Do you have to live outside your own country to understand fully its national characteristics and foibles, both positive and negative? Having lived most of the past decade in Washington, 3,500 miles away from Britain, I’m increasingly convinced this is so – and that I have a clearer perspective of what is happening in my homeland than I had when I lived there. I present you with an example: ten months ago, on a weekend visit to London, I attended Holy Communion at Westminster Abbey. I came away with a curious sense of unease.
The atmosphere had changed. Authoritarian notices seemed to have sprung up everywhere, making the visitor feel unwelcome. We were crammed together on narrow, plastic fold-up seats. The Anglican tradition of kneeling while receiving Communion had been dispensed with in favour of a fast-moving conveyor belt. Spirituality seemed minimal: I listened to a particularly vacuous sermon in which the preacher told how, as a boy, he had watched ships sail to and from their moorings in Devonport. But the very minor detail I remember – one that stuck in my craw for some reason – was that he referred to the navy as “the British navy”.
What had not changed, though, was the excellence of the music. It may be hard to go wrong with Mozart’s Coronation Mass, but hearing the boy trebles soothe gently through the Ave Verum made me feel there would always be an England.
Back in Washington a couple of days later, I wondered why the the preacher’s vacuities had seemed so jarring; an Englishman would naturally refer to the navy, I thought, either as “the navy” or “the Royal Navy”, but not “the British navy”. Then it clicked. He thought he was catering for American tourists, I realised – being altogether too clever by half and putting the emphasis on a Disneyesque drive-thru presentation rather than content.
I did not know then what was to happen the following month: the “reforming” dean of the abbey, the Very Reverend Dr Wesley Carr, was to try summarily to dismiss the organist and master of the choristers, Dr Martin Neary. In Holy Week, a month later – while the minds of the rest of Christendom were on more spiritual matters and the leaders of Northern Ireland were thrashing out a deal to end centuries of strife – Carr finally dismissed Neary, who had been one of the stars at Diana’s funeral the previous September.
Learning of all this back in America, I realised that on my visit to the abbey Neary had been on duty conducting the Coronation Mass with the same intensity that more than two billion had seen him directing the Croft, Purcell and Tavener at Diana’s funeral. Of Carr I had seen nothing. It was only later I found out that, billed as the man “who presided over the funeral of Diana”, he had been preparing to deliver a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington the following day, for which a fee of $1,000 was paid.
I sensed something terrible was going on in Westminster Abbey and flew back to England to research the Neary sackings for what became a cover story for the Sunday Times magazine. I quickly discovered the triviality of the charges against Neary despite the claims of “financial irregularities”. I came away convinced that the Nearys (his wife Penny was also sacked from her part-time post as choir secretary) were innocent of any wrong-doing.
I had strange forebodings, though, that justice would not be done. In my article I included one sentence that read: “It is the dean, of course, who has the real backing of the Establishment. ‘It’s much easier to sack an organist than a dean, isn’t it?’ asked one Establishment diehard cheerily (and rhetorically).” Would there, I wondered from my perspective across the Atlantic, be an Establishment stitch-up of the Nearys?
Here one starts to see the foibles and perversities of one’s homeland with an awful clarity. Where else would a country’s most renowned spiritual sanctuary be under the supreme control of a poorly educated 72-year-old woman – known to most of us as the Queen? The only recourse for the Nearys was to appeal formally to her over their summary dismissals; no other legal remedy existed, for the Queen was in sole feudalistic control of her 12 “Royal Peculiars” that did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Church of England or even (where such matters were concerned) of the laws of the land.
So what happens? The Establishment moves in. The matter is put in the hands of our public school-educated Prime Minister, who puts it in the hands of his Lord Chancellor – who leaves matters in the redoubtably safe Establishment hands of the public school-educated “Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle”.
I had never heard of this man, but discovered he was 73, a retired Scottish law lord who lists his recreations in Who’s Who as “shooting, fishing, bicycling, genealogy”; he lived, naturally, in Tullichettle (in Perthshire) and (according to the painstaking detail he had provided to Who’s Who) had married, successively, the daughter of an admiral and KBE, the widow of an army major and MC, then the daughter of a lieutenant-colonel and DSO. Most ominously of all, as I read all this disbelievingly in Washington, he was a “Member of the Royal Company of Archers (Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland)”.
He wasn’t going to put that 72-year-old woman, accorded so much strange obeisance in my homeland, in an unwelcome dilemma, was he?
And so, last week, it proved. In the memorable words of Frank Field, his 58-page verdict – delivered after a 12-day hearing that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees for the Nearys and the abbey – read like an amateur detective story, coming up with clue after clue about what he called the “gamma minus” conduct of the dean, as well as confirming that the case against the Nearys was not one of dishonesty (an accusation to which Carr had doggedly stuck until the beginning of the hearings). Then the tone suddenly shifted; the dean had been justified, after all, in dismissing the Nearys for “gross misconduct”. Phew! So that was all right: the Queen could take herself off for a gin and tonic and the Establishment, now minus the Nearys, could breathe easy.
The Nearys’ lawyers were disbelieving and some of the choirboys in tears when they heard; a handful of Neary’s musical rivals may have been happy but nearly everybody else smelled a rat. Jauncey had made much of the “secret profits” that the Nearys were alleged to have made; that sounded sinister but I did not see it pointed out anywhere that this is a legal term to describe money of which the other party in a case is unaware, rather than some luridly plotted dishonesty. When the choir took part in non-abbey events, such as BBC promenade concerts, the Nearys sometimes hired extra musicians and received what is called a “fixing fee” for the work involved. This is standard musical practice. It is no more a secret profit (as that term might be understood by most people) than a newspaper staff journalist’s freelance earnings or, for that matter, Carr’s $1,000 lecturing fee, if he chose to keep it himself rather than handing it over to the abbey.
On Wednesday 9 December, Carr convened staff in St Margaret’s Church (next door to the abbey) to tell them of the verdict before announcing that none of them could leave until it was released at 3.30pm; they then sat there, said one, “feeling we were being held like prisoners”. Next morning a new statement appeared on the abbey’s website under the broad heading “Information on the Jauncy [sic] Determination”. In a sub-section entitled “Elucidating the Lord Chancellor’s Statement”, Carr took it upon himself to correct details he deemed Jauncey, the Queen’s emissary, had got wrong – though in general, he told the media, he welcomed the verdict. And those Royal Peculiars? “If you start investigating them, you destroy their independence, which is crucial.”
Quite; as long, it seems, as Arthur Wesley Carr is in charge. His abbey website now describes him as one of the Church of England’s “foremost thinkers and organisers” who has “achieved distinction as an academic theologian and an internationally recognised authority in managing human relations and social change”. Says who? Carr himself, presumably. This took me back to a conversation I had in London with a distinguished member of the Synod who had been instrumental in choosing Carr as dean. Why was he chosen, I asked? “Because,” the man replied, “he had published some interesting books.”
What is so quintessentially British, to an expatriate like me, is the immediate notion that the verdict of the 73-year-old huntin’, shootin’ lord who pores over genealogy books becomes somehow sacrosanct, the definitive, untouchable tablet of truth handed down from on high. It gives the Guardian the excuse to describe Neary as “the disgraced organist” – richly unjust, particularly in view of Neary’s own devout Anglicanism (he has a degree in theology as well as music). I met many, in fact, who see Neary as far more a man of God than Carr.
And those books that secured the ascent of Carr to Westminster? First, I found that some listed in his curriculum vitae are not necessarily solely by him; one, for example, has no fewer than ten additional named authors. The most apparently prestigious book, Lost in Familiar Places – published by Yale University Press in the US – was actually co-written with an American Freudian psychoanalyst, but you will not read that fact in Carr’s Who’s Who entry. It’s a peculiarly dry and inert effort, marked by what sometimes seem like philosophies at odds with Christianity:
The centrality of dependency for religious organisations is explicitly acknowledged by their affirmation of belief in a transcendent being – God. Whatever else churches may attempt, if they reject this task of representing dependency they are likely to become redundant . . . Dependency is difficult to manage, particularly given its connection with irrational behaviour. Religious institutions offer a means for addressing this connection.
What could be more depressing, to any Christian, than such dour psychobabble with so bleak a rationale for the existence of churches? I doubt whether many members of the Synod had actually read Carr’s “interesting books” before John Major speedily rubber-stamped their recommendation; thus Westminster Abbey found itself with a decidedly odd fish in charge before anyone realised. From my study in Washington I’m tempted to write that there’ll always be an England. But given the conduct of the Queen, the dean, the government and Jauncey, I’m forced to speculate: will there? Is the British Establishment of old in the throes of self-destruction? For future historians, the sad saga of Westminster Abbey in 1998 will present a fascinatingly revealing study of what is happening in the land I watch so avidly from afar.
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