Last Thursday I gave a talk to the Fitzroy Society at Harrow School. I went by Uber as I’d strained my Achilles’ tendon – walking and stairs were a bit of a problem. For the same reason I took a walking stick, one I’d inherited. It has, near the top, a gold band in which is engraved T. D. ACLAND from R.W. 1909. I have no idea who R.W. was. The T.D. was Cousin Theodore the husband of Cousin Mary.

After the talk I was taken to see the Harrow schoolroom, 1571. It is the schoolroom of John Lyon’s foundation, and still contains the original furniture including the forms on which the first generation of Harrow boys sat. Carved on almost every surface including the black oak panelling which surrounds the room are the names, some cut rather crudely by their own hands, of Byron, Sir Robert Peel, Sir William Jones, Lord Palmerston, Sheridan, and of many other Harrovians.

As we went into the room one of my hosts exclaimed, “I’ve just spotted something!”. He had seen a name carved into the doorpost of the doorway in which I was standing. It was, T. D. ACLAND 1799. That was Thomas Dyke Acland, my great great grandfather and the great grandfather of the T. D. ACLAND of my walking stick.

And the talk? I called it ‘The New Zealander’. It included stories about my great grandfather Barton Acland, son of the above 1799 and another Old Harrovian. My talk began,

‘Anthony Trollope, author of The Warden, Barchester Towers and in all sixty-five books, wrote one that was never published in his lifetime. Its title? ‘The New Zealander’. And it wasn’t about New Zealand or a New Zealander at all. So why the title?

In mid nineteenth century Britain there was a great debate about the inevitable collapse of empires and therefore the inevitable collapse of the British Empire. In 1840 the historian and social commentator Thomas Babington Macaulay prophesied that one day soon a visitor from New Zealand would stand on the ruins of London Bridge, with a sketch book and would view ‘the time-worn columns and shattered through dome’ of St Paul’s Cathedral.’

This was before I thought the British Empire had really got going. Trollope entered the debate and wrote ‘The New Zealander’. Chapter one begins:

‘Is the time quickly coming when the New Zealander shall supplant the Englishman in the history of the civilization of the world? Have the glories of Great Britain reached their climax, culminated, begun to pale? Is England in her decadence?’

Trollope continues: ‘Come, alas, he will. As surely as we stand gazing at the Parthenon thinking now the glory of Greece as it was, and then of the glory of England as it is; so surely will strangers from the broad shores of the Atlantic and Pacific wander through the half peopled labyrinth of our desolate streets (he’s writing about Regent Street and Piccadilly, hardly ‘half peopled’ a week ago) and tell to each other with self-satisfied pride how great were formerly these people, but now fallen.’

Trollope presented the manuscript to his publisher in 1855. His publisher turned it down. On January 4 1855 my great grandfather, John Barton Arundel Acland and his friend Charles George Tripp, disembarked from the 837 ton clipper, Mary Stuart, in Lyttleton, New Zealand.’

Incidentally Trollope was another Old Harrovian and he hated his time at Harrow.

In my talk I told some family stories and painted a picture of the early European settlement in Canterbury. My audience included a member of staff and current Harrovians among whom were aa South Korean who had had much of his primary education in Christchurch New Zealand, the descendant of a Chinese New Zealander from Wanganui, and another the descendant of an Irish Catholic New Zealander whose grave is in Temuka, my father’s political constituency. I finished my talk quoting again from Trollope who visited New Zealand in 1873. Trollope wrote,

‘I must specially observe one point as to which the New Zealand colonist imitates his brethren and his ancestors at home, and far surpasses his Australian rival. He is very fond of getting drunk. And I would observe to the New Zealander generally, that if he blew his trumpet somewhat less loudly, the music would gain in its effect upon the world at large.’

And I added that I hoped my trumpet blowing had not been too loud and thanked my audience for listening.

‘

Some friends have called me ‘utopian’ and that suggests to me things unattainable and therefore not to be attempted and so to be accepted. ‘Some human failings just have to be lived with,’ they imply. I don’t buy that and it seems to me to be giving up before starting the race.

Anyway, as a Christian, I say ‘heavenly’ rather than ‘utopian’. And I see improvement not only as desirable but also attainable. The hymn ‘Thy Kingdom come O God’ includes the verse that begins, ‘When comes the promised time that war shall be no more,…’ The abolition of war is as achievable in the future as the abolition of slavery was in the past.

Recently at a weekday mass Fr Paul commented, almost as an aside, that it is not a matter of us getting into heaven but rather of our letting heaven get into us. It’s about being open to heavenly attributes, to positive possibilities. It applies to the prevention of fights within families or between communities or nations – war. And it applies to the healing of divisions when the fighting is over.

While you may think this is rather too religious I believe we are not trapped in our human weakness but rather that we are at our most human when we are transfigured by love. No doom scenario and no grim resignation for me. Utopian, heavenly, that’s the way to go.

P.S. At least two thirds of the BBC television news is about the war in Ukraine. Yes, it is happening and it is dreadful. But there is something horribly voyeuristic about how it is being reported. And in Sri Lanka there is a major economic crisis. There are fuel shortages and power cuts. There’s been nothing on the news. And what is happening in Afghanistan, or Syria or Yemen? Has covid disappeared worldwide? Are the Uighur fine after all? Where is the BBC’s balanced news?

Of all the wars of my lifetime I wonder why what is happening in Ukraine is affecting me so much more than did any of the others. Perhaps it’s simply because it’s happening now not then, and my present mind is more aware of concern than my reflective memory. Or perhaps not.

Geographically Ukraine is further from me than Albania and Croatia and yet I cannot remember being so affected by the war in the Balkans. The Six-Day War between Israel and the coalition of Arab States and the Iraq war were both much closer to me geographically than the war in Afghanistan but it was Afghanistan that seemed and still seems more immediate to me. So I don’t think my concern is primarily proximity.

Is my concern media led? The fact that Ukraine is on the news every hour must have some impact. I had become very media weary and wary but the fact the Russian authorities have closed down any independent or external news channels has swung me back towards the great importance of some sort of free, albeit editorially biased, press.

Perhaps I identify racially more easily with the European Ukrainians than with the people of Yemen and yet I don’t actually know any Ukrainians personally and I do have friends from Afghanistan so I don’t think it’s a matter of race.

Through all this I am aware of something different going on now from any of these other recent wars. It is the first time in many years that I have heard the word ‘nuclear’ being used and have really thought of the actual possibility of nuclear war. And yet, having lived through the forty or so years of the Cold War and the Cuban crisis, that was the fear with which we all lived. That was the atmosphere in which Nevil Shute in 1957 wrote ‘On the Beach’ a post apocalyptic novel in which a mixed group of people in Melbourne wait the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war the previous year.

So here we are in what the Russian leadership, not President Putin alone, calls a ‘special military operation’ and we call a war.

Two thoughts from others. It was a friend who came to dinner during the week, a friend who has many Russian friends and who speaks Russian, who reminded me not to use ‘Putin’ when I mean ‘the Kremlin’ and who told me that until the mid nineteenth century the manufacturing of armaments was state controlled and only then handed over to private companies. Once privatised profit became an important factor and therefore war, cold or actual, entered the economic equation for the manufacturers.

The other thought came in Fr Paul Ensor’s sermon this morning when he said, “War should be abolished, because all time is under God’s judgment… and, in the words of that old cliché… there is no time like the present. Such a call seems all the more important to me in an automated world where the use of communication and its manipulation make war not only a greater possibility but more hidden. How familiar we have become with the work of hackers. Is what I am suggesting nothing but fantasy? I think not… as I mentioned earlier, there are encouraging precedents for a larger hope. It was once assumed that slavery was simply part of: ‘the natural order’ and those calling for slavery’s abolition nothing but foolish utopian dreamers. Yes, slavery continues to exist in multiple disguises, but no one thinks aloud that slavery can be justified, or that public profit can be made from it.”

And then through all of this, as another friend pointed out to me, it’s fine to intellectualise about my concern but what am I actually going to do? Of course I am one of the fortunate ones who can pray about it and alongside the praying a notice has come up on my online bank account explaining how I can make a donation to a group of charities involved in helping in Ukraine. Praying and giving – there’s a start.

P.S. My broadcast on Radio New Zealand’ from many years ago, ‘The News, The Sport, and The Weather’, is relevant to the media led aspect to this. It cannot be healthy for the nation to be fed negative news on the hour every hour. And not only is it not healthy it is not balanced. Life is not almost entirely negative with the occasional ‘light’ or ‘positive’ or ‘good’ story thrown in at the end.

Notices I noticed in Kennington Park this morning. On the railings around the newly grassed dog walking area, after an apology for the area not being open and a lengthy explanation as to why, ‘Please refrain from accessing the area.’ Followed by ‘Your support is appreciated and thanks for understanding.’ How about, ‘So do not enter’ and ‘Thank you’.

And also from Lambeth Council, near the entrance to the park, ‘Please use the dog foul bins provided’ and ‘Action will be taken against offenders.’ Which I found more acceptable than the notice from Lambeth Landscapes tied to the railing around the war memorial, ‘Please pick up your dog’s Faeces and help to keep your park Poo free.’ And, ‘Thank you for your understanding.’

What I don’t understand is why faeces and poo each have a capital letter and why the notice is attached, inappropriately I think, to the railings of the war memorial when there are lots of other railings around. That’s my thought for the day.

‘What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft on Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile;’

So begins the second verse of Bishop Heber’s hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’. These days, if the hymn is printed in a hymnal at all, the second verse is omitted not because Ceylon is now Sri Lanka but because, I suspect, ‘man’ and ‘vile’ are no longer acceptable.

I haven’t come across a single vile person, man or woman while I’ve been here in Sri Lanka. That doesn’t mean there might not be individuals here who are a bit off. It’s just that I haven’t encountered them. And as I was taught you can argue from the general to the particular but never from the particular to the general I must assume that not every Sri Lankan is as those I’ve met.

It’s St Paul and the Western church’s doctrine of Original Sin that gives Heber ‘vile’, but the problem for Heber the hymn writer must have been that ‘Original Sin’ neither fits the line nor makes the rhyme. So ‘vile’ it is.

While I’m not keen on ‘vile’ as a word, I’ve only ever heard it in relation to the taste of a medicine, I am inclined towards the doctrine as I understand it. I think the doctrine of Original Sin fits with self preservation, the human tendency towards self centredness, and that basic biological reality that the human foetus takes for itself whatever it needs before the nurturing mother. I also see Original Sin as a state to be moved or delivered from rather than one to remain contentedly in. It concerns me that a good deal of the individualism of today may owe more to Original Sin than to the good of humanity and creation. But I may be getting out of my depth.

There’s a plaque in memory of Bishop Heber in St Peter’s Church, Fort, in Colombo which celebrated the bicentenary of its consecration last Sunday. I was at the service. Bishop Heber worshipped in St Peters when he visited Ceylon in 1825. Ceylon was in the Diocese of Calcutta of which Heber was Bishop. During last Sunday’s Service the hymn was referred to, not sung, and not the offending line.

Incidentally above that plaque there’s one for Percival Acland Dyke, the brother or cousin of one of my forebears. He lived and worked here for more than forty years. Perhaps that’s why I feel at home at St Peters, or perhaps it’s because there Bishop Heber reminds me that I’m part of ‘vile’ humanity for whom there’s hope.

And while I’m on plaques or monuments I do hope the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t come here and see these. The BBC news tells me the Archbishop is in speedy offending monument removal mode. He would surely want all the monuments and plaques at St Peter’s removed as some people must associate them with colonial oppression. Come to think of it the existence of most of the Anglican Communion could be associated with colonial oppression. What is he or the General Synod of the Church of England to do about that?