Crowning glory
AS JANUARY rolled into what felt like its ninth week, even I began to lose enthusiasm for waiting for Candlemas.
It baffles me how quickly some take down their decorations, undeck their halls, and extinguish the lights of Christmas at the most miserable time of year. The weather is rotten, the mornings are still dark, and there’s a tax bill to pay. And, worse, some willingly give up drink. We keep up the decorations in our house — as in our church — until 2 February, though it is odd to have the only wreathed front door on the street.
By the time you read this, the French santons will have been packed away at All Saints’, Blackheath, where I am a churchwarden. One of the delights of Christmastide is our nativity scene, made up of Provençal villagers around the Holy Family in the stable.
The idea began during the French Revolution, when an artist from Marseilles distributed clay figures of the ensemble, with shepherds dressed as local tradesmen to root the Christmas story in their modern community. Two parishioners who holidayed near Avignon donated a collection of these to All Saints’ some years ago, and it has been gradually increased.
The figures are laid out on a table by the organ before midnight mass, while the Magi perambulate round the church before Epiphany. Two years ago, however, Balthazar went missing, along with a peasant girl carrying lavender. Romance, or theft? I tried to order two more online from a santonnier, but, although he took my £120, they never arrived. Stopped by Herod on the way to south London?
When I wrote about this, I received an email from one Jenny Fitz Gerald, who lives in the south of France but had grown up in Blackheath. “One of my proudest memories was standing in the pulpit of All Saints’ as the narrator reading the nine lessons in a nativity play in the mid-1950s,” she wrote. The santons tradition has been observed in her home for 50 years, and she wanted to repay her nostalgia.
She visited a santons exhibition and bought us a new Balthazar, who has slipped easily into the original line-up, like Foggy replacing Blamire in Last of the Summer Wine. It was the most charitable and unexpected of Christmas miracles.
Brute strength
ALL SAINTS’ was consecrated by Archibald Campbell Tait, then Bishop of London, in 1858, the same year as another of my loves was formed: Blackheath rugby club.
The club began life playing out of the Princess of Wales pub, two hoofs of a ball from All Saints’, and it was there that the England and Wales teams got changed before — and refreshed after — their first international in 1881, played half a mile away beside what is now Marks & Spencer. Next month’s 143rd encounter will again test my friendship with our Reader, a proud daughter of Penarth.
The concept of “muscular Christianity”, a belief in the spiritual value of team sports, caught on after the phrase appeared in a London weekly paper in 1857, the same year as the publication of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, a novel about life at Rugby School, where playing hard and praying hard — a ball in one hand and a Bible in the other — went easily together.
The sport of rugby was famously invented at the school in the 1820s, when a boy, William Webb Ellis, caused a stir by picking up the ball and running with it. Twenty years later, he became Rector of St Clement Danes, on the Strand in London, best known for a stirring sermon on the Crimean War which made the papers. By then, Rugby’s headmaster was the future Bishop Tait.
The school at that time had a reputation for an ultra-aggressive approach to sport. One visitor in the 1860s, shocked by the roughness on display, asked the then head whether he would ever stop a match for foul play. “Never,” Frederick Temple replied stoutly, “short of manslaughter.” Like Tait, he became Archbishop of Canterbury.
Question of attribution
EVEN more competitive, if not quite as vicious, is the parish quiz night, a highlight of our calendar.
The week before, there was the usual post-mass lobbying over coffee to attract key players on to teams. One member of the congregation let it be known that he had been on University Challenge, and was promptly nabbed by our curate. This gave me added motivation, after captaining my college to victory in the intra-mural competition run by the Cambridge Union, but not being invited on to the telly.
I warmed up for our quiz by entering another one the night before, when a friend from St Michael and All Angels, Blackheath, asked whether I would join his team. Winning that from behind, going into the last round, was ideal practice. Despite cries of “fix” at our curate’s table, when the quizmaster asked which of Paul’s epistles had the words “For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians, as if you needed telling), we came through in the second half to take the laurels, and cap what had been a good weekend. Blackheath rugby club beat Moseley from behind, too.
It is, of course, not about the winning (cough). The quiz was in aid of our parish charity, Charlton Athletic Community Trust, who — despite preferring round balls —do excellent work to improve lives in south-east London. It raised £1800, helped by an extensive set of raffle prizes donated by local businesses: meat from the butcher, a haircut from the barber, a meal from the Indian restaurant, and so on.
A heartening sign of our whole community pulling together to help our church to help others.
Timepiece de résistance
EVERY churchwarden has something that keeps breaking down (and it is to be hoped that it isn’t the vicar). For me, the persistent bugbear is our clock, which stubbornly insists on resetting itself immediately after my twice-yearly ascent into the steeple to switch between GMT and BST, so that it strikes the hour at two minutes to, while the face shows eight minutes past. Or sometimes vice versa.
We have got used to it, and joke that — despite our close proximity to the Greenwich meridian — we keep Blackheath Mean Time. Now, a solution has been presented, as one of the minute hands fell off during a storm. Since we have no desire to hire scaffolding to fix it, the north face will for now simply display the time as, say, “ten-ish”. That should be good enough.
Patrick Kidd is churchwarden of All Saints’, Blackheath, and Diary editor of The Times.