The Church of England and the Home Front, 1914–1918: Civilians, Soldiers and Religion in Wartime Colchester by Robert Beaken

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Church of England and the Home Front, 1914–1918: Civilians, Soldiers and Religion in Wartime Colchester by Robert Beaken Adrian Gregory The Church of England and the Home Front, 1914–1918: Civilians, Soldiers and Religion in Wartime Colchester. By Robert Beaken. (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 272. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-78327-051-4.) A local study can have significant benefits when studying the religious experience of wartime because it is not only the devil that can be found in the detail. Local vicar Robert Beaken clearly understands the context of Colchester, a garrison town in Essex, and he also benefits from an abundance of documentation. In addition, he shows a generally excellent and up-to-date sense of the wider historiography of the British home front during World War I. In an episcopal church the character of the bishop in authority always matters. Colchester had in early 1914 been incorporated into the new Anglican diocese of Chelmsford. Colchester thus found itself going to war under the oversight of John Watts-Ditchfield, an outspoken low-church figure who had been raised a Methodist. Beaken comments that if he had a sense of humor, “it doesn’t leap out from the pages of his diary” (p. 15). During the war he appears to have suffered from depression, although he continued to work hard and had a “very warm and caring pastoral heart” (p. 16). His deep-ingrained suspicion of “ritualism” had liturgical consequences. The exigencies of wartime had strengthened the case for two practices that had been very controversial in prewar Anglicanism. The reservation of the host was seen by Anglo-Catholic believers in the real presence as increasingly important in [End Page 854] order to be able to administer Holy Communion at short notice. Watts-Ditchfield, with support from Anglican bishop Charles Gore of Oxford, held a diocesan meeting on the subject condemning the practice—although it is unclear whether any of the Anglo-Catholic churches in Colchester had actually done it. Prayers for the dead proved more complex, because, at the very start of the war, Archbishop Randall Thomas Davidson of Canterbury had authorized the practice, with careful wording designed to deny that this implied any acceptance of the erroneous doctrine of purgatory. Watts-Ditchfield wrote to the archbishop to protest the practice and, despite the reassurances, continued to oppose prayers for the dead in his diocese. Nevertheless, in this case, many parishes pushed ahead. Beaken is particularly good on the National Mission of Repentance and Hope of 1916. This was on the whole a more unifying experience for Anglicans, and, like this reviewer, Beaken believes that it should probably be judged a modest success unfairly condemned due to inflated expectations. In retrospect, one important element was the engagement of women as “bishops’ messengers.” This proved controversial in Colchester and elsewhere. In the end, Watts-Ditchfield sided with the predominantly Anglo-Catholic critics and ruled that women would be allowed to preach and lead prayers only in halls and vicarages, not in churches. Ironically, Davidson wrote to his counterpart in York that he had heard from Catholic Bishop Peter Emmanuel Amigo of Southwark that women leading prayers in churches had become commonplace in wartime France. The war does not seem to have had a huge quantitative impact on Colchester churchgoing amongst Anglicans. Easter communicant numbers rose slightly between 1914 and 1916, and then fell away slightly by 1918 but remained higher than the prewar figure. Shifts in the numbers of male and female confirmations might suggest a degree of feminization of the congregations. (Anglican confirmation was quite often an adult act.) There was a big increase in confirmations for both sexes at the end of the war. The war years were regularly marked by days of intercession and national days of prayer. These seem to have been consistently well attended. The link between the local Essex regiment and General Sir Edmund Allenby, the former Colchester garrison commander, with the Palestine campaign of 1917 meant that the capture of Jerusalem seems to have created real local enthusiasm with the bishop authorizing a Te Deum. The war’s end saw massive attendance at services of...