Archbishop Davidson, the General Strike and the Revised Prayer Book, 1926-1928: a Victorian stranded out of his time?
During the final two years of his Primacy, Archbishop Randall Davidson experienced a humiliating rebuff when he attempted to intervene in the General Strike of 1926, and saw decades of patient work dashed aside when Parliament refused to validate the Church of England's Revised Prayer Book in 1927-8. This essay, which is loosely linked to "Queen Victoria defended, 1926" (https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/418-queen-victoria-defended-1926), asks whether he was a Victorian who had become stranded out of his time.
In February 1926, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, defended the memory and public image of Queen Victoria – as discussed in a companion piece to this essay.[1] In the next two years, his last in the Primacy, he also made an inglorious attempt to intervene in the General Strike and twice failed to persuade Parliament to validate a Revised Prayer Book that had been the subject of deliberations, under his guidance, for two decades. Davidson presented his Times article on the Queen who had so warmly supported him as a eulogy for a misunderstood monarch, but it may also be read in elegiac terms in relation to his own career. Should we link these three episodes as evidence that the Archbishop had become a stranded dinosaur from a vanished era?
Randall Davidson in the nineteen-twenties Given that they have usually come to the job after proving their worth in careers of achievement, it is hardly surprising that few Archbishops of Canterbury have held the Primacy for as long as twenty years, a milestone that Davidson passed in 1923.[2] Indeed, by the nineteen-twenties, and especially after the upheaval of the First World War, it was becoming difficult to imagine the Church of England under any other leadership than his. Yet, fully to comprehend the pitfalls that trapped Davidson in 1926-8, we need to focus on the exact meaning of that loaded concept. We instinctively associate leadership with a jutted-jaw, first-out-of-the-trench authoritarian posture that inspires, rallies and triumphs. But that classic form of leadership can only function within an entity – whether a church, a political party or even a nation – in which there is unity of purpose and a broad degree of confidence in the judgement of those entrusted with its government. The Church of England had lacked these characteristics for at least one hundred years. Where an organisation is inherently divided, a different kind of leadership is requisite, one that seeks consensus and, if internal harmony cannot be secured, aims at the very least to avoid irreconcilable division. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson was determined to avoid conflict. "I will never be the Archbishop to force a disruption," he emphatically told the bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, in 1923. The combative Henson, who would have thought it his duty to provoke a schism on a desert island, is not necessarily the best witness to Davidson's character, but his comment on the Primate five years later seems fair enough: "The lifelong habit of 'getting round' difficulties, instead of facing them, hardly prepares a man for the handling of a crisis."[3]
In 1920, Randall Davidson was at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his moral authority. He won great praise by deftly presiding over the sixth Lambeth Conference, an international conference of 252 "Archbishops and Bishops in full communion with the Church of England", who gratefully recognised the personal ascendancy of the Archbishop of Canterbury by presenting him with an ebony crozier as a farewell gift. A gathering which might easily have dissolved into liturgical factions united behind an uplifting ecumenical Appeal for unity addressed to Christians around the world. That same year – indeed, in the very same week that the Conference began – also saw the first session of the new Church Assembly, which grew out of an earlier consultative body and was intended to supplant the existing Convocations by creating a legislature that would involve laity in the running of the Church. There was an obvious case for entrusting its first steps – which proved to be anything but faltering – to a Primate who was so generally respected.[4] However, it could be argued that, by 1923 – when he was 75, and twenty years into his Primacy – Davidson would have been well advised to retire and leave the Church of England in the hands of a successor.[5] There would have been problems. No Archbishop of Canterbury had ever resigned – although a few had been deposed – and some were shocked by the prospect. As the succession to Tait and Benson had confirmed, there were few candidates among the episcopate who could rise to the challenge of the Primacy. Bishops had deferred retirement during the First World War, with the result that, by 1923, more than half the dioceses were headed by a recent appointment, while some of the longer-serving veterans, notably the dangerously popular bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, lacked the tough streak necessary to lead the Anglican Church.[6] Davidson worked closely with the Archbishop of York, Davidson's fellow Scot, Cosmo Lang, whose essentially defensive attitude to the position of the Anglican Church made him the natural successor, as was demonstrated by his automatic translation when Davidson finally stepped down in 1928. But Lang was aloof, too openly ambitious, inclined to strike poses, "admired but not loved".[7] The liveliest of the younger bishops, William Temple, had only recently gone to Manchester: his frenetic attempts to redesign the Church and the whole world had something of aut Cantuar, aut nullus about him, but his time was not yet.[8] But, as the decade advanced and Davidson eased towards his eightieth birthday, it became obvious that either death or retirement would have to usher in a new Primate. Another Lambeth Conference was due in 1930, it could hardly be orchestrated by an octogenarian and a successor would need time to settle into the role.[9]
In October 1925, after five years of preliminary discussion, the Church Assembly began the detailed process of revising the Prayer Book of 1662. Throughout 1926 and 1927, the House of Bishops held intensive private sessions at Lambeth to hammer out an agreed document, eventually titled the Deposited Book. It was at this time that Davidson began to worry about the reputation of Queen Victoria in the light of the projected new publication of selections from her correspondence.
The truth was, as his generally favourable biographer bluntly acknowledged, that the Archbishop was "not really sufficiently interested" in the liturgical issues that so dangerously threatened Anglican unity. His forte was chairmanship and his principal priority was to ensure the despatch of business without becoming especially engaged himself in its content.[10] Was his concern for the memory of Queen Victoria a displacement activity? The Randall Davidson of Windsor and Winchester days was a master of multi-tasking, and he could hardly have survived the grinding workload of Lambeth for two decades without a machine-like ability to compartmentalise. But he was undoubtedly feeling the passage of years, as he admitted in January 1928: "While my mind can grasp one thing, it cannot grasp six or seven almost simultaneously, as it ought to be able to do, and as it had been able to do in the past."[11] Securing Queen Victoria's place in history was a step towards memorialising the achievements of his own career, and bringing it to a close on his own terms.
The Church of England, politics and strikes He was not to be granted that privilege. Two months after his Queen Victoria article, a long-running industrial dispute in the coal industry culminated in Britain's only General Strike (4 to 12 May 1926), in which the Trades Union Congress attempted to close down the country in support of the miners.[12]
It should not be thought that the Archbishop stumbled naively into a great public crisis, for he was no stranger to involvement in politics. The workload of the Primacy alone made most Archbishops regard attendance at the House of Lords as an occasional duty linked to some specific major issue. But Davidson relished his place on the red benches and somehow found time to sit through hours of debate, occasionally raising an issue himself, such as the treatment of Western Australian Aborigines in 1905, or intervening with some effect, as in 1908 when he insisted that the moral case for Old Age Pensions outweighed any concern for the cost.[13] Nonetheless, he was cautious about committing himself to issues that might prove to be passing fads. "Wise men always shrink from being ready to lend themselves too readily to some obvious popular outcry about something which may be only imperfectly understood."[14] As Archbishop, he was close to the 1909-11 constitutional crisis, but either steered clear of committing himself or made tentative approaches for compromise behind the scenes.[15] Most of the ethical issues that arose between 1914 and 1918 could be subsumed under the argument that a Just War validated harsh measures. However, the desire to maintain unity in wartime did not apply to the terrible events of 1919-21 in Ireland.
The historian Kenneth O. Morgan noted that Davidson "was noticeably coy in giving a lead in denouncing the outrages and atrocities committed in Ireland under aegis of the British government", although in November 1920 he did deliver some guarded criticisms of the Black and Tan campaign.[16] But Ireland exposed the contradictory weaknesses in ecclesiastical pretensions to wave a magic wand in secular affairs. Davidson either talked, as he admitted in the November 1920 debate, in "generalities" or – if minded to propose specific solutions – was inclined to come up with ideas that did not work. In May 1920, he urged the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, to confront the Irish Catholic bishops. The hierarchy should be challenged: did they support the Sinn Féin demand for a republic, or not? It is strange that someone who had lived so close to the centre of power for so long could not see that such a move would have been a major blunder. The Irish Catholic bishops would have been much too shrewd to walk into that trap, and would have deftly turned the demand into an act of aggression. Nothing came of the suggestion. In the later stages of the Troubles, Davidson contributed little more than statements of goodwill welcoming the Truce in July 1921 and the signing of the Treaty five months later. Even these anodyne statements aroused the anger of Protestants who accused him of abandoning Irish loyalists.[17]
Industrial conflict posed starker challenges, largely because strikes involved class conflict – philosophically, the Anglican Church might support the poor, but sociologically it was – in a celebrated jibe – the Conservative party at prayer, but also because, in a legendary triumph, Bishop Westcott of Durham had secured peace in a long-running mining dispute back in 1892.[18] (Three years earlier, Cardinal Manning had helped resolve the London Dock Strike: if Anglicans did not involve themselves in industrial disputes, the Catholic Church would steal a march on them, thereby encouraging those critics who challenged the point of an established Church.) In 1919, Davidson offered to mediate in a railway strike, joining with other Church leaders in a statement deploring "the currently expressed view that such a struggle was inevitable and must be fought out", a well-intentioned statement but one that hinted at some religious-inspired magic solution to industrial strife. Fortunately for all concerned, the strike ended without the deeper involvement of the men of God. In 1921, Davidson offered himself as a mediator in the coal industry strike and called for a day of prayer. "Nothing material occurred as a result." Nonetheless, the episode foreshadowed the awkward position that the Archbishop would find himself in five years later. The Church of England had been trying to work out a position on social issues: George Lansbury and R.H. Tawney had helped shape the sweeping proposals of the 1918 volume, Christianity and Industrial Problems, the product of a committee established by the two Archbishops.
However, there were signs that the initiative was passing out of Lambeth control as less cautious spirits than the Primate staked out partisan positions. The Convocation of Canterbury insisted that "moral no less than economic issues" were involved in the coal strike, and passed a resolution of vacuous goodwill which did nothing but infuriate the government.[19] That incident proved to be a temporary embarrassment, but a far greater threat to Davidson's instinctive resistance to boat-rocking came from the hyperactive and foggily idealistic bishop of Manchester, William Temple. In 1919, Temple began planning a movement that was intended to reshape society on Christian lines. The five-year project culminated in a week-long Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, which met at Birmingham in 1924 to consider recommendations pre-prepared in twelve heavyweight reports. (In one of the earliest manifestations of the deplorable twentieth-century practice of the coinage of pretentious acronyms, it became known as COPEC.[20]) There were over one thousand delegates, but Davidson was not among them. He had steadily kept COPEC at a distance, limiting his involvement to a message of greeting which explained that he would be in Italy at the time of the gathering. His caution was understandable: three years earlier, Temple had assured him that his aim was to secure a declaration of principles "which would be more explicit than the great platitudes and less particular than a political programme". This was pushing the Anglican ideal of a Via Media on to an impossible tightrope. Davidson's message to the conference expressed a noncommittal confidence that its proceedings would "make it clear that along a Christian pathway our perplexities can often be simplified", but it was obvious that he did not look to any miraculous solutions. Temple insisted that the conference was "representative of a great movement within the Church which is, I am convinced, a movement of the Holy Ghost", the component of the Trinity that is perhaps the hardest to define. At Birmingham, the Holy Ghost moved in predictably mysterious ways, for instance demanding the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen but omitting to inspire unanimity in discussions of pacifism and birth control.[21] Bishop Temple won much credit for creating COPEC but, in effect, having sensibly pocketed the dividend, he did not try to repeat the venture until 1941, when the prospect of post-war reconstruction gave him a pretext for a new conference movement. But, when the General Strike erupted in 1926, the memory and the mythology of COPEC were strong, and loomed ominously as the Archbishop of Canterbury faced the need to find a distinctive role in the crisis. Temple was largely spared the need to define his position: he was on the continent, undergoing medical treatment for gout.[22]
The General Strike, 1926 Thus, well before 1926, there was good reason to fear that Church intervention in public events might create expectations that could not be fulfilled, and perhaps even exacerbate already bitter confrontations. Hence the General Strike was a confrontation that defied Davidson's penchant for "'getting round' difficulties". There were Anglicans like Henson, the bishop of Durham, who believed that all strikes were morally wrong, a view pungently expressed by Cardinal Bourne, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, who condemned the General Strike as "a sin against the obedience we owe to God". But at the other extreme there were radical clergy who urged their Archbishop that the Church of England should make a gesture of self-abnegation. Anglican finances were managed at arm's length by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (now the Church Commissioners), an efficient body of bean-counters who would have been perplexed by the concept of ethical investment. Either through purchase or bequest, the Church had acquired an extensive interest in coal-mining, drawing royalty payments from the industry of about £300,000 a year, enough to pay the salary costs of all the diocesan bishops and cathedral clergy. In resisting demands that the Church waive this income in support of the miners, Davidson chose to plead the interests of poorer clergy who were feeling the pinch of post-war inflation: since 1920, those receiving less than £300 a year were receiving a £30 annual supplement, while curates in general were awarded a fifteen percent pay rise.[23] Thus the Archbishop found himself awkwardly placed in relation to a problem which defied his skills at evasive obfuscation. But he did try.
Speaking in the House of Lords on 5 May, Davidson denounced the General Strike: "it is simply shocking that it should be possible at this time of day in our country for a set of men who are a kind of oligarchy chosen in such a way that it is not very obvious that it rests upon a broad popular basis, to make the extraordinary claim to exercise the powers of the Government as regards the control of the Press, the control of the country's communications and the ordinary living and well-being of the people." Insisting that the "people, who, although anxious and suffering, are showing at this moment a remarkably fine spirit of good humour and good temper", he hinted that Stanley Baldwin's cabinet might somehow conjure some formula that would end the confrontation: "the Government would have behind them an overwhelming weight of public opinion if they felt it to be possible, even at the risk of doing something illogical, something that appears inconsistent, to explore yet further the possibility of averting the growth which must arise soon of a spirit very different from that which prevails at this moment." A sympathetic historian has half-apologetically called it "the sort of speech which archbishops were expected to make". If he spoke in generalities, the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed irrelevant; if he proceeded to definite suggestions, he became controversial.[24] Developments during the next few days would make Davidson appear both partisan and impotent.
The day after his speech in the Lords, Davidson was approached by a deputation of Anglican and Nonconformist leaders who initially proposed that the Archbishop should support an appeal for prayer, accompanied by an assurance that they were "anxiously considering possible ways in which Christian opinion may be brought effectively to bear towards the solution of the grave problems of the hour". Within a further twenty-four hours, this worthy sentiment had congealed into a compromise proposal for peace, which was even endorsed – in outline and through indirect negotiations – by Cardinal Bourne on behalf of the Catholic Church. Although Davidson believed this initiative had secured the approval both of Baldwin and the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, his tentative venture into the political arena quickly became a crushing anticlimax. With Fleet Street disrupted by the Strike, there were only two forms of mass media that could effectively address the nation. One was the government's own emergency newspaper, the British Gazette, run with a predictable lack of moderation by Winston Churchill; the other was the British Broadcasting Company.[25] Churchill initially refused to print the Church leaders' appeal (it eventually appeared on a back page, without comment). John Reith, the BBC's Director-General, abruptly reneged on an agreement to allow Davidson to address the nation. The broadcast did go ahead four days later but, by then, the Strike was on the verge of collapse anyway.
Bishop Bell, Davidson's biographer, bravely insisted that there was "no doubt" that the Archbishop's attempted intervention "wrought a very real change in the atmosphere – and in particular had a very great influence on the attitude of the working classes".[26] In reality, the episode was a humiliation. In a towering national emergency, the leader of the English Church had not only called for a miracle solution but sought to outline how it might be achieved. He was refused a platform to address the nation. While news of his initiative did circulate by other means, there seems no evidence to suggest that it produced anything more than a renewed demonstration of the government's decision to stand firm. There is certainly no reason to think that the opinions of any Archbishop of Canterbury had any influence among the lower orders. In an exhaustive thousand-page biography of Stanley Baldwin, Davidson's appeal received just four sentences.[27]
The rebuff sustained by the Primate of All England was a notable event. However, it may have inadvertently done Davidson's reputation a favour, since it has deflected attention from the actual proposals that he floated. Two developments in particular had exacerbated the crisis in the mining industry that had brought about the General Strike. The Baldwin government was determined to end the taxpayer subsidy to the mining Industry that had been provided as a temporary cushion to protect jobs, and the mine-owners had consequently demanded that the unions accept a reduction in wages and a longer working day. Davidson and the Church leaders proposed a tripartite solution: the General Strike was to be called off, the government subsidy should be extended "for a short definite period" (whatever that meant) and the employers were to withdraw their reduced scale of wages. To appease Conservative fears of revolutionary mob rule, cancellation of the General Strike was placed first in the list, but since the proposal envisaged that all three elements were to be implemented "simultaneously and concurrently", this hardly met Conservative concerns that the challenge to elected government was in itself unconstitutional. But the real weakness of the Church leaders' proposed solution was that it solved nothing at all. This was not a formula for peace but a recipe for the prolongation of conflict. The renewal of the subsidy – even for the proposed undefined and presumably elastic "short definite period" – and the suspension of the demand for wage cuts simply returned the problem of coal industry economics to Square One. As The Times wrote in its retrospect of the Strike, the proposals "were regarded by the majority of those to whom they were addressed as showing some confusion of thought between two entirely separate issues – the economic deadlock in the coal industry and the attack on the Constitution, with which the miners had little to do."[28] The Conservative cabinet minister William Bridgeman privately condemned the Archbishop as "very foolish" and described his proposal as "very woolly & cowardly".[29] Since Bridgeman was an ultra-Tory, his anger might be interpreted as a compliment, but he was also an active Anglican layman who would be entrusted – by the Primate himself – with the responsibility of recommending the Revised Prayer Book to the House of Commons the following year.
Davidson's temperamental addiction to formulae that evaded confrontation was harmless enough in the internal politics of the Church of England for, in the last resort, it really did not matter to the nation at large if a handful of eccentric clergy engaged in blatantly theatrical forms of worship. Applied to the future of a great national industry, it was almost farcically irrelevant.
The Revised Prayer Book, 1927-8 Angered by Randall Davidson's attempted intervention in the General Strike, Stanley Baldwin caustically "asked how the Bishops would like it if he referred to the Iron and Steel Federation [an employers' body] the revision of the Athanasian Creed".[30] In the two years that followed the General Strike, the doctrines and practices of the Church of England would be pulled apart in a far wider public controversy, and Davidson suffered a second and far greater blow in the rejection by the House of Commons, on two occasions, of the Revised Prayer Book that he had hoped would crown his Primacy, and which had certainly occupied much of the quarter-century that he had spent at Lambeth. His inability to secure parliamentary approval for the Deposited Book reflected two deeper unresolved issues arising from his years as Archbishop of Canterbury. The first was constitutional, even mildly tedious. One of Davidson's undoubted achievements was the creation of the Church Assembly, which broadened the ability and scope for Anglicans, clergy and laity together, to run their own affairs. But the 1919 Enabling Act had prescribed a devolved form of self-government, one which required still the submission of doctrinal issues to Parliament for ultimate confirmation. Since politicians in recent decades had generally been too busy with other matters to concern themselves with Church affairs, it seemed reasonable to assume that any well-considered measure of liturgical reform that emerged from internal consultation would be nodded through by the elected representatives of the nation. However, this assumption tacitly assumed that any proposed Church legislation referred to Westminster would be backed by a wide measure of agreement among Anglican activists and, on doctrinal matters, this was hardly likely.
The second issue that the Archbishop had arguably failed to confront was emotional and explosive. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, ritualistic practices had infiltrated the Church of England. Some of the external manifestations, such innovations in clerical dress, had penetrated very widely, as Davidson had found it necessary to explain to a scandalised Queen Victoria. But the High Church campaign involved much more than vestments and dog collars: it is impossible to comprehend just how much opposition ritualism provoked without appreciating that it was seen as a ruthless and relentless conspiracy to edge the Church of England ever closer to Rome, to a point where the whole demoralised entity would be swallowed by the Catholic Church and the Reformation put into reverse. Davidson himself had admitted in 1916 that he had "learned by experience the danger of allowing even apparently insignificant changes in exceptional cases because they are instantly taken advantage of as a starting point for something fresh".[31] Hence any process of Prayer Book revision that contemplated some accommodation with the ritualists was likely to fall between two challenges, on the one side from Protestants who distrusted any concessions and on the other from Anglo-Catholics who objected that they did not go far enough, their perceived limitations justifying persistent brazen defiance of liturgical restrictions.
Davidson had begun his Primacy in 1903 on a tough note. In his first public function at Lambeth Palace, he received a deputation of over one hundred members of parliament who demanded action to curb ritualist excesses. The new Archbishop agreed with them: "tolerance has reached, and even passed its limits. The sands have run out. Stern and drastic action is in my judgement quite essential". His firmness was welcomed: The Times, in reporting his declaration, commented that "history will deal with his tenure of the Primacy in the light of what he said yesterday", and those words were indeed thrown back at him in 1927.[32] Unfortunately, he had set himself an impossible task. For all the grandeur of his office, the Archbishop of Canterbury had little control over the dioceses that constituted his province. Some bishops were sympathetic or at least indulgent towards High Church practices, especially as Anglo-Catholic clergy tended to be willing to take on large and unattractive urban parishes where their sense of theatre brought colour into working class lives.[33] The Archbishop could adopt the rhetoric of firmness in dealing with those cases of contumacy that might rise through Anglican disciplinary processes to come before him. But what could he – and the system – do? The Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 had provided that recalcitrant priests could be imprisoned for contempt of court. Five of them duly went to gaol, acquiring a crown of martyrdom that effectively destroyed any further attempt at penal enforcement of uniformity. (They also soured the last years of the Primacy of Davidson's father-in-law, Archibald Campbell Tait, whose biography he had written.)
The 1903 deputation was followed by a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, with Davidson as a member, which sat from 1904 to 1906 and made more fierce noises about ritualist excesses. Its report recommended that the bishops should "promptly" stamp out various imports from Roman Catholicism, such as veneration of the Virgin Mary and prayers borrowed from the Mass, although it was vague about how this might be done. But the report also called for steps "to secure the greater elasticity which a reasonable recognition of the comprehensiveness of the Church of England and of its present needs seems to demand." The archbishops and bishops were to be given authority to sanction and regulate additional forms of worship, and the Convocations charged with the responsibility of revising forms of service and the ornaments and fittings that accompanied them.[34]
On the face of it, there seemed some inconsistency in demanding firm action against some "naughty" practices – the adjective was a favourite of the Commission's veteran chairman, Lord St Aldwyn, the former Sir Michael Hicks Beach – while urging a broad process of revision that would accommodate others. Looking back on its deliberations in 1927, Davidson explained: "we found that, however difficult it was to enforce discipline as things then were, the real mischief lay behind. It was that the rules which had to be followed and obeyed – or disobeyed, as many of them had to be – by the ordinary parish priest or the ordinary Bishop, were wholly out of date, and that it was quite necessary to get new rules laid down, new orders – marching orders I suppose they would be called – put into shape if we were to expect to be able to have an orderly mode of working within the Church and its life."[35] Congregations were required to recite the Athanasian Creed once a month, an obligation widely ignored by Anglicans who were uncomfortable with its hellfire clauses. Clearing the decks would pave the way for a disciplinary crackdown by depriving Anglo-Catholics of the argument that since nobody embraced the 1662 Prayer Book in full, they were free to improvise as their consciences dictated. The Royal Commission appears to have assumed that the episcopacy would generally act in unison, and it hoped that the two Convocations might fast-track liturgical changes by sitting together as an informal convention. In fact, the process would continue for over twenty years.
The revised liturgy that eventually emerged in 1927 prescribed prayers to meet present-day needs which had not existed in 1662, for instance invoking divine blessing upon the Empire and the League of Nations, neither of which was destined to be long enduring. More striking was the introduction of prayers for the dead, an innovation that would perhaps have been approved Queen Victoria. Addressing the House of Lords, the Archbishop invoked the creativity of Anglican vagueness: "there has never been in the Church of England any suggestion that it was a false doctrine, or forbidden in the Church, although it was not prescribed". He had a simple answer to those who queried why such prayers should be validated in 1927: "The War". English homes had been "shattered by what happened in the War", and the Church needed to meet "the craving desire which existed, for some prayers in commemoration of the departed", so long as they did not violate "legitimate doctrine".[36]
However, the most controversial changes related to the service of Holy Communion, and particularly the Reservation of the Sacrament. In Victorian times, loyal Anglicans had been expected to take Communion four times a year, and most parsons arranged only quarterly celebrations. The trend towards greater frequency was initially a High Church holier-than-thou gesture. In 1898, Queen Victoria complained that "people seem to treat the Sacrament too easily. Why, I am told that many people receive it as often as once a week." This struck her as a "very mechanical view" of the ceremony. "I wonder how much preparation they can give. For myself, three months seems not too long to prepare."[37] (The thought of the Queen-Empress leading her life in thirteen-week cycles of penitent contemplation is delicious but implausible.) In fact, Edwardian debates on Prayer Book revision devoted relatively little attention to the Communion service. It was the War that provided the second impulse that broke through the tradition of quarterly reception. Soldiers going into battle were offered Communion to underline the moral purpose behind their all-too-likely sacrifice, and the practice was adopted in solidarity at home too. Davidson was pointedly neutral on the merits of such frequent participation, but he recognised that "there are many hundreds of parishes with thousands of parishioners who are now in the habit of having celebrations perhaps every day of the week, certainly on many days of the week, and often communicating many days of the week". In his habitual managerial tone, he spoke of "a gigantic increase in the number of people for whom provision has to be made". One issue was how to serve the sick who were "accustomed when well to communicate perhaps two or three times a week in their churches".
The obvious answer was that the Sacrament should be taken to the sufferers. But here there arose the delicate question of what happened during the Communion service. Protestant orthodoxy held that the bread and wine acquired merely symbolic importance, symbolising the body of Christ as he himself had described at the Last Supper. But most ritualist clergy were sympathetic to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence, the belief that the elements had taken on the corporeal form of the Saviour himself, and were therefore an appropriate focus for veneration. There were Anglican churches, particularly and blatantly in the diocese of London, which encouraged not merely Reservation, the storage of the bread and wine in the church, but the Adoration of the Sacrament. In 1917, the well-meaning but weak Bishop Winnington-Ingram had "frankly admitted" that his attempt to control the practice "had broken down: it began to break down before the war, and the war had finished it; the tide of human grief and anxiety had been too great, the longing to get as near as possible to the Sacramental Presence of our Lord had been too urgent".[38] Clearly, such practices only made sense if the elements were regarded as possessing special spiritual significance. In addition, the 1662 Prayer Book had assumed that clergy would take the Sacrament to those too ill to attend soon after the very occasional Communion service. Hence, so asked the fervently Protestant Sir William Joynson-Hicks: "If it is only for the comfort of the sick, why should it not be reverently put in a cupboard, where nobody can worship it?" But in Anglo-Catholic practice, the consecrated Host was to form a continuing focal point within the church, convenient for veneration by all worshippers, the healthy as well as the bedridden, and at all times.
The Revised Prayer Book went some way towards accommodating the ritualists. It prescribed that the lockinf of the Sacrament in an Aumbry, a kind of safe, in a fixed location in the north wall of the chancel or chapel, but decreed that it should receive no further attention or honour. (The north wall was specified to block the Roman Catholic practice of placing the elements in a tabernacle behind the altar.) Outraged Protestants objected that it would be impossible to prevent the objectionable practice of Adoration: "if an honest man believes there is a kind of sacred change… which brings the body and blood of our Lord, spiritually if you like, into the corporeal presence of bread and wine, and you reserve these in an Aumbry or Tabernacle, it is difficult to say that you shall not worship, as thousands of men and women are doing to-day." Davidson even admitted that when he first began to consider the issue, he had hoped "that we should not find it necessary to sanction reservation at all. It seemed to me that the dangers of superstition loomed rather large." However, he offered the consoling thought that it was "not reservation itself, it is what may follow from it that causes the difficulty." The Revised Prayer Book forbade services of devotion to the consecrated elements "and altogether the utmost care has been taken to guard against the superstition which might quite possibly arise."[39] But would ritualists take any notice, and how could such prohibitions be enforced in churches that were open at all hours?
In the event, the Revised Prayer Book had an unexpectedly easy passage through the House of Lords, where even the censorious Henson of Durham conceded that Davidson's speech – one hour and twelve minutes – "was a notable achievement for an octogenarian" (the Archbishop was 79). But in the House of Commons, it was twice rejected, in December 1927 and again in June 1928. The reasons for its rejection have been much discussed. The first debate was a great parliamentary occasion, in which cabinet ministers spoke against one another, and it is reasonable to argue that advocates of the Deposited Book were tactically inept. The Archbishop was largely responsible for the failure to inspire the Lords: Henson thought he "did not make his points effectively".[40] Perhaps more damaging was the fact that his arguments were delivered like bullets from a memorandum and lacked the firepower of real ammunition. Worse still, he exaggerated the degree of support for the changes within the Church, defiantly asking the Lords "what would be the consequence in the country of the rejection of a united wish officially given by a united Church[?]". It would no doubt be a serious matter to accuse the Primate of All England of distorting the facts, but the degree of internal division was a matter of record. In the Church Assembly, the Deposited Book had won eight-to-one support from the bishops and secured the seven-to-one backing of the clergy but, among the laity, the majority fell to five-to-two. Davidson's claim that the revisions had gained the support of eighty percent of participants in the diocesan synods of course reflected the dominance of the clergy in such gatherings. Following the defeat in December 1927, some cosmetic changes were made in the hope of placating parliamentary critics. Unfortunately, this reshuffling of the liturgical deckchairs did nothing to increase the appeal of the Revised Prayer Book within Anglican ranks. True, two bishops dropped their previous objections, creating a statistically slewed sixteen-to-one majority in the episcopacy, but the level of the support among the clergy dropped to three-to-one, while among the laity it fell as low as two-to-one.[41] To say the least, the Archbishop's concept of a united Church was open to discussion. The Church was not united, and some of the critics who had fought the revision in the House of Laity, notably Joynson-Hicks and Inskip, felt entitled take their resistance to the Commons.
In a Church organised around the principles of hierarchy and obedience, it was reasonable that changes in the Prayer Book should be primarily the work of the episcopacy, men chosen for their authority and learning. But the bishops had a concomitant responsibility to rally their followers to support the new revised liturgy, and this they conspicuously failed to do. Looking back on the Prayer Book debacle, Cyril Garbett concluded that "the Bishops made a serious mistake in treating the new book as a disciplinary measure rather than as an enrichment of the worship of Almighty God"[42] – a truly astonishing confession of spiritual bankruptcy. In this, they took their lead from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Davidson told the House of Lords that he shrank from discussing the "thoughts and doctrines which belong to the deepest and most sacred mysteries of our faith" in a parliamentary debate.[43] This was spectacularly obtuse. The 1919 Enabling Act, which he had steered into law, had reserved to Parliament ultimate control over the doctrines of the Anglican Church. If Davidson had a pastoral responsibility to expound its articles of faith to simple folk from the pulpit, then he had a far greater duty to defend its new formularies to peers and politicians.
The Archbishop's failure to issue a clarion call compounded the tactical mistake of the decision to entrust the fate of the permissive measure in the Commons to William Bridgeman. Although bluff and generally popular in the House, he confessed that he had "no claim whatever to speak as a theologian, or as an authority on doctrine or on liturgies". Bridgeman might have added that he had been supplied with no rousing brief to compensate for his deficiencies. As a result, he was evidently uncomfortable with hecklers, and he failed to win the confidence of MPs with his non-nonsense posture of the "man-in-the-pew" reluctantly bowing to the realities of Anglican diversity.[44]
Two decades earlier, Arthur Benson, son of the Archbishop and a pungent diarist, had rejoiced at the elevation of his friend Davidson to Canterbury, but found it incongruous that "he should be the chief exponent of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth…. Randall would have listened to Christ politely, but without interest, and then would have gone back to the Sadducees and arranged a little matter of legislation." With the affectionate but savage skill of a caricaturist, Benson's whimsical portrayals exaggerated the weaknesses of his prey. The Sadducees were a Jewish social and administrative elite in New Testament times who upheld a rigid interpretation of the written law: there was a certain poetic truth in Benson's mordant view that Davidson was a Sadducee at heart.[45] The Archbishop's problem in 1927-8 was that he was a Sadducee who was arguing for specific and mostly minor changes in the law that his whole career had been dedicated to defend. His heart was simply not in the task. Thus one of the most compelling arguments that he could put to the House of Lords for the adoption of the Revised Prayer Book was that it would "enormously facilitate the work of the Bishops": easing the burden of the episcopacy was hardly a priority aim to be found anywhere in the New Testament. Its approval "would mean the liberation of the Church from the great mass of those petty strifes which have troubled us up and down the country in the past, and would conduce to the Church's firm progress towards doing better the work to which we long to give ourselves wholeheartedly and together both at home and overseas".[46] This was no doubt a noble sentiment but it would have been more effective had he added a few sentences about the nature and development of that mission, or said something about the new Prayer Book's "enrichment of the worship of Almighty God", to borrow Garbett's regretful phrase.
One curious feature of Davidson's House of Lords speech was that he twice referred to the practices of the Episcopal Church in his native Scotland, which held a small but honoured place in the wider Anglican Communion, despite employing slight differences in liturgy and tolerating alternative forms of service.[47] The Archbishop might have built on these references to send forth a stirring personal appeal: a Scot himself, who had devoted his life to the Anglican Church, he could have urged that the religious life of England be permitted to flourish by adopting the flexibility that had enriched their brethren north of the Border. He might have added, in minor key, a plea to Scotland's Presbyterians to show respect for the creativity of their fellow Protestant minority by abstaining from intervention in purely English affairs. No such declaration was forthcoming. In the House of Lords, Catholic peers tactfully abstained from voting on the Prayer Book. In the House of Commons, English Nonconformists and Scots and Welsh MPs of all denominations contributed to its downfall.[48]
Davidson was probably also unwise to appear to make his age an issue. "The attack has been largely against myself. I am an old man. I have been a Bishop nearly 35 years and an Archbishop for nearly 25 years and my life has not been lived in private or silently or unrecorded." He hoped that his long record, rooted in the greater certainties of Victorian times, might reassure those who feared that the Deposited Book would undermine Protestant orthodoxy: "I am absolutely unconscious of any departure from the principles of the reformed Church of England to which I declared allegiance at my ordination 52 years ago and I have striven to maintain them ever since." His claim to the wisdom of old age was directly controverted by another Protestant critic, Sir Thomas Inskip, in the House of Commons. "I wish I could give such comfort or solace for the last years of his tenure of his great office by granting him … this Book, but I doubt if it is ours to give. … [W]hatever veneration and affection and esteem can be given to the Archbishop are his already" but, Inskip asked, "have we any right to give to any man, even a man greatly beloved, that which belongs to the nation and to posterity?"[49] Put bluntly, Davidson's longevity meant that he would not be around for much longer. By the time the re-Revised Prayer Book came back to the Commons in June 1928, he had passed the milestone that carried him into his ninth decade. "I am an old man, and we are told that old men dream dreams," he declared in a pathetic public appeal. "My dreams for the world I shall soon be leaving are rich in hope.... My heartfelt prayer is that ere I say my nunc dimittis I may somehow – and not least by our new [Prayer] Book – be helpful to the younger folk whose Pathway gleams with promise."[50] He cut no ice. In a renewed assault, Joynson-Hicks spoke of his "deepest respect" for Davidson and his "very touching" plea. "He told us of his 80 years. … The Archbishop very frankly says that it must not be long, as we all realise, before someone else takes his place" but – echoing Inskip's earlier speech – 'Jix' insisted "that this matter is not for the life of any one of us; it is for the life of the people for centuries to come, the life of the Church, the life of the nation".[51]
Randall Davidson: a Victorian relic? For some time, Davidson had signalled that he would not be in office at the time of the next Lambeth Conference, scheduled for 1930. Six weeks after the second rejection of the Prayer Book, it was announced that he would step down from the Primacy on the occasion of his Golden Wedding in November 1928. A few previous Primates had been deposed, but none had even handed in his notice, and a special commission had to be established to receive his resignation. There were tributes on his retirement, respectful obituaries when he died in 1930, and he was briefly but honourably remembered in the press five years later when George Bell published his comprehensive biography.[52] The first part of this study focused upon the Archbishop's attempt to defend, indeed to reshape, the image and memory of Queen Victoria. In concluding this second section, reviewing the difficulties of his last two years in office, it seems appropriate to ask: were the setbacks of 1926-8 evidence that he was himself a Victorian who had survived too long into a strange new world in which he could only appear as a dinosaur?
It is likely that any Archbishop of Canterbury would have found himself in an awkward corner during the unprecedented crisis of the General Strike. The expectation that England's spiritual leader would wave some sort of magic wand in an industrial dispute had been fostered both by Davidson's own well-meaning gestures in previous disputes and by the wider attempts within the Church of England to hammer out a position on industrial issues. It did not help that the General Strike came just two years after the massive COPEC gathering in Birmingham. Perhaps a longer period of reflection would have engendered the conviction that the posturings and vapourings of COPEC, in its carefully staged theatre of benign make-believe, proved only that any social and economic philosophy distilled from the New Testament could not easily be applied to a capitalist industrial society two thousand years later. As it was, the responsibility for realising Temple's impossible blend of a pronouncement that was "more explicit than the great platitudes" but "less particular than a political programme" fell upon Davidson, and in circumstances that were too urgent to permit his habitual strategy of delay by reference to a committee.
Since the choices forced by the General Strike were real, intractable and immediate, it seems reasonable to ask why Randall Davidson did not mobilise his undoubted talent for temporising and evasion to sidestep the pressures to go beyond resounding appeals for calm and understanding. The risks in attempting to formulate some concrete proposal in a great national emergency had been demonstrated a few days earlier, when Cyril Garbett, bishop of Southwark, had put his name to a letter calling for the continuation of negotiations on the eve of the Strike, a document that his biographer called "strangely nebulous and long-winded". Garbett's own comment was: "It was not a very wise letter, but we had to act in haste!"[53] As the Strike took hold, Davidson found himself in the grip of an even more urgent imperative. However, the key element in the discussions of 6 and 7 May 1926 that made it impossible for the Archbishop to avoid open commitment was the approach made to him by Free Church leaders: he was trapped by the logic of the Lambeth Appeal of 1920 that had called for unity among the Churches. Twenty years earlier, when the controversy over public funding for Anglican schools had driven many Nonconformists to civil disobedience, it would have been unthinkable that a plea for archiepiscopal leadership could have come from that quarter. The education issue was by no means resolved, but Davidson had worked with the Free Churches in an attempt to work towards a single national school system. Equally important was the eclipse and probable demise of the Liberal party, which could no longer give effective voice to the Nonconformist conscience, and so compelled its exponents to seek new vehicles for their views. Thus, while co-operation with the Free Churches might look like the creation of coalition of strength, it also represented an alliance with a force that recognised its own increasing irrelevance. His ecumenical stance equally irritated the loyal Anglican Bridgeman, who condemned the Archbishop not simply for signing "miserable" proposals but for giving the impression that "the Church of England could not speak for itself".[54] Davidson might well have resisted pressure from his own ranks to take a stand on the General Strike, but he could hardly refuse to act as the spokesman for such a wide range of the Christian churches.
It followed that he must put forward concrete proposals. Since the unions and the government could not agree upon any formula for peace, or even agree that some way forward was required, it was more or less inevitable that any policy package which Davidson might endorse would prove to be either unpopular or impracticable – or, more likely, both. It is difficult to imagine any alternative Primate having more success. Lang lacked Davidson's gravitas and was dangerously lacking in humility: his disastrous Abdication broadcast a decade later certainly indicated that he was not to be trusted to issue a national appeal through a microphone.[55] Temple would probably have been on the barricades rallying the strikers; Henson would have plotted counter-revolution. By great fortune, the bishop of Manchester was on the continent throughout the General Strike seeking treatment for his gout while the bishop of Durham was felled by appendicitis just as it collapsed. Moving as ever in mysterious ways, the Holy Ghost did not on this occasion reveal a formula for the creation of industrial peace.[56] Davidson's failure to carve out a role during the General Strike had much more to do with the impossible expectations that the Church of England had fostered for itself in its dreams for the redemption of society.
Randall Davidson's characteristic lack of passion no doubt contributed to the rejection of the Revised Prayer Book, but this was not necessarily a product of his shaping in Victorian times. Indeed, the reconsideration of the liturgy had spanned almost the whole of his quarter-century as Primate but, arguably, his consensual skills may have been responsible for the process actually reaching a conclusion. It is important to stress that discussions were not continuous, even though to some they may have seemed interminable. It was conventional to describe Convocations, Synods and (from 1920) the Church Assembly as the Anglican equivalents of Parliament. But Parliament sat for about half the year and, although many backbenchers were also businessmen or barristers whose contributions were intermittent and based on their outside experience, Westminster was essentially operated by a cadre of full-time politicians. By contrast, Church bodies rarely sat for more than a few days at a time: bishops and clergy had other duties while laity could only spare the occasional week for ecclesiastical affairs. Thus, even without the Archbishop's habitual caution, Prayer Book revision was hardly likely to be rapid although perhaps it did not need to have advanced at such glacial speed. The creation of the Church Assembly was seen as a step forward in allowing Anglicans to manage their own affairs, but it delayed liturgical reform because it was necessary to start the process over again.
The torrent of slaughter and bereavement between 1914 and 1918 meant that the second phase of Prayer Book revision took place in a wholly new and grim context. In the art and poetry of those years, the horror of the Crucifixion was transposed into the trenches, as millions of people found it emotionally and psychologically impossible to accept the totality of death. The earthquake of grief profoundly disrupted the context of liturgical reform. In 1906, the Royal Commission had echoed Davidson's own fiery determination to bring ritualists to heel. Prayer Book revision had been intended to dump the seventeenth-century deadwood, in order to crack down on Anglo-Catholic experimentation. But the War emboldened the ritualists. In 1917, almost one thousand of them signed a memorial to the bishops refusing to obey any rubric that banned Reservation. Davidson deplored their "unseemly threats" and resented the charge that he had backed down in the face of schism, but there can be little doubt that a process designed to enforce uniformity became onw which had to accommodate diversity.[57]
Such a retreat required to be carried off with panache, endorsed by a united episcopate boldly led from Canterbury. Davidson's loyal biographer found it hard to explain why such a gesture was not forthcoming. Perhaps "Reservation as a theological problem did not in itself make a strong appeal to Randall Davidson". Probably he feared that any definite declaration would precipitate the rupture of Anglicanism that he so deeply feared.[58] After the War, he was set on a path that would eventually see two decades of detailed discussion set aside by Parliament. Yet it is hard to blame his undoubted failure in 1927-8 on his own increasingly incongruous survival from Victorian times. Rather, the insoluble difficulty lay in the complex nature of leadership within the contradictory and labyrinthine ranks of the Church of England. Yet there was a considerable near-miss, might-have-been aspect to the rejection of the Deposited Book by the House of Commons in December 1927. The majority against was 33 votes; supporters had expected to win by 75.[59] A more robust appeal from the Primate, a piece of pulpit oratory to the Peers, and perhaps he could have deterred the critics and rallied the waverers in the lower House. We may feel reasonably confident that the alternative personalities whom we might plausibly locate at Lambeth in 1927 would have attempted a more upbeat endorsement of the new liturgy, but we need to remember that any such appeal would have been directed well beyond the ranks of the Anglican Church to a House of Commons more influenced by atavistic fears of Popery than by any sense of loyalty to the Anglican Church. There was always the danger that Lang would have provoked and Temple terrified those wider constituencies whose acquiescence was required in a House of Commons that had long since ceased to be identical with the established Church. It is indeed true that Davidson's attitudes to ritualism had been framed in Victorian times when such practices, to use Lord St Aldwyn's term, were regarded as "naughty", and he was never at ease with the need for accommodation and regulation. Nor is there any reason to believe that the legendary Primates of the nineteenth century – prelates such as Sumner, Longley, Tait, Benson and Frederick Temple – would have issued more compelling rallying calls in support of the Deposited Book. Indeed, none of them had any effective solution to the challenges from ritualism.
'Victorian': a useful label? A few days before the second and fatal rejection of the Revised Prayer Book in the House of Commons, Archbishop Randall Davidson addressed his own diocesan conference at Canterbury. Among the matters to which the octogenarian Primate directed his comments was the popular culture of courtship. He warned that "there was a danger of our treating the friendliness of men and women, what we called in a rough way flirtation, as something largely comic, to be joked about, rather than to be dwelt on with the realization that it produced the holiest of all life's intercourse and communion".[60] Read a century later, his sentiment naturally prompts us to touch the button that classifies his comment as "Victorian". Yet it is striking that, both at his retirement in 1928 and at his death two years later, the assessments and the tributes markedly omitted any use of that term to describe him. Their silence merits examination, which may lead to the conclusion that the concept is both superficial and overused. It might be thought that Lytton Strachey had made "Victorian" into a term of mockery, rendering it inappropriate as a polite label for a veteran cleric. In fact, Strachey used the word only four times in Eminent Victorians, and then purely adjectivally and – despite the book's often-quoted title – not at all as a classification of individuals. "The history of the Victorian Age will never be written," he wrote in a famous aphorism; "we know too much about it."[61] There is a sense in which the analogy from Gulliver's Travels applies here: just as the people of Lilliput had no idea that they were small until they encountered Gulliver, so the men and women of the nineteen-twenties were unlikely to label one another, admiringly or otherwise, as 'Victorian', simply because what we might pretentiously call 'Victorianism' remained an endemic and permeating set of values among them.
It was true that by the time of his Times article on Queen Victoria in 1926, Randall Davidson was one of the very few survivors of her Court circle, but that did not make him the last product of her era by any means. Of the politicians who clashed over the Prayer Book, Joynson-Hicks had started his own practice as a solicitor in 1889, Bridgeman had become private secretary to a cabinet minister that same year, while the slightly younger Inskip had been a pupil at Clifton College at the time when Henry Newbolt captured the school's sporting ethos in the embarrassingly immortal phrase, "Play up! Play up! And play the game!" Not only was the Britain of the nineteen-twenties run by men (with a few walk-on parts for women) who had been shaped by the events and values of late-Victorian times, but the collective culture which they manipulated looked back to that perceived golden era, seeking to recover and reassert its reassurance in a world that had been so violently shaken in 1914. However, if the nineteen-twenties were still dominated by 'Victorianism', it took forms that were dynamic rather than merely derivative. Increasingly, in the longer perspective, we can identify Stanley Baldwin, who so unexpectedly emerged as Conservative leader in 1922, as the distinctive political philosopher of the era.[62] He stamped his personality on the politics of the decade partly through his nostalgic evocation of a Britain – and, more specifically, an England[63] – which his troubled contemporaries yearned to believe had genuinely existed. Specifically, he sought to ensure that the Labour Party was tamed, domesticated, trapped – the pejorative terms somehow fail to capture his entire motivation – within the secure embrace of parliamentary government. The strategy moved on to dangerously experimental grounds on the twenty-third anniversary of Queen Victoria's death, when the socialist and pacifist Ramsay MacDonald became Britain's Prime Minister. George V thought of "dear Grandmama": "I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!"[64]
Randall Davidson was one of those Victorians who sought to carry forward the values of the good Queen's era into changing times, although he would have subsumed them under the wider label of Christian belief. We should remember that, on New Year's Eve 1923, he became the first Primate to take advantage of the new medium of radio to address the people of Britain. But it is also true that when he first heard the sound of music flooding out of a wireless set, he enquired if it was necessary to open the windows to receive the signal.[65] But, in 1926, it became clear that his Victorianism differed from that of Stanley Baldwin in one important respect. There was a ruthless edge to Baldwin's idealistic aim of creating cross-class consensus, balance, even harmony: if Labour was to become a moderate element in government, it must shed its subordination to the militant and potentially revolutionary forces of the trade union movement. "I believe that it is only in the spirit of the teachings of Christianity that solutions can be found to the many difficult problems with which our generation is faced," Baldwin had assured the delegates to COPEC. Few would have disagreed with the principle, but when Davidson committed himself to specific solutions during the General Strike, his version of Christian neo-Victorianism was roundly condemned by the Prime Minister and his allies. "Well meaning busy-bodies are the greatest nuisance of all", Bridgeman complained.[66] The other great rebuff suffered by the Archbishop in his final years can hardly be attributed to the irrelevance of Victorian ideas at all. It is true that the very idea of parliamentary endorsement of Anglican liturgy was alien to modern thinking. S.D. Saklatvala, Westminster's only Communist MP, was among those who voted against the Deposited Book, but the Labour MPs who contributed to the negative majority had probably mostly displaced Liberals who would have hearkened to Nonconformist revulsion against ritualism. But, essentially, the opposition drew on atavistic deep roots that had originated long before Victorian times. The rhetoric mobilised by the Prayer Book's opponents reminded Davidson of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. At one point as he sat through the House of Lords debate, Viscount Haldane "felt that I was back in the sixteenth century".[67] If there was any contemporary element in the hostility to liturgical change, it may have been aroused by Davidson's distinctly un-Victorian attempt to mediate in the General Strike. Cosmo Lang suspected that there were politicians – he could only have meant Conservatives – who could not "forget the Bishops who dabbled in the Coal Strike".[68] Lacking in charity himself, the Archbishop of York was perhaps not the best person to assess the motives of others. Nonetheless, like Davidson's initiative in the General Strike, the Revised Prayer Book could easily be seen as an unworkable compromise, and the debacle of 1926 may have contributed to the failures of 1927-8.
As the nineteen-twenties came to a close – and Randall Davidson left Lambeth Palace for a brief and frustrated retirement – so the feeling grew that the march of events was taking Britain and the world into a new phase. In writing My Early Life in 1930, Winston Churchill realised that his bachelor days, which had ended in 1908, belonged to a "vanished age". He described himself as "a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realization of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger." Three decades later, wherever he looked, whether at society, politics, warfare, "the outlook of youth, the scale of values", everything had changed, "and changed to an extent I should not have believed possible in so short a space without any violent domestic revolution." At the 1929 general election, women had for the first time voted on the same terms as men (although only fourteen were elected). As recently as 1923, Baldwin, in one of his few political missteps, had called an election seeking a mandate to introduce tariffs. The electorate had voted firmly in favour of Free Trade, just as it had done so in the more confident days of 1906. But the crumbling of the world economy between 1929 and 1931 had dramatically destroyed the laissez-faire intellectual legacy of Victorian times. There were seismic movements in moral thinking too: in the year that Churchill published his autobiography, the Lambeth Conference determined that married Anglicans could use methods of artificial birth control. Davidson in 1928 had spoken of "the younger folk whose Pathway gleams with promise", but Churchill was suspicious of the challenge to inherited values. "I cannot pretend to feel that they are in all respects changed for the better." All the same, he dedicated his evocation of times past "To a New Generation". The Earl of Midleton – the St John Brodrick of Edwardian days – took a more upbeat view in 1932, "The freedom of this generation from old trammels is welcomed not as a victory in a time-long [sic] struggle, but as the natural birth of a new era." The Victorian world was now not so much rejected as ignored.[69] In the early 'thirties, an academic historian attempted to tread in the footsteps of Lytton Strachey. G.M. Young began his explorations "convinced that Victorianism was a myth, engendered by the long life of the sovereign and of her most illustrious subjects…. my own difficulty was to find anything on which they [the people of Victorian England] agreed". However, after several attempts, he produced the atmospheric Portrait of an Age, a celebration of inspirational and infuriating diversity which definitively established two points. First, Victorian England (its subtitle) had indeed existed, as a place, a period and a phenomenon. Second, and equally beyond argument, it had long since ceased to exist, even in the climactic manifestation of those two final decades, the years when the aged Queen intrigued to promote the career of her solemn Scottish chaplain. In the terrifying new world of 1935, it was barely even a whisper: "in the daily clamour for leadership, for faith, for a new heart or a new cause, I hear the ghost of late Victorian England whimpering on the grave thereof."[70]
Portrait of an Age was published in the year that also saw the appearance of George Bell's massive biography of Randall Davidson. It was, and remains, an impressive achievement as well as – especially from the point of view of this study – an almost inexhaustible quarry. Yet Bell's fourteen hundred pages left his subject in a curiously indeterminate position. A former chaplain at Lambeth and himself a bishop since 1929, Bell was a likely future candidate for Canterbury: Lord Stamfordham considered him a plausible choice in 1928, while the combative Dean Inge of St Paul's would have liked to have seen him appointed then, if only to frustrate Cosmo Lang.[71] Bell was hardly likely to consign Davidson's career to a sealed past but, equally, he could hardly portray his last years as Primate as a blueprint for taking forward the Church of England, all the more so when his successors were engaged in undignified manoeuvres to pretend that the rejection of the revised Prayer Book had never happened. Hence Bell offered no overall evaluation of his subject's career, choosing instead to engage in a stocktaking at 1923, when Davidson was seventy-five and completing twenty years in the Primacy. This device had the advantage of illustrating different aspects of his work close to the peak of his energies (if not slightly past them) but, by implication, it treated his last five years as a forgettable anti-climax. Both the book and its subject were respectfully received, but neither was widely or profoundly discussed. The Times ran three promotional articles "extracted" from the text, and blandly reviewed the biography as its "Book of the Week".[72] Perhaps if the tome had appeared eighteen months later, immediately after the minor trauma of the Abdication, it might have triggered public debate on the nature or the durability and the value of Britain's inheritance from Victorian times. But Bell certainly did not brand Davidson as a "Victorian" and nobody else seems to have thought the former Archbishop sufficiently relevant to the nineteen-thirties so to label him either. By contrast, the biographer of one of his junior colleagues was sometimes "suddenly and startlingly reminded that Archbishop Garbett was quite literally a Victorian".[73] Garbett had been a junior recruit to the episcopacy in the nineteen-twenties. He had risen to become Archbishop of York in 1941, retiring in 1955, a quarter of a century after Davidson had left the stage. By then, the tide of Victorianism had totally ebbed, and the handful of stranded survivors from that bygone age stood out in awkward eminence.
Thus the episode of Randall Davidson's selective defence of Queen Victoria in 1926, and the frustrations that blocked his attempts to give the Anglican Church a coherent social, political and liturgical identity in 1926-8 may be simply summarised. In the mid nineteen-twenties, the Archbishop had strong personal motives to defend the public image of the Queen who had so strongly propelled his career. The setbacks that he encountered during the last two years of his Primacy were largely caused by the collision of inchoate and sometimes naïve assumptions about the role of the Church with the realities that had been exposed by the rise of Labour and the carnage of the First World War. But to dismiss him as a mere irrelevance, a stranded dinosaur in the post-war world, would be to ignore the continuities of character and strategy – contested and challenged though they came to be – that had carried him from the Deanery of Windsor to the conclusion of his magisterial Primacy.
Randall Davidson in 1904, shortly after his elevation to Canterbury.
ENDNOTES I owe particular thanks to Dr Andrew Jones for his tactful elimination of at least some of my infelicities and carelessness.
[1] Ged Martin, "Queen Victoria defended, 1926": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/418-queen-victoria-defended-1926.
[2] Between 1500 and 1900, 7 Archbishops of Canterbury held the office for more than 20 years. Davidson's 5 predecessors and 9 successors have averaged about 10 years, although the average is depressed by the two Temples, father and son, who survived only 8 years between them.
[3] H.H. Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (2 vols, London, 1942), ii, 140, 183. My comments on leadership are derived from a career studying Canada. Bishop Bell discussed these two kinds of leadership in identical terms, concluding that Davidson should not "be dismissed as an unsuitable kind of leader in dangerous and unsettled times". But the consensual version of leadership needs to be ready to seize the initiative when circumstances permit or crises demand, skills that Davidson lacked. Bell, Randall Davidson, 1160-1. Margot Asquith, who had known the Archbishop since she was ten years of age, wrote of him that "he has a sweet and rich nature, a fine temper and is quite unspoilable. I have only one criticism to make of Randall Davidson: he has too much moderation for his intellect: but I daresay he would not have steered the Church through so many shallows if he had not had this attribute". Unlike most other comments quoted here, which were made in private, this was in her published memoirs, and may be interpreted as a coded message. M. Bonham-Carter, ed., The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (Boston, 1963 ed., cf. 1st ed. London, 1920), 71-2.
[4] G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson… (3rd ed., Oxford, 1952, cf. 1st ed. 1935), 1003-15 (Lambeth Conference); 1024, 1037 (Church Assembly).
[5] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1151-68 reviewed Davidson's position at the age of 75 and his increasing reliance upon Lang.
[6] Cyril Garbett, Lang's successor as Archbishop of York, wrote in 1939 that Winnington-Ingram "was the most loved and popular of all the bishops", but that he had left the diocese of London "in a condition of ecclesiastical chaos". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography concludes that Winnington-Ingram's "failure to understand the depth of divisions within his own diocese meant that he was unable to develop a concerted policy for managing it". J. Morris, "Ingram, Arthur Foley Winnington (1858–1946)", ODNB; C. Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett… (London, 1959), 184. If Canterbury had fallen vacant during the brief Premiership of the Scots Presbyterian Andrew Bonar Law, it would have been difficult to have appointed Lang in succession to the Scot Davidson. Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London since 1901, might have been chosen as a provisional Primate. Since he clung to his diocese until 1939 and survived to 1946, he would not have proved a stopgap.
[7] Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 70-1. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (A. Wilkinson, "Lang, (William) Cosmo Gordon, Baron Lang of Lambeth (1864–1945)") notes Lang's capacity for "self-dramatization" and argues that he suffered from "an over-long apprenticeship to the cautious Davidson".
[8] A. Hastings, "Temple, William (1881–1944)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[9] "According to the gossips, he has been about to resign any time these last ten years", wrote the London correspondent of the Adelaide Chronicle, 26 November, 1927 (via Trove, the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive).
[10] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1328-35.
[11] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1362.
[12] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1306-14; M. Morris [ed.], The General Strike (Harmondsworth, 1976.
[13] Hansard, cxlv, 9 May 1905, 1298-1307; Bell, Randall Davidson, 593. Davidson's concern for indigenous people caused him mild embarrassment in 1916 when he was pressed to call for clemency for Roger Casement, sentenced to hang for treason. Casement had been a useful source of information on racial exploitation in the Congo and Peru. Bell, Randall Davidson, 786-9.
[14] Bell, Randall Davidson, 546-7.
[15] Bell, Randall Davidson, chs 33, 36-7. When Baldwin lost his majority at the 1923 general election, Davidson shuttled between Asquith and Baldwin as they contemplated the formation of Britain's first Labour government. The guiding principles in this negotiation seem to have been not so much the tenets of the Christian religion as the spirit that animated the rules of cricket. P. Williamson and E. Baldwin, eds, Baldwin Papers… (Cambridge, 2004), 136-8.
[16] K.O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity… (Oxford, 1979), 161; Hansard, xlii, 2 November 1920, 142-8. Davidson admitted that he knew little about Ireland, but he insisted that "this is not a conflict between England and Ireland in the large sense … but is a contest between one part of Ireland and another part, and the inability or unwillingness of the two parts of Ireland to come to an agreement upon terms which, if they once were agreed upon them, England would, I imagine, also not fail to agree upon, provided they were consonant with the safety of the Empire. But these are generalities." Indeed, they were.
[17] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1055-66.
[18] Westcott was probably fortunate in delaying his intervention until both sides were exhausted: with any earlier initiative "in the judgment of those who were best able to advise me, I was more likely to do harm than good by such interference". His compromise solution included the establishment of a neutral conciliation board to fix wage rates in the future. This did not prove very successful. A.W. Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott… (2 vols, London, 1903), ii, 117ff; G.A. Patrick, "Westcott, Brooke Foss (1825–1901)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[19] Bell, Randall Davidson, 951-2, 1045-8. Notably, the reproach that the Church of England was the Conservative party at prayer apparently dates from 1917.
[20] Since the full title of the project / gathering was Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (my emphasis), the acronym should have been COCPEC. It was ironic that the key word had to be omitted to avoid any hint of impropriety.
[21] Kent, William Temple, 115-27; The Proceedings of C.O.P.E.C… (London, 1924), 14-15, 20. Canon Lloyd caustically noted that many delegates were "lightheartedly promising new worlds for old at once and on the spot. … the conference was discussing sociological problems out of their theological context, and was therefore continually surrendering to the impulses of a transient mood of idealism". Lloyd, The Church of England 1900-1965, 306-8.
[22] Davidson gently discouraged Temple's offer to return: "of course your presence as a counsellor would be very valuable… I feel deeply for you in the necessity of being absent from England at such an hour." When Temple did return, he energetically involved himself in attempts to resolve the coal industry dispute, which continued after the termination of the General Strike. It is not clear that his efforts were helpful. F.A. Iremonger, William Temple… (Oxford, 1948), 336-44.
[23] J. Kent, William Temple… (Cambridge, 1992), 135-9. From Whitaker's Almanack, 1923, 271-8, I estimate the total salaries of diocesan bishops, deans and canons residentiary in English cathedrals at around £220,000. Appointed bishop of Southwark in 1919, Cyril Garbett aimed to pay each incumbent in the diocese a minimum stipend of £400 a year (or £470 where there was no parsonage). Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 152-3. Canon Roger Lloyd defended the Ecclesiastical Commissioners as socially responsible landlords, but his history of the Anglican Church is overwhelmingly celebratory: R. Lloyd, The Church of England 1900-1965 (London, 1966), 333-6.
[24] Hansard, lxiv, 5 May 1926, 49-51; S. Mews, "The Churches" in Morris [ed.], The General Strike, 322.
[25] The BBC became a public corporation in 1927.
[26] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1306-14. Mews argues that the initiative of the Free Church leaders in approaching Lambeth is evidence of their awareness of the decline in the political power of Nonconformity. Thus the interdenominational coalition that Davidson sought to mobilise was weaker than it might have appeared: Mews in Morris [ed.], The General Strike, 322.
[27] K. Middlemas and J. Barnes, Stanley Baldwin… (London, 1969), 413. Reith's decision seems to have been dictated by the Archbishop's unrelated namesake, J.J.C. Davidson, a Conservative politician who held the emergency office of Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner. On reading a draft of the proposed radio address a few hours before the projected broadcast, the other Davidson immediately decreed that "it could not go out". Reith telephoned the news to Lambeth Palace, insisting that the cancellation was his own decision. The historian Simon Potter accepts the explanation that Reith delayed the broadcast because he feared that the government would use it as a pretext to take control of the BBC. R.R. James, ed., Memoirs of a Conservative… (London, 1969), 248-9; S.J. Potter, This is the BBC… (Oxford, 2022), 33. Bishop Barnes of Birmingham thought the impact of Davidson's appeal was "enormously increased by the Government's refusal to allow it to be broadcast", something of a back-handed compliment to its content. Mews in Morris [ed.], The General Strike, 336.
[28] The Times, 18 May 1926.
[29] P.A. Williamson, ed., The Modernisation of Conservative Politics… (London, 1988), 197.
[30] W. Temple, Christianity and Social Order (Harmondsworth, 1942), 13. It is possible that Temple's memory failed him in the details here. In a speech in July 1926, Baldwin mocked Temple's subsequent attempts to solve the continuing coal industry strike by likening them to the Federation of British Industries seeking to unite the Baptists with the Anglo-Catholics. P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin … (Cambridge, 1999), 290.
[31] Bell, Randall Davidson, 801.
[32] Bell, Randall Davidson, 398-9. The Archbishop used "quite" to mean "totally" not, as in informal modern English, "partly". In 1927, the Protestant champion William Joynson-Hicks referred to Davidson's 1904 promise of a crackdown in dismissing the argument that episcopal discipline would ensure that the Revised Prayer Book did not lead to further experimentation. "We are asked to trust the Bishops. Therein lies the difficulty. It is not a question of trust. It is a question how so many of them can possibly deal with these offences when they have connived at their existence for 20 years past, and from time to time, have appointed men who they knew to be guilty of these illegalities to offices in the Church." Hansard, ccxi, 15 December 1927, 2545-6.
[33] "The Bishop of London has filled the Diocese of London with these men", Joynson-Hicks complained. Hansard, ccxi 15 December 1927, 2546.
[34] Bell, Randall Davidson, 454-73, esp. 470-3. The Royal Commission recommended that Romish practices should be halted "if necessary, by proceedings in the Ecclesiastical Courts". It was not clear how decisions would be enforced.
[35] Hansard, ccxi, 12 December 1927, 776.
[36] Hansard, ccxi, 12 December 1927, 782.
[37] J.G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London, 1949), 134.
[38] Bell, Randall Davidson, 812.
[39] Hansard, ccxi, 12 December, 784-6 (Davidson); 15 December 1927, 2543-4 (Joynson-Hicks).
[40] Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, ii, 164. Davidson's speech: Hansard, ccxi, 12 December 1927, 771-93. For the rejection of the Prayer Book, Bell, Randall Davidson, 1344-58; H.A. Taylor, Jix: Viscount Brentford (London, 1933), 251-67. The Note by Philip Williamson in Williamson, ed., The Modernisation of Conservative Politics, 211-13, is succinct.
[41] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1340, 1350.
[42] Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 405n.
[43] "I cannot go into such profound doctrines as the presence of our Lord, in argument on the floor of this House. I am ready to do it in the right time and place, but I do not think it would be right to do it here and now."
[44] Hansard, ccxi, 15 December 1927, 2531-40. Bridgeman blundered into an angry clash with the Methodist Labour MP Alfred Salter by seeming to imply that opponents of the Revised Prayer Book were enemies of the Church of England. The Press Association likened Bridgeman to "a sleepy country squire reading a speech prepared for him by the curate". Wellington Evening Post, 17 December 1927 (via PapersPast, the National Library of New Zealand online newspaper archive).
[45] D. Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise… (London, 1980), 113. Since the Sadducees were among the losers of History, very little is in fact known about their beliefs.
[46] Hansard, ccxi, 12 December 1927, 793.
[47] Davidson also made a curious reference to changes in Presbyterian worship since his boyhood. "There are no better known places in the Scottish metropolis than St Giles Cathedral and St Cuthbert's Church. People who had to do with those churches even fifty years ago, to go no further back, cannot but contrast the services in those places, and in those days, with what they are to-day. The contrast is even greater than that which is to be seen in most of our churches in this country. That is not a very strong point, perhaps, as an argument, but it explains why it has been found necessary to have it in mind in the changes we are making. ... you can have these changes without departing from the sternest doctrines of Presbyterianism which you may desire to maintain." (Italics added.) He was presumably referring to the use of music in Kirk services, but it was an odd digression that would have resonated with few English people. Curiously, Davidson mentioned Scotland in his speech more often than he referred to God.
[48] In his denunciation of the Prayer Book, Rosslyn Mitchell, Labour MP for Paisley admitted: "My ideals, my training, my thoughts, are quite contrary to those of the members of the Church of England". His peroration saw him turn into Abraham Lincoln ("a Church divided against itself cannot stand. I do not believe that the Church of England can permanently endure to be half-Reformist and half-Romanist") before metamorphosing into the full Martin Luther: "thanking God from my heart that there were men who formed the Reformation which cleansed the Catholic Church as well as gave birth to the Protestant Church – I myself can do nothing but vote against this Measure. I do not want to do it, but I can do no other, so help me God!" Hansard, ccxi, 15 December 1927, 2560-7. Read a century later, Mitchell's speech sounds farcical, but its impact at the time confirms that Davidson was unwise to adopt a dispassionate approach. The Press Association reported that he spoke with "the conviction of an old Scottish Covenanter", and that his conclusion "moved many to tears": Wellington Evening Star, 17 December 1927.
[49] Hansard, ccxi, 15 December 1927, 2648.
[50] Times, 7 June 1928.
[51] Hansard, ccxviii, 14 June 1928, 1211. In commenting on Davidson's age, Joynson-Hicks made the strange remark: "Ridley went to the stake in his 80th year for the reformed Book." Although the comment sounds like a scornful put-down, its context suggests that it was intended as a compliment to the Archbishop's durability and courage. Presumably the reference was to Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London, who was burned at the stake in 1555. But the Dictionary of National Biography (published in 1896) had made clear that Ridley was in his mid-fifties when he died. Of other notable martyrs, Thomas Cranmer was 66; Hugh Latimer about 70. Joynson-Hicks did not correct the statement in the printed record (MPs often tidied up their speeches to eliminate inaccuracies) and no indignant correspondence has been traced in the press. Cf. Taylor, Jix, 265.
[52] Davidson was not only the first Archbishop of Canterbury to resign his office, but the first to receive a peerage. It was always easier to confer a hereditary title on a man who had no son to complicate the future size and composition of the House of Lords, and the Davidsons were childless.
[53] The letter was published in The Times on 3 May 1926. Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 430-1
[54] Williamson, ed., The Modernisation of Conservative Politics, 198.
[55] As Archbishop of York, Lang had refused to offer himself as a mediator during a coal strike in 1912, insisting that it was "within the power of reasonable men" to "devise some means by which both the rate of a fair day’s wage and the output of a fair day’s work can be ascertained". He kept a low profile during the General Strike. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang, 239.
[56] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1125-33. The Archbishop's wish to work towards an integrated national education system was blocked by the National Society, which operated the Anglican schools. For the decline in Nonconformist political influence after the First World War, Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, 161-3. Free Church support was cultivated by Baldwin, a loyal Anglican but proud of his Dissenting forebears. In his rewriting of history to conjure a nostalgic Merrie England, he even spoke of "dualism" of Church and Chapel as "the most potent force in the life of our country", as if they had always been allies under the skin. With the Liberal-Nonconformist alliance crumbled, the rise of Labour broke the political unity of the Free Churches: some Nonconformists took the plunge and joined Labour, but it is likely that many voted Conservative for the first time in 1924. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, 286-8, 349, 354-5.
[57] Bell, Randall Davidson, 813-15; https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/17-february/regulars/100-years-ago/memorial-on-reservation.
[58] Bell, Randall Davidson, 815.
[59] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1346n. discusses the different figures for the division that were (strangely) reported at the time. J.M. Kenworthy, Labour MP and teller for the Ayes, was quoted on the expected majority of 75 by the Press Association, Wellington Evening Post, 17 December 1927.
[60] Canterbury diocesan conference, 8 June, Times, 11 June 1928.
[61] The aphorism is the opening sentence of the Preface to Eminent Victorians. It may be compared with the reflection offered by the historian Kitson Clark in 1962, 44 years later: "The first thought that comes to mind on looking back at the society that occupied England in the age of Queen Victoria is that one knows very little about it either in detail, or for that matter as a whole, as a subject for generalization." G. K. Clark, The Making of Victorian England … (London, 1962), 275.
[62] I follow here the illuminating analysis in Williamson, Stanley Baldwin. Philip Williamson occasionally refers to 'late-Victorian' influences that shaped Baldwin's thinking, but avoids the simplistic label of 'Victorian'.
[63] Speaking on St George's Day 1924, Baldwin expressed his "profound thankfulness that I may use the word 'England' without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out 'Britain'". S. Baldwin, On England … (London, 1927), 1. Neither in these addresses, nor in the speeches in Our Inheritance (1928), did he use the term 'Victorian'.
[64] H. Nicholson, King George V… (London, 1952), 384.
[65] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1210-11; Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 199.
[66] The Proceedings of C.O.P.E.C, 16; Williamson, ed., The Modernisation of Conservative Politics, 198. Of the Archbishop's intervention, Bridgeman wrote: "I wish our Church could be a little more clear in discerning fundamental right from fundamental wrong – & not always trying to condone the unchristian behaviour of the mob, because they are poor." (Ibid., 197).
[67] D. Sommer, Haldane of Cloan… (London, 1960), 424.
[68] Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang, 303.
[69] Fifty Years: Memories and Contrasts … [introduction by G.M. Trevelyan], (London, 1932), 17.
[70] G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England (2nd ed., Oxford, 1953, cf. 1st ed., 1935), v-vii, 164.
[71] R.C.D. Jasper, George Bell Bishop of Chichester (London, 1967), 53-4.
[72] The Times, 22-24 October, 8 November 1935. Some reviews were discussed in Jasper, George Bell Bishop of Chichester, 77-8.
[73] Smyth, Cyril Foster Garbett, 469.