From Mr Simon
Kershaw
Sir, - Alex Gilmore (31 May) tells some
of the story of the book of devotions prepared by Archbishop Fisher
for the young Queen before her coronation. The book was designed
and printed at Cambridge University Press, and in his
autobiographical To Be a Printer, Brooke Crutchley briefly
tells the story from his perspective as the designer.
He was first approached by
SPCK on Easter Monday, 6 April. The Archbishop had asked two
religious communities to produce a draft, and the book needed to be
in his hands by the end of April. Just five copies were originally
intended: for the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh,
Princess Margaret, and the Archbishop.
The text arrived on 14
April, and proofs were returned to Fisher on 18 April. Crutchley
suggested that a few extra copies should be printed, for the
national libraries, for SPCK and CUP, and for those people who had
done the work, and he records that, with Fisher's agreement, 19
copies were printed and bound. "The whole work", he writes, "-
setting, correcting, printing in red and black, and binding in full
morocco - took exactly two weeks."
SIMON KERSHAW
5 Sharp Close, St Ives
Huntingdon
Cambridgeshire PE27 6UN
From the Revd Sister
Teresa CSA
Sir, - The archives of the
(Deaconess) Community of St Andrew include:
1. A letter (i) dated 31
March 1953, from the Archbishop (Fisher) to Mother Clare, DssCSA,
requesting her or her Community "to prepare a devotion, per diem,
roughly after the table I enclose". A letter (ii) of thanks is
dated 7 April.
Another letter (iii) of
thanks is dated 18 April and indicates that the Archbishop had
approached another (unnamed) community, but their suggestions were
not received until after the material for the first two weeks had
gone to the printers.
A letter (iv) dated 30 April
indicated that Cambridge University Press printed not only the four
royal copies, but also three more. He was sending one to the
Community (of DssCSA) on loan, to be returned at a later date for
preservation at Lambeth.
2. Carbon of typescript of
devotions submitted (1953).
There is no indication of
who the second community was.
TERESA CSA
St Andrew's House
16 Tavistock Crescent
London W11 1AP
From Dr Peter
Clough
Sir, - Alec Gilmore's
excellent feature provided welcome extracts from the Queen's
Book of Devotions.
There is a good description
of the commissioning and production of the volume in Edward
Carpenter's biography Archbishop Fisher: His life and
times (Canterbury Press, 1991). Fisher did not write the book,
although Carpenter seems to imply that he edited it. He
commissioned the text, very late in the day, on 31 March 1953. The
principal authors were the heads of two communities: "Miss Margaret
Potts of St Julian's and Mother Clare of St Andrew's".
Carpenter also reports that
the Queen told Fisher on 15 May 1953 that she was using the book
enthusiastically, "morning by morning in company with her
family".
PETER CLOUGH (Reader)
22 Ross Gardens, Canterbury
Kent CT2 9BZ
From the Revd Dr Nigel
Scotland
Sir, - At her coronation
service in Westminster Abbey on the 2 June 1953, the Queen solemnly
promised before God and this nation "to maintain the laws of God
and the true profession of the Gospel", "to maintain in the United
Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law", and
"to preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England,
and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as
by law established in England".
In view of this, if
Parliament were to pass the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, the
Queen, who is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, will
clearly not be able to sign it into law, since its teaching so
clearly contradicts established Christian doctrine.
NIGEL SCOTLAND
Trinity College, Stoke Hill
Bristol BS9 1HD