LXVI

The Twenty-Thirteen Thirties Reformation is filtered through

The violet-tinted lenses of choicest maps and territories

Of the Left-side of the mental hemisphere (that’s the Right

Of the political sphere) –sponsored by Saga and Atos;

Subsequently, so many of the more altruistic details

Of this Retro-Thirties time shift of material readjustments

Are edited out: for instance, there’s no atmospheric mention

Of Soroptimists Storm Jameson and Vera Brittain, and less

Evangelical beneficiaries, Violet Markham and her circles;

Nor nostalgic odours of comrades-of-the-cloth, such as

Conrad le Despenser Roden Noel, the so-called “turbulent

Priest of Thaxted”, friend to Gustav Holst, his composer-

Parishioner, and surrogate organist; was also a founding

Member of the British Socialist Party and core founder

Of the Catholic Crusade which first pitched Trotyskite thought

In the foggy change-resistant shires of England –rhetorical

Polemicist, as illustrated in a transcript from his public

Dialectic with Christadelphian Frank Jannaway during

Which Noel pitted his anthithetical riposte ‘Ought Christians

To be Socialists?’ to Jannaway’s reactionary thesis,

‘A Godless Socialism’, billed as a ‘Debate with the “Red

Vicar” Rev. Conrad Noel’, in 1909 –this crimson curate

Also incurred the rugger-aggro of Cambridge undergraduates

After he’d hung the Red Flag and Sinn Féin’s next to

St. George’s in his church –and unfortunately lost the ensuing

“Battle of the Flags”, forced to take both banners down by

Edict of the consistory court… Or Cosmo Lang, the anti-

Fascist Archbishop of Canterbury, public denouncer

Of the flattening of Guernica (albeit resistant to British

Intervention on the side of the Spanish Republic and, later,

A pacifistic supporter of Chamberlain’s attempt at Hitler-

Appeasement); Lang reclined with age into a balding conservative

With a small ‘c’, a Stanley Baldwin cast-off in a cassock, whose

Alopecia had intercepted his formerly youthful countenance

For all the pricks of his capricious Archbishopric, which

Culminated in his dummy of dotage being ritually burned

Like a Guy Fawkes effigy by conflagrations of farmers for

His defence of the ancient status quo of churchly taxes on

Agricultural incomes, during the “Tithe Wars” –such a come down

From those earlier ideological days when he cut a dash

Of radicalism in the cloth, and, as a Lord Spiritual, voted against

The Lords’ attempt at pettifoging Lloyd-George’s “People’s Budget”,

Lang’s maiden speech berating the Second Chamber’s ermined

“Unwisdom” in vetoing the progressive measures –and making

His mark, in spite of being rebuffed by Tory Lord Curzon,

And, in any case, history was on Lang’s side in this debate:

Herbert Asquith’s Government called the bluff of the Billy Goats...