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Letters

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Missing steeple

Sir: Alex James writes (Slow Life, 19 April) of the joys of orbiting the spire of Canterbury Cathedral, ‘the static needle of the steeple pointing quietly up’. In my years as chaplain of the King’s School Canterbury, I took many pupils to the top of the tower of the Cathedral. They would have looked in vain for a spire or steeple. Has Alex James perhaps mistaken Rochester for Canterbury?

Father John Thackray
Senior Chaplain, King’s School,
Rochester, Kent

The wrong George

Sir: It was a delight to receive the St George’s Day special issue and to read what were, for the most part, well-balanced and interesting articles about England and the English. That delight was only marred by reading Beryl Bainbridge’s classic error (Diary, 19 April) in confusing our patron saint with another George, George of Cappadocia, who was an early bishop of Alexandria. Gibbon’s reference to that bishop is a well-recorded error and has been made use of on many occasions as a put-down to the English, most recently by Ken Livingstone.

John Clemence QPM
Vice President of the Royal Society of St George,
Battle, East Sussex

Our origins

Sir: In his Spectator’s Notes of 19 April, Charles Moore writes that John Buchan’s idea of ‘Old English’ is ‘historical rubbish (who were these Old English who were here even before the Angles arrived to bring the word “England” to our shores?)’. But it is not historical rubbish; DNA research in the past decade or so has revealed how little is the input from successive waves of Vikings, Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Normans. The earliest ‘English’ came from the western coast of Spain and France to establish our race. Why should they not be called Old English? Charles Moore should read Stephen Oppenheimer’s masterly The Origins of the British and stop sneering at Buchan.

David Hancock
Witney, Oxfordshire