This little book offers a detailed analysis of Church of England Prayer Book revision up to the parliamentary rejection in 1928. It emerges out of a Glasgow master's thesis which makes it more of a rather stretched-out article than a fully-fledged book. It is a good piece of work and offers a fresh look at the course of Prayer Book revision from 1906 to 1928 which seeks to dispel a few of the common myths, the most important of which was that revision was principally a result of the failure of the Book of Common Prayer to address the needs of those caught up in the unprecedented suffering of the First World War both at the front and at home (p. 40). By looking in detail at the Acts of Convocation and various reports Cruickshank succeeds in showing that the demands for Prayer Book revision were already well advanced by the outbreak of the war, where the practice of reservation of the sacrament proved one of the most divisive issues. Secondly, he has also shown convincingly that the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, was far more interested in reform than many had hitherto claimed, even if his own attitude was complex. Finally, he challenges the idea of the ‘silent majority’ in the country that was reflected in parliamentary opposition. Along the way there is a very good discussion of the growth of the role of the laity both informally and formally through the early years of the Church Assembly. Unsurprisingly, Church and State tensions loom large and point to some bigger themes in the increasing pluralisation of British society and also raise constitutional issues emerging from a United Kingdom assembly making decisions for a Church of one part of that kingdom. More subtle points are made about the ways in which the revised Prayer Book amounted to the beginning of a ‘directory’ approach to worship; Common Prayer had in practice long since broken down, as Davidson noted in 1927 (p. 77).

In a book of this length there are bound to be some omissions: the main focus throughout the book is on the communion service which means, somewhat surprisingly, that other divisive issues (especially on such issues as prayers for the dead) are scarcely mentioned. Similarly, it would have been good to have had rather more information on some of the protagonists – for instance, the leading Anglo-Catholic layman, Athelstan Riley, is simply called ‘a member of the House of Laity from Winchester’ (p. 83) but he was much else besides. A longer book might have drawn out rather more nuance from the discussions and far more detail on some of the long-standing divisions of eucharistic theology.

What is perhaps most surprising is the layout of the book which amounts to a series of separate articles and bibliographies rather than a book – no doubt this is about the publisher wishing to sell off the different chapters independently of one another and is a symptom of one type of modern academic publishing – but it is somewhat bizarre to have an abstract and keywords to a three page conclusion. This strange format also makes for a vast amount of repetition in such a short volume. In addition each edition of the Journal of Convocation and Proceedings of the Church Assembly is listed separately in the footnotes and then again in the bibliographies which is both unwieldy and not the most user-friendly format. Moreover, there are very large numbers of typos and errors which should have been picked up at the copyediting stage. Despite these criticisms, there is much that is helpful in this little book. One might hope that the author will be able to extend it into a full account of one of the formative periods in the changing identity of the English Church in the twentieth century.