Watts and co.
A FRIEND asks me whether I’m going to the Watts anniversary celebration in Westminster, and I reply, much to his amusement, “Did you know that Watts is regarded in some circles as a queer icon?”
My friend, it turns out, is referring to Watts and Co, that very upmarket firm of church furnishers and clergy vesturers, rather than to Isaac Watts, the Congregational hymn-writer about whom there was recent rejoicing for his 350th birthday (Diary, 30 August).
Some time after I wrote about this, I heard from an almshouse Brother, Adrian Risdon (who was, I gather, the blind Anglican poet John Heath-Stubbs’s amanuensis), regretting that I, as well as John Greening on Songs of Praise, had failed to mention Watts’s blank-verse epic The Dacian Battle “in terms of high praise”.
Watts called it a translation, but Brother Adrian has it on good authority that it is in fact an original poem. “Its most striking passage — effectively a blank-verse sonnet — describes two gay Muslim princes, lying dead on the battle-field — ‘Each with his spear laid o’er his lover’s heart.’”
These 14 lines my correspondent connects with the poet’s close friendship with one Thomas Gunston and the two longish poems that Watts wrote about Gunston before and “poignantly after the latter’s death in 1700, just when they both were due to begin the new century sharing Gunston’s new house”.
I was unaware of all this, but have now visited relevant parts of the internet to find out more; and, indeed, there is certainly some very intense affection here that did not, for some reason, find its way into Songs of Praise.
The conclusion: “Isaac needs to be rescued from his hymn-singers.” Discuss.
Freethinking folk
IT IS nice to hear from the Editor of the Freethinker, Daniel James Sharp, in friendly terms, after he discovered that Samuel McKee (Comment, 6 September) was a contributor to both publications.
“While I obviously disagree with Samuel’s views on religion, his ability to write for a notorious infidel magazine and an Anglican newspaper is a testament to his breadth of mind. Should we call this a form of inter-faith dialogue? (No!),” Mr Sharp writes.
“Dare I make bold and suggest that your readers might also be interested in sallying forth beyond the battle lines? They might find some interesting and provocative things to disagree with in our pages, as I have found in yours. At the very least, I am sure they would enjoy Samuel’s contributions.”
We do love an optimist. And the Freethinker, he says, was founded in 1881, when the Church Times had already been in battle for nearly two decades. I imagine generations of thoughtful people enjoying both and paying for neither as they warmed their feet in the public library.
Camp comrades
WHEN the clergy go away together, you do see a different side to them; and that’s all I’m going to say.
Canon Brian Stevenson recalls being at Butlin’s, Bognor Regis, in the 1990s with the Rochester clergy for “a creative mixture of prayer and playfulness, with keynote speakers such as John Bell, though I loved the slapstick theology of the clerical clown Roly Bain. We made our own cabaret and comical sketches and in one I was cast as a bellowing prophet of Baal. We saw a different side to the dignitaries and made many lasting friendships.”
But his memories go back to the prototypes: those Southwark clergy camps with Mervyn Stockwood, though not the one mentioned by the Revd Fergus Butler Gallie (Features, 30 August).
A Butlin’s, Clacton, in 1971, “when the weather was wonderfully warm and bright and lots of crazy golf was played. . . . I was amazed at how efficiently the meals were served with many hundreds in the long dining hall.
“Mervyn Stockwood was in good form and liked being woken up by Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Falling in love again’ over the loudspeakers in the morning for early service.”
Hats off!
ON ALL SAINTS’ DAY, I enjoyed a patronal festival the likes of which I haven’t been to for years — on Blackheath, in south London, where our reviewer Canon Nicholas Cranfield was also celebrating 25 years as the Vicar.
A people’s procession wound round the church to Sine Nomine, and there was Mozart (brevis) and the Merbecke Nicene Creed, the singing of which, despite a three-decade interval, was (had I ever been a cyclist) like riding a bicycle.
Afterwards, a new cocktail had been mixed, and I went away with the smartly printed card so that I could pass the recipe on: “The Cranfield: Cranberry Liqueur, Barrelling Tide, topped up with Franciacorta, Lombardy”. And inspired, apparently, by the pompon on the Vicar’s biretta.