humanism). Zinn was evidently a superb teacher and his enthusiasm was infectious; in Jonathan Katz he had an equally formidable successor (whose interests extended to Sanskrit – in the manner of Edwin Abbott of the City of London School – and other Indo-Iranian languages). Zinn was evidently a far more tolerant teacher than Busby, whose bust (a copy of the one by Rysbrack at Christ Church) may be seen glowering in the background of Zinn’s class. Busby was very free with the birch, and it was written of his successor, Robert Freind:
“Ye sons of Westminster who still retain
Your antient dread of Busby’s awful reign,
Forget at length your fears, — your panic end, —
The monarch of the place is now a Freind.”
As to Sussex, John Fulton and Asa Briggs (John Sparrow’s Sir Gas Bag) were anxious to create an entirely new kind of university, arguably in their own images: classless, humane and progressive. They very much wanted a university shorn of any Oxbridge lumber so, unlike Geoffrey Templeman’s collegiate system at the University of Kent, there were no colleges, and the ‘school’ (i.e., faculty) was everything. Sussex in the 1970s was much the most ‘fashionable’ of the plate-glass institutions created under the aegis of Lionel Robbins. It was just the sort of place where admitting to having gone to one private school or another would likely have received relatively short shrift, or at least with bland indifference. Indeed, Christianity struggled also at Sussex to gain a foothold for a while: there was considerable opposition to having any form of chapel, and it was only in 1966 that Fulton was persuaded that there should be a non-denominational ‘meeting house’, designed by Basil Spence, and made possible by a donation from Sydney Caffyn of the car dealership (who was a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church of England), Stanmer church in the neighbouring Park being used periodically as a more specifically Anglican location until its closure in 2009 (it is now in poor condition).
Froghole, I can confirm much of what you say about Sussex Uni. There were a number of scions of illustrious families in the arts and media among my contemporaries, such as the Attenborough girls. Most of my tutors in the School of English and American Studies were former Oxford dons and being very consciously not Oxbridge. All that is part of what I meant when I said Sussex was probably not a Iwerne recruiting ground, although by the time I arrived in 1974 we had not only Basil Spence’s chapel but also a full-time Anglican chaplain and a lively CU. In my final year, incidentally, Michael Ball (Peter Ball’s brother) was the chaplain.
But all that was a long time ago and in the interim I have mixed with people of all classes and in many locations, and what schools people attended has never been a common topic of conversation. It still seems to me a strange preoccupation to have. I realise its significance to a certain sort of Brit as a signifier of social status, but that just underlines the fact that in the UK today – even among Christians – class snobbery still plays far too great a part.
I hadn’t thought about school much until participating in these pages and IICSA, preferring otherwise to forget those unhappy times. In other walks of life I’ve not noticed people talking about school at all. It’s hardly relevant. Perhaps the obsession with school and class is around the church world?
Anthony Archer on ‘Surviving Church’ 3.10.19 post identified 1968-78 as Iwerne’s highwater mark, which in terms of numbers it probably was (peaking in 1977 I believe), with a strong core of participants.
As I gather you were fortunate to be part of that Christ Church generation which upheld muscular and happy Christianity at its best – Christian Union members and Iwerne men were captains of cricket (Gillingham), rugby (Collins), prominent in boxing and rowing (Ashton), and this list is not exhaustive. The benign Christian influence of Henry Chadwick, himself a Iwerne man of the past and by then the man at the top in Christ Church, must have been a power for good.
I think a lot of women, a lot of dibbled people, and a lot of ethnic (and other) minorities, would consider there was nothing ‘happy’ and ‘wholesome’ about muscular Christianity. Thank God those days are behind us.
I will say more about my experience of Iwerne when I have read Bleeding for Jesus. Campers’ reflections will of course be different but all need to reflect in the light of Smyth, who I remember fairly well.
Is it just me, or is it weird to give someone the nickname “Bash”?
But it’s good to get another perspective. It’s good to remember not everyone suffered.
Oh, and in my experience, nearly everyone is brought up not to “grass”.
Whereas, going to American schools, it was hammered into me that reporting offences is a civic duty. I’ve never understood the English attitude to ‘grasses’, but I do know it’s been a major contribution to cover-ups, not least in the Church.
You should read Stalky and Co. The code of honour develops from the dual role of the masters: they are both your superior officers and the occupying army. So they must be resisted but not physically and not by outright lying. Playing dumb is a different matter.
Incidentally, another point of beating as a punishment was that it was meant to teach the ability to bear physical pain, and the prospect of physical pain. When muscular Christians taught that the flesh is nothing and the spirit is everything, being flogged was one of the ways they’d learned this, or learned to wish devoutly that it were true.
Yes, indeed. Kipling’s Stalky and Co is a most instructive if unpleasant book. It is required reading for understanding the public school mentality . Attitudes haven’t changed as much as people like to think ?
I attended, as a scholarship day boy, a minor, but very ancient, public school attached to one of our ancient cathedrals from 1955-1963. Sport was important and as a very weedy short-sighted child, I dreaded rugby – especially lying in the wet and cols mud, holding a ball upright by my finger tips to allow a great oaf to kick it. (I think even rugby has got more civilised but that hasn’t diminished my hatred of it).
There was the CCF which took place during teaching time. I didn’t want to join and my father (from the Brethren who actually served in WW2, rather than being a conscientious objector) said ‘they’ll get you into uniform soon enough!’ My alternative was cycling!
From there to Cambridge and CICCU. There was a Iwerne influence but not overwhelming and no different from others who had been to the same school. I remember meeting ‘Bash’ and was singularly unimpressed. David Watson’s influence, as Curate to Mark Ruston at The Round Church was much stronger. The crisis came when ‘he went charismatic.’ That caused a number of problems both generally and personally. 3 of us shared a luxurious suite of rooms; one of the sharers (unlike the other 2 of us , from a prestigious public school, Winchester) fell under the influence of David Watson and ‘ received the gift of tongues.’ Good for him, but not for us when he started loudly singing in tongues at 3am.
Myself and the other sharer met both with Mark Ruston and Herbie Carson (St Pauls’s Cambridge ultra Protestant) to try and understand this.
What I am trying to express through this long ramble, is that for impressionable, and I think in the 1960s, quite immature and naive young men, leaders with charisma had a profound and distorting influence. This is the danger of the cult of personality around Smyth and dare I say, a number of current ‘big names’ especially in the Con Evo constituency. Liberal catholics don’t tend to react in the same way to personalities.
The key is 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 where Paul negates personality in favour of the Gospel.
‘At the time Our Age entered the public schools they inculcated two ideals: manliness and loyalty. Sports had replaced Athens as the ideal city state and not for nothing did Loretto and Sedburgh choose as their motto ‘Spartam nactus est, hanc exorna’. In Bowen’s house at Harrow no boy might have an armchair, a fire or a warm bath. A boy had to endure the headmaster’s birch or the prefect’s cane without flinching or crying, however unfair and however savage the beating might be. The dread of waiting to be beaten and the ritual of being called up and sentenced was almost as bad as the agony of the beating itself. Loyalty was the supreme asset which investment in a public school education produced. And it was a transferable asset. It guaranteed devotion to regiment, college, hospital, the civil and colonial service or to Jardine Matheson. The Officers’ Training Corps was the symbol of the greatest entity – of loyalty to the nation.
These were the schools who sent into the world, as E. M. Forster said, boys with ‘well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and underdeveloped hearts’. For boys who were clever, retiring, intellectual, nondescript, late developers, rebels, boys who were learning to flex their minds, their wits, their will and show that they did not accept good form opinion, they were a Gehenna.’ (from Noel Annan, ‘Our Age: Portrait of a Generation’ (1990), at 43).
All this was part of what Annan described as the ‘insufferable ideal’: the national need to form gentlemen and, specifically, Christian gentlemen, who would lead their obedient men over the top and march strait as a fox across no-man’s land to almost certain, but glorious, death. Yet as Annan also noted in his 1966 Romanes lecture, ‘The Disintegration of an Old Culture’, that ideal had come under fatal assault by the the forces of modernity within a culture of choice and consumption, a culture in which appeals to authority and the past no longer had any traction.
Nash, Smythe and their ilk were engaged in a desperate attempt to stem the tide. If the public schools lost their ‘traditional’ ethos, there would be no officer class; if there were no officer class, not only would the ‘rest’ fail to obey the lead of those who had education, capital or position, but they would deny even Christianity itself. If they were to deny both their betters and the faith, then the country would be prostrate before the forces of libertinism, anarchy or even communism. In the 1970s, in a country swept by free love, pornography, irreligion, immigration, inflation and the diktats of such ‘traitors’ as Hugh Scanlon, Jack Jones and Arthur Scargill, that ‘dark’ prospect seemed a real possibility. Smythe, presumably, felt himself divinely ordained to beat that prospect out of his charges: in his deranged mind there was simply too much at stake.
Many thanks, Mr Brown, for all your reportage over the years: you have taught me a great deal.
I certainly puzzled over the attitude to ‘grassing’, since it seemed to go against the Christian truth/lies thing – the only explanation I could come up with was that it had been found in practice that people’s motives were rarely pure in grassing – they might (a) be gossiping, (b) be forgetting that adults could often see for themselves what was going on, (c) be acting self-righteously, (d) be actively malicious by reporting people with whom they had a previous beef or history of conflict, on whom they wanted revenge. All these 4 are relevant today too, of course. (a) is universal, (b) is the busybody tendency, (c) is the priggish tendency, and (d) is the revenge instinct, or else trying to pull people down to a lower level. I always judged I didn’t have any of these as a motive – which may well have been so to an extent, and just went with truth.
Reading something in an article today, I wonder whether people are influenced by the war, and then the Soviet Union, when “grassing” on someone could easily mean they died. And the chance of what had been said not being true was very high.
I think it goes back further than that. I read somewhere that it’s a boarding school thing – the teachers are the common enemy, so you don’t tell on each other. But I have to say I’ve also encountered it in Salford, and again on a tough estate. There it was because if you reported something to the police you’d get a brick through your window, or worse. I got a phone intended for the blind, so I could dial 999 at night without turning the lights on. If the lights go on in. house and then the cops arrive, it’s a giveaway who did the dobbing in.
My school was Liberal catholic C of E with plenty of emphasis on corporal punishment, as mentioned before. Sport was for those with innate ability. As a day school and at the time inadequate facilities for everyone to be sporty, there was zero military activity either.
Its selling point was academic grades. One boy in our set got a B for maths and was made to resit it. It was considered shameful. My use of the word ‘got’ would also have been reprimanded!
I was an undergrad at the “Godless Institution of Gower Street” (University College London) where despite its atheistic foundation, Christian societies were many and flourishing. I joined the CU which was a bit wishy-washy in my (then) con-evo opinion. There was a thriving Anglican Society. Jonathan Fletcher was speaker at the CU house party and the diminutive Christian Medical Fellowship on one occasion. I found him charming and engaging. I’m perfectly sure my school’s pedigree wasn’t the right one there. Neither were these two groups evangelical enough for me or others to be “invested” further in. I breathe a sigh of relief frequently on that front.
Private education is not a homogeneous commodity in any sense of the word. You’re buying different things whichever ones your children attend. Some “advantages” carry hidden damage. Reading different accounts on these pages over the years illustrates this very clearly.
David Fletcher and his contemporaries (Watson, Green) will have been of an age (the 1950s) where public culture was Christian, Billy Graham was packing Harringay, the Queen was backing him to the hilt in her initial 1957 Christmas broadcast, and optimism was on the increase.
By the time the sexual revolution hit, they will have been set in their view of what was normal.
Jonathan Fletcher is 10 years younger than his brother, and of an age with the late John Smyth. The sexual revolution, and responses to it, will have been far more an issue in their formative adult years. And one can see that Iwerne, as an organisation, was one liable to be peculiarly challenged by the sexual revolution, which was diametrically opposed to the wholesomeness for which they in the 1930s to 1950s and subsequently stood, and which their leadership understood to be the normal way things were.
I remember one afternoon when there were meringues for tea. Bash was there, and he said I was to fill my mouth with meringue, and then say “pussy.” I tried it, with embarrassing results. Fun.
Um, did ‘pussy’ mean then what it means now?
And who got out the hoover and cleared up the mess?
I wonder if some of these overgrown children ever grew up?
Janet, I took it then that pussy was short for pussy cat, as I do now. I expect I am missing something. My free will offering went over a table with a plastic top, thankfully. I forget who cleared it up.
See John’s comment below. ‘Pussy’ and ‘bunny’ both have sexual connotations, which at least some people taking part would know of. So these ‘games’ could be passed off as innocent, while in fact breaking down people’s boundaries and being a gateway to abuse.
It did not occur to me at the time, but in general the atmosphere was happy and good clean fun.
Chubby bunnies was a popular game in my very non public school church youth group in the early 90’s. I do remember it at oxford but I think it was simply something fun that was not linked to excessive alcohol consumption as many other student activities were.
I thought the chubby bunny thing came from the way that a rabbit would store food in pouches either side of its mouth – you gained that look while playing.
Far more suggestive was the game “Making love” that was played in the rolling magazine tent at Greenbelt the early 90’s. This was almost pitched to sound suggestive to give interest to a fairly basic game of spelling out the letters of a word (in this case Love) with a the bodies of a team of people. I can remember other games that just would not be played nowadays like making a rope out of clothes belonging to a team.
Janet I suspect there was considerable naivety around these terms in the evangelical constituency that Iwerne drew people from. I remember being astonished that a Christian musical that was popular amongst evangelicals in the 1970s could be called ‘Come Together’ and even in the late 80s Emmanuel Northwood called their all age service by the same name. It was the cause of some mirth in the local area.
I recall a 1970s praise album which featured a track called ‘Cause Me to Come’, followed by ‘Bring My Body Closer’.
Yes, some were naive, but not all would have been. Anyone who read a newspaper, looked at magazine, or watched TV, knew about Playboy Bunnies. And John’s remarks about the early stages of grooming apply.
But all that means is that one of the current usages of the word was that, not that that usage is the one that would immediately spring to mind. There would be those for whom it would be the first to spring to mind – but not those inhabiting healthy contexts.
That’s absolutely right, Christopher. The ‘pussy’ idiocy was also inflicted on me, in my late teens .. and I remember at the time realising with amazement that the perpetrators (older than me by some ten years) seemed to have no awareness of the word’s other possible meaning (and this was of course at a time when Americanisms were less well-known in Britain). But I also remember Jonathan Fletcher at that time saying with pride that he would never watch a film with a more adult rating than PG. There are serious issues around his domineering personality and its damaging consequences in ministry, but I remain convinced that sexual naivete and repression as much as anything more consciously malicious underlie his current problems. (This is in no way to minimise the damaging effect on others of his actions.)
I don’t want to deny the possibility of double meanings and concealed intentions, but I’m sure Chubby bunnies (aka Fluffy bunnies) which was played as a silly party game (along with the chocolate game and the smartie on a flour pudding game) at the socially- and gender-mixed youth group of the south London Baptist church of my youth without anyone attaching any other meaning to ‘bunny’ than they would have to the Easter bunny, or to bunny hops.
It may be important to know that Pussy was the (presumably informal) name of Bash’s aunt, who had lived with his family during his upbringing. I doubt the family was aware of any vulgar association.
Hmm Janet, the mental image conjured up by juxtaposing your two questions….
But I doubt Iwerne’s muscular-Christianity culture, which you’ve already deprecated, would have much time for a “pussy” (feeble gutless person) and would naturally spew it out of its mouth.
At houseparties associated with St Helen’s Bishopsgate they did something similar, this time with marshmallows and saying “Chubby Bunnies”. Maybe that’s a mildly derogatory reference to girls as well? If you pronounced it audibly you had to stuff another MM in, and so on until it became absurd.
I hope these were house parties for toddlers, not for adults?
Not sure toddlers would hold many MMs, maybe the mini kind but I don’t know if they had those then. Mainly young adults as I recall, mostly I guess from the RML Bible study groups newcomers were encouraged to join.
Not something I would have thought of – but I don’t see why people can’t occasionally have a bit of lighthearted fun no matter how old they are.
If I were a newcomer, that would have put me off for good. It’s not my idea of fun.
Yes, we’re learning a great deal about other ‘lighthearted’ activities, such as JF’s “lighthearted forfeits” (beatings). Attempting to dismiss denigrating others, such as women as humorous, we are also beginning to learn is crass and ugly. It’s time to face up to the truth about this.
Are you suggesting the MM thing fits the bill?
It might be innocent, of course, but ‘bunnies’ might equally be the Playboy variety. Even if we assume everyone will be thinking of rabbits, of the wildlife rather than sex toy kind, the game is designed to make people look ridiculous. That doesn’t seem to me a kind thing to do, especially to newcomers.
Abusers do use this kind of ‘light-hearted’ activity as part of grooming behaviour, to lower their victims’ resistance to more obviously dubious behaviour and then to outright abuse.
I had a posh boyfriend once. His idea of a jolly jape was to have a bowtie tying game. The point being to humiliate those who had come with ready tied versions. He was about twenty. He had time to grow out of it. And I didn’t think it was funny, even then.
Chubby Bunnies was certainly around in the mid-to-late 1980s when there was a contest at OICCU between a Northern engineer, the incoming principal of Wycliffe Hall and an Australian Bishop (I think the Bishop won with an improbable 30+ marshmallows). It is a funny phrase concerning rabbits. Lee Abbey and OICCU houseparties had revues with good-fun content of this nature, in the same way that uniformed organisations and students in general do.
In the late 1980s the incoming principal of Wycliffe would have been Dick Lucas, who had previously been at St Helens Bishopsgate. There does seem a certain theme here.
If there was an Australian bishop, it might have been the year of the Lambeth Conference. I recall that David Penman, also a conservative evangelical, was in the UK in, I think, 1988.
You are confusing two people with the same Christian name.
Dick Lucas was and remained rector at Bishopsgate; Dick France took over at Wycliffe Hall. And I am sure both of them have/had a sense of fun.
2nd clarification: In fact the bishop (actually Archbishop or probably at the time Archbishop-elect) was David Penman’s successor at Melbourne, Keith Rayner. The year was rag-week 1989. The comment from the rag-week rep (who was tasked with giving each university society an appropriate ‘forfeit’) was that they had considered asking the Christian Union to have a race to see who could break all 10 commandments in the shortest possible time, but things had ended up with Chubby Bunnies instead. The president’s reply (to be taken in the spirit and genre it was given) was ‘We’ll try that next time.’.
Could it be that japes and pranks (and investment in fun friendships in general) are a way people in their twenties use their surplus energy unless (as suddenly became the case relatively recently) they are socially allowed sex before/outside marriage?
Dick Lucas was never Principal of Wycliffe. The reference is presumably to Dick France, who was Principal from 1989-1995.
And the (Arch)Bishop was not as stated but was his successor at Melbourne.
Sorry, you’re right.
Dick France was a lovely gentle man with a good sense of humour. I know he found the Lucas-ade faction something of a trial. This was before the formation of Reform
Christopher, when this is between people belonging to the same thing, including seminary / bible school, it will always have undertones. To be tricked and hazed out of “loyalty” taking priority over self-respect spells disaster for respect for others.
That is probably why the chosen participants were the authority figures rather than students who would have been in danger of being embarrassed. Apart from the one student (who was known to be game for a laugh, a terrific guy and a friend). The last thing they would have thought would have been that it would all be analysed years later – it was just a bit of fun for rag week, at the suggestion not of the CU but of the rag week rep – though the CU chose the particular nature of the fundraising activity.
Teasing always has an undercurrent of cruelty. Sometimes the victim is ok with it, but actually, I think it’s better avoided altogether, frankly.
Thinking about the non-innocent activities and particularly the disrespect for property and prank in the post. Abusers all, without exception, try their targets out and build up to cumulatively passing boundaries. Doing things which are socially unacceptable is the classic way to do this, and if apparently innocent can be plausibly denied. The car parking, bus stop prank, and the fact of exposing people to a potentially dangerous activity are all similar grooming activities. The dangerous walk requiring skill would reveal a lot about people’s attitudes and behaviour under stress, as well as whether you would go along with things.
That may be true, but (as I’m sure you agree) it does not by any means follow that pranks are always in that sort of context. They happen in friendship contexts; in school contexts; in medical-student contexts; in Catholic Trainee-Priest contexts. I have often thought that trainee ministers/priests (including Iwerneites) and trainee doctors can be linked in this respect – they know they will not be able to marry, or not till they have finished their training, so they let off steam in other ways. Secondly both of these categories remain students for appreciably longer than others.
Many Anglican ordinands are already married. Others can marry during training as long as they have permission.
When I was at Wycliffe only a handful of students had begun training straight from university; most had had another career first.
Of course. Sorry, I should have clarified. I was speaking specifically of Iwerneites who were typically expected to devote the energy of their twenties to the gospel before marrying after they hit 30. This was not a hard and fast rule, of course. It was also quite normal for them to marry in their mid to late 20s.
I can vouch for this. Having come to faith through the ministry of Jonathan Fletcher (to whom I remain profoundly grateful), one of the final nails in the coffin as far as my Iwerne involvement was concerned was an extraordinary ‘disciplinary breakfast’ (not as lurid as it sounds .. just the occasion for breath-taking personal rudeness) with David Fletcher when I had the temerity to become engaged to be married in my early twenties.
Oh quite. You have (perhaps intentionally) highlighted something I didn’t make clear enough – that the early stages of grooming are always explainable as the pranks you describe.
Yes, and I have heard ‘to the pure all things are pure’ quoted at those who protest. Nowadays we would call that gaslighting or DARVO (deny, and reverse victim and offender).
But how do we distinguish that from occasions when people are genuinely having fun and being light hearted? That, after all, is not a rare activity – not in healthy societies, anyway. The examples I cited (revues and Chubby Bunnies) were either student-led or involved the usual occasional laugh at the expense of authority figures. In neither case, therefore, were the powerful exploiting the less powerful. And they would be aghast that something so trivial and everyday be subjected to analysis. Neither of these is in the category of the Fletcher forfeits; we should also imagine that the japes of the unmarried may well continue for those who continue to be unmarried, there being no within-marriage outlet.
I think the fact that you see such ‘japes’ as being an outlet for sexual tension speaks for itself.
Play is universal, and the fact that play appears years before sexual desire shows that play is not essentially a sex-substitute. But play among friends will be found less among the married than among the unmarried.
Edmund you stated that “Nor was there, to my knowledge, any undue pressure to be converted: I’m quite sure that a 16 year old presented with an ideology [wa]s mature enough to make a choice”. But youngsters from a family known to a church are probably sufficiently converted (in the real sense) already. Jesus never took children away from home (no matter how they’d have enjoyed the daring) and confronted them with a momentous “choice”. Camps should be low key relaxation.
The trouble with that is being uncritical rather than thoughtful about one’s upbringing. One could be born into any kind of family and will initially go along with it, but critical faculties will and should be employed later. That is why confirmation ceremonies happen, why many people do not identify with the religion of their youth, why it was frequently heard that people thought their local church did not explain the central Christian message clearly, so that they would ‘twig’ only later and elsewhere.
What you say about VPS operating behind the scenes is certainly true. I suppose all boards and committees are behind the scenes, these no more than any others. The Wycliffe Hall board included David Fletcher and the late Andrew Dalton from VPS at the time 10-15 years ago when Richard Turnbull (doubtless a VPS-influenced appointee) was appointed as principal and Wycliffe was in the news because of the relatively controversial nature of the apppintment. (As Ridley Hall and St John’s Nottingham were solidly open-evangelical and Oak Hill solidly conservative-evangelical, it was naturally over Wycliffe that the battle took place.) And of course Jonathan Fletcher was on numerous boards.
Naivety is structured in to these exclusive communities. By erecting walls around the chosen it’s quite possible to see, by reading the above various threads, that sometimes that ignorance endures in perpetuity.
The walls are usually virtual. The exhortation only to look inwards to the elite teachers and to avoid all external non-permitted sources of information, ensures this. At an impressionable age these exhortations are most likely to be embedded.
It’s quite possible to be intelligent and highly educated and not see this. Again follow the threads here and earlier.
Set against the coached naivety is a small group of leaders who know exactly what they are doing. I agree with the comments above about grooming and gaslighting. These leaders groom a wider group of leaders unwittingly to continue the system where abuse can be disguised.
My abuser started with a “silly game”, and escalated from there to abuse.
I’m really sorry you suffered this Mary, and thank you for your contributions which help us all build a picture to understand these things.
Thank you. As has been pointed out, malicious behaviour masquerades as “good fun”. “Helpfulness” also disguises malicious behaviour . A controlling and domineering person “helps” me, despite my asking them three times to stop their behaviour and leave me alone. I am then portrayed as a badly behaved disabled person. Please don’t stop offering help to disabled people. Your help will either be gratefully accepted or politely declined. It is the person who disguise s their malicious behaviour under cover of being helpful and insists on being “helpful” who can be grouped with the person who plays silly games. My disability makes me easy pickings for these types of behaviour. I am the obvious target. This behaviour is condoned everywhere except in church, the only place I am unsafe. And church is the one place abusers are protected, at least in my diocese and My parish.
Ouch. That’s tough. I hope you have good support?
Yes, from this website. Not in my parish or Diocese. A previous vicar pleaded guilty to safeguarding offences after I pursued my complaint when my Bishop wrote telling me I must not complain. Then I was charged by my Diocese at the police station with making unfounded and baseless allegations against him. Sadly I have had to complain about his replacement. I await a response. Every day I feel very blessed by the kindness of others as I go about town. Most people are lovely, willing to give a helping hand when asked, and otherwise respecting my independence. S breast that with my Rector writingto reprimand me for not following visual clues I cannot see given by stewards, writes reprimanding me for telling stewards I am cannot see and would they speak instead of using visual signals, all whilst failing to follow advice from national safeguarding about a written agreement and writing to tell me I must not show the agreement to my churchwarden. My parish is a place where “silly games” have flourished for a number of years and I know two other vulnerable adults who have suffered. I fear for children who are less able to complain and are more easily silenced.
Mary, the idea that you’re not allowed to tell people you can’t see is…. words fail me! It’s not normal. If moving to another church were practical, I suspect things would be so different, you’d be astonished.
I have worshipped happily and without incident in other churches and know really good clergy. Of course in this blog we post about the bad because that is what affects us. As you say the contrast between a parish where good flourishes and a parish which is the opposite is great.
It’s downright pathological!
Sadly as a spiritual director, sometimes having errant clergy sent to me, the immaturity and worse of some ordained priests has to be seen to be believed. And the hierarchy wanted me to do the impossible and patch them up. They always remained in post. One Methodist Superintendent did leave in disgust, but he was a very Godly man.
I had never heard of the Bash Camps until I read about them in Pete Ward’s “Growing up Evangelical”. As a youngster growing up in 1960s North London I attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Elstree and the local Crusaders group on Sunday afternoons. Of course Crusaders had been formed in the early 1900s to fill a “gap in the market” for boys who went to independent day schools: not boarders at Public Schools nor the “hoi polloi” who went to Board Schools and went to church Sunday Schools. (As a result it has had to completely reinvent itself over recent decades).
Anyway, while totally non-militaristic (indeed we rather looked down on the Boys’ Brigade with its uniforms and bands), we did use the language of “Commandant” (shortened to “Commy”), “Adjutant” (“Adgy”), “Quarter-Master” and “Tent Officer” at camps into, I think, the 1970s at least and without thinking twice about it. I think that the memory of WW2 and National Service was still fresh enough in many adults’ memories to make this totally unremarkable; I’d also suggest that Britain still thought in more militaristic (even imperialistic) ways than it does today.
We also had, perhaps in the autumn, “recruiting drives” where boys were urged to bring their friends along to class; indeed, there were rewards (in the shape of points for your team) if you did this.
I can’t comment of course on the Christian formation given at Bash Camps. I can however say that in my Crusader group (and, indeed, at the two weekend leadership training courses I attended) there was a positive encouragement to think fairly broadly about the Christian faith. Although the movement, as I found it, was definitely evangelical and conversionist, it sounds broader than both Iwerne and other Christian groups. I am grateful for it.
“Commandant” (shortened to “Commy”)
Hmm, and how did that sound when said out loud?
Reading all the above it seems that there’s scope for more than one research project for a PhD or the like on the creation of the conservative evangelical subculture through Iwerne, “lesser breeds”, Scripture Union camps, school Christian Union camps, Crusader Camps, etc etc. They all share the early C20 and especially post war cultural context, the Victorian legacy of Muscular Christianity, and a whole load more, and there are clearly a number of strands. But we need to avoid simplistic theories of their development so we can truly learn from it. Andrew Graystone has done a tremendous job of getting it started, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn.
I’m waiting for the Graystone book to arrive! Meanwhile Pete Ward’s “Growing Up Evangelical” is a good place to begin.
There’s a young church history lecturer at St Mellitus College who, according to the website is completing a PhD which “ focuses on the summer camps run by EJH Nash at Iwerne Minster in the interwar years and mid-twentieth century. He is considering the links between Nash’s ministry to the public schools and evangelical leadership formation, in particular conservative evangelical attitudes to class, masculinity and holiness.”
Perhaps worth a guest post on this site?
Very interesting. That’s just the dirt if work I was thinking of. Hope they continue to research the broad area.
“… sort if work ..”
Maybe, although if we take the description literally its field of survey would terminate when Nash passed the leadership to David Fletcher in 1967, and so the study would presumably have little to say about the Smyth scandal let alone Jonathan Fletcher’s. Also, huge changes took place in both Britain and British evangelicalism from around that date. Still, it’s always good to take a second look.
Regarding the “japes” and such-like.
From today’s reading in Morning Prayer from Proverbs 26
Like a maniac who shoots deadly firebrands and arrows,
so is one who deceives a neighbour and says “I am only joking”
Not sure if it is apposite but it seemed timely!
Love it. And being blind I also like Leviticus 19:14 “Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind ,but fear your God.I am the Lord.” My Rector ignored this one too.
A responsible and respected blog like this is a great way to uncover facts and debate theories about what is going on in the churches. Moreover it keeps the issues at the forefront of our thinking.
The disadvantage of books, official reports and academic theses is that these are quickly shelved and forgotten. Many are excellent too and it’s a pity they become history so quickly.
Social Media, however much we tire of them and however much their faults loom large, are an important venue where change will be hastened.
The world where only a select few have a say, has gone.