It might be thought a recipe for disaster to ask a committed and convinced pacifist to review a treatise detailing and defending the practice of the Church of England during the First World War. Yet, although I would take issue with Robert Beaken's agreement with his subjects that the war was, reluctantly, acceptable, there is so much to admire in his excellent study, The Church of England and the Home Front, 1914–1918: Civilians, Soldiers and Religion in Wartime Colchester, that I was hooked, regardless.
Beaken is a parish priest who understands and communicates just what that role means. His principal focus is on what it meant to be the Church of England in that place, at that time. The Church of England needs these studies for many places and many times, for something precious is being captured here. Yes, it was wartime in a military town and there was exceptional stress and suffering, but the principles and practice still apply that make the Church of England a national treasure to be diminished at our peril.
This is a local study, but, as with Cyril Pearce's epic study of war resistance in Huddersfield (Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community's Opposition to the Great War [2014]), a local focus gives an opportunity for exploration in depth that broad-brush studies lack. Any place would have its uniqueness: Colchester was a garrison town, and Beaken shows what impact that had. The percentage increase in illegitimate births, for example, was higher than the national average. Yet there remained an ordinariness about the town that makes one think that the picture Beaken paints would have been the same anywhere in England. Beaken's book is not merely of interest to the local history society, but a volume that could describe towns, villages, and cities the length and breadth of the country. That transferability would be true, most of all, for the ministry of Colchester's parish priests, faithfully maintaining high levels of pastoral care and constant prayer.
Beaken's research is immense, often drawing on church council papers or parish magazines, and his writing is accessible and attractive, a combination that makes for an absorbing read. One gets a real sense of what it would have been like being in a Colchester church during the war: the issues, the stress, and the emotions, as well as the faithful public prayer. Beaken draws out not only publicly expressed ideas but the feelings of people in meetings and in church services. Many readers will connect, thinking “I have been to gatherings like that; I can feel what it would have been like to be there.”
Parish clergy, despite hugely divergent opinions and attitudes, are the bedrock of the Church of England. The inclusiveness of parish life, with care and prayer for anyone, everyone, regardless of commitment and faith (if any), is what makes the Church of England unique in comparison to Catholic and Free churches that emphasize membership, and even within the wider Anglican Communion. For generations, clergy have been given the “cure of souls,” the responsibility to care for the social, moral and spiritual well-being of the people—all the people.
Beaken has captured that unique inclusiveness and the responsible way in which one set of unexceptional clergy went about their exceptional ministry. He has produced a comprehensive study of parish life, with its disparate concerns, in an age when the militarization of the town and the all-embracing nature of the war was seeping into every aspect of community and church. How was liturgy affected by people's fear of loss or disability, of bereavement and shattered hopes? A previous age would have held impassioned debates on the theology of praying for the dead; in time of war, as losses mounted, pastoral necessity meant prayer for departed loved ones became commonplace in many churches.
My own priestly training taught me that parish ministry involves a combination of being pastor, priest, and prophet. Colchester clergy in the First World War were not unique in rising to the challenges of the first two of these, with little prophetic critique of the war itself. It was happening, and they felt it had to happen, so that was enough.
Beaken, however, does not duck controversial issues. Did, or did not, the bishop of London, Winnington-Ingram, preach about a great crusade “to kill Germans”? (He did, but Beaken provides the context.) What about conscientious objectors? Beaken also notes the retired field marshall who denounced reprisals (that is, responding to attacks on English civilians with bombing of German civilians) as “always useless.” I could not help thinking of the moral decline of the last century, given that such reprisals on a cataclysmic scale are now national “deterrence” policy in a nuclear age.
Finally, although we come from different starting points, I would share with Beaken a desire to challenge any dominant narrative of the First World War. For me, that means discovering and reclaiming stories of war resistance; for Beaken it means revisiting claims that the Church of England had a “bad” war. His apologia, at least at the parish level, is persuasive. There are multiple narratives of the war, and any single dominant narrative would inevitably be inadequate. In Beaken's words, “the First World War is simply too big and complex for a single, objective history of it. ‘Pure’ history, I must remind myself, is the prerogative of Heaven” (243).
All of which means that, although I would obviously have preferred to see greater critique of the war, I cannot commend this volume highly enough. It is not, I repeat, merely a local history. It is a masterly insight into life in parish churches across the country, motivated by the faith and inclusive practice which continue to characterize so many Church of England parishes today.
