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Tuesday 2 December 2008

And Another Thing

Stop throwing bricks! You might hit a bishop’s niece

‘Damn! Another bishop dead!’ said Lord Melbourne in 1834, adding, ‘I think they do it to vex me.’ The departure of one bishop meant he had to make a new one, and that involved writing (in his own hand, for security reasons) disagreeable letters on matters in which he took little interest. In his time, however, there were only 26 bishops, and no more than two died, on average, in any one year. Today there are 114 bishops, and when one dies, or half a dozen for that matter, it is, to use Talleyrand’s distinction, a news-item, not an event. The Anglican Church is a shrinking phenomenon. In Melbourne’s day, 80 per cent of the population were baptised into the Church of England: today it is 15 per cent. There were more than three million weekly church-goers. Today there are less than a million though the population has quadrupled. But the fewer Anglicans there are, the more bishops they are given. There are over 800 throughout the world. At the recent Lambeth Conference, an entrepreneur found it worth his while to set up a shop selling antique crosiers. In his 1930s tract, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote:

In a Lancashire cotton town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the south of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.

It was a different matter in the old days. I often go for walks in Little Venice and St John’s Wood, land which once belonged to the Ecclesiastical Commission. It was an area where grandes horizontales had their villas — I often pass Lillie Langtry’s. Incongruously, when the Commission developed the area, and laid down new streets, they called them after prominent bishops. Thus there is Blomfield Road, after the hyperactive Bishop of London, much denounced by Sydney Smith for his busybody ways. He is said to have built over 400 churches, one of which he paid for out of his own pocket, to the fury of his nieces, let alone his nine children. He was the first to refuse to wear an episcopal wig, though he kept the apron, quipping: ‘I need it when Mrs Blomfield requires me to help with the washing-up.’ This was a joke not much relished among poor perpetual curates, for the Blomfields had a dozen indoor servants.

More articles from: Paul Johnson | this section

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