THE premise of Timothy Larsen’s book on Anglican chaplains in World War One is very simple: In 1917, F B Macnutt, himself a senior chaplain, edited a collected volume of essays by 17 chaplains, The Church in the Furnace. His forward opened with the declaration, ‘the Church is in the furnace’, and towards its close expressed the hope that the book might help ‘those at home who are thinking out the problems that confront Church and nation…’ The Church in the Furnace ran to multiple editions and has long been recognized as a key primary source for scholars of religion and conflict. The Fires of Moloch discusses the contributions of those 17 authors and traces their lives and ecclesiastical careers.
As Larsen observes, the majority of the writers became bishops (and at least two more declined bishoprics). Most of their paths crossed for the rest of their lives, and their friendships transcended their theological differences, ten being identified as Anglo-Catholic and the remainder as evangelical or low church. Some of them became famous in the post-war period, and in a few cases their names have lived on long after their deaths. For example, Eric Milner-White is annually remembered as the originator of the service of nine lessons and carols at King’s College, Cambridge. While some discussed major theological questions, such as the challenge posed by the conflict to traditional views of divine omnipotence, an oft-repeated theme was the need for Prayer Book revision in order to make it more accessible and usable. The so-called Prayer Book crisis of 1927–28 could be seen as an example of the way in which, a decade after the Armistice, the hopes of the chaplains for change in the Church were often unfulfilled.
Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy was perhaps the most famous of the contributors. Certainly, he was the most prolific author in the decade between the war and his death in 1929. Moreover, he has been the subject of most attention by scholars of religion and conflict. While he is identified as ‘priest and poet’ in the Church of England calendar, many other descriptors have been suggested, including theologian, showman and pacifist. It could be thought that there is little more to be said.
However, what Larsen offers is a careful teasing-out of some of the labels given to Studdert Kennedy, through a meticulous examination of primary sources. For example, he considers Studdert Kennedy’s poem ‘Woodbine Willy’ which starts, ‘They gave me this name by their nature…’ and shows, conclusively in my opinion, that far from his nickname being invented by the soldiers to whom he gave packets of Woodbine cigarettes, it was in fact Studdert Kennedy’s own invention! While such a revelation might seem to support the ‘showman’ label, a case can be made that his self-promotion was simply to further his advocacy of the Christian gospel. Certainly, there was no personal gain involved, for he lived and died with few possessions and little wealth.
As for the ‘pacifist’ label, Larsen cuts through the conflicting mass of secondary sources to disprove the claims that Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist after the conflict. He was appalled by the human and financial cost of war but did not reject it outright.
When he turns to the sad story of F W Worsley – ‘The Immoral Dean’ – we again see Larsen forensically interrogating familiar sources, producing a more nuanced picture of the sometime dean of Llandaff, forced to resign after a very public discovery of his marital infidelity and becoming an estate agent in Portsmouth.
Four other chaplains each have a chapter devoted to them, before, under the title ‘The Minor Prophets’, we encounter shorter biographies of the remainder. My initial reaction was to have hoped for rather more about those whose post-war profiles were rather lower than, for example, Studdert Kennedy’s. In reality, I suspect that there is less to say about them. However, taken together, the pen-portraits present a broad picture of men who, to different degrees, carried the mental and physical scars of war throughout their ministry.
The Fires of Moloch is a welcome addition to the many relatively recent volumes on religion and the First World War. While it brings together biographies of the less well known of the ‘Furnace 17’, its nuanced revisiting of the more familiar stories with a meticulous analysis of the sources familiar to scholars in the field means that it certainly merits a place on their bookshelves, physical or virtual.
Moreover, as I read of ‘The Immoral Dean’, the latest ecclesiastical safeguarding story was being aired on the TV news. As I was being reminded of the story of the Knutsford Ordination Test School, described as a ‘pre-pre-theological college’, to make relatively uneducated working-class men ready for a college course prior to ordination training, I read in the Church Times of proposals for a national strategy to allow working-class leaders to thrive in the Church. Readers will find other themes common to the stories of the 1920s and the challenges of the 2020s.
