A Corporate Act of Prayer

Members of the Society are encouraged to join together in saying the following Collect

at the same time in their own homes, at 10.00 p.m. each Sunday evening.

THE COLLECT OF THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITYO LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend

thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy

succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through

Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

© The Prayer Book Society 2013

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Issue No. 31 · Lent 2013ISSN: 1479-215X

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Spiritual Formation through the Book of Common Prayer 4

The Peace which the world cannot give 11Prayer Book Society Church 13The 1928 Prayer Book Controversy Revisited 14The Right Man for the Job 16Royal Arms in Parish Churches 18iPray 19Correspondence 20Book Reviews 21News from the Branches 23Forthcoming Events 27Branch Contacts 30

CONTENTS

Submission of Photographs

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note the following:

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• When taking photographs at events, ‘action shots’ of

the event in progress are preferable to posed

photographs of groups of people or individuals

standing still.

Filling vacancies in Prayer Book

parishesThere can be little doubt that the most effective way

of ensuring the continuation of worship from the

Book of Common Prayer in a parish is to make sure

that, when filling a vacancy for a new parson,

someone with strong personal sympathy to the

Prayer Book is appointed. To this end, and thanks to

the efforts of our Churches and Clergy Co-ordinator,

John Service, we now have a list of over 70 non-

retired clergy, sympathetic to the Book of Common

Prayer, who have asked to be kept informed of

vacancies in potentially suitable parishes. In

addition, we are able to provide information about

the legal rights of PCCs in relation to appointments.

If you are a member of the congregation at a church

which has a significant commitment to the Book of

Common Prayer for a large proportion of its

services, please do let John Service know as soon as

a clerical vacancy arises. Information from our

members about impending parish vacancies is

vitally important, alongside the details we receive

from a variety of other sources. All information

received will, of course, be handled with discretion.

John Service can be contacted by e-mail at

john.service@pbs.org.uk, or via the PBS office at

Copyhold Farm.

Have your sins been rubbed out?If you are not sure, you might

want to consider purchasing

one of our new Prayer Book

Society erasers. Shaped like a

miniature red Prayer Book, and

bearing the slogan ‘For undoing

those things which we ought

not to have done’, these are

now available from PBS Trading

for 50p each (plus postage and

packing).

3

President’s Collect CompetitionCongratulations to the Revd Philip Corbett, Priest

Librarian and Chaplain of Pusey House in Oxford,

who has won the President’s Collect Competiton

with the following entry:

Grant unto this nation O Lord thy succour

and continual mercy; that we may remain

faithful and true to Thine anointed servant

Elizabeth our Queen and Governor. As Thou

hast granted years of Jubilee for thanksgiving

we offer Thee thanks and praise for her, asking

that thou wouldst bless her and this and every

nation in her care with the abundance of Thy

love. We make our prayer through Our Lord

Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of

lords who reigneth with Thee and the Holy

Ghost, one God now and forever. Amen

My text is from the Preface of the Alternative

Service Book 1980: ‘Christians are formed

by the way in which they pray, and the

way they choose to pray expresses what they are.’

I have always felt that remark was profoundly

true. We become what we pray and we pray from

that place of becoming. So it seems appropriate to

ask at this service to launch the choir’s CD

reflecting Cranmer’s genius: What kind of

Christians are formed by the Prayer Book? What do

we become if the Prayer Book is central to our

praying? I would like to suggest four particular

aspects of the Prayer Book which are formative for

those who use it.

The first is the quest for what I can only call pax

et bonum, which I would translate as ‘peace and

“The Good” ’, or perhaps ‘peace and well-being’,

or even ‘peace and human flourishing’. The Prayer

Book was formed in the crucible of civil and

spiritual conflict. There is a knowledge in its texts

of tragedy and waste, of lives ruined and hopes

unfulfilled. Tonight we sang the 137th Psalm, a

reflection on the restless anxiety of exile. Given the

context in which the Prayer Book was formed

there is an understandable longing for peace that

runs through the texts: ‘Give peace in our time, O

Lord’, ‘The peace of God which passeth all

understanding’, ‘leading a quiet and peaceable

life’, ‘O God who art the author of peace and lover

of concord’, ‘now lettest thou thy servant depart in

peace’, ‘give unto thy servants that peace which

the world cannot give’.

To pray with the Prayer Book suggests that the

most desirable thing in life is not excitement, or

originality, or novelty—but stability, concord and

unity. There is realism about the potential for terror

in the world. Boredom is not to be feared. It might

even be preferable to the jumpy, febrile

assertiveness which characterises so much of

contemporary life. In fact we can contrast the

Prayer Book’s sober desire for peace and well-

being with the more aspirational flavour of much

contemporary liturgy, the relentless idealism, the

endless desire for the new. Yet the unspectacular

realism of the Prayer Book is salutary. Here is both

a positive view of human society and its

institutions alongside a sceptical estimate of

human pretensions to virtue.

While thinking of peace and well-being it is

worth noting that there is nothing over-

ecclesiastical in the Prayer Book. The concern is for

nation and community, for peace and civic life, for

rain, for the armed forces, for protection in

sickness and temptation and for making a good

death. Boundaries matter, politeness matters,

goodwill matters. Morality is not private but

public, and spirituality is linked to active good

works, not to vacuous or charismatic interiority.

The stress on good works as the proof of saving

faith is amply demonstrated in the Collects. The

Collect which Cranmer composed for the 25th

Sunday after Trinity urges God to ‘Stir up the wills

of thy faithful people . . .’. Our wills need to be

stirred by divine grace because our wills are not

necessarily inclined to pax et bonum any more than

our hearts can be assumed to be in the right place.

The Prayer Book gives us permission to find the

world a troubling, dangerous and contradictory

place. But it also prepares us to find within this

complex environment a spiritual poise and peace

in alignment with God’s will.

Second, people formed by the Prayer Book will

be encouraged to see themselves as part of a bigger

whole. The Church of England is unique among

reformed churches in keeping a form for Morning

and Evening Prayer which is derived from the

Roman breviary. The Psalms, which form the core

of the daily Office, open our eyes on the natural

world, on times and seasons, the rhythms of the

day and the year. They also give us words to plead

for justice and to lament suffering and sin. The

Psalter ensures that we have spiritual moorings in

the Jewish and early Christian worlds and that we

are spiritually located, as our forebears were,

within the natural world of God’s creation. They

encourage us to live in harmony with nature, and

in moderation and simplicity.

Look at the 104th Psalm, ‘He laid the

foundations of the earth: that it should never move

at any time.’ The stability of the natural world is the

backdrop of life. Nature is the canvas on which we

see the good providence of God.

Spiritual Formation through the Book

of Common Prayer Angela Tilby

4

6

He bringeth forth grass for the cattle: and

green herb for the service of men;

That he may bring food out of the earth, and

wine that maketh glad the heart of man: and

oil to make him a cheerful countenance, and

bread to strengthen man’s heart.

God’s providence is not only for human beings.

God cares about the wild asses, the fowls of the air

and the fish of the sea. There are other things going

on beside us. We receive our portion of bread and

wine and oil along with the grass that feeds the

cattle, and as the lions roar after their prey. There is

a natural life as well as a supernatural life. We are

meant to be cheerful as well as earnest; to be

happy as well as serious. We ask for good things ‘as

well for the body as for the soul’.

Contemporary liturgy has quite a lot to say

about nature. There is a concern for the planet and

an awareness of our bad stewardship of the earth

and its gifts. But we do not always find this

reverent observation, this recognition of our place

in a world that in many ways is both graced and

baffling. The Prayer Book’s attitude to nature is a

strange instance in which the older text seems

more in tune with contemporary scientific

thinking about where we really are than more

recent texts which are so much more self-

conscious.

Third, the Prayer Book will form people who

see their daily work as a vocation, whatever that

work might be. The Prayer Book is not just written

for the clergy. There is a contrast here with much

contemporary liturgy in which it is assumed that

everyone is called along a path of discipleship in

which recognised ministry of some kind is a

distinct possibility. The Prayer Book grounds

vocation not in churchy activities or in any general

feelings about self-fulfilment, but in the day-to-

day necessity of earning a living. Ordinary, secular

work is not a lesser path. It is a way of holiness to

be accepted willingly, a discipline which is graced.

To stay for a moment with the 104th Psalm:

Man goeth forth to his work, and to his

labour until the evening.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works: in

wisdom thou hast made them all; the earth is

full of thy riches.

Vocation is a necessity—most of us need to earn

our living—but it also unfolds as part of our duty

to be good citizens and good neighbours. The

Catechism asks, ‘What is thy duty towards thy

neighbour?’ And the response is:

My duty towards my neighbour is to love

him as myself and to do to all men as I would

they should do unto me: To love, honour and

succour my father and my mother: to honour

and obey the Queen and all that are put in

authority under her: to submit myself to all my

governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and

masters: to order myself lowly and reverently

to all my betters: to hurt nobody by word nor

deed: to be true and just in all my dealing: to

bear no malice or hatred in my heart: to keep

my hands from picking and stealing, and my

tongue from evil speaking, lying and

slandering: to keep my body in temperance,

soberness and chastity: not to covet nor desire

other men’s goods, but to learn and labour

truly to get mine own living, and to do my

duty in that state of life, unto which it shall

please God to call me.

—Here is a riff on the Ten Commandments!

I can’t help wondering whether we would have

seen so much dishonesty in public life if bankers

and Members of Parliament had been exposed to

the Catechism’s warnings about keeping their

hands from picking and stealing!

The Prayer Book forms people who know that

the human heart is complicated. You won’t find

here a simple affective piety; for that you need a

Wesley not a Cranmer. I like to think that there is

something of Thomas Cranmer’s character in the

Prayer Book. He knew from his own experience

how easily the human heart betrays itself, and is

betrayed, by inconstant desire and fickleness of

purpose. So just as you will not find a simple

affective piety so you will not find a simplistic

view of what it is to be saved. Assurance is a matter

of theology, not emotion. The Prayer Book does

not encourage introspection. It does not urge us to

discover our own uniqueness or to develop our

individual spirituality.

Prayer Book spirituality starts with repentance,

‘keeping short accounts with God’ as the Puritans

would put it. But there is no room for poking

about in the innermost recesses of consciousness.

After all it is God ‘to whom all hearts are open, all

desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’.

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And I think that is enough. We judge ourselves by

external criteria, not by what we think about

ourselves. We have the Ten Commandments as the

standard; we know that the Gospel offers grace to

repentant sinners, and that is really all we need.

To summarise—the human heart is complicated

and unfathomable. But it is so, and therefore it can

only be known in its depths to Almighty God.

There is no room in the world of the Prayer Book

for endless affirmation of our dignity. We can rest

in the love of God. In fact we are commanded to

do so, to trust and obey.

Again, there is a contrast with modern liturgy

here, which is always anxious to affirm our worth

before God, our vocation to be living in his

kingdom, as though that were something we could

do by force of will and boundless optimism. The

Prayer Book does not flatter or cajole. Being saved

is always more important than becoming good.

So there is a profound rejection of fantasy in the

spirituality of the Prayer Book tradition.

How to summarise? Those formed by the Prayer

Book tradition will be serious Christians but they

will not go looking for spiritual heroics. There is

no glamorising of experience. There is instead

evangelical faith, Catholic resonance and a serious

call to a life marked by honest, faithful and

charitable relationships.

I will never forget how the critic and

broadcaster Marghanita Laski, much parodied by

right-wing sections of the press because she was

Jewish, an atheist and socialist and—most culpable

of all—lived in Hampstead, always insisted that she

would have nothing other than the rite of the Book

of Common Prayer at her funeral. Why? Well,

partly because she valued England very much and

thought it was simply the proper English way of

marking the end of life. But I think also because

she saw a universalism here; a recognition that we

are all caught up in the quest for pax et bonum; that

some necessary solace, wonder and detachment

comes from the contemplation of the natural

world, and that the human heart is where we are

both most hateful and most loveable. I think she

was right.

The Revd Canon Angela Tilby is Diocesan Canon at Christ

Church Cathedral, Oxford.

This article was a sermon preached at St Michael at the

North Gate Church, Oxford, for the launch of the choral CD

Cranmer’s Legacy, with music based on texts from the Book

of Common Prayer. The CD was produced with assistance from

the Prayer Book Society, and is available from PBS Trading

(price £12.95).

9

John Service is in need of some ongoing assistance

with internet-based research, and we are appealing

for volunteers to help with this.

The tasks are as follows:

Researching details of Corporate Member

churches

We list details of churches that are Corporate

Members of the Society on our website, but we

still have something of a backlog of churches that

are not listed, and new Corporate Members are

joining all the time. We need someone to look up

the websites of these churches and other online

sources, and compile a short paragraph of

information, similar to what is currently shown

for the listed churches, and forward it to us for

uploading. In cases where there is nothing to be

found online, it would be helpful if the volunteer

could e-mail the relevant contact person (where

an e-mail address is provided) and request the

relevant information.

‘Drilling down’ into clergy vacancy

advertisements appearing in the Church Times, in

order to identify those which could be of interest

to the Society

The Society regularly contacts clergy on our e-

mail list, alerting them to vacancies in Prayer

Book-sympathetic parishes. Clergy vacancy

advertisements appear every week in the Church

Times, and the wording of some of these gives

‘hints’ that there may be significant BCP usage.

We need someone to scan the vacancy

advertisements each week, identify those which

may possibly be of interest (John can give

suggestions as to what to look for), and then see

if any more information about the pattern of

services can be ascertained online, on the parish

website or on www.achurchnearyou.com. You

will need a subscription to the Church Times

(online or print), which will be paid for by the

Society.

Researching diocesan websites to identify clergy

vacancy advertisements which could be of

interest

Allied to the above, clergy vacancy

advertisements also appear on diocesan websites,

often with more information than is shown in a

short advertisement in the Church Times. We need a

volunteer to scan the vacancy pages of diocesan

websites regularly and identify those with

significant Prayer Book use. (There are 44 dioceses

in England, but this task could be speeded up

considerably by saving a link directly to the

vacancies page on each website.)

There is work here for several people, so any offer

of help will be gratefully received. Each of the above

tasks could potentially be divided up between

several volunteers, if it proved to be too much work

for one person.

If you think you may be able to help with any of

these activities, or would like to find out more,

please contact John Service atjohn.service@pbs.org.uk

Could you help with online research?

10

11

We bless thee for our creation, preservation,

and all the blessings of this life; but above all

for thine inestimable love in the redemption of

the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the

means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

Iwas eleven when my family became Anglicans

and I first encountered the Book of Common

Prayer. Brought up as a Congregationalist it

was a novelty to encounter liturgy, of which there

were only vestiges in our Congregational Chapel.

One of those vestiges was the frequent use of the

General Thanksgiving, a small part of which I have

used as my text tonight. As an eight- or nine-year-

old I enjoyed getting my tongue around words like

‘inestimable’ and ‘unfeignedly’. Little did I realise

then that I was using a prayer written by Bishop

Edward Reynolds, Bishop of Norwich after the

restoration of both monarchy and episcopacy in

1660 and a contributor by means of that prayer to

the Book of Common Prayer as revised and

published in 1662. Even less did I know that I

would one day succeed him. Few things would

have seemed more unlikely to a Cornish

Congregationalist child.

I begin here because we are recalling with

thanksgiving the 350th anniversary of the Book of

Common Prayer published in 1662. It was not, of

course, the first Book of Common Prayer in

English. The inclusion of Reynolds’ General

Thanksgiving illustrates that. It was a Prayer Book

already revised. Reynolds had considerable

sympathies with the Puritan Movement. He played

a key part in the negotiations between

episcopalians and presbyterians at the end of the

Protectorate. Through his influence a good many

people who had previously followed a

presbyterian form of church government

conformed to the re-established episcopal Church

of England. The Book of Common Prayer of 1662

is rather more protestant than someone like

Archbishop Laud would have ever thought suitable

in the 1630s. It was a negotiated book. It was the

product of ecclesiastical and national politics and

not merely the devotional life of its age.

What we celebrate today is a Prayer Book which

even 350 years ago had well over a century of

tradition behind it. It had been the subject of

violent disagreement within the Church and

nation during a period of convulsion and civil war.

For some the formal liturgies to be found in the

Prayer Book were in themselves the sign of

papistry (to use the word current then) and

superstition. For others, the defence of one nation

in common prayer under God was the defence of

the character of England itself. The beauty of

liturgical language didn’t come into it. There were

much harsher realities around.

The first stages of the English Reformation

didn’t produce a liturgy in English at all. The Latin

Mass continued. It wasn’t until 1544 when

England was at war with France that the King

requested that prayers in English should be used

throughout the country. The impulse towards a

liturgy in English was unmistakably connected

with national unity when the country was under

threat.

The General Thanksgiving was not the only

prayer to be added to the Book of Common Prayer

in 1662. There were a good many others—prayers

to be offered in a time of dearth and famine, a

prayer to be used when faced by war and tumults

as well as a prayer when any common plague or

sickness prevailed. There were also prayers for fair

weather, for peace and deliverance from enemies,

and for restoring public peace at home. The 1662

Prayer Book was produced in a nervous nation.

After all, England had executed its King only

thirteen years earlier. There was a preoccupation

with the threats which England faced. So the BCP

can read as a rather sombre book.

The prayerful longing of the Book of Common

Prayer is for one nation which is ‘godly and quietly

governed’ and in which the ‘punishment of

wickedness and vice’ is decisive. The Book of

Common Prayer was crafted in two centuries of

unquietness and fear.

But our English liturgy made some changes

which were highly significant, though often

forgotten. Between the first Prayer Book of 1549

The Peace which the worldcannot give

Graham James

12

and the second Prayer Book of 1552 the

Purification of Women, the service after childbirth,

became the Churching of Women. A note of

greater thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a child

was sounded along with concern for the

continuing health of the mother. The traditional

view that women needed to be purified for

uncleanness after childbirth diminished

considerably. This amended service put the woman

at the centre of the liturgy. It led to a distinctive

Anglican female piety which continued until the

last century. It began to die out well before

liturgical revision in recent decades took place. In

many ways we are the poorer for it. We did not

treasure our Prayer Book’s spirituality even when it

faced no competition from liturgical revisers.

That’s a matter for deep regret. We are only now

realising what we allowed ourselves to lose.

The Book of Common Prayer was intended to

be a prayer book for clergy and lay people alike. I

believe there is a largely unacknowledged reason

for this. The monastic Offices were known and

appreciated by the devout. The Dissolution of the

Monasteries led to the loss of a good deal of social

welfare but also popular religion too. The

monasteries nurtured far more lay piety than we

sometimes credit them for. Archbishop Cranmer

took the Offices of Matins, Lauds and Prime and

created from them Morning Prayer. He took

Vespers and Compline in the monastic tradition

and created Evening Prayer. These were now daily

Offices to be used by all the people of God, clergy

and lay. The words which introduced them until

the Reformation were ‘O Lord open my lips.’

Cranmer changed this to ‘O Lord open thou our

lips.’ These twice-daily acts of corporate worship

and praise, observed every day in this Cathedral for

centuries, became congregational. Cranmer

wanted our parish churches to be inhabited twice

a day by congregations praising and worshipping

God. He wanted parish churches to be

powerhouses of daily prayer, to replace the

monasteries of the past with new communities of

Christians, ordained and lay, whose worship and

prayer were woven into the texture of their daily

lives. That’s what common prayer meant to him.

That’s what being a Prayer Book church is truly

about.

The Book of Common Prayer was intended to

be a book of worship, a book of private devotion,

a book of spiritual learning, and a book

articulating the doctrine of the Christian Faith as

the Church of England understood it. It was all

expressed before God in prayer. Often people have

admired the language of the Prayer Book for the

dignity of its expressions and the quality of its

cadences. It is all true. It was a great century for

beauty in the use of the English language. But as

Alan Bennett once wrote, ‘Cranmer did not die for

English prose.’

What Cranmer did shape, however, was the

devotion of countless members of the Church of

England over succeeding centuries. These were the

people who came to know the words of his prayers

so well that they needed no book to follow. We are

liable to be the last such people unless we treasure

the Book of Common Prayer much more. I had not

been ordained very long when I went to sit at the

bedside of a dying woman in the parish in

Peterborough where I served my curacy. Edith was

a daily communicant, formed in the highest

Anglo-Catholic tradition, the sort that the

Protestant Cranmer would never have imagined

might re-emerge in the Church of England. The

parish where Edith grew up used the English

Missal but stuck to the Prayer Book for the Offices.

She frequently attended Morning Prayer and

Evening Prayer as well as the daily Mass in our

parish. As I sat by her bed one evening I prayed

aloud the collects from Evening Prayer, partly

because I wondered what else to do. She had

seemed to be asleep. As I repeated the prayers she

joined in—‘Give unto thy servants that peace

which the world cannot give; that both our hearts

may be set to obey thy commandments, and also

that by thee we being defended from the fear of

our enemies may pass our time in rest and

quietness.’ The collect for peace may have been

once very much a prayer for the nation. Gradually

it shaped an individual spirituality too and linked

them both. That evening in 1975 a young curate

on a council estate in Peterborough learned how

sustaining and renewing that collect could be. I

found new meaning in that prayer as a dying

woman prayed it, perhaps praying familiar words

with an intensity and understanding as never

before herself. That’s what the Book of Common

Prayer gave us. It has shaped Christians in life and

in death. We have many reasons to give thanks.

Sermon preached by The Rt Revd Graham James, Bishop of

Norwich, in Norwich Cathedral, for Choral Evensong and

Celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common

Prayer (1662)

Prayer Book Society Church

St Thomas à Becket is part of the

United Benefice which comprises

the parish of St Anne, the parish of St

Michael, and the parish of St Thomas at

Cliffe with All Saints in Lewes. It is a

Corporate Member of the Prayer Book

Society. St Thomas’s hosts daily services:

Morning Prayer at 7.00 a.m. and Evening

Prayer at 6.00 p.m. During the week the

1928 lectionary is used, but at the Sunday

celebration of Holy Communion the

1662 Prayer Book lectionary is the order

of the day. Founded in the twelfth century,

the church was rebuilt in the fourteenth

and restored in the nineteenth century; it

has a delightful cloister which connects

the church with the church hall. St

Thomas’s has an excellent website,

www.st-thomas-lewes.org.uk. The website

opens a window onto a vibrant

community with a lively engagement

with the wider parish. The Priest is the

Revd George Linnegar, whose telephone

number is 01273 478145.

The East Window of St Thomas à Becket,

Lewes

13

Blackburn Diocese’s 350th celebrations on 19th

May 2012 have been recorded for posterity on a

double CD. This was the exact anniversary of the

passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1662. To add

to the sense of occasion all the words and music

used in the celebration of Holy Communion

were contemporary to the second half of the

seventeenth century. The celebrant was the Bishop

of Blackburn and the preacher Lord Hope, the

previous Archbishop of York. The service of Sung

Evensong, also recorded, included the propers for

Ascension Day. The total playing time is 125

minutes.

This CD is available from PBS Trading (stock

code c113).

14

The 1928 Prayer Book Controversy Revisited

Robert Beaken

No liturgy is perfect, and by the early

twentieth century many in the Church of

England had come to believe that the

1662 Prayer Book needed revising. To take an

obvious example, it made no provision for Harvest

Thanksgiving. Prayer Book revision, though, was

easier said than done. During the second half of

the nineteenth century, Anglo-Catholics had

increasingly enriched the 1662 Communion rite

with additional material, and this led to friction

with evangelicals. Further controversy erupted in

the early twentieth century when several

Modernists advocated the revision of the liturgy in

a liberal direction, for example by abolishing the

Athanasian Creed.

Part of the difficulty was that the Church of

England had replaced several pre-Reformation

rites with a single Book of Common Prayer; and

the concept of common prayer, expressed in one

service book used by Anglicans of all

churchmanships, had become part of Anglican

self-identity. In 1906, a Royal Commission on

Ritual had recommended that the Convocations

should revise the law relating to worship ‘as may

tend to secure the greater elasticity which a

reasonable recognition of the comprehensiveness

of the Church of England and of its present needs

seems to demand’. The task proved larger than

expected, and by 1922 it had become evident that

what was needed was not a tinkering with the

1662 book, but instead a newly revised Prayer

Book. This turned out to be highly controversial.

The Anglo-Catholics sought a liturgy which gave

full expression to their beliefs about the Eucharist.

The evangelicals saw this as an attack on the

Reformation and opposed it bitterly.

By 1927 the Church Assembly was finally ready

to submit a Measure to Parliament sanctioning a

Revised Prayer Book. Many of the changes in the

new book were entirely unexceptional, but two

areas proved contentious. An alternative

Communion rite contained a longer canon,

intended to meet Anglo-Catholic complaints that

the 1662 consecration ended abruptly after the

words of institution. The 1927 canon, however,

proved unacceptable to many Anglo-Catholics

because it contained an epiclesis, or invocation of

the Holy Spirit (‘with thy Holy and Life-giving

Spirit vouchsafe to bless and sanctify both us and

these thy gifts of Bread and Wine, that they may be

unto us the Body and Blood of thy Son’), in the

Eastern Orthodox position after the words of

institution (‘Take, eat, this is my Body’ etc.), rather

than in the Western Catholic position prior to

them. The significance was that in the Western

Catholic tradition, to which many Anglo-Catholics

looked for an example, the moment of

consecration was believed to occur during the

words of institution, for which the epiclesis had

been said preparatorily. This contrasted with the

Eastern Orthodox liturgy, where the process was

reversed and the words of institution prepared the

way for the moment of consecration during the

epiclesis. Much sweat and ink were spilt over this

difference, except by the evangelicals, who did not

really believe in a moment of consecration and

consequently were satisified by the 1662 rite.

A second sticking point was permanent

Reservation of the Sacrament. The 1927 Revised

Prayer Book contained a rubric permitting

Reservation for communion of the sick, subject to

episcopal licence. This provision irritated Anglo-

Catholics, who wished for pastoral reasons

occasionally to communicate the whole as well as

the sick, and sometimes to have Benediction. It

also displeased many evangelicals, who feared that

Reservation would lead to an idolatrous view of

the Sacrament. Thus, in a nutshell, the 1927

Revised Prayer Book was unacceptable to Anglo-

Catholics because it was not catholic enough, and

unacceptable to evangelicals because it was too

catholic. The Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals

marshalled their respective forces, publicly

criticised the proposed new book, and wrote to

their MPs. Evangelicals also enlisted support

outside the Church of England from English

Nonconformists and Scottish and Welsh

Protestants. The 1927 Prayer Book was

overwhelmingly approved by the Church Assembly

and was passed by a majority of 155 in the House

of Lords. To the surprise of many, it was rejected by

the House of Commons on 15th December 1927,

by 238 votes to 205, largely because of evangelical

pressure, but also because its supporters spoke

badly during the debate.

The bishops believed that this outcome was

because of ‘misunderstandings’ and responded by

modifying the Revised Prayer Book in 1928 in the

hope of making it more acceptable to evangelicals

and MPs. The epiclesis was retained in the Eastern

Orthodox position after the words of institution.

Reservation was still permitted, but as the

exception rather than the rule. These changes failed

to appease evangelicals and were resented by

Anglo-Catholics, who thought the result a much

worse Prayer Book. On 13th June 1928 the

Commons again rejected the modified Prayer

Book, this time by 268 votes to 222. Archbishop

Davidson was profoundly shaken and announced

his resignation. He was succeeded by Archbishop

Lang in December 1928.

Lang was immediately confronted by a skein of

interwoven problems. To begin with, the

controversy about the Revised Prayer Books had

seen much dirty linen washed in public.

Disagreements about churchmanship had been

exacerbated. Many Anglicans felt hurt by the

Commons’ rejection of twenty years of liturgical

revision. Michael Ramsey, then an ordinand and

later Archbishop of Canterbury, found the rejection

of the Revised Prayer Books a searing experience

which he remembered all his life. There was also

the lurking fear of Anglo-Catholic secessions,

which, according to Davidson, would lose the

Church ‘men of the intensest devotion, greatest

pastoral effectiveness, and deep piety’.

Much of Lang’s primacy (1928–42) involved

containing the fall-out from the crisis and holding

the Church of England together. Himself an Anglo-

Catholic, he treated all Anglicans equally and

sought a balance of appointments, reflecting the

range of churchmanships. In the diocese of

Canterbury, Lang gave sensible instructions about

Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament and

permitted it when there was a pastoral need. His

attempts to secure further reform of the liturgy

were largely stymied by the bishops, most of

whom were uninterested in questions of liturgy.

Lang appointed a commission to examine the

relationship of the Church to the state, which

published its report in the week that George V died

and was thus rather overshadowed. By the time the

Second World War broke out, the controversy over

the 1928 Prayer Book seemed very old hat.

And what of the 1928 Prayer Book? Parts of it

soon became well known and much used in the

Church of England, for example the marriage and

burial services. The 1928 Communion rite was not

especially good, and, apart from in a few high-

church liberal parishes, never really took off.

Evangelicals mostly continued to use 1662

‘straight’, whilst Anglo-Catholics tweaked the 1662

rite (the so-called ‘Interim Rite’) or used the English

Missal.

For all its faults, though, the 1928 Prayer Book

remains worth dipping into. It provides collects,

epistles and gospels for a variety of minor holy

days and a selection of very fine prayers in

traditional English. Bishop Hensley Henson, for

example, wrote a very good prayer for the peoples

of the British Empire, which can easily be adapted

into a prayer for the Commonwealth, or for

brotherly love and compassion throughout the

world.

My final reflection about the 1928 Prayer Book,

though, must be a rather poignant one. I believe

that the Revised Prayer Book was a missed

opportunity. Had Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals

listened to one another, and been more flexible in

their understanding of common prayer, they might

have devised a very useful and worthwhile Revised

Prayer Book, perhaps, for example, containing two

Communion rites to accommodate different

spiritualities. In the light of the twentieth-century

Church of England’s later liturgical changes, the

1928 Prayer Book doesn’t seem quite so terrible

after all.

The Revd Dr Robert Beaken’s book, Cosmo Lang,

Archbishop in War and Crisis, is reviewed on p.22.

15

16

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like you all to

imagine that you are the Search Committee

for a most important job: preparing the

Book of Common Prayer for the Church of

England. We have interviewed several candidates—

and now it is time for us to sum up impressions of

our last interviewee: his name is Thomas Cranmer.

I have to say that there seems to be one major

question mark against our man: clearly he is not an

Anglican. Questioning revealed that he is a rather

alarmingly international-minded Reformed

Protestant, with a great admiration for the

Reformed Churches of Strasbourg and Zurich. I

suspect that he wants England to lead the

Reformation, perhaps even stage a General Council

to rival the Pope’s Council of Trent (though that

does seem to me to be over-ambitious; I don’t

think that that is going to come off). When I tried

to explain to him what a ‘via media’ was between

Rome and the Reformation, he rather snappily

retorted that you can’t have a middle way between

Antichrist and the Truth. And his clear lack of

enthusiasm for cathedrals and their choral music

does give one a little pause, doesn’t it? His plans to

introduce metrical psalms as the main music in

church, and get rid of pipe-organs from churches,

won’t please everyone.

But there it is: no candidate is going to be

perfect. Let’s consider what the qualifications are.

No question: Cranmer is a most respectable

scholar. Nothing startlingly original in his research

stands out from the Cambridge part of his CV, but

he undoubtedly has a much bigger personal

library than either Oxford or Cambridge

University libraries, and he is not afraid to use it.

He has a clear enthusiasm for liturgical studies,

although, as one of you has rightly observed, it

does rather concentrate on the liturgy of the

Western Church: no hint of an interest in

Orthodoxy, though somehow he seems to know a

little about the ancient Mozarabic rite of Spain!

And for a Reformed Protestant, Cranmer seems

remarkably jackdaw-like in his approach to liturgy.

I was rather surprised when he started enthusing

about the new breviary that Cardinal Quiñones

prepared for the Pope in 1536. But as he remarked

to us, why should the Devil have all the best tunes?

It just needs a bit of adaptation, he said breezily.

You know what happened when I asked him to

translate the Latin of the opening sentence in

Quiñones’s preface: ‘There was never anything by

man so well devised which could not later be

rendered more perfect by the added insight of many.’ He

turned it right round! ‘There was never anything

by men so well devised or so surely established

which in age and continuance of time has not been

corrupted.’

You might almost call it a sort of ruthlessness—

perhaps adaptability is the better word. We put a

problem to him: what happens if people won’t

come to a new English Communion Service week

by week, because it is introduced by fierce

warnings that before you can be a communicant,

you have to be reconciled to your neighbour? A lot

of folk might not come because they didn’t feel at

all reconciled, and don’t want to eat and drink to

their own condemnation. Not a problem, said

Cranmer. I would take Matins and Evensong, two

services which I have created mainly for the clergy

to use, drawing on the old monastic Offices of the

Western Church, and if laypeople won’t come to

Holy Communion every Sunday, I will encourage

the laity to come to these Offices alongside the

clergy instead. It will take just a bit of rewriting to

make it sound more as if it is for the whole

community—for instance, I’ll change ‘O Lord,

open Thou my lips’ to ‘O Lord, open Thou OUR

lips’—and I would tell the curate to ring the bell,

so that the people may come. And so they will,

over centuries, I would think, he remarked

cheerfully.

And above all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we

all picked up on Cranmer’s remarkably sensitive

use of English prose. Not poetry: that exercise in

turning the old Latin hymn ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’

into a metrical English hymn for the ordination

services (the Ordinal) was not a success, and I

think that we might have to turn later to Dr Cosin

to produce something better—‘Come Holy Ghost,

Our Souls Inspire’, perhaps. But the special gift in

The Right Man for the JobDiarmaid MacCulloch

17

Cranmer seems to be formal prose: nothing flashy

or showy, but words you can use again and again,

until they are worn as smooth as a pebble on a

beach. He is, I have to say, a little cavalier in

borrowing other people’s English words and

saying them over and over to himself, until he has

discovered just where you stumble when you say

them—then he tweaks the sentence just a little and

makes it his own. A good thing we Tudors don’t

have copyright laws.

And it is a major plus that his plans seem to

suggest that his liturgy will be full of opportunities

for everyone to join in and make their responses:

so they will remember those solemn words and let

them shape their language. Cranmer seems to be

very good at creating muscular, slightly old-

fashioned prose. We all know the problem with

our Tudor English: there may be much praise of it,

but a lot of it is pompous, long-winded and full of

new Greek and Latin words that humanist scholars

have introduced (just to show off, in my opinion).

In all the words which Cranmer proposes to use, I

hear very few of these over-elaborate words. In his

plan for an Ordinal, I did rather stumble when he

used the phrase ‘the immarcescible crown of

glory’, and I won’t do a show of hands to see how

many people know what ‘immarcescible’ means.

Might it be that, down the line, say in 113 years

from this year of grace 1549, that could be calmed

down to ‘never-fading crown of glory’? Perhaps he

did the Ordinal in a bit of a hurry.

Altogether, we have a great linguistic stylist on

our shortlist, who could teach our nation how to

speak its language for centuries. His services will

be the most widely performed play in the whole

realm, with the whole people as cast. It will be

even more influential than all those variants on Mr

Tyndale’s version of the Bible that are proliferating,

for these Prayer Book words are words which

everyone says in public, not just hears, or

encounters in their private reading. And if only for

that wonderful and rare gift, I suggest that we

choose Thomas Cranmer for the task in hand.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the

Church in the University of Oxford.

This talk was given at ‘A Celebration of 350 years of the

Book of Common Prayer in British Life and Culture’ at the

Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, in November 2012.

Bishops and Deans

We reported last year that our President, Lord

Cormack, had written to all Cathedral Deans and

Diocesan Bishops in England, inviting them to

become honorary members of the Society, and

that the response had been very positive. The list

of all those Diocesan Bishops and Deans who are

either full or honorary members of the Society is

shown below:

Diocesan Bishops

The Bishop of Carlisle

The Bishop of Chelmsford

The Bishop of Chester

The Bishop of Chichester

The Bishop of Coventry

The Bishop of Derby

The Bishop of Ely

The Bishop of Exeter

The Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

The Bishop of Gloucester

The Bishop of Guildford

The Bishop of Lichfield

The Bishop of Lincoln

The Bishop of Liverpool

The Bishop of London

The Bishop of Manchester

The Bishop of Newcastle

The Bishop of Norwich

The Bishop of Oxford

The Bishop of Peterborough

The Bishop of Ripon & Leeds

The Bishop of Rochester

The Bishop of St Albans

The Bishop of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich

The Bishop of Salisbury

The Bishop of Sodor & Man

The Bishop of Southwark

The Bishop of Truro

The Bishop of Winchester

The Bishop of Worcester

Deans

The Dean of Carlisle

The Dean of Durham

The Dean of Guildford

The Dean of Hereford

The Dean of Manchester

The Dean of Peterborough

The Dean of Sheffield

The Dean of Southwell

The Dean of Winchester

18

Upon going into one of our parish

churches 200 years ago and looking

towards the altar, the first thing one

would have probably noticed would have been the

large and colourfully painted royal coat of arms

above the entrance to the chancel.

It might have been the royal arms of the current

sovereign or, if it was still in good condition, it

might have dated from an earlier reign. But, by

order of Queen Elizabeth I in 1561, the royal arms

had to be prominently displayed in

all English churches to emphasise

that the sovereign was not only the

Head of State, but also, as a result of

the Reformation, the Church of

England’s Supreme Governor.

And these beautifully painted

royal coats of arms also fulfilled

another purpose because, before

England became a Protestant

country with the Reformation, its

churches had been ablaze with

colour—coloured frescoes on the

wall, coloured statues of saints and,

dominating all, at the entrance to

the chancel, the painted crucifixion

scene on the rood screen. So, in the

reformed English Church, the

colourful coats of arms went some

way to compensate for the loss of

that pre-Reformation colour.

Many churches across the

country still have their royal coats of

arms. Most of them date from

Georgian times and there were

several reasons for this. The

Georgian Church of England, which

Dr Johnson loved, was, of course,

very Protestant in character, and in

the aftermath of the Jacobite risings

it was also politically important for

the first three Georges to have their

sovereignty asserted strongly. Many

of the older coats of arms would, in

any case, have needed replacement through wear

and tear. And in the turbulent days of the

Commonwealth, monarchist symbols had been

largely rooted out and the royal arms generally

went the way of the old rood screens. In this

respect, the very isolated little country church in

Cotes-by-Stow, near Lincoln, is a wonderful

example of continuity through times of

revolutionary change. Not only did the pre-

Reformation rood screen remain in place but the

Royal Arms in Parish ChurchesPeter Criddle

The Chancel Arch in Edenham Parish Church, Lincs

19

royal coat of arms of King Charles I, a particular

anathema for the Puritans, has also been preserved.

Examples of the royal arms of the Church of

England’s Roman Catholic Supreme Governor,

James II, are also rarely to be found, both because

of the shortness of the reign and the Protestant

fervour built up in the Glorious Revolution of

1688.

In the heyday of the Georgian Church, the royal

arms came to be made of metal for greater

permanence. But, in the changed climate of the

Victorian Church, it came to seem inappropriate

that such a secular image of the royal arms should

have so predominant a position in our churches,

so the shields were generally removed from their

situation on the chancel arch and either disposed

of or sidelined. New coats of arms were

occasionally made, but where royal arms survived,

they very often became faded or fell into disrepair.

And it was then left to the regular use of the

prescribed prayers in the Book of Common Prayer

to emphasise the Church’s loyalty to the sovereign.

With the revival of interest in the traditions of

our Church, royal arms, where they still exist, are

once again being appreciated. But it can be a very

expensive operation to have a shield that is in poor

condition restored. Information about qualified

restorers can be obtained from The Conservation

Register, c/o Icon, The Institute of Conservation,

Unit 1.5 Lafone House, The Leathermarket, Weston

Street, London SE1 3ER and grant aid may be

available in some cases through the Church

Buildings Council.

Peter Criddle is a PBS member in Lincoln Diocese.

iPray, a mobile phone and tablet application that

provides users of the traditional Book of Common

Prayer with a convenient and intuitive way to read

the daily prayers and Scripture of the Church’s

liturgical calendar, is now available for iPad and

Android users.

Due to high demand and the success of the

iPhone version that launched last April, requests

were made to create iPray for the iPad and Android

market. While there are no major functional

differences, the new iPad app will provide users

with a scrolling calendar on the top of the screen

along with improved graphics.

‘We are excited to bring iPray into the Android

market and increase on-the-go access to the Book

of Common Prayer with the iPad version,’ said

Revd Patrick Bright, Rector at All Souls’ Episcopal

Church in Oklahoma City. ‘We have had

overwhelmingly positive reviews of the app and

hope to continue making improvements to

increase the ease in which people can access the

appointed lessons of Scripture, psalms and prayers

for a particular day.’

The app costs $1.99 for both iPhone and

Android users, and was developed by Phase2

Interactive of Oklahoma City. The app is available

through the iTunes Store and Android Market.

iPray is modelled after the Church of England’s

1662 Book of Common Prayer and based on the

ancient practice of the Church as refined by the

English Reformation.

iPray presents the Scripture readings and the

appropriate daily prayers referenced in the Book of

Common Prayer in one easy-to-use format

according to the traditional liturgical calendar of

seasons, feast days and commemorations of the

saints. In the course of praying these daily Offices

through the medium of this app, one enters into

the honoured tradition of the sanctification of

time in prayer and the spiritual digestion of God’s

word written.

iPray Anthony Triana

CorrespondenceDear Sir,

‘In the beginning was the Word’. Hopefully I am not

alone in finding the article by Alexandra Daborn

(from The English Speaking Board in the Michaelmas

edition, pp.10–11) informative, helpful and

confirming. The joyous relaxed smile of the reader is

a fitting visual image of many blessings this subject

and those related to in the text have bestowed.

Speedy technology and the use of the microphone to

amplify have their places; I am no Luddite but the

former may de-personalise and the latter prove a

dreadful negative, with eye contact, breath control,

projective skills, range of voice and use of pause

forgotten or never learned. I well recall the service of

carols and readings in which the reader was

inaudible beyond the first rank of pews and the

delivery could best be described as a slurred muddle

reminiscent of a platform announcement.

My father was the church organist, often

commenting on being caught between Scylla and

Charybdis: intellectually undemanding, dreadful,

repetitious ditties undermining reverence or dry,

mumbled liturgy, only being occasionally uplifted

when hot-air harangue was replaced by clear reading

and informative interpretation.

There is a link between pulpit and stage in that

knowledge and a leap of imagination are required;

young people especially have a spiritual insight

uninhibited by self-consciousness. Alexandra

Daborn’s article is rich in excellent points and

interest and was a joy to read, especially for those

who, like myself, may have felt that they were

fighting a rearguard action against collective

mediocrity of watered-down faith and woolly-

minded apologists alike.

Yours sincerely,

Howard Air

Kennington, Kent

Dear Sir,

Mr John Scott thanks God for our cathedral choirs

(Michaelmas edition, p.18) and how I agree.

However, in the tiny village of Coleman’s Hatch in

Sussex, not only does the church use the Book of

Common Prayer but also, once a month at Sung

Evensong, the choir sings an anthem, beautifully I

may say, and each month the anthem is different. Can

any village match that?

Yours faithfully,

Godfrey Dann

East Grinstead

20

21

Fr Simon Holden CR, Ways of Loving, Mirfield

Publications, booklet, 39 pages (nine colour), £5

It is a rare thing to find a book about the Christian

Faith that distils the dynamics of Christian living to

simple sentences and clear illustrations. It is rooted in

prayer and pastoral ministry and its fruit is Wisdom.

This means that both a lifelong Christian and a

person beginning to search the Christian way will

find this fruit easy to digest and full of goodness.

The essence of the Christian Life, writes Fr

Holden, is to learn how ‘to receive and give love’. In

eight short chapters, reminiscent in length to the

‘chapters’ of the medieval mystics, Fr Holden leads us

through this reciprocal dynamic of love in creation,

incarnation, the life of the Church, in the liturgy and

in prayer. In addition he reflects on love in

relationships and the difficulties we encounter in

loving. The last chapter contemplates the

transformation of love beyond physical death.

Angela Ashwin in her Foreword advises the reader

to read the book slowly and prayerfully. It is a book,

she suggests, that will ‘restore our confidence in

God’. It lends itself to a kind of Lectio Divina; it has a

beautiful clear font in a sensible size and each

chapter is illustrated with prints of art works ranging

from Orthodox icons to a photograph of a pair of

open hands. It would be a good Lent book and also a

suitable present for anyone looking to renew or

explore their spiritual life.

Siân John

Andrew Burnham and Aidan Nicholls (editors), Customary of the Ordinariate Our Lady of Walsingham,

Canterbury Press, Norwich, hardback, £45

It was a surprise to receive a copy of this book for

review in the PBS Journal, indeed some reading the

name here may have already turned the page. For

those sticking with it, it may be useful to explain

what it is, especially since the book’s obfuscatory

introduction will not give much help to the lay

Anglican. This is the book of daily Offices especially

designed for those congregations who have left the

Church of England and joined the Roman Catholic

Church. Why is it worth a mention in these pages

which, after all, do not normally review other

denominations’ liturgical books?

The answer lies in the prominent role the book

gives to the Book of Common Prayer. ‘It is right and

just,’ says the introduction, ‘indeed meet and right, in

the words of the Prayer Book—that this Customary is

published in the 350th anniversary year of the Book

of Common Prayer.’ You will find here traditional

language worship from Matins and Evening Prayer—

almost, though never of course quite, the real thing:

the Litany, Collects and Coverdale Psalter through to

Night Prayer based on 1928 Compline. (The Mass is

absent.) It is an eclectic assemblage, as the list of

acknowledgements covering nearly three and a half

pages shows. Converts will find much to love and

admire here, and the passage of traditionally minded

ones across the great divide will have been greatly

eased—they may indeed find more Prayer Book

worship than when they were within the Anglican

Church. There are also post-biblical readings from,

among others, Caroline divines and leaders of the

Oxford Movement as well as some modern prayers as

good as or better than those in the traditional pages

of Common Worship. The book, considering the niche

market at which it is aimed, is a lavish production;

those looking towards seeing the Book of Common

Prayer produced with greater clarity will find much

to emulate in the layout. Of course, many Prayer

Book Society members will look grimly upon the

whole concept.

The Prayer Book Society’s views are found in the

relevant Articles of Religion.

Peter Bolton

Paul Thomas, Using the Book of Common Prayer: A Simple

Guide, Church House Publishing, paperback, 144

pages, £12.99

This book has been needed for at least thirty years.

The advent of the Alternative Service Book 1980 marked

the triumph of revision over tradition and since then

most men and women entering ordained ministry

have been quite ignorant of the Book of Common

Prayer and how to lead its worship. The same is true,

to a lesser extent, for Licensed Readers. As Paul

Thomas comments in his preface, ‘The 350th

anniversary . . . presents us with an opportunity to

engage afresh with a founding “historic formulary”

of the Church of England, and to find in it new

insights and inspiration.’ The key phrase is ‘new

insights and inspiration’ and there is little doubt that

last year’s anniversary had opened up the Prayer Book

for the first time to many people in ministry.

This book assumes a complete ignorance of the

Book of Common Prayer, its history, contents and

liturgical and pastoral application. Members of this

Book Reviews

22

Society should not be surprised that such ignorance

exists and ought to be grateful to Paul Thomas for

addressing it so sensitively and fully.

The book is in two equal sections. The first is a

history of the Book of Common Prayer. The second

describes its contents and how to use it in today’s

parochial setting. The historical introduction is not

short on facts, the narrative is light of touch and its

judgements are sound. Paul Thomas ‘knows his

stuff’! It is no mean achievement to cover the

religious turmoil of two centuries and explain how

this one small book is central to the story. The

account, like the Prayer Book itself, maintains a

balance between High Church and Low Church

perspectives.

The second half, on the pastoral and liturgical

practice, is extremely clear and practical. It includes

inset boxes of questions and answers to address those

often asked by those seeking to use the Prayer Book

for the first time. What readings to use? Should the

commandments always be said at Holy Communion?

The answers are common sense and should allay fear

and anxieties. Paul Thomas also points his readers in

some useful directions—not least towards the Series

One services for Marriage and Funerals which

authorise the 1928 versions of the Prayer Book

Services.

It is here that some lovers of the Prayer Book

might dispute Paul Thomas’s advice. Some might feel

that he has, in the pastoral Offices, sold the 1662

Book of Common Prayer far too short. They are

justified in their feelings about this. In his defence it

has to be said that to reintroduce the Book of

Common Prayer in a purist way is not Paul Thomas’s

aim. His aim is to encourage those clergy and readers

who have never or seldom considered offering the

Prayer Book for Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals to

seriously consider doing so. Time will tell on this

one.

This book ought to be on the desk of every clergy

house in England and certainly ought to be required

reading for those new to ministry. It has seized the

moment well and lovers of the Prayer Book ought to

be grateful to Paul Thomas for his work.

Thomas Andrew

This book is available through PBS Trading.

Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis,

I.B. Tauris, hardback, 300 pages, £25

This book is a serious work of history and engages

areas where popular historians have plied their trade

in supplements and television series. Dr Beaken walks

where angels fear to tread in challenging widely held

views about the ministry of Cosmo Lang, not least

during the Abdication Crisis and the Second World

War.

It was my intention to invite someone else to

review this book, but I started to read it and couldn’t

put it down! It has the advantage that someone like

myself, who is largely ignorant of some of the

subject matter, is deftly guided through the

complexities and characters involved. Dr Beaken

gives the strong impression that he is sure of his

material and his judgements are always well argued

and balanced. This is something I would expect of a

country parson in the Prayer Book tradition.

The key to Dr Beaken’s method is very close

attention to the sources, some of which have recently

become available. He has gathered some lost or

discarded pieces of the jigsaw and has gone some

way to restore a well-rounded picture of the

Archbishop who seems to have been an early and

unfortunate victim of mass media. His radio

broadcast after the Abdication is a case in point; some

of his remarks were taken out of context to make

him appear judgemental and vindictive. That does

seem contrary to the man described in this book.

It would appear that this major work has had a

long gestation. The appendixes record the author’s

sources and these include interviews with those who

knew Lang or were closely acquainted with those

who did. The first of these is dated 19th October

2001. The second is with The Queen Mother on 4th

December 2001. The book also covers much of the

inner wrangling of the Church of the time, including

its wrestling match with Parliament over Prayer Book

revision. (See Dr Beaken’s article on pp. 14-15). I

found this a valuable, informative and enjoyable read.

As a country parson myself I am full of admiration

for all Robert Beaken has achieved. I am sure it will

not go unrecognised in the world of academic

historians.

Andrew Hawes

Andrew Hawes (The Editor)

23

Derby

A very unusual event involving at

least some PBS members took place

on 21st September 2012. The small

church of St Saviour, Foremark, in

the benefice of Repton, Foremark,

Ingleby and Newton Solney, in

South Derbyshire, is almost unique,

in that the present building was

consecrated in 1662, at the end of

the Protectorate. Hence its 350th

anniversary of consecration

coincided with the 350th birthday

of the Book of Common Prayer. The

Vicar and PCC therefore felt that a

joint celebration would be in order.

The PBS was consulted and our

Chairman, Miss Prudence Dailey,

agreed to be present at a Service of

Thanksgiving on the date of the

church’s consecration.

The night was one of storm and

tempest and the road to the church

was rocky, but there was a capacity

congregation who enjoyed

Evensong. The officiant was the

Vicar of Repton, the Revd Martin

Flowerdew, with the psalm and

anthem beautifully sung by the

local Repton Singers. The sermon

was preached by the Bishop of

Derby, the Rt Revd Alastair Redfern.

Unfortunately Miss Dailey was

defeated by the weather and heavy

traffic and missed not only the

service but also the splendid

refreshments provided at nearby

Foremark Hall, Repton’s

preparatory school.

It is not possible to find out how

many present were PBS members,

but the pleasure engendered by the

evening might indicate that, with

goodwill, a resurgence of the local

PBS Branch could be possible. Let us

hope so.

Leicester

Mr Chris Stephens, a member of the

PBS, organised a very successful

exhibition to celebrate the 350th

anniversary in All Saints Highcross

Street in Leicester, a church in the

care of the Churches Conservation

Trust. The exhibition included a

Prayer Book in Hindi, a BCP Altar

Missal and three ‘ladies’ purse’

editions. Well over 150 people

attended over four days. The

exhibition remained in place over

the Christmas period.

London & Southwark

We were the first Branch to

introduce the phone conference as a

social and theological novelty—

unless you know otherwise, and

please say so if you do.

We seem to be the first again,

this time to set up a Twitter account.

Many Society members,

whichever Branch, are not on e-

mail, let alone on Twitter. A few in

this position express proud

contempt: ‘I don’t know what

Twitter is, and I don’t want to

know.’ Yet according to

commentators who write about the

necessity of learning e-mail, anyone

who doesn’t learn it will eventually

find themselves cut off from life in

the outside world beyond our

Society. An example is the local

authority which refuses to send an

elderly person a form to fill in,

except by e-mail.

Twitter is a list of Tweets. A good

way to explain to the uninitiated is

to say that you can arrange to type a

message, sometimes amusing and

informative, as you would an office

memo; to the left of each message is

the Twitter person’s ‘picture’. The

Twitter account holder can display

his messages to the world, or

restrict to a chosen few.

There are many other choices on

Twitter, and space doesn’t allow me

to go on with them.

I suggest you go on a computer,

if you are willing, and search for

prayerbookman, and see what you

think.

News from the Branches

24

We are fortunate to have the

national Deputy Chairman, the

Revd Paul Thomas, as a member of

the London and Southwark Branch.

Even better is his being author of

Using The Book of Common Prayer: A

Simple Guide. By the time you read

this, the book launch will have been

held, but you will have had The

Branch, our newsletter, in time, with

information and directions to get

there.

Finally, our Branch Chairman

Ken Ellis heard that the Branches

Representative Council Chairman

was retiring in October 2012. Ken

decided to stand for election in

York, but was beaten by a surprise

candidate, the Revd Jamie Lee

Potter, a more experienced BR

member. Ken looks forward to

working under him. His first BRC

meeting with the new Chairman is

on 13th April 2013.

Norwich

To celebrate the 350th anniversary

of the Book of Common Prayer,

members of the Branch enjoyed a

service of Choral Evensong in our

Cathedral on 20th May. This proved

to be a memorable occasion with a

good attendance from the Society

and a very encouraging address by

our Bishop which is published

elsewhere in this issue.

Our last Branch meeting of 2012

took about a score of us to

Shropham near Attleborough, the

delightful home of our members

George and Angela Lynne on a

bright afternoon in early August.

George Lynne gave a most

interesting talk on the historic

background of this fascinating

house and of the previous owners.

This was followed by a delicious

afternoon tea prepared by our

hosts. We then visited the church of

St Peter and St Paul Shropham to see

the re-creation of a 1952

Christening and a tableau of

children in church 60 years ago,

with photos and articles set out by

Angela Lynne to commemorate The

Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. After this

we joined the congregation for

Choral Evensong at which George

Lynne, a reader, preached a sermon

on the value and merits of the Book

of Common Prayer.

During August and September, to

celebrate the 350th anniversary of

the Prayer Book, Norwich Cathedral

held an exhibition to display its

collection of Prayer Books, and our

Branch maintained a stand there to

show the flag and to try and

increase our membership.

In June and September we

continued our practice of

presenting Books of Common

Prayer to readers at their licensing

and ordinands at their ordination,

as we consider this the optimum

time for them to be received.

Oxford

The Oxford Diocese Branch

crowned an active year with its

annual Advent Service held in the

church of St Michael at the North

Gate in Oxford on Saturday, 8th

December. The service, which is

designed around the Advent and

other Collects from the Prayer

Book, was conducted by the Rector,

the Very Revd Bob Wilkes, with

prayers led by Branch President, the

Revd Dr Roger Beckwith. Two of the

lessons were read by the winners of

the diocesan heats for the Cranmer

Awards, Charles Graham of

Magdalen College School (senior)

and Eloise Jenkins of St Andrew’s

Members of Leicester Branch at the 350th Exhibition

School, Pangbourne (junior). The

swelling organ competed

successfully with the vibrant tones

of Oxford’s main shopping area,

and after the service the

congregation of about thirty

enjoyed excellent refreshments,

including mulled wine, provided by

the Branch Committee.

Peterborough

Church Safari to commemorate the

first use of the 1662 Prayer Book on24th August 1662

On Saturday, 25th August 2012

twenty-five PBS members,

including several members from

neighbouring Branches, met at All

Saints’ Church, Great Harrowden,

to begin a day of celebration of the

350th anniversary of the first use of

the 1662 BCP. A service of Matins

and Litany was ably led by Miss

Esme Godden. Afterwards we had

the opportunity to have a guided

tour of St Hubert’s Roman Catholic

Chapel in the grounds of

Harrowden Hall.

We moved on to Little

Harrowden to partake of a hearty

lunch in The Lamb Inn. Our next

port of call was Hannington where

we were treated to an erudite talk

by Mr John Souter on links between

Hannington Church and the

Gilbertines and the Godwins. This

was followed by a superb (and

enormous!) afternoon tea in the

Village Hall.

The day was completed by a

service of Sung Evensong led by

the Revd James Mogridge, one of

the two clergy members on our

Branch Committee. The singing was

led by the choir of Higham Ferrers

Church. Music had been specially

chosen to be suitable for the

participation of the whole

congregation. Immediately after the

service we were delighted to

welcome the PBS Chairman, Miss

Prudence Dailey, who gave a most

encouraging talk on the work done

by Board members and

administrative staff. We left for

home with a strong feeling that the

Book of Common Prayer would

remain at the heart of Anglican

worship for generations to come.

The Branch Committee wish to

extend thanks to all those whose

tireless efforts resulted in a very

successful day. The day was ably

organised by Mr Mike Rowlandson.

Salisbury

Autumn Meeting

The Church Hall of St James’s

Church, Poole, was the setting for

the Autumn Meeting of the Prayer

Book Society. Canon Christopher

Brown, Branch Chaplain, gave the

opening prayer and Vice-Chairman

John Jago introduced the speaker,

James Bowman. Mr Bowman, a

world-renowned countertenor,

began his singing career as a

chorister at Ely Cathedral and at

Oxford sang in the choirs of both

Christ Church and New College. He

later sang in all the major opera

houses of the world.

Describing himself as a ‘gut-

reaction Anglican’ who dislikes

mateyness and noise in church,

especially at Holy Communion, he

explained how much he missed

church music during his operatic

career. Returning to it later, he

voiced his fears for the future of

Anglican church music. The loss of

Matins and the lack of parental

25

Anglican Association Retreats

with Prayer Book Worship

Anglican Association Northern Retreat

at Parcevall Hall near Skipton

11th–15th March

Julian of Norwich and The Revelations of Divine Love

Conductor Canon Arthur Middleton

Tel. Rosemary Hall 0191 285 7534

e-mail: hallrosyhall@aol.com

Anglican Association Southern Retreat at the St Denys Retreat Centre, Warminster

24th–28th June

The Writings of Jeremy Taylor

Conductor Canon Arthur Middleton

Tel. 01985 214824

e-mail: stdenys.ivyhouse@btopenworld.com

26

desire to enter their boys for

a choir, parish church or

cathedral means that choirs

cannot be recruited and if

our great traditions of music

die—what have we got?

Warm applause and a

brisk question time followed,

and the speaker was thanked

by Mr John Eliot. After the

usual hearty tea, the

congregation attended

Evensong at St James’s with

its choir and Mr David Owen

Norris as organist. Canon

Christopher Brown

conducted the service.

Advent Carol Service

The Salisbury Branch held its

twelfth consecutive Advent

Carol Service on 8th

December. This year, for the

fifth time, it took place at St

Catherine’s Church,

Netherhampton.

The bells pealed out

before the service. The

programme of Advent Carols

and Hymns had been

compiled by Miss Sheila

Houliston and her sister Miss

Eileen Houliston, the lessons

were taken from the King

James Bible and the church

was packed as members and

friends sang heartily. The

service was conducted by the

Revd Mark Wood and the

organist was Mr William

Alexander. Afterwards,

members adjourned for

lunch, ably organised by

committee member Mr

Derek Barnes, to the Rose and

Crown Hotel, Harnham.

The Chairman of the

Branch, Mr Ian Woodhead,

said it was gratifying to see

so many members at this

beloved annual event and the

beautiful weather was

particularly appreciated.

Cranmer Awards

The Salisbury Branch

Cranmer Awards were held

on Friday, 16th November at

Milton Abbey School, Dorset,

courtesy of the Headmaster,

Mr Gareth Doodes, M.A. The

Branch Chairman welcomed

the competitors and gave a

short explanation of the

purpose and history of the

awards. The junior section

was won by Findlay

MacGregor and the runner-

up was Poppy Grant; both are

pupils at Milton Abbey

School. The senior section

was won by Hugo Slawson

and the runner-up was

Edward Polsoe; both are

pupils at Sherborne School.

Miss Prudence Dailey,

Chairman of the Judges,

presented the winners and

the runners-up with a book

token and a Book of

Common Prayer.

Truro

Twenty-seven members of

Truro Branch enjoyed a

guided tour of the National

Trust gardens at Lanhydrock

on Wednesday, 10th October,

led by the Head Gardener, Mr

Tommy Teagle. After a

sumptuous cream tea in the

restaurant, at which we were

joined by the Bishop of

Truro, the Rt Revd Tim

Thornton, celebratory

Evensong conducted by the

Revd Roger May was held in

St Hydroc’s Church. Bishop

Tim preached the sermon

and the lessons were read by

Mr John Sale and Mr Geoff

Chapman. A big thank you to

the National Trust and

especially to Mr and Mrs Sale

for making all the

arrangements for this very

happy occasion.

Forthcoming EventsCranmer Awards 2013

National Finals

Thursday, 28th February

at the Royal York Hotel and Events

Centre, Station Road, York YO24 1AA

We are delighted that His Grace, the

Lord Archbishop of York, John

Sentamu, has agreed to present the

prizes. All members and friends of

the Society are warmly invited to

attend.

The timetable for the day:

10.30 a.m. Coffee

11.00 a.m. Finals begin

12.45 p.m. Lunch (pre-booking

essential)

2.00 p.m. Presentation of Prizes

A buffet lunch served in the

restaurant will be available at the cost

of £18.50 per head for those who

have purchased tickets in advance. If

travelling by car please contact the

Royal York (Conference and Events

department) to book a parking space

(01904 653681). Once the ten

complimentary places are booked

additional spaces have a daily rate of

£6.

Peter Toon Memorial Lecture

Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, Tuesday, 16th

April

4.00 p.m. Evening Prayer

5.00 p.m. Inaugural Lecture by

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali

Fuller details will be available on the

PBS website.

Bath and Wells

Wednesday, 20th March. Visit to

Chavenage Manor, nr Tetbury,

Gloucestershire. Litany and Ante-

Communion in the chapel, followed

by lunch and a tour of the house.

Monday, 13th May. Holy

Communion will be celebrated at St

Giles-in-the-Fields, London to mark

the 75th anniversary of the English

Clergy Association.

Tuesday, 14th May. Choral

Evensong at Merton College, Oxford,

followed by a formal dinner.

Thursday, 30th May (Feast of

Corpus Christi). Visit to East

Quantoxhead to celebrate Holy

Communion in the parish church of

St Mary the Virgin. We hope to visit

the Court House and gardens.

Saturday, 13th July. Sacred Bristol:

a guided walk will be led by Martin

Palmer, Secretary-General of the

Alliance of Religions and

Conservation, then Choral Evensong

at St Mary, Redcliffe, sung by the

Harmonia Singers.

Monday, 29th July to Sunday, 4th

August. Musica Deo Sacra Festival,

Tewkesbury Abbey.

Sunday, 18th August to Sunday,

25th August. Edington Festival.

Saturday, 21st September (Feast of

St Matthew). Visit to St Nicholas,

Brockley, nr Bristol and AGM. The

Abbot of Downside will talk on the

Reformation. This will be preceded

by Matins and followed by the

Monastic Office of Sext and then

lunch.

Sunday, 6th October. Visits to the

Chapels Royal at St James’s Palace and

Hampton Court Palace, with lunch at

the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

Blackburn

Saturday, 27th April. Prayer Book

Celebration in Blackburn Cathedral,

with the aid of the choir Octavius:

27

11.00 a.m. Choral Communion.

Preacher The Rt Revd Robert Hardy,

former Bishop of Lincoln. Followed

by lunch; 1.50 p.m. Branch AGM in

the Crypt; 2.15 p.m. Afternoon

Speaker, Dr John Bertalot: ‘The Prayer

Book and Music’, an illustrated talk;

3.30 p.m. Cathedral Evensong.

Services and talk are open to all and

are free. Lunch must be pre-booked

and paid for in advance and is

£12.50 per person.

Exeter

Tuesday, 12th March at 11 a.m.

BCP Holy Communion followed

by The Litany, at St Matthias

Church, Babbacombe Road,

Wellswood, Torquay TQ1 1HW.

Lunch afterwards at a nearby

inn, The Kents.

Wednesday, 1st May at 2.30

p.m. A visit to Lukesland

Gardens, nr Ivybridge—

entrance fee £5.00. Tea available

at the tea room. Evensong to

follow, conducted by the Revd

Preb. Paul Hancock, at Plympton

St Maurice Church, Plympton.

Please contact the Branch

Secretary by 20th April if you

wish to come to this event.

Saturday, 15th June at 2.30

p.m. Branch AGM at The

Wickham Hall, Ashburton

Road, Bovey Tracey, followed by

Tea and Evensong. The speaker

has yet to be decided.

Norwich

27th April. Joint visit with the

Round Tower Churches Society.

6th June. The AGM will be in the

Norfolk Club, King Street, Norwich.

Oxford

The annual commemoration of the

martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas

Cranmer will take place in Oxford

on Thursday, 21st March. Further

details will be available from the

Branch Secretary nearer the time.

Contact John Dearing on 0118 958

0377 or gpwild@btconnect.com .

28

IN VOICE AND VERSEProfessional trio ‘In Voice and

Verse’ have been celebrating the

350th anniversary with a special

concert called ‘From Time to

Time’. Their aim is to show the

Prayer Book as a companion to the

major milestones of life (birth,

childhood, adulthood, marriage,

illness and death). The music

includes Handel’s ‘Come unto

him’, S.S. Wesley’s ‘Lead me, Lord’,

John Ireland’s ‘It is a thing most

wonderful’ and Geoffrey Burgon’s

‘Nunc Dimittis’. The words

include not only the incomparable

language of Cranmer and his

successors but also examples of

how the Prayer Book has affected

people’s lives over the centuries.

‘In Voice and Verse’ received rave

reviews last year for their concert

celebrating the King James Bible.

They have performed at venues

across the country including the

National Gallery, the Buxton

Festival and Durham Cathedral.

Lance Pierson is a professional

actor and poetry performer,

Belinda Yates is a member of the

Monteverdi Choir and Heather

Chamberlain is an accomplished

pianist and teacher. Their concerts

are available for 2013 and beyond.

For further information, please seewww.invoiceandverse.co.uk .

Forms of words for making a bequest to the PrayerBook Society in your Will

For a new Will

‘I give [the residue of my estate/the sum of £___] to the Prayer Book Society

(Registered Charity number 1099295) of The Studio, Copyhold Farm,

Lady Grove, Goring Heath, Reading RG8 7RT for its general charitable

purposes and I declare that the receipt of the Finance Director or other

authorised officer shall be a full and sufficient discharge to my

Executors.’

For a codicil to an existing Will

‘I [full name] of [full address] declare this to be a [first/second] codicil to my

Will dated [dd/mm/yyyy]. In addition to any legacies given in my said

Will I give to the Prayer Book Society (Registered Charity number

1099295) of The Studio, Copyhold Farm, Lady Grove, Goring Heath,

Reading RG8 7RT [the sum of £_________/___% share of my residuary estate]

to be used for its general charitable purposes and I declare that the

receipt of the Finance Director or other duly authorised officer shall be a

full and sufficient discharge to my Executors. In all other respects I

confirm my Will and any other codicils to it.’

29

The Society stands for:

Respect for the Monarchy: Duty to our

Sovereign and our Country;

The cause of England and Englishness.

In accordance with our Constitution, the

Objects of the society are:

One

To foster the love of England and to

strengthen England and the commonwealth

by spreading the knowledge of English

history, traditions and ideals.

Two

To keep fresh the memory of those, in all

walks of life, who have served England or

the Commonwealth in the past in order to

inspire leadership in the future.

Three

To combat all activities likely to undermine

the strength of England or the

Commonwealth.

Four

To further English interests everywhere to

ensure that St. George’s Day is properly

celebrated and to provide focal points the

world over where English men and women

may gather together.

Are you proud of your Country and her glorious history?

Then why not become a member of

The Royal Society of St. George. Membership provides an

opportunity to take part in our determination to honour England

and Englishness, and to celebrate our nation and its achievements.

An elected Council governs the Society, and we have over 100

branches worldwide.

Please visit our website for regular updates

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Contact the address below for a brochure

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Membership Application Form

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The Royal Society of St. GeorgePatron:

Her Majesty the QueenSociety Founded: 1894

THE ENGLISH CLERGY ASSOCIATIONFounded 1938 www.clergyassoc.co.uk

Patron: The Rt. Rev’d & Rt. Hon. the Lord Bishop of LondonPresident: Professor Sir Anthony Milnes Coates, Bt., B.Sc., M.D., F.R.C.P.

Parliamentary Vice-President: The Rt. Hon. The Lord Cormack, F.S.A.

The Association seeks to be a Church ofEngland mutual resource and support forclergy (with Freehold or on CommonTenure) patrons and churchwardensrequiring information or insight.

Donations to the Benefit Fund provideClergy Holidays:

Gifts, Legacies, Church Collections muchappreciated.

Registered Charity No. 258559

Mon. 13th MAY 20132p.m.

75th Anniversary

St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London (St. GilesHigh St. Tottenham Court Road tube)

Benoporto-eca@yahoo.co.uk for Membership enquiries.The Old School House, Norton Hawkfield, Bristol BS39 4HB

12.45p.m. HOLY COMMUNION (B.C.P.) Celebrant: The Rev’d John Masding (Chairman)Buffet lunch upon reservation

Annual Address usually printed in the Members’ journal Parson & Parish.

Branch Contacts• BATH & WELLS:

Mr Ian Girvan, 59 Kempthorne Lane,

Bath BA2 5DX

Tel: 01225 830663

iangirvan@me.com

• BIRMINGHAM:

Please contact the office, Copyhold

Farm

• BLACKBURN:

Mr Neil Inkley, 6 Knot Lane, Walton-

le-Dale, Preston, Lancashire PR5 4BQ

Tel: 01772 821676

Fax: 01772 259340

• BRADFORD:

Please contact the office, Copyhold

Farm

• BRISTOL:

Mr David Selwyn, 8 Barrow Court,

Barrow Gurney, Bristol BS48 3RW

Tel: 01275 463421

Membership Secretary: Mrs Joyce

Morris, 29 St John’s Road, Clifton,

Bristol BS8 2HD

• CANTERBURY:

Mr Christopher Cooper, Goose and

Gridiron, 6 Churchyard Passage,

Ashford, Kent TN23 1QL

Tel: 07525 095717

saveashfordchurch@yahoo.co.uk

• CARLISLE:

Secretary: Mrs Joy Budden, Arthuret

House, Longtown CA6 5SJ

Tel: 01228 792263

jobudsignofthefish@yahoo.co.uk

Membership Secretary: Mrs Kate

East, 10 Fernwood Drive, Kendal

LA9 5BU

Tel: 01539 725055

• CHELMSFORD:

Mr David Martin, The Oak House,

Chelmsford Road, Felsted CM6 3EP

Tel: 01371 820591

• CHESTER:

Mr J. Baldwin, Rosalie Farm, Church

Minshull, Nantwich, Cheshire CW5

6EF

Tel: 01270 528487

mdsc187@aol.com

• CHICHESTER:

Mrs Valerie Dane, 225 Chichester

Road, Bognor Regis PO21 5AQ

Tel: 01243 827330

valerie.225@btinternet.com

(Chichester East) The Revd G.

Butterworth, The Vicarage, 51

Saltdean Vale, Saltdean, East Sussex

BN2 8HE

Tel: 01273 302345

• COVENTRY:

Mr Peter Bolton, 19 Kineton Road,

Wellesbourne, Warwickshire CV35

9NE

Tel: 01789 840814

peterandrosalindbolton@hotmail.com

• DERBY:

Please contact the office, Copyhold

Farm

• DURHAM:

Mrs Rosemary Hall, 23 Beatty

Avenue, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE2

3QN

Tel: 0191 285 7534

hallrosyhall@aol.com

• ELY:

Mr P. K. C. White, The Orchard

House, 12 Thrift’s Walk, Old

Chesterton, Cambridge CB4 1NR

Tel: 01223 324176

pkcwhite@waitrose.com

• EXETER:

Mrs Esme Heath, Brookfield,

Stokenham, Kingsbridge, Devon

TQ7 2SL

Tel: 01548 580615

esme.heath@sky.com

• GLOUCESTER:

Miss S.M. Emson, 38 Gloucester

Road, Stratton, Cirencester GL7 2JY

Tel: 01285 654591

susanemson@gmail.com

• GUILDFORD:

Mr John Fox-Reynolds, 3 Orchard

Cottages, Bron-y-de, Churt, Farnham

GU10 2LL

Tel: 01428 605156

john_reynolds2002@hotmail.com

• HEREFORD:

Mr Stephen Evans, 14 Raven Lane,

Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 1BW

Tel: 01584 873436

Mobile: 07920 200619

• LEICESTER:

Mrs S. Packe-Drury-Lowe, 35 Green

Lane, Seagrave, Loughborough LE12

7LU

Tel: 01509 815262

ritaphillips@gmail.com

• LICHFIELD:

Mr D. Doggett, Grassendale, 5 Park

Drive, Oswestry, Shropshire SY11

1BN

Tel: 01691 652902

• LINCOLN:

The Hon. Christopher Brightman,

The Grange, Hall Street, Wellingore

LN5 0HU

Tel: 01522 811432

cbrightman@hotmail.co.uk

• LIVERPOOL:

Ms Dianne Rothwell, 7 Gorsey Lane,

Warrington WA1 3PT

elfmag@btinternet.com

Tel: 01925 632974 (eve)

• LONDON:

Please contact the office, Copyhold

Farm

• MANCHESTER:

Mr Nicholas Johnson, 552 Liverpool

Street, Salford, Manchester M5 5JX

nicholasj2104@yahoo.co.uk

• NEWCASTLE:

Mrs Rosemary Hall, 23 Beatty

Avenue, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE2

3QN

Tel: 0191 285 7534

hallrosyhall@aol.com

• NORWICH:

Mrs A. Wilson, The Old Rectory,

Burston Road, Dickleburgh, Diss,

Norfolk IP21 4NN

Tel: 01379 740561

• OXFORD:

Mr J. B. Dearing, 27 Sherman Road,

Reading, Berkshire RG1 2PJ

Tel: 0118 958 0377

gpwild@btconnect.com

• PETERBOROUGH:

Mrs M. Stewart, The Sycamores, 3

Oakham Road, Whissendine, Rutland

LE15 7HA

Tel: 01664 474353

mary.stewart@decomplexity.com

• PORTSMOUTH: Please see

Winchester & Portsmouth

• RIPON & LEEDS:

Mr J. R. Wimpress, Bishopton Grove

House, Bishopton, Ripon HG4 2QL

Tel: 01765 600888

bgh@ripon.org

• ROCHESTER:

Mr G. Comer, 102 Marlborough

Crescent, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 2HR

Tel: 01732 461462

joannacomer@btinternet.com

• ST ALBANS:

Mrs J.M. Paddick (Treasurer)

82 Barton Way, Croxley Green,

St Albans WD3 3QA

Tel: 01923 442734

j.paddick@ntlworld.com

• ST EDMUNDSBURY & IPSWICH:

Mr Anthony C. Desch, South End

House, 2 Sicklesmere Road, Bury St

Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 2BW

Tel: 01284 755355

anthony@adesch.wanadoo.co.uk

• SALISBURY:

Mrs Lucy Pearson, 10 Briar Close,

Wyke, Gillingham, Dorset SP8 4SS

Tel: 01747 825392

lucypearson@waitrose.com

• SHEFFIELD:

Miss Rosemary Littlewood, Railway

House, Hazlehead, Sheffield S36 4HJ

Tel: 01226 764092

rowood@waitrose.com

• SODOR & MAN:

Mrs Clare Faulds, The Lynague,

German, Isle of Man, IM5 2AQ

faulds@mcb.net

Tel: 01624 842045

• SOUTHWARK: Please contact the

office, Copyhold Farm

• SOUTHWELL AND NOTTINGHAM:

Mr A.F. Sunman, 1 Lunn Lane, South

Collingham, Newark NG23 7LP

Tel: 01636 893975

adriansunman@lineone.net

• TRURO:

Mr J. St Brioc Hooper, 1 Tregarne

Terrace, St Austell PL25 4BE

Tel: 01726 76382

j.stbrioc@virgin.net

• WAKEFIELD:

The Revd Philip Reynolds, St Aidan’s

Vicarage, Radcliffe Street,

Skelmanthorpe, Huddersfield HD8

9AF

Tel: 01484 863232

life.draw@virgin.net

• WINCHESTER & PORTSMOUTH:

Mrs Nikki Sales, 19 Heath Road

South, Locks Heath, Southampton

SO31 6SJ

Tel: 01489 570899

grass.green@virgin.net

• WORCESTER:

Mr John Comins, The Old Rectory,

Birlingham, Nr Pershore WR10 3AB

Tel: 01386 750292

john_comins@yahoo.co.uk

• YORK:

Mr R. A. Harding, 5 Lime Avenue,

Stockton Lane, York YO31 1BT

Tel: 01904 423347

eboraco@talktalk.net

• NORTH WALES:

The Revd Neil Fairlamb, 5 Tros-yr-

afon, Beaumaris, Anglesey LL58 8BN

Tel: 01248 811402

rheithor@spamarrest.com

• SOUTH WALES:

Dr J. H. E. Baker, 56 Bridge Street,

Llandaff CF5 2YN

Tel: 0292 057 8091

• CHANNEL ISLANDS: Please see

Winchester & Portsmouth

• OVERSEAS MEMBERS:

Mrs Sally Tipping, Woodland Cross

Cottage, Woodland Head, Yeoford,

Crediton, Devon EX17 5HE

sally631@btinternet.com

AFFILIATED BRANCHES

• IRELAND: Please contact the office,

Copyhold Farm

• SOUTH AFRICA: Please contact the

office, Copyhold Farm

SISTER SOCIETIES

• AUSTRALIA:

Miss Margaret Steel, 9/63 O'Sullivan

Road, Rose Bay, NSW 2029

mste8801@bigpond.net.au

Mr F. Ford, PO Box 2, Heidelberg,

Victoria, 3084, Australia

Mrs Joan Blanchard, 96 Devereux

Road, Beaumont, South Australia,

5066, Australia

• CANADA:

The Prayer Book Society of Canada,

P.O. Box 38060, 1430 Prince of

Wales Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K2C

3Y7, Canada

• SCOTLAND:

Mr J. C. Lord, 11 Melrose Gardens,

Glasgow G20 6RB

Tel: 0141 946 5045

jcl30@btinternet.com

• UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

The Prayer Book Society, P.O. Box

35220, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

19128, USA

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