CHURCHES, of one kind or another, have played important roles
throughout my life, although, I must admit that I am no longer a
devout worshipper, if indeed I ever was.
I remember filming for the Himalaya series at
Rawalpindi in Pakistan, in the only brewery in the entire country.
There was only one outlet for the products of the Murree Brewery,
and that was a hole in the wall at the back of Raffles Hotel on the
Grand Trunk Road. Here, liquor could be purchased, but only after
I'd filled in a very thorough form: "Mother's Name; Father's Name;
Place of Birth; Religion."
As I was on camera I felt I should be scrupulously honest; so I
wrote down "Agnostic" and pushed the form towards him. He took one
look, shook his head, and pushed it back to me. How could I be more
specific? I thought again, and after some deliberation wrote
"Agnostic with doubts". I pushed this across to him, he took it
quite happily and passed me a large bottle of Murree whisky.
"Agnostic with doubts" still remains an accurate description of
the state of my faith. But I still visit churches whenever I can,
and find great comfort in them. Two years ago, I was at a court
hearing at the Rolls Building in Fetter Lane, London. The case was
a particularly unpleasant spat between the Monty Python team and
one of our producers on the film Monty Python and the Holy
Grail. I was the chief witness for the Pythons, and was given
a much tougher time in the witness box than I'd expected. So much
so that my cross-questioning was still not completed by the lunch
break.
As I was still under oath, I was absolutely forbidden to speak
to anyone who was anything to do with the case. So I walked down to
Fleet Street and sat at a fast-food counter and ate a sandwich I
didn't really want. It was busy; people were coming in and out; I
wasn't encouraged to stay. It was bitterly cold, and I found myself
at the doorway of a church I'd never noticed before: St
Dunstan's-in-the-West.
After the grilling of the morning, and the rushing of the
lunchtime crowds, never was a church interior more welcome and more
comforting. And I've done the same thing in New York and Paris and
wherever else there has been a tumult to escape from. I've also
listened to sublime music and wonderful choirs in churches around
the world, and I still find that a special treat.
But there are seven churches that have meant more to me than
most.
THE first is the church in which I was baptised in 1943, and in
which my parents worshipped until 1966: St John's,
Ranmoor, in Sheffield. Grade II listed, designed by
Flockton and Gibb, and opened in 1888 after a fire destroyed all
but the tower of the previous church; consecrated in 1879. The
spire is the tallest in Sheffield.
Many of my most potent early memories are associated with St
John's, Ranmoor, at which I was a regular attendee throughout most
of my childhood. My parents were both regular churchgoers, which in
those days put them very much in the majority in our
neighbourhood.
My father was a bell-ringer. St John's had a ten-bell peal, and
occasionally he would take me along, helping me climb the
precipitous stairs to the belfry where I would watch him rising and
falling gently on the rope of the Number Nine bell. From him I
learnt my Bob Majors and my Grandsire Triples.
My father was also a keen chorister. The interior of the church
was on a spectacular soaring scale; so I can remember early filial
pride as he sometimes led in the choir, his singing being
completely unaffected by his serious stammer. And very occasionally
he would be chosen to play the organ, which was particularly
impressive.
I would go out after the Nunc Dimittis to Sunday school across
the road at the vicarage. On certain occasions, we were allowed to
stay for the entire service, particularly when he had visiting
speakers, my favourites being the missionaries: often bronzed,
powerful men with wild hair who would grip the pulpit with one
hand, the other having been lost at a mass baptism in the
Limpopo.
Among the milestones celebrated at St John's was my sister's
wedding (I was an usher), and my first terrifying performance in
public: reading one of the lessons at the Christmas carol service,
at which I remember my knees wobbling like those of a newborn
giraffe, as I stood before proud parents, sister, and some 250
Sheffield worthies.
THOUGH I was born and brought up in Sheffield, my father was an
East Anglian, the son of a doctor from Fakenham, and the two-week
summer holiday provided the ideal chance for him to get back to the
beloved county of his birth, and in particular to the magnificent
churches in the area. I can remember that barely had we unpacked
than my father was off to see a church or three.
In a BBC play I wrote in 1986, East of Ipswich, I
fictionally recalled my frustration at having to accompany him
rather than prowl the beach in search of pretty girls. But,
actually, I rather enjoyed these church visits.
If the church was empty, I would climb up into the pulpit and
deliver the stirring first few lines of an improvised sermon,
delighting in being able to be in front of a captive, if entirely
absent, audience.
In a sense, these church visits gave me a chance to feel what it
might be like to be an actor. Ironically, my father had expressly
forbidden me to even think of acting as a career. But he chuckled
away at my attraction to pulpits. I think he could quite happily
see me becoming a vicar, one of the few callings which probably
paid even less well than acting.
In 1966, my father retired from his job at the export department
at a Sheffield steelworks, and promptly moved to Southwold, which
boasted a church as different in look and character from the
Victorian Gothic of Ranmoor as the Suffolk coast was from the dark
satanic mills of industrial Sheffield.
Indeed, Nicholas Pevsner, who wasn't one to scatter praise,
called St Edmund's, Southwold, "the epitome of
Suffolk flushwork".
The church is impressive: the tower is 100 feet high, the nave
144 feet long. And you could easily put your neck out gazing at the
glorious painted roof with winged angels carved on the end of the
hammerbeams. Not surprisingly, it gave my father great pleasure,
and he rarely missed a Sunday service here.
Both my parents are buried here at Southwold, and I recorded in
my diary my mother's funeral service, on what would have been her
86th birthday, on 14 January 1990:
"The service goes well. The church itself is a fine setting for
it. The choir was out in force and hymns sung lustily. 'Guide Me, O
Thou Great Redeemer', 'The King of Love My Shepherd Is', 'Immortal,
Invisible', and 'Morning Has Broken'.
"The choice of lesson worked well. . . 'There is a time to every
purpose under heaven' seemed to suit her departure so well. 'He
hath made everything bootiful in his time,' reads Joe Hurran, in
unconscious parody of the well-known turkey farmer. I read my
address clearly, though received a bit of a knock when I mounted
the lectern to find a piece of paper with 'Cleese' written on it.
It turned out to be Joe's aid to pronunciation of
Ecclesiastes!"
ONE of my happier memories of church-hopping was to drive with
my father south down the A12, passing the proud and formidable
church at Blythburgh, a quite magnificent building, towering over
the surrounding estuary, then turning off to the altogether more
intimate village church of St Peter's, Wenhaston.
Like Southwold, there was much history here. The tower has stood
since the 14th century. But, unlike Southwold, St Peter's had never
been damaged by fire, and possessed original Norman windows.
But what made it really special, and what my father revealed to
me with great excitement, was the Wenhaston Doom, a wall-painting
of the Last Judgement dating back to the reign of Henry VIII. It's
wonderful and unusual, though Pevsner, who'd clearly used up all
his superlatives at Southwold, called it "distressingly rustic". I
beg to differ.
I agree with John Seymour, in the Companion Guide to East
Anglia, who called it "a quite marvellous panel". And, dare I
say it, a quite Monty Python-ish vision of hell, which must have
had quite an impact on the 16th-century congregation, distressingly
rustic though they may have been.
EVERY now and then, I did manage to get away from my father's
church trips. By chance, one of the girls I had been so anxious to
meet on the beaches of Southwold became not only a close friend
but, in April of 1966, we married at St Margaret of
Antioch, Abbotsley, near St Neots, in what is now
Cambridgeshire. The churchyard, with its tall chestnuts and ancient
dark yew trees, bordered on to my mother-in-law's house. The church
clock is kept going by a rota of local men whose perilous ascent to
the winding mechanism would appal Health and Safety.
As we've remained married for 49 years, I'm obviously quite
thankful for what happened here in Abbotsley. I'm also lucky to be
able to see and enjoy it whenever we're up visiting mother-in-law,
who's now 102, and has only recently given up reading the lesson
there.
The church occupies the most prominent position at the top of
the hill in the centre of Abbotsley village. It, and its
predecessor, has occupied the same space since 1138. The structure
dates back to the 13th century, and we know that in 1367 Balliol
College, Oxford, became the church's patron.
This good-looking but unflamboyant church does have its
curiosities. On the top four corners of the tower are statues of
what appear to be knights, or certainly men at arms. They date from
the 15th century, and are thought to represent the Kings Macbeth,
Malcolm, Harold, and William. Though the provenance is shaky, their
mysterious origins still add a special touch of character which
differentiates this otherwise modest church from any other.
The problem with somewhere like Abbotsley, which is an
increasingly prosperous commuter village for Cambridge, is that,
though only a handful or villagers go to church regularly, many
will turn out at Christmas and Easter. There is a genuine fondness
for the church that defines this village. It may attract few
regular worshippers, but it stands out boldly on every
commemorative mug, tea towel, local magazine, photograph, and
painting.
IN 1986, I received some family papers from a cousin of my
father's. Included among them was a diary belonging to my
great-grandfather, Edward Palin. He was a don at St John's College,
Oxford, and one of the diaries, dated 1861, tells of a walking
holiday in Switzerland, when he was 39.
On Lake Constance, he writes of meeting two American ladies: one
of early middle-age, and the other, whom he presumes to be her
daughter, called Brita, who is "17 years and six months old". He
clearly falls for her, and writes regretfully, "if only our ages
had been closer, how different things might have been."
To which had been appended much later, in red ink, the words:
"We married in Paris in 1867, she has made me the happiest of
men."
The girl, my great-grandmother, was an orphan from the Irish
potato famines, shipped out to America and adopted by a wealthy
spinster. My great-grandfather had to relinquish his position as
Senior Tutor at St John's, as all dons were expected to be
celibate. The college found him a living at Linton in
Herefordshire.
He remained Vicar of St Mary's, Linton, for 36
years, from 1867 to his death in 1903, and is buried in the
churchyard, alongside Caroline Watson, Brita, and their third
child, Richard, who died at the age of 18, while still at school.
The eldest of their seven children was my grandfather; the youngest
was my Great-Uncle Harry, who was killed on the last day of the
Somme offensive. I draw some sense of continuity with the past when
I think of my great-grandfather addressing the congregation from
the pulpit of St Mary's.
THERE have been many churches that I've seen on my journeys
around the world, but none more modest in scale, yet more heroic in
location, than the Naval Chapel on Cape Horn.
Cape Horn was a sailor's graveyard before the
Panama Canal opened in 1914, and is still perilous. We landed there
during the filming of Full Circle, to be greeted by a dog
that clearly hadn't seen strangers for quite a long time. This is
the diary entry I made on 15 May 1996:
"I'm surprised to find a chapel on Cape Horn. It's small, not
much more than 15 feet long. The walls are made from planks of wood
sheathed in rough, pine-tree bark. A tin-roofed porch protects the
entrance, and rubber matting covers the floor. The altar is a
wooden slab resting on two tree trunks. A plaster statue of the
Virgin surveys the empty chairs.
"What light there is falls from two small windows, one on each
side, both of them murky with sea salt.
"Out of one window is the Pacific Ocean, and out of the other
the Atlantic. Nowhere else do the coastlines of the world's two
greatest oceans come so close that by a simple turn of the head you
can see them both.
"And that's not all. Behind me, through the doorway, I can see
the point where America ends, where 15,000 miles of coastline peter
out in a cluster of grassy rocks."
And so to the last of my selection of seven churches. This last
is my local church, St Martin's, Gospel Oak,
London NW5 - a very eccentric church, indeed; and for once it's
impossible to disagree with Pevsner when he describes it as "the
craziest of London's Victorian churches".
Elizabeth and Wayland Young, in their book London
Churches, were more specific, likening it to "a duck-billed
platypus", though somewhat qualifying this eccentric judgement by
adding that "this is not an expression of the author's liking or
approval, rather an expression of faith in the oddness of the
human, and therefore of the divine imagination."
It was made to the designs of Edward Buckton Lamb, and for a
cost of £11,114 5s. 6d., a cost borne largely by
John Allcroft, a glove manufacturer from Worcester with strong
Evangelical beliefs, who was moved to spend some of his fortune on
the moral and spiritual improvement of this rough and deprived part
of expanding London.
Suitably, perhaps, the first incumbent was the Revd Joseph
Medland, whose training had been largely among the convicts in
Tasmania.
The interior is full of weird and wonderful architectural and
decorative flourishes. Perpendicular Gothic prevails, though not as
we know it. The apse with its richly coloured and textured ceiling
is almost Byzantine. There is fine stained glass, and complex
carvings on the capitals and mosaic panels on the walls.
Set among bland and functional modern estates, St Martin's is as
incongruous as it is eccentric. But before one is tempted to
dismiss St Martin's as an ecclesiastical folly, a sort of
Disneyland of devotion, it's worth remembering that it's not only
Grade I listed, but has pride of place among Simon Jenkins's
Thousand Best English Churches.
For me, the importance of St Martin's is inextricably tied up
with the development in the area, in which my wife and I have lived
for nearly 50 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, much of Gospel Oak was
razed to the ground to create new estates accommodating higher
population densities. Street patterns were destroyed, and the scale
of the housing became monumental, with long concrete blocks
replacing the human scale of the brick terraces.
Standing like a beacon in the middle of all this, to remind us
how it once was, was the chunky, fanciful tower of St Martin's.
Even this was threatened at one time, but this indomitable
Kentish ragstone tower has become a survivor, a survivor keeping
alive the memory of the all-but-lost history of this ill-favoured
area.
FOR my part, I feel very strongly that, if the idea of a
community is to mean anything at all, then we must value the
churches that are at their centre. Not just because so many are
beautiful buildings in themselves, but for what they can still
offer - as they used to offer - as havens, shelters, places of
protection, places that it doesn't cost a penny to enter, and which
won't cost you a penny to stay all day.
We must not be afraid to try and use our churches, open them for
believers and non-believers, and even "agnostics with doubts" to
enjoy. They are an archive of hopes, dreams, fears, skills, talent,
and troubles, which should surely be available to as many people as
possible. They are a precious expression of our past. And it is the
duty of our present generation to deliver them intact for the
future.
This is an edited version of a talk Michael Palin gave to
the National Churches Trust on 26 March.
For more information about the National Churches Trust,
visit www.nationalchurchestrust.org.