Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 29 April 2007

 

Revd Preb Michael Moreton recalls his time as a Curate at St Andrew’s 1948-1952

 

The Vicar of St Andrew’s after the War was John Lance.  He had been an Army Chaplain (and always wore his Sam Browne with his cassock), and later became Archdeacon of Wells.  He one day received a telephone call from the Bishop of Bath and Wells to say that he had got a curate for him.  That was me.

 

Coming from St Albans via Oxford and Wells I wasn’t quite sure where Taunton was.  But there I went with my wife and young family, a son and daughter number one.

 

In those days St Andrew’s was Prayer Book Catholic, i.e. the Book of Common Prayer understood in a Catholic sense.  High Church, you might say.  The fare was good solid stuff: Matins, Mass and Evensong every day, and a Sung Mass as the principal service on Sunday.  Pastoral work in the parish was rigorously organized.  Visiting, visiting, visiting afternoons and evenings.  The Sunday Schools were huge, largely run by Betty Routley, with lots of nubile young women as teachers.  They were crowded into the nave of the Church for the Sung Mass, so that the congregation looked good number-wise.  On Mothering Sunday the Church was packed from side to side.  And in line with all this was an annual parish outing to the seaside, in a dozen coaches or more.  The age of TV and the family car had not yet fully arrived.  But where were the men?  A man’s man though John Lance was, he couldn’t crack that one.  Who can?

 

We were soon joined by Alfred Harrison, also in the War like us.  He and I had been together at Christ Church Oxford and then Wells Theological College.  He was a bachelor, but an honorary member of our family and the Godfather of our second daughter.

 

Curates, as you well know, are always more up-to-date than their Vicars, so John Lance had a good deal to put up with.  Alfred in fact very nearly didn’t get ordained at all because of a scruple he had about the precise meaning of the canonical oath of obedience to the Bishop.  He was never fully an Establishment man, so that eventually he went off to the West Indies where he became Dean of Port of Spain in Trinidad.  For my part I was very much under the influence of the Liturgical Movement, which in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England changed liturgical life in the latter part of the 20^th century: so I fretted under the Prayer Book regime.  But good humour and good sense kept us together.

 

 

St Andrew’s was in origin a railway parish, and in the pre-Beeching era the railway still made its impact on the parish.  Often on my day off I used to take the children to the Forty Steps to see the down Cornish Riviera go through and the up Torbay Express, rush back home for something to eat, and then back to see the down Torbay Express and the up Cornish Riviera.  Standing over the lines.  Kings and Castles of course.

 

The railway played a part one year in the annual Church fête.  The fête was important for the money, and you needed a V.I.P. to open it.  So we got the Akond of Swat (in India as you will know), and he arrived on the branch line from Thorn Falcon (I think it was), with a suitably be-flagged engine.  Actually he was a railway man.  He was received at the station with due ceremony by the Mayor (also a railway man) and the Vicar.

 

Besides the fête, the Christmas parish party was, as you may imagine, also a big social occasion.  One year Alfred taught them to sing ‘Lloyd George knew my father. My father knew Lloyd George’ and so on, sung to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers'.  Verse 2 was the same of course.

 

Would you like a story against John Lance?  Some of us went on the Glastonbury Pilgrimage every year.  He was rather snooty about that, dismissing it as all banners, incense and lace cottas.  Right.  You come with us.  We will walk through the night from Taunton to Glastonbury.  He came.  Ouch.  Later he became Chairman of the Glastonbury Pilgrimage.

 

Eventually it became time to move on, as the politicians say.  I was offered a job by the Bishop of Exeter in the neighbouring diocese.  I soon got John Lance to come and preach for me.  He was surprised at how Prayer Booky it was.

 

Years later my wife and I took him and Winifred out to lunch before the shutters came down on their lives.  Much later I got to hear how deeply moved he had been by that.  And not only he.

 

It is my turn to be advanced in years.  I still remember these and other St Andrew’s people now departed in a requiem mass year by year.  I still see two of the living, Michael and Betty Steed now in Tiverton; and I heard from Ivy Dorrington before Christmas.  As Sir Thomas More said before the scaffold, ‘May we all be merrily together in heaven’.

 

Michael Moreton

 

We are very grateful to Fr Moreton for his article. He will be 90 on 1^st  June 2007

 

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