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| A new study of Evelyn Waugh and the first vicar of St Jude's |
A Totally Preposterous Parson: Evelyn Waugh and
Basil Bourchier
Basil
Bourchier was once one of the most famous clergymen in the Church of England,
held in the highest esteem by the many hundreds who flocked from all parts of
London to hear him preach, and the many more who followed his doings and
opinions in the press.
In 1907 he
was appointed the first vicar of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an experimental
community in which the social classes would live together in attractive housing
and semi-rural surroundings. The parish
inevitably attracted Bohemian and radically minded residents keen to campaign
for and debate the issues of the day such as women’s suffrage, animal rights
and spiritualism. Bourchier played a
leading part in these discussions and took them to a wider audience through his
journalism, books and radio broadcasts.
At the
beginning of the First World War he accompanied a women’s medical unit to
Belgium where he was arrested and sentenced to death as a spy. The last minute intervention of a German
officer who had visited the Garden Suburb as part of a pre-war town-planning
delegation brought about his reprieve.
Bourchier
would probably be forgotten today if it were not for a few lines in Evelyn
Waugh’s A Little Learning in which he
is ridiculed as “a totally preposterous parson”. Waugh had been a regular worshipper at
Bourchier’s church from shortly after it opened in 1910 and was confirmed there
in 1916. His father, Arthur, was a leading
member of the congregation and its various committees, and became a friend and
publisher of Bourchier.
By the time
of A Little Learning (1964) Waugh had
been a Roman Catholic for over thirty years and had long since come to think of
the Church of England as an essentially ‘bogus’ institution. Bourchier himself
had died in 1934 at the age of 53.
Biographers
of Waugh invariably repeat the 1964 portrait as if it were an accurate account
of Waugh’s youthful opinion of his vicar.
Alan Walker (the current vicar of Hampstead Garden Suburb) reconsiders
Waugh’s statements in the light of the church’s records and suggests the author
actually had a much warmer and more positive opinion of Bourchier – and indeed
of the Church of England. He corrects
several errors and misunderstandings about Bourchier and his ministry, and goes
on to look at the clergyman’s later career and final downfall.
Reviewed by Stephen James in the Suburb News Autumn 2016 No 128 page 7
http://www.hgs.org.uk/suburbnews/sn128/index.html
Reviewed by Stephen James in the Suburb News Autumn 2016 No 128 page 7
http://www.hgs.org.uk/suburbnews/sn128/index.html