Saturday 13 April 2024

REGINALD UNDERWOOD

 
THE FINEDON BACHELOR
REGINALD UNDERWOOD
Some biographical details and a
Selection of his writings

By
Barry Van-Asten


 
it looks as though we are all going to be Shakespeared
to death, if you will forgive the forlorn pun.’ (1)

 

 

 

It is a sad fact that the author, Reginald Underwood is only known, if he is known at all, for a handful of novels published by the Fortune Press which are either hard or impossible to find and an autobiography which in fact, says very little about him. But Reginald Underwood was much more than a minor novelist found in a few footnotes and whispered about by a small group of aficionado’s, he was a concert pianist and music teacher, an author of short stories and articles, a Humanist of deep-thought who wrote on various philosophical and social subjects; a Freethinker writing on religious issues and theological points of contention, but he was also a man interested in history, particularly the history of the village in which he lived and died, Finedon, in Northamptonshire, a place also blessed by the worthy bones of the poet, Digby Mackworth Dolben (1848-1867) whose tragic death at the tender age of nineteen had devastating effects upon the older poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-1889). Little is known of Underwood’s background and some even believe his name to be a pseudonym but he was very real and born in Finedon and as we shall see had much to say on various matters, especially of a religious nature. It is my intention to explore a little of his life from what records are available, but mostly to re-produce some of the writings which were published in his time and are now hard to find. I believe they are important and should be appreciated by a new audience who would certainly remain in the dark as to who Reginald Underwood was and such works would be quite unknown to all except a few who are dedicated enough to search them out; they may not be to everyone’s taste but it is a privilege for me to present them here and to help keep the memory of Reginald Underwood alive.

Reginald Underwood, author, historian and musician was born at The Ferns, Obelisk Road, Finedon, in Northamptonshire, on Thursday 3rd May 1894. His grandfather was George Underwood (1828-1904), seventh-born child of Daniel Underwood (1798-1861) and Frances Abbot (1791-1855) (2); George married Elizabeth Gillet Lever (1828-1907) (3) in Finedon on Friday 15th September 1848 and they had the following children: Alathea Underwood (1849-1874), Jesse Underwood (1852-1916) who married Annie Guest in 1871; Frank Underwood (1859-1899) who married Matilda Cooper in 1887; Miriam Underwood (1861-1929) who married the carpenter Josiah Johnson in 1902; Alice Underwood (1863-1935) who married James Hendry in 1883; Charles Underwood born (1866-1912) and Hannah Lever Underwood (1870-1929) who married Charles Alfred Hanson in 1900. Charles Underwood (born in Finedon, 1866) is Reginald Underwood’s father who married Mary Ann Jacquest (sometimes ‘Jaquest’) in the summer of 1892 (4), Reginald Underwood was the first-born child of Charles Underwood, a shoemaker and Ann, all born in Finedon, next came Mildred Underwood, born Thursday 5th March 1896 (she married Bertie Brown in Wellingborough in 1925 and died in 1975); Walter Underwood, born Monday 28th November 1898 and serving with the Essex Regiment in 1919; Albert Underwood born 1899 and Richard Jacquest Underwood, known as ‘Dick’ (1906-1965) (5). In the 1901 census taken on Sunday 31st March the family and their young children are in Obelisk Road, Finedon, Charles Underwood, 35, is a shoemaker, his wife Mary Ann is 34 and the children, Reginald, Mildred, Walter and Albert are 6, 4, 2 and 1 respectively.

As a young boy Reginald regularly attended the Methodist Chapel, ‘our chapel’ as he says in his autobiography, ‘Hidden Lights’ (1937) which was the centre of the family’s social life in Finedon – ‘every evening was occupied by a class-meeting, a guild-meeting, a prayer-meeting or choir practice. All very smug and self-centred to those outside, but, as I know, of real importance to those inside.’ (6)

In the census of 1911 taken on Sunday 2nd April the Underwood family are present at Obelisk Road, Charles who is 45 is working in boot manufacturing, Mary Ann is 43 (and we are told they have been married for 18 years), Mildred is 15 and working as a ‘sewing machinest’ for a clothing manufacturer while the three boys, Walter 12, Albert 11 and Dick 5, are of school age; but Reginald is not there in Finedon. In his autobiography he mentions around 1911 spending time in London with his aunt who introduced him to the London world of the theatre and classical music. Searching the census we can find 16 year old Reginald living in Hampstead, London with his aunt, Isabella Jacquest, aged 50 (born Isabella Davies Ward in Cardiff in 1861) and his uncle Thomas William Allen Jacquest (1857-1942) who is 58 and a branch manager for a coal merchant [ten years earlier in the 1901 census Thomas, a ‘coal merchant’s manager’ and family were living at 39, Maitland Park Road, Kentish Town, London]. Their nephew, Reginald, is working as a ‘printer’s clerk’ and also at the same household are Reginald’s cousins, Thomas and Isabella’s daughter, Elsie Marian Jacquest who is 22, single and works as a ‘telephonist’ for a ‘private exchange in residential flats’ (born St Pancras in 1888, she married Rudolf Meier in 1914), and their son, Richard Ward Jacquest (1894-1972) who is 17 and an ‘apprentice electrical engineer’ (Richard married Guinevere De Moubray (1894-1985) in 1922) [1911 census, RG14, schedule 10, piece/folio 21, page 1, which also states that there are 13 rooms occupied in the household]. In the census of 1921, taken on 19th June [RG15, schedule 175, piece 07698 (RD 166 RS 1 ED 5)] Reginald, who is 27 and one month and whose occupation is ‘Music Teacher’, ‘own account’, is at the family home in Obelisk Road, Finedon with his mother, Mary Ann who is 54 and eleven months old and a widow (she is the head of the household and has one minor dependant, son Richard); Mildred who is 25 and eight months old, single (she married four years later) and working in boot and shoe manufacturing at ‘Trolley Bros’ [S. Trolley & Co.], Allen Road in Finedon; Walter, who is 23 and six months old is single and works in the boot and shoe industry at ‘Bailey Bros’ [Albert Bailey & Son], Obelisk Road, Finedon; Albert is 21 and seven months old single and working at ‘Trolley Bros’ and Richard is 15 and nine months old also working at ‘Trolley Bros’. Reginald’s father, Charles Underwood, has obviously died between the 1911 and 1921 census. Searching through the death registers we find a Charles Underwood dying aged 47 in Wellingborough in 1912 which fits perfectly.

In 1925 Reginald met the author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) who became a huge influence in his philosophy of life and in his writing. Underwood’s second novel, Bachelor’s Hall published by Fortune Press in 1934 had been conceived towards the end of the twenties and remained in manuscript form as its subject of homosexuality would have been difficult to publish and to tolerate by the reading public at the time; one review said that ‘if this book had appeared four or five years ago, there would probably have been proceedings against the author and publishers. Underwood has tackled delicate and difficult task courageously and has accomplished without creating anything nauseating or offensive. While normal people will find it hard to appreciate the theme of the story, nevertheless affords an insight and understanding into one of the peculiar tragedies of life. The characters are strongly drawn, especially Adrian and Grace and except for one or two highly coloured touches it may be said that the general treatise reveals that fiction is not stronger than truth.’ (7) The novel is concerned with the acceptance of the main character, Adrian Byfield’s sexual orientation and his feelings for Ronald Whitlock; Adrian is the organist at the church where the previous curate, Charlie Jefferson, shared similar sexual sensitivities but despite the tender and expert writing the novel is darkened by the death by suicide of Ronald which unfortunately mirrored many real cases when such relationships were considered a criminal offence. The novel echoes Reginald’s first novel, Flame of Freedom which features a Midland’s man, Julian Ferrer who goes to London and meets Donald Mackness, an author and the two men live together at Don’s South Kensington flat; along the way Julian wrestles with feelings for a prostitute named Olive Denwent and a sailor named Jacob. Another author Underwood became acquainted with was Herbert Ernest [H. E.] Bates (1905-1974), who was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and attended Kettering Grammar School; the letters from Bates to Undewood, 1926-1943 are held at the Northamptonshire Records Office.

Underwood’s third novel is ‘An Old Maid’s Child’ published in 1935 and a short review of it appeared in the Edinburgh Evening News on Tuesday 16th July that year (p. 13) which said that ‘there is a touch of A. J. Cronin sternness in this tale of a battle for a little girl. The old maid of the title is the child’s aunt. Its mother is a shiftless person who had it before she was married, and who at that stage was not the least concerned about its fate. Neither did the aunt then desire it, but compassion and a starved maternal instinct altered her views, and she adopted the baby without worrying about any benefice of law. After a year or two the real mother sees the baby again, and, out of a mixture of pride and pique, asserts her legal right to it. Here the tale leaps from conflicting desires to drama, and the end comes with the mother being battered to death in a field by a bull. Strong, pulsating stuff, with Underwood most impressive in his handling of the old maid’s changes of moods and emotions.’

Reginald was not against standing up to what he saw as an injustice or infringement of one’s liberty; he often fired off letters to the press such as this letter to the editor on the value of tremolo –

‘Sir, - Your correspondents fail to make the old distinction between use and abuse. Tremolo is of course deliberately taught. It may be produced either by a special method of breathing or by the action of the glottis. And through no other means can such flexibility be attained. All our great singers (and violinista) without exception use it, and with splendid effect.

 Reginald Underwood. Finedon, Northants.’ (8)

And again in this short piece under the heading – ‘Corrupting Books’:

‘All sane-minded people resent, ought to resent, being told what or what is not, fit for them to read. As for minds being corrupted by books, that is merely an impudent excuse for fanatical tyranny. Healthy minds cannot be corrupted by books. Unhealthy minds will be corrupted without them.

 Reginald Underwood. The Ferns. Finedon. Northants.’ (9)

 

The earliest reference I have found to Reginald Underwood in the press is from May 1920 and it is an article on ‘The Nightingale’s Competitor’ which says that ‘Mr. Reginald Underwood writes from Finedon, Northants: In these turvy days, when it is the fashion to challenge superlatives from Shakespeare downwards, it would be interesting to know if the nightingale still holds its own as the supreme songster. The writer of those delightful snatches under “A Breath from the Country” says that he is more often heard than recognised, and that his song is more marked after dusk because there is then less competition. Doubtless most birds are more often heard than recognised but as for competition after dusk the one bird – the storm thrush – which may compare with the nightingale in brilliance and variety, is often to be heard after sundown. Yet no observant ear, I think, would mistake the one for the other. I have never counted more than six or seven distinct phrasings in the thrush’s.’ [Daily News (London). Monday 3rd May 1920. p. 4]

Reginald was a concert pianist and he often gave recitals at local events, such as this appearance at the Wesleyan Church where he gave an organ recital on Tuesday 13th February 1923; the Saffron Walden Weekly News [Friday 23rd February 1923. p. 12] states that ‘Mr. R. Underwood FVCAL of Finedon Northants’ performed the recital and it was ‘thoroughly enjoyed, several being encored. Recitations were rendered… and the choir sang the anthems “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “The Radiant Morn”.’ And another organ recital at the Wesleyan Chapel arranged by Mr. J. W. Housden of the Chapel for ‘Tabernacle Tuesday’ [Tuesday 30th December 1924] in which Reginald Underwood FVCM [Fellow of the Victoria College of Music (London)], performed with Mrs. Wolfe of Cottenham who sang the solos “Father of Light”, “Lead Kindly Light”. Mr. Housden took the chair and ‘thanked Mr. Underwood and Mrs Wolfe on behalf of the large and appreciative audience for their admirable entertainment.’ [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 2nd January 1925. p. 16] Underwood also played at Finedon Town Hall on Friday 5th December 1930 where a dinner and speeches with music to follow was given by the Heart of Oak Tent to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the Independent Order of Rechabites (a temperance society); Underwood played pianoforte and singers included Miss Eva Piggott of Irthlingborough and Mrs. Stobie; Miss Pell and Mr. Weil were accompanists [Northampton Herald. Friday 12th December 1930. p. 11]. Underwood performed again at the Wesleyan Memorial Hall in Finedon in November 1931 [Northampton Mercury. Friday 6th November 1931. p. 3] – also at the same concert was Arthur Gerald Remmington (1917-1982), eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Remmington of the Dolben Arms, Finedon who was a cornet player, a member of the Brass Bands League and a conductor for the Finedon Town Band. Remmington appeared with Underwood at a Finedon Concert in November 1932 organised by the Social Service Committee in aid of the unemployed [Northampton Mercury. Friday 25th November 1932. p. 6]. He also attended the Finedon Women’s School in July 1939: ‘Members of the Women’s Adult School received a visit on Sunday [16th July 1939] from Mr. Reginald Underwood (Finedon’s author and musician), who played several delightful pianoforte solos. He was accompanied by Mr. Cyril Wilson, who read two nature stories. Thanks were expressed to the visitors. Mrs. J. Kirton presided, and Miss M. Pell played the hymnal accompaniments.’ (10) Cyril Wilson who accompanied Reginald was a very close friend who had similar tastes in the arts, both delighted in music, literature, theatre and ballet and both expressed themselves in writing, Reginald in novels and Cyril in poetry and storytelling. He was born, Cyril Bradlaugh Wilson on 1st February 1909 at Rock Road in Finedon, the son of Finedon born parents, George Bradlaugh Wilson (1880-1957), a former professional goalkeeper for Carlisle F.C., and Lottie Cramp (1881-1919) who were married in 1904; a sister to Cyril, Dorothy May Wilson was born in Finedon in 1911. Around the time of the First World War, the Wilson’s moved to Nottingham where they had two more children: George born 1914 and Roland born 1918; Cyril’s mother died in 1919 aged 38 (George married again in 1920, in Nottingham to Mollie O’Connor). Cyril won a scholarship to Mundella Grammar School in Nottingham with hopes of going to University and becoming an English teacher but such hopes were dashed when the family insisted he must work and provide for the family and so he became employed by the Co-Operative Society in Nottingham. Sometime around 1930 Cyril transferred from Nottingham to the Finedon branch of the Co-Operative Society and lived there with his step-mother, Mollie and his step-sister, Annie Wilson, born in Nottingham in 1921; on moving back to Finedon Cyril delighted in storytelling, such as giving a reading of  a short story by Ann Bridge called ‘The Glass of Milk’ to the Wednesday evening meeting of the Finedon Women’s Co-Operative Guild at the Co-Operative Hall in Finedon on Wednesday 11th January 1939, and he also became a good friend of Reginald Underwood who shared many interests of the younger man and Cyril contributed to Underwood’s ‘Pageant of Finedon’ published in 1942 which Reginald acknowledged. In fact, Cyril became a well-known authority on the Finedon poet, Digby Mackworth Dolben (1848-1867) the poetic muse of Gerard Manly Hopkins, who tragically died young from drowning, (I am also a great admirer of Digby Dolben and have made my own pilgrimage to the poet’s grave in Finedon) – In 1967 Cyril organised an exhibition celebrating the centenary of Digby Dolben’s death. During the second world war Cyril was conscripted as a gunner in the Royal Artillery’s Eighth Army, working in the gun operation’s room relaying orders to gun batteries and he took part in the siege of Tobruk; he entered two of his poems in the Eighth Army’s Montgomery Poetry Prize competition in 1943 and his poem ‘Reverie’ won second prize (the poems were published in ‘Poems from the CMF’. Italy. Eighth Army. 1944). Following the war Cyril returned to Finedon and to his old loves: art, literature, ballet and history and gave talks on several of these subjects, one such talk was on the origins of ballet at Wellingborough Music Club (of which Cyril was a member) on Thursday 12th December 1957; in the Northampton Evening Telegraph of Friday 13th December 1957 (p. 14) Cyril is described as a ‘balletomane from Finedon’ and the article says that ‘at intervals in his lecture, Mr. Wilson illustrated his argument by records of ballet music.’ After a long career with the Co-Operative Society he retired in 1974 and later, on Wednesday 18th November 1987, suddenly died at home in Finedon, aged 78. (11) It is only fitting that I reproduce two poems by ‘Gunner C. B. Wilson’ in his honour, taken from ‘Poems from Italy: verses written by members of the Eighth Army in Sicily and in Italy, July 1943-March 1944’. London. George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. 1945. pp. 89-90:

 

REVERIE
 
If when we wander through the fields
We find that evening pasture yields
Cowslip and ladysmock,
Would we not search all day
To add to our bouquet
Daisy and buttercups?
 
If none but bright kingfishers gleam
Among the willows by the stream
And only thrushes sing,
How we should ache to hear
The cuckoo calling clear
Or see a lark take wing.
 
And if the sun blazed all the day
While every night the moon held sway
And there was never rain,
One star would captivate
A single cloud elate
And storms be praised again.


 
SICILIAN SHADOWS
 
This shadow of a spire of grass
Trembling along my naked arm
Is lovelier, as the clouds that pass
Not in the sky
But in the lake’s green calm.
 
Sometimes tired wantons look
In an old glass
And mirrored see untroubled eyes;
And for a while forget the farce
That love spins out of smiling lies.
 
It may be that the hours I nurse
(Borrowed or stolen, never given)
Are better, or at least not worse,
Than those that happier lovers
Think are heaven. (
12)

 

Reginald also gave lessons (beginner and advanced) in piano playing and singing, receiving pupils at his home and visiting them also; in 1939 a typical ad ran:

‘Pianoforte, Singing – Thorough, modern tuition; moderate fees. Preparation, contests and all grades examinations. Special courses beginners. Prospectus: Reginald Underwood. The Ferns, Obelisk Road, Finedon, and 66, West Street, Wellingborough. Telephone Finedon 246 E29.’

Reginald also seems to be very successful in giving lessons by post as this advertisement from The Musical Times & Singing-Class Circular for the 1st November 1926 (volume 67, p. 964) can testify: ‘MANY eminent musicians including the late SIR FREDERICK BRIDGE, have used and highly recommend my System – the ORIGINAL POSTAL SYSTEM. No apparatus or special music necessary – just an easily acquired method with much better and quicker results. 20,000 successful Pupils. Yours faithfully, Reginald Underwood.’ Also on the same page we find: ‘This pupil after five lessons plays with confidence music he could not even hope to play a year ago. “The Ferns”, Finedon, Northants, August 23rd 1926.’

In 1939 with war in Europe on the horizon, Reginald wrote a letter to the press against conscription –

‘Sir – with regard to military compulsion. I should like to put one question which I have put many times, but to which no militarist has so far ever given any reasonable, let alone satisfactory, answer. It is this: How do the advocated and imposers of conscription justify their claim to maintain their own liberty and independence while they take away the liberty and independence of one small and comparatively helpless section of the community? Logically, if conscription is fair for one, it is fair for all, including both Prime and Cabinet Ministers. A young man of twenty has as much right to his freedom as any old tyrant – perhaps more, since all his life lies before him. It is no argument to spout about the physical fitness and so forth that may or may not result from his training. That can be had without compulsion if it is desired. It is the moral – or immoral – principle behind the tyranny that matters. And as for the wastrels, that so many are glibly talking about, being brought to boot, well I know no wastrels, but I do know a number of young men in tragically unfortunate circumstances which could be readily altered by better methods than military conscription. Yours, etc…

 Reginald Underwood. The Ferns. Finedon.’ (13)

Another friend of Reginald’s was the novelist Mary Lucy Pendered (1858-1940) whose outspoken views on anti-war and conscription in the press caused a series of angry and critical letters; Reginald wrote to defend her and to condemn one such ‘pseudonymous writer’ who signed himself as ‘Wellingburian’:

‘Sir, - In Monday’s “Evening Telegraph” you say that Miss Pendered has been rebuked. But how can that be a rebuke which is merely the anonymous expression of an opposite opinion? Miss Pendered has as much right to her opinion, and as much right to express her opinion as “Wellingburian”, and whether or not one agrees with her, one can respect her outspokenness. But who can respect the opinions of a Person who must needs hide himself behind an Editor’s Shutters before he shouts his “Yah!”? Yours, etc,.

 Reginald Underwood. The Ferns. Finedon.’ (14)

The arguments in the press continued and Reginald wrote another letter to the Editor a week later:

‘Sir, - Controversy with an anonymous opponent usually seems to me a waste of time, but your correspondent, “Wellingburian” raises point which I think needs airing. I, at any rate, said nothing about his account or bank balance, which was no business of mine. But he infers that both Miss Pendered and I aught to have taken for granted the reason for his anonymity. But how could we? It is quite certain that all anonymous writers do not conceal their identity for the reason that “Wellingburian” gives. With most of them I believe it to be, to say the least, a very dubious method of achieving what they regard as personal safety. Yet I would suggest to “Wellingburian” that the very reason which he gives for his own anonymity, cancels his argument. In other words, here an advocate of the principles of compulsion, tyrannically as same breath that because of this same – tyrannically applied in another direction, he has opinions which he desires to express, but which he dare not express openly, because he fears he would be penalised for doing so! It is queer sort of “free” country when a man is to be browbeaten for speaking his mind. Yet it would appear that such a shameful condition does exist. Voltaire, one of the greatest of controversialists, used to say that he didn’t care how widely an opponent might differ from him, he would go to the stake to defend the right of that opponent to hold and express his own opinions. And even if argument descends into mere abuse, the wisest thing is to ignore it and show by example that one has a greater control of one’s temper. Vituperation gets us nowhere, and as my grandfather used to say: If you are in the right you’ve no need to be angry; if you are in the wrong, you’ve no right to be angry. “Wellingburian”, I think, demonstrates his own unfortunate position that compulsion is a fundamentally bad principle. It is always the over ruling of the weaker by the stronger, and too often for no other purpose than their own selfish ends. Yours, etc,.

 Reginald Underwood. The Ferns. Finedon.’ (15)

Soon after we find an attempt at an apology from ‘Wellingburian’:

‘Sir, - I must apologise to Mr. Underwood for attributing remarks to him that he did not make. It was not with intention, but due to careless wording. He and I seem to be at cross purposes. I am most decidedly not an “advocate” of the principle of compulsion. On the contrary, I loathe and detest it as much as anyone, but (and it is a big “but) in the present special circumstances I do consider it a necessity that all young men, irrespective of class, should receive equal training for the defence of this country. As I see it, this can only be done by conscription. No one deplores the necessity more than I do, but since it is there I am prepared to face facts and admit it. For the rest, far from being “scuppered”. I think I have made my point. I quite agree with Mr. Underwood’s remarks on freedom of speech, and am fully prepared to admit any man’s right to his opinion. What I objected to, and still do, is the humbug of the Labour Party and trade unionists in practising compulsion for sectional interests and opposing it at the present critical time for national interests. I do not think this is unfair criticism since it is a simple fact. – Yours, etc, Wellingburian.’ (16)

Not long after these exchanges in the press Miss Mary L. Pendered, the Northamptonshire authoress, died the following year on Thursday 19th December 1940 at Beechwood, Overstone Park, aged 82, and it was a ‘sad privilege’ for Reginald to write some last words about his old friend who had become an ‘institution rather than a mere individual woman’. Reginald said that she was a pacifist and that ‘temperamentally we were very different, intellectually we were much of a muchness’ and that they had ‘kindred interests… books and music were Miss Pendered’s chief joys’. She went to live in Great Addington and Reginald explained to her the ‘principles of pianoforte techniques’ as expounded by Tobias Matthay; at the age of 77 she had ‘considerable pianistic gifts’. ‘We both had at the same time two books each in the hands of Danish publishers. The translations had been done, and she was most eager to see what these books would look like in Danish. But the unspeakable German invasion intervened’. He goes on to say that she was a socialist and an agnostic with an affinity for Quakers and that ‘philosophically she shared my admiration for Kant’. (17) Miss Pendered was cremated at Kettering and her funeral service, which Reginald attended, was at the old parish church in Great Addington on Monday 23rd December 1940; it was a simple service conducted by the Rev. D. H. Meggy (rector) with no music and a few words of tribute – the rector read the hymn ‘Now the labourer’s task is o’er’.

Reginald’s sister, Mildred, who married Bertie Brown in 1925 had been having a difficult time of marriage, in fact, in March 1930 a warrant was issued against Bertie Brown, a labourer of Finedon, as he did not appear at the summons in a maintenance case; he was summoned for ‘disobeying a married women’s order, the arrears of costs being £16’. He was committed to prison for two months which was suspended as long as the defendant paid ten shillings a week (18). Another summons occurred several years later in 1939: ‘Finedon Summons withdrawn. At Wellingborough Petty Sessions today [Friday 17th February 1939], Mildred Brown, “The Ferns”, Obelisk Road, Finedon, summoned Bertie Brown, shoehand, Irthlingborough Road, Finedon, for disobeying a married woman’s order made on November 23rd 1928. The Chairman (Mr. W. Langley) said: on the recommendation of Mrs. Brown, this case will be withdrawn.’ (19)

Reginald’s cousin, Florence Ada Jacquest (born 13th November 1886 in Haslingdene, Lancashire, daughter of John Jacquest born Finedon 1860 and Emily Watson, (1850-1899) who were married in Northampton in 1883, [Florence died in 1971 in Wellingborough]) married Ernest Berwick (born 29th March 1894 in Kettering); Ernest was a correspondent for the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph and Wellingborough News and football correspondent for the Daily Echo who wrote under the columnist name of ‘Mulso’; Florence and Ernest were married on Sunday 12th February 1928 at the Wesleyan Chapel, Wellingborough; Ernest died in Wellingborough in 1974. Reginald, who was against military conscription and wrote letters to the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph in May 1939, perhaps had some ‘insider’ influence in the form of Florence’s husband, Ernest Berwick.

Reginald’s illustrated articles ‘Sketches of Old Finedon’ appeared in the Wellingborough News, the first appearing on Friday 2nd June 1939; the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph did a brief article on this prior to their appearance which said that ‘it will be remembered that in his [Underwood’s] book, “Hidden Lights”, he allowed himself some outspoken allusions to modern Finedon’s doubtful architectural attainments. Mr. Underwood has devoted his literary talents to writing these “Sketches of Old Finedon” rather as a labour of love for his native township, which now hides its feudal fame in the role of a municipal ward of Wellingborough. In particular, he has applied himself to putting on record the latter chapters of its history, when the Mulso, Dolben and Mackworth families successively occupied the Hall, and the Paul family held the Vicarage for more than a hundred years from father to son. Present members of the Paul family have lent assistance in compiling these details and, in addition, Mr. Underwood draws with a deft and often amusing touch on his own recollections. In his opinion, the death of Miss Mackworth-Dolben, the Lady of the Manor, in 1912, marked the end of an era for Finedon. Until then it was a typically secluded English village living quietly under the shadow of its Hall, but when the estate was sold up “something” was irretrievably lost. Perhaps it was not hard for Finedon to transfer its allegiance in the further course of time to Wellingborough.’ (20) One of Reginald’s last letters to an editor to appear in publication was on the subject of Humanism which was very close to his heart. It was published in The Humanist of January 1964 (volume 79, issue 1, p. 29):

‘Sir, - in reply to Celestine C. Kenine’s query about the Humanist ideology, one may say that Humanism is not a religion. Humanism is a philosophy of Life. It stands, simply and essentially for the advancement of human welfare in every possible direction, without any recourse to the supernatural. When she says that the more she reads The Humanist the more Christian she becomes, is she not confusing Christianity with good living? But good living was preached and practiced long before Christianity came into existence and still succeeds without it. The theoretical monopoly of the good life claimed by so many Christians is completely unjustified.
Christianity, often so contradictory in its various manifestations, may entail various ways of pious living. But that is another matter. First and foremost, Christianity is a system of supernaturalistic beliefs which Humanism rejects. Without these beliefs, no amount of human goodness can make one a Christian any more than the mere acceptance of them can in itself constitute human goodness. – Reginald Underwood, Finedon, Northants.’

 

TWO POEMS BY REGINALD UNDERWOOD


The following poems by Reginald Underwood were published in The British Musician and Musical News in 1936 and 1937, the first poem praises the skill and beauty of the English ballet dancer and choreographer, Sydney Francis Chippendall Healey-Kay (1904-1983) who was renamed ‘Anton Dolin’ to give a ‘Russian flavour’ to his name which was in vogue at the time with the popularity of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a company he joined in 1921:

 

ANTON DOLIN
(Markova-Dolin Ballet, 1936)
 
Light as a water-lily leaf that lies
Upon a shadow-cool, clear stream,
He glides into the dance; his eyes
Half shy, half veiled as in a dream.
Lithe-limbed and slow
His movements go,
Till sudden, a smile upon his face,
He leaps and drops,
He spins, he stops,
Poised in a pose of perfect grace.
With delicate art the difficult breath concealing,
With subtle skill revealing
The motif hid behind the music’s pace.
Oh, costly gift and rare that understands
So well thus finely how to share
The spell of toes and eyes and hands.


 
GENERATIONS
 
My little son upon my knee
Confides in God that he would rather
Be a man; that he would be
A brave, strong man, just like his father.
But I, if I could pray, would plead,
Now that my course has thus far run,
To be a child, again: indeed
A little child, just like my son. (
21)

There is an interesting article in the British Musician and Musical News of 1938 which promotes Underwood’s autobiography, ‘Hidden Lights’ published in 1937, the article reads: ‘”Hidden Lights” is the title of an autobiography by Reginald Underwood, just published by Fortune Press, Buckingham Palace Road (10/6). The author has recently won a very considerable reputation as a novelist whose themes are of the “difficult” order. He is a country teacher of music, by that occupation making his living. And he is known in particular to readers of the “British Musician” for articles the paper has been very happy to incorporate in its pages.
The book is written with absolute ease, as a good talker with a well-stored mind talks to understanding friends. It is as easy as good journalism, but it is not journalism, it is literature. There is plenty of philosophy in the book, - practical philosophy, the fruit of a rather difficult life lived bravely if not hopefully, and thought about intelligently in retrospect. The philosophy tends to the pessimistic, yet not in the slightest to the despairing. On the contrary, it flows eventually into Mr. Underwood’s clever and true modification of the old saw, - “He who laughs lasts!” Also there is in the book a little of the contemporary freedom and inelegancy of this generation of ours. Yet this is quite inoffensive, so natural is it, so opposite, and so intensely and fully human.
Mr. Underwood began life in a village, and in a village he has continued to live. He began the study of music under the local shoemaker, who was one of those monstrosities who make children learn to play the piano with pennies balanced on the backs of their hands and with books held under the arm-pits. He eventually pursued his studies alone, learning by many failures how to succeed; for though with the shoemaker’s aid he could play “The Maiden’s Prayer” and the Hallelujah Chorus at local charity concerts, he soon discovered that if you cannot have the best expert instruction in a subject, it is wiser to tackle it yourself.
In 1911, when 12 years old, Reginald Underwood spent some time in London at an aunt’s. It is in a chapter which is a true page of life that he records this experience. His aunt took him to concerts and plays, so that in these impressionable moments he came into contact with the work of many of the great people who survived from the 19th century, - among them the incomparable Pachmman, whose playing of Chopin, it may be, planted the seeds of a Chopin understanding in Mr. Underwood which has resulted in that composer being his most contenting of all creative musicians.
He encountered Sir George Martin, organist of St Paul’s, - he was sitting in the church, saw Sir George coming down the aisle, looked at him with an earnestness that aroused the old man’s attention, so that he spoke to him, and after a few minutes’ talk actually took him up to the organ and allowed him to play on it – “So that you can tell people you have played on the organ in St Paul’s.” The book has many human touches like this.
Another chapter deals with pupils, and this again is as a true page from life. The young teacher’s first batch of pupils included a girl who was stupid to idiocy. (Among his later pupils was an unpleasant middle-aged lady who wore a necklace of the gall stones that had been taken from her body years before.) The poor stupid girl proved to be properly musical by nature: “she had a remarkable sense of time and rhythm, and even mastered a fair degree of technique. She would sway, and sometimes sing in the most appalling voice, as she played her pieces through with quite powerful emotional expression. To watch her and listen to her was sometimes an awesome experience. Who could say what strange passions and desires, what cravings and disappointments, hopes or fears, moved in the obscure recesses of that benighted mind. To find, perhaps, no other solace, no other outlet than that of the language which tells no lies and outsoars in capacity of expression all other mediums.”
There is only room here for another item of the many which make up this delightful book. Let it be a reference to the servant Martha, - an evangelical “enthusiast”, who used to sing the most concrete of hymns, yet with (as the grown-up Reginald Underwood now suspects) some underlying sense of humour: such hymns as, - “Come needy, come guilty, / come loathsome and bare, / you can’t be too filthy, / come just as you are!” Which reminds us of how a poor street-singer used to sing that prime Moody and Sankey effusion, “dare to be a Daniel”: which was thus, - Dirty be a Daniel, / dirty stand alone, / dirty have a purpose firm, / and dirty make it known.
We hope that many readers of the “British Musician” will acquire this book, either for themselves or from the libraries. For they will meet in the author an one who will, without preaching, help them further to understand life and art. And they will also meet one who has the profoundest reverence for Tobias Matthay, regarding him as the greatest piano-forte teacher of our time. (
22)

In 1955 Reginald wrote a letter to the editor of the Literary Guide under the heading ‘The Quest for Belief’ which tells us a little of Reginald’s religious attitude:

‘Sir, - Lt-Col F. H. Thompson makes statements that are more sentimental than accurate. How can he possibly know that for the majority of agnostics agnosticism is not enough? I don’t believe it. Forty years of agnosticism and association with agnostics impels me to an opposite conclusion. Neither can I believe that agnostics lack experience of inspiration and sacrifice. I know of more than one who could give a very different account so with regard to the alleged necessity of agnostics for a little bit of heroism and aggression – aggressiveness is doubtless meant. We may waive the heroism but, good gracious, has Lt-Col Thompson never heard of Voltaire, Bradlaugh, Shaw, Wells, and even our own Margaret Knight? Lt-Col Thompson sweepingly generalizes with demonstrable un-truth that the agnostic is luke-warm and indifferent. To what? And he puts this apathy down to Nature’s dislike of a vacuum. But that is too deep for the likes of me. As for the courage to try Christianity, well, which particular brand out of a large assortment does the Colonel recommend to try, he says, aright? So far I have found it impossible to get anything approaching a clear definition of Christianity, let alone any guarantee of aright-ness in practice. I was brought up in a strongly religious atmosphere and for the first twenty years of my life took myself for granted as an impeccable Christian. The end of the First World War left me profoundly disillusioned. Incidentally it was an old paper-backed copy I came across at the time and still possess, of Mill’s Three Essays on Religion – the book Margaret Knight writes about in your July issue – which made me indeed think again to some purpose. I was compelled in all honesty to reject Christianity, and so far from any regret in doing so it has been a treat ever since to be free from the miasma of such a welter of contradiction and, so to speak family hatreds.

Has Lt-Col Thompson yet found the courage to try agnosticism – aright?

 Reginald Underwood, Finedon, Northants.’ (23)

 A few months before Reginald Underwood died he wrote a piece on ‘The Impotence of Omnipotence’ for his column, Views and Opinions in the Freethinker which makes some fascinating points in which he says ‘omnipotence’, the concept of unlimited power to anything and everything, is ‘used as an alternative name for God’ and is ‘no more than a courtesy title the courtesy of which is constantly falsified.’ He attempts to burst the bubble of God’s omnipotence, saying that there is a ‘list of things impossible to God. At the same time God is proclaimed omnipotent, we are exhorted that in all human affairs, God, without man’s permission and collaboration – whatever that may mean – is as frustrate as man himself.’ Omnipotence fails at the suggestion of the least limitation and is destroyed for ‘power cannot be unlimited and limited at the same time. A Supreme being cannot be supreme unless his supremacy is absolute.’ He declares that as a species we are capable of acting without God’s permission and do it an ‘almighty sight better for ourselves.’ As humans with freewill omnipotence is incompatible with our nature and ‘strongly suggests that perverseness which slyly takes advantage of the fact that whatever surpasses the humanly intelligible can never be intelligibly disproved’ before he investigates the realm of fanaticism in believers and non-believers which are equal in their convictions. The author says that God has his limitations and therefore cannot be omnipotent – ‘the laws which govern mathematics and logic, were originated and ordained by God and naturally God cannot transgress his own laws. Can is always followed by cannot.’ He goes on to say that ‘the centuries old accumulation of theistic theology amounts to the end of nothing but a motley of calculated ecclesiastical interests’ and that there is ‘virtually no evidence for them [miracles] except what theologians have deliberately concocted to serve their own purposes.’ Interestingly he suggests that if ‘God is omnipotent, that he is supremely able to do everything conceivable or otherwise, then he must be supremely able to overthrow his own supremacy, to obliterate his omnipotence and thus cancel out his own existence’ which is a delightful thought and in summing up he says that ‘if God is omnipotent he cannot exist because he is omnipotent: if God is not omnipotent he cannot exist because he is not omnipotent’ which tells us exactly where Underwood’s thoughts on the existence of a supreme creator were towards the end of his life. (24)

Reginald was also a great enthusiast of local history and he is inextricably linked to Finedon through his interest and the publication of his volume, ‘The Pageant of Finedon’. Another young man who had the same passion for Finedon was John Leonard Hawthorne Bailey (1942-1016) who met Underwood when he began photographically documenting the historic buildings which were being lost in the village in the early nineteen-sixties. Bailey is to be much admired for his preservation of old Finedon and like the loss of those fine old architectural wonders which could not be saved the loss of John Bailey MBE is felt by many who remember him and owe him a great debt. He is the author of several books on Finedon: ‘Finedon otherwise Thingdon’ (1975), ‘Finedon Revealed’ (1986), ‘Look at Finedon’ (2004) and ‘Finedon’s Yards’ (2005) which is truly an impressive legacy.

Reginald Underwood died aged 70 in Finedon, Northamptonshire on Saturday 14th November 1964.

 

Following Reginald’s death, The Freethinker, a periodical Underwood wrote articles for, printed the following announcement: ‘Reginald Underwood. Once again, this week, our View and Opinions, is written by Reginald Underwood. It will, alas be his last. Indeed it was almost certainly the last article that he wrote. It was posted to me on November 7th and Reg died suddenly exactly a week later at the age of 70. His contributions to this paper will I know be sadly missed. His freethinking friends have lost a kindly, generous and undoubtedly brilliant colleague – and a genuinely modest one. It was characteristic of him to accompany each of his articles with a note that if I didn’t like what he had written I could always tear it up. I hardly need say that I never did. He was a clear thinker and a fine writer. He had a splendid and often scintillating command of English. When he taught the language in a grammar school it was, he laughingly told me, more than a trial: it was a torture. “Most boys don’t care two hoots about grammar,” he said, “and their logic against it is sometimes unassailable.”
He also taught the boys music, having himself been a concert pianist, well known on the Continent, before the last war. In this country he was better known as a writer, with his novels Bachelor’s Hall, Flame of Freedom and An Old Maid’s Lights’ [sic]. And in a real sense his life came full circle. “I still sleep in the room I was born in – and hope I shall die in it,” he said to me a little while ago. And his wish was fulfilled. The truth is that, despite his modern intellectual outlook, Reg disliked the present-day world and looked with nostalgia at the past. On a recent visit to
London he deplored the “redevelopment around St. Paul’s Cathedral”– in which respect, incidentally he was far from alone. He longed for the old city he knew during his student days. It was fifty years ago this month that he had his first short story published – in The Sunday at Home. He went on to write dozens of stories and other pieces for magazines, and for The Queen, The Windsor, and other periodicals that were then flourishing but have long since vanished. “What a different world that was”, he exclaimed, “and for me at any rate a hundred times preferable to the present!” He knew well a number of the literary figures of that time, and he was a close friend of Havelock Ellis, whom he often used to visit in Herne Hill. Sad though he felt at the human predicament, it must however be said that Reg Underwood was a cheerful and charming companion with a fund of stories and a wealth of experience. Death undoubtedly came to him as a blessing he had had more than enough of life – fortunately without suffering. At the same time, perhaps a little selfishly, I am glad he lived his three score years and ten, delighting us with his writing up to the very end. Colin McCall.’ (25)

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

Flame of Freedom. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press. 1930. pp. 238. Maroon cloth on boards and gilt titles on the spine. Mustard dust jacket. [d’Arch Smith: 565]

 

Bachelor’s Hall. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press.1934. pp. 328. Dedicated to Edward Carpenter. Manuscript written circa 1929 (the author waited five years before publication). Maroon cloth on boards and gilt titles on the spine. [d’Arch Smith: 561] 2nd edition published 1937. London. Fortune Press. pp. 319. Reprint: New York. Arno Press. 1975. pp. 319. Spanish Translation: Las Tribulaciones de Adrian. (translated by Carlos Sanrune). Association Cultural Amistades, Particulares. 2020. pp. 262.

 

An Old Maid’s Child. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press. (July) 1935. pp. 224. Maroon cloth on boards and gilt titles on the spine. [d’Arch Smith: 564]

 

Hidden Lights (autobiographical reminiscences). Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press. (November) 1937. pp. 202. some copies portrait frontis. Underwood relates details on school, London, working as a tailor, journalism and teaching; Methodism, his interests in writing and thoughts on sex and his meeting Edward Carpenter and association with H E Bates. Orange ochre cloth on boards with gilt titles on the spine. [d’Arch Smith: 566]

 

The House of Pleasant Bread. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press.1941. pp. 272. [d’Arch Smith: 567]

 

The Pageant of Finedon (historical). Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press.1943. pp. 142. illustrated with 20 topographical plates. Red cloth on boards and gilt titles on the spine. [d’Arch Smith: 568]

 

Secret Fear. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press.1943. pp. 212. Maroon cloth on boards and gilt titles on the spine. Mustard dust jacket with red lettering on the front and spine; the reverse has a list of books from Fortune Press in red lettering. [d’Arch Smith: 569]

 

This Sorry Scheme. Novel. Cr. 8vo. London. Fortune Press.1960. pp. 302. [10 October 1962] [d’Arch Smith; 570]

 

[The d’Arch Smith numbers are those allocated by Timothy d’Arch Smith in his ‘R. A. Caton and the Fortune Press. A Memoir and a Hand-list’. London. Bertram Rota. 1983. 2nd edition: 2004. Asphodel Editions]

 

ARTICLES IN MAGAZINE PUBLICATIONS

 

I feel it is worthy to reproduce some of the articles Reginald Underwood submitted to magazines and periodicals for publication. Reginald saw many of his writings published in the British Musician and Musical News and the following piece, ‘The Lure of the Ballet’, published in 1936, is a good example of Underwood’s forward thinking attitude to the ballet and the role of male and female dancers calling for an acceptance of different forms of sexuality within ballet and the arts in general which is certainly ahead of its time.

 

THE LURE OF THE BALLET

 
It is quite probable that many people reading the title of this article would be inclined forthwith to put a sardonic question mark behind it. For while, on the one hand, ballet seems to gain a growing list of devotees who regard it with an inviolable adoration, on the other, it still meets with lofty indifference or even contemptuous execration.
One not infrequently meets with critics – perhaps detractors would be more correct – who, in responsible columns, still express their inability to see anything in ballet beyond an inane capering about and a dubious display of physical charms. The devotees lavish praise with a holy and uncritical fervour. When they visit the ballet they apparently prefer to leave their critical faculties at home and bitterly resent anything in the nature of criticism, however reasonable, from others. They forget, or seemingly ignore, that only by such criticism can ballet or any other art hope to become effectual and grow. These balletomaniacs like all other sorts of maniacs are of little use in enlisting sympathetic appreciation of the art they so ardently worship, since nothing more vigorously encourages prejudice in an opponent than too vehement enthusiasm. The detractors are just as fatuous on their side. They defeat themselves by their own violence. When they go to the ballet they take all their critical faculties (such as they are) with them – and nothing else. Whether or not they come to pray they certainly remain to scoff. They need to be reminded of the old woman who, when her friends remonstrated with her for kissing her cow, replied, “it’s a matter of taste my dears.” They forget that although to them, the ballet may seem no more than a childish romp unfit for the entertainment and edification of he-men and she-women, and suited only for the amusement of a lot of feeble minded old women, that these same old women still have a perfect right to kiss their cow, and that when their preference comes to be defended upon intellectual grounds, they can soon find ample justification for it.
Another point these detractors forget is, that if they despise the ballet so much, they can at least always stay away from it!
A serious but sane admiration of ballet will not take much notice of such extremists; a serious but sane dislike of ballet will equally avoid them. Reasonable opponents can respect, even if they cannot understand each other’s point of view, because they know that their preferences and objections really are at bottom no more than a matter of taste. They know too that taste is quite an arbitrary matter and cannot be subjected to any opinionativeness.
The very fact that ballet has been able to provoke such intense diversity of opinion is a sign of its vitality. A feeble or moribund art can arouse neither love nor hate. No longer is ballet the mere handmaiden of opera, a frivolous stopgap. It stands with dignity upon its own two legs. It is now a serious competitor with opera and not a humble ally. In spite of its enemies it has proved that it can by itself undertake a successful season in that supreme English citadel of opera, Covent Garden. True, it was a Ballet Russe that had done so. But when we consider the accomplishment of the static Vic-Wells Ballet, or the mobile Markova-Dolin company, it looks as if even British ballet promises in due course, achievements quite equal to those of its foreign contemporaries. The choreography of Frederick Ashton or the superb dancing of Anton Dolin need fear no comparison with their counterparts in other countries.
The lure of ballet is indeed no myth. For such developments could not have come about without the support of a genuinely discerning enthusiasm. In his Dance of Life, Havelock Ellis makes out an excellent case for the dance as the most fundamental form of human expression. The child and the savage dance even before they sing. Ballet at the other end of the scale, is the present supreme exposition of dancing, as far removed from those primitive childish and native attempts at rhythmical movements as God Save the King with one finger on the piano is from a fine performance of one of the “48”. And it may well be that as ballet attains nearer and nearer to perfection, both in conception and execution, and as its meaning becomes at once more profound and more clear, it will rank at its best with the most spiritualistic expositions of any form of art. It shows of course like music or literature various types of manifestations and varying degrees of artistic excellence. There is as much difference between the voluptuous delights of a Rimsky Korsakov composition and the austerity of a Bach fugue. The one depends on colour and story. The other is an expression of almost pure pattern and rhythm, and as such will blend, for those who can assimilate it (and in spite of the violent denunciations of the philistines), into an amazing harmony with the Brahms No. 4 symphony. The philistine’s objections seem always to me a revelation of incapacity on their part. Because their narrower range prevents them from enjoying what they denounce, they cannot believe or admit that anybody else can enjoy it. Personally, I find that the only difficulty in this combination of fine dancing with fine music, is, that it takes too heavy a toll almost of my appreciative faculties. So much beauty presented at once to the ear and the eye, is almost more than I can take in. There are those who admit that though ballet has indeed a lure, it is a lure rather for women than men. Possibly. It is understandable that women may be more attracted by male dancing than men. At the same time they may be equally attracted to female dancing for different reasons. Here, they can see themselves in the same roles, wearing fascinating dresses and evoking similar applause as they display their graces. On the other hand, while men may have a masculine enjoyment in the female dancer, they are assumed to regard – Britons at any rate that dancing is effeminate and not a man’s job, that man is more in place, say, on the football field or in the boxing ring. And by this, is implied obliquely, that football or boxing are of a superior order to ballet. But are they? Afterall, although there may be a great deal of art for instance in playing football, football is only a game. It has beauty of movement but it appeals primarily to animal rather than aesthetic instincts. It is a combat. Its chief purpose is that one side should overcome the other. It is therefore more primitive than civilised. To refer to it as in any sense spiritualised, however vague that term may be, would be to invite deserved ridicule. As for referring to boxing in such terms, it would be like pronouncing the benediction at the close of a prize fight. But ballet, if it means anything at all, surely exists for the culture and expression of beauty. It is the emotion of motion. If as certain hostile critics sneer, it provides a means of lascivious enjoyment – a possibility I should imagine to be remote in first-class ballet, - I can only retort that nastiness like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As for the epithet effeminate applied to male ballet dancers, it seems to me both foolish and futile. Even so balanced and penetrating a critic as Arnold L. Haskell says that “the majority of male dancers, are effeminate because the majority are frankly bad.” This sounds at first a little like putting the cart before the horse, but whether or not, I don’t see why what is called effeminacy should be considered, synonymous with bad. Effeminacy is at best a vague term and as Mr. Haskell conceives it seems to be any sort of departure of the male dancer from an attitude of virile gallantry towards the female dancer. But surely the function of a dancer of whichever sex is to dance, and the suggested restriction would seem to imply a rather absurd attempt to confine the expressiveness of the ballet within conventional sexual limitations, like the old-fashioned novel, in which all the hes were hes and all the shes shes in emphatic capitals. But if balletic representations are to grow with the same comprehensiveness as music or drama, no such limit must be imposed. Human nature is an endless graduation of psychological types, not a water-tight division of definite male and female. And every type has a claim. It is said, with ample evidence I believe, that not only are the more intermediate types more drawn into the ballet itself, but that they form its strongest support as spectators. Any importation of mere male or female prejudices will do more harm than good. It is by no means impossible to conceive of first-class ballet being composed entirely of male dancers as well as entirely of female dancers as in the old days. It is always stupid convention and never reason that refuses to call a man beautiful as well as a woman, whether it be physically or expressively. To lay a charge of effeminacy and then to say that because of it a dancer is a bad dancer is no more than an outburst of personal distaste. It is the detached quality of the motion, the gesture, that matters. The dance – its rhythm, pattern, emotion – and not sex makes the ballet. If ballet exists as I hold for the manifestation of a particular form of beauty, then all true beauty lovers will feel to some extent its lure, whether it be through an enjoyment of that deliciously fantastic wonderland to which mimes and marionettes also belong, or whether it be through the perception of those profound human instincts for rhythm and pattern so exquisitively expressed by the trained graces of the perfect dancer. (
26)

The next article I am reproducing is from the same periodical, British Musician and Musical News and it concerns that old controversial subject among musicologists, scholars and critics, the vocal tremolo. In the article he mentions the wonderfully named Mr. Fox Strangways (Arthur Henry Fox Strangways 1859-1948) and his critical opinion of the ‘wobble’, and a friend of Reginald Underwood’s, the Scottish singer, Madame Jessie Strathearn (1871-1845):

 

WOBBLE WOBBLE

 

In a recent number of the Sunday Observer, Mr. Fox Strangways had some caustic things to say about what he calls, the wobble in singing. This peculiar phenomenon has been much discussed and condemned of late and while the inference is, that it is an enormity which the majority of singers are guilty of perpetrating, not one of them has apparently come forward in its defence. Mr. Fox Strangways suggests that there are singers – both teachers and performers – who actually approve of and deliberately cultivate this wobble. He says that in his opinion all such are beyond argument. But surely nothing that is merely a matter of opinion is beyond argument. He considers that once perhaps, in a song, this wobble may be indulged in to express emotion, but no more than once apparently no matter how much emotion the song may seem in need of expressing. He obviously wants all notes of any duration to be drawn out firm and straight as a ruler – like the lines of very modern architecture. No curves or waves in them anywhere. Yet there are those who contend, and not altogether without reason, that such firmness and straightness can result in a good deal of hardness and an unpleasant quality of strained tone. Whereas a slight loosening, a sort of not too-pronounced pulsing has a distinctly mellowing effect quite apart from the specific expression of emotion. He says that Jenny Lind never used the wobble. I cannot say. She was too long before my time. But I know that all the great singers that I ever heard, Calve, Melba, Tetrazinni, Clara Butt, Caruso and the rest, without exception made constant, and to my ear very beautiful use of this loosening in their tone production. “Wobble” would be too strong a description I think, but their notes were by no means always firm and straight.
The question is, what exactly does Mr. Fox Strangways, as for that matter all its other denouncers, mean by this wobble? Has he in mind a special kind, or a special degree, since surely there are varieties of both. He would no doubt agree that the wobble is much more pronounced in some singers than others. And he will not be unaware that certain teachers who countenance and even cultivate it, try to dignify it with more high-sounding names such as tremolo or vibrato. Not but what a bad wobble by any other name would sound as offensive. But, so it seems to me, it is with the wobble as with most things, it becomes revolting only when it is overdone. And eminence is no guarantee against that. The singing for instance of Elena Gerhardt, otherwise that of a fine artist, is rather spoilt for me by exaggeration in this direction. In all such singing, this exaggeration suggests and probably is actually the result of, a helpless lack of control in some part of the breathing apparatus. And therein I think, lies a most important point. There is all the difference in the world between a wobble, or as I prefer to call it, a wave, consciously controlled and one that is merely the outcome of weakness, even though the particular specimen may sound overdone. The singer who can sustain a note with a perfectly steady vibration or wave it at will, is in a very different position artistically from one who wobbles because he can’t help it. And it is fairly safe to say that a controlled deliberateness of this action will rarely if ever be excessive, so long as it is coupled with any artistic perception whatever.
The term “wobble” I consider to be appropriate only to those voices which are so insecure in pitch that it would be difficult to tell from them precisely what note they are supposed to be sounding. Not so long since, I heard a soprano of considerable renown who when she was singing, shall we say high G, produced a tremolo that seemed like a rapid alternation of the G with E below it. Indeed, it struck me that as a special effect purposely aimed at, it might have been regarded as very clever. But almost every other note was similarly distorted and it was painfully plain that the distortion was quite involuntary. Such an example is far from unique and one can very heartily sympathise with Mr. Fox Strangways abhorrence of it. He puts the blame for tolerating it upon the hypocrisy of audiences who will applaud what they do not like. There may be something in that, but when this lady had finished her song, a gentleman in the next seat, a perfect stranger, turned to me with the dry comment, “Poor thing!” The applause was neither loud nor prolonged. It was merely and maybe falsely courteous. It was just as if the audience echoed my neighbour’s comment, but added “More to be pities than blamed.” Which perhaps was quite true. On the other hand, a slight waving of the voice on sustained notes, in my opinion very considerably enhances its beauty. The effect I have in mind is a sort of series of small crescendos and diminuendos alternating at the rate of four or five to a second, and produced by a controlled action of the glottis, and used of course with due artistic discretion. The fact that players of stringed instruments invariably aim at a similar effect indicates how wide-spread is the inclination for it. One wonders if Mr. Fox Strangways would have all the notes of a violin sound as taut as those of a flute. No doubt there are poor performers on the fiddle who overdo this sort of thing as abominably as poor singers. And it may even be weakness – the weakness of an ingrained bad habit – in their case too. But, then, they are hardly a criterion of judgement.
One of the interesting facts that arises from these discussions on wobbling is the different ways in which, in the human voice it seems to be produced. For instance the larynx varies in formation in different individuals, so that the speed of the pulsing or waving can vary from the slow quavering of a voice worn with age to the rapid, almost staccato succession of sounds which results in a sort of lamb’s bleating. Moreover, all this wobbling is not necessarily produced in the glottis. I have known cases, both voluntary and involuntary where it arises from a vibration of the diaphragm. The result is generally an emulation of the cinema organ, surely the most atrocious kind of wobble in existence. The late Madame Jessie Strathearn, an old friend of mine and a well-known singer, once told me that when she was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, she knew an eccentric professor (I wonder if anybody else recalls him) who not only admired and approved of the wobble (though he wouldn’t have called it that!) but boasted that he knew of four distinct methods of producing it, and one method was by vibrating the walls of the abdomen. It was said that a quite famous bass singer, who for the life of him couldn’t produce the wobble in his throat, used this weird method on occasion with fine effect! I have always thought that a singer possessing really expert anatomical knowledge of, all the physical organs involved in singing, could write a fascinating exposition of the ways and means by which this wobble could be caused – and cured. Text-books are hopelessly vague on the subject even if they mention it at all. As for those critics who will have none of it at any price, who declare that it is offensive in every kind and degree, well, they are, shall we say, beyond argument. (
27)

The next article from The Freethinker of 1964 reveals something of Reginald’s friendship with the author, Richard Rumbold who was born in 1913 and went up to Christ Church, college, Oxford. Richard lived under the brutal tyranny of his father and like his mother, Anne and sister Rosemary who both committed suicide in 1928 and 1957 respectively, possibly followed in their footsteps when he fell from a window to his death on 10th March 1961 aged 47.

 

THE POINT OF NO REWARD

 

To the recently published diary of the late Richard Rumbold (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 36s.), William Plomer, its most efficient editor, has given the title A Message in Code. This does not, as it might at first seem to suggest, refer to any explicit message which the book is supposed convey. It is taken from a comment made by the author towards the end of his diary: “Life, I am almost inclined to think, has the fantastic quality of a message in code, to which we do not possess the key.” There might be differing views on whether or not life is, or has, a message over and above its meaning as we understand it in the experience of daily living. Bit if there is any mysterious other-reality behind appearance, if there is any message in code that requires deciphering, it is pretty safe to say that nobody has as yet found the key to it. Nobody has ever got nearer than unproved assumption, not even the infallible Pope, as Richard was destined to discover.
It might be said that the diary itself has a message, or maybe several messages, none of which is so cryptic as to call for much skill in deciphering. To a Freethinker at any rate, it provides plain enough confirmation of the futility of religion in general and of the Christian religion in particular when dealing with the intractable problems which life imposes. Richard Rumbold was brought up in what to a Freethinker is the sinister light of the beliefs and dogmas of that unchristian brand of Christianity called Roman Catholicism. At a fairly early age he seems, both for temperamental and practical reasons, to have come to distrust and then to detest the Catholic Church. He eventually turned upon it and although in later years he seems under pressure to have resumed some sort of sketchy dalliance with it, he appears, rather like Talleyrand, to have nodded both but not to have spoken. He never, either in practice or in spirit, actually returned to it. In later years he travelled far and wide, both physically and mentally. He sought the elusive key through Buddhism, both the Ceylonese and Japanese Zen varieties, but although he seems to have derived more satisfaction from them than from Christianity, they did not lead to any lasting success. Richard’s first real clash with the Roman Catholic Church apparently arose out of the publication of a first novel, suggestively called Little Victims. He wrote this at the time he was an Oxford undergraduate. From his later autobiography and still later diary, this novel can now be seen as thinly fictionalised account of his own first twenty years. Written at so early an age the novel is not surprisingly intellectually immature and somewhat amateurish in execution. But because of its subject matter and the offence it gave in certain influential quarters, it involved its author in a phase of the most unpleasant notoriety. It doesn’t, or it didn’t, take much to shock some people. It is now over thirty years since the novel appeared. Today it would be difficult to imagine a reading public being scandalised at anything so comparatively innocuous. However, since on the one hand it exposed the loutish and disgraceful goings-on of jejune Oxford undergraduates and on the other the vicious atmosphere of a famous Catholic school, it made powerful enemies in two directions. Richard seems, so to speak, to have burnt the scandal at both ends. If it gave a light that was lurid its effect was also brief. Moreover, it was not the novel itself that caused the upstir so much as the publicised reaction of a well-known Catholic priest.
Although the actual characters in the book were carefully labelled fictitious, Richard had been indiscreet enough to make an elderly and seamy-minded French tutor ask the leading character (obviously Richard in disguise), “So you’re a Catholic, are you? Have you met Father Ronald Knox yet – such a nice man?” In such a context that could easily have been a double-edged remark and Father Knox with typical priestly forbearance at once took umbrage. He lost no time in finding an excuse for a humiliating revenge. He excluded Richard from Communion in the most inexcusably pointed way. “I knelt at the Holy Communion rail with the others,” said Richard, “but when Father Knox reached me he took the silver plate from my hands and passed on to the next person,” unmistakably implying that Richard was unfit to receive the consecrated wafer. News of this incident promptly got into the papers and there was a blaze of undesirable publicity, into which the Archbishop of Birmingham was also drawn. When Richard presently sought out Father Knox for an explanation, the priest told him, “I hear you have written a very filthy book,” and so forth. The priest admitted that he had not read the book but had received information from another undergraduate. But Catholic restrictions, as Richard said at the time, are appalling. “I have written a very moral book,” he protested, “but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarchy, has no discrimination. People seem to think that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. This is untrue. They are worse.” Richard could speak from personal experience. But as usual the Catholic authorities resented the truth. Only a Catholic version of truth must ever be permitted.
My own acquaintance with Richard Rumbold began shortly after the publication of Little Victims. A novel of mine had just come out and I had dedicated it to Edward Carpenter, whom in my young days I used to visit. Richard, much younger than I, had a warm admiration for Carpenter’s ideas and on this account wrote to me through the publishers. Shortly after we met and forthwith became firm if not close friends. Our further meetings and correspondence were always spasmodic as he was continually changing his address. He had what is so curiously called an independent income nothing could be more dependant and was able to spend and roam in a way I could not. It was not until the early part of 1949 that I received through the post the copy of a book entitled My Father’s Son, obviously an autobiography. It was by Richard Lumford, a name unknown to me. However, an accompanying letter soon explained. Here, of all things, was Richard Rumbold’s autobiography under a protective pseudonym. The first part of this very welcome gift turned out to be a more or less factual account of what had been told as fiction in the novel. It carried on the life story much further. Some of it I already knew at first hand. This book proved to be a great advance on the novel, far more mature and this time extremely well written.
The rumpus with the domineering Catholics is described in this autobiography and retold in the diary, which in the earlier parts inevitably overlaps the autobiography. In fact all three books, novel, autobiography and diary are to a considerable extent varying versions of the same life story and the different modes of telling provide a remarkable illustration of how a mind can develop. From first to last that story evinces a strong, natural and intelligent antipathy towards organised religion, especially Romanism with its dogmatic teaching based on an authority that is entirely self-constituted. “Even before I was excommunicated,” Richard remarks in the autobiography, “I was not a convinced Catholic.” And the same candour threads all through the diary, which has become more intimately revealing, more deeply reflective. But apart from this all-pervasive hostility to western religious pretensions, this diary gives an absorbing insight into the workings of a strange and remarkable mind, irremediably warped by a bad heredity and darkly overshadowed by the ravages of tuberculosis. The tragic circumstances of his family life are graphically portrayed. His mother, dominated and goaded by an atrocious husband she was unable to divorce because of Catholic forbiddance, eventually went out of her mind and committed suicide. Richard’s only sister, also a Catholic, committed suicide for reasons which seem never to have been cleared up. Nevertheless, although an aura of tragedy permeates the book, it has its lighter aspects. There are extremely interesting accounts of Richard’s associations with the great and famous and of their religious and literary opinions. Then, the latter part of the diary can be read as a fascinating travel book with vivid descriptions of life in
Ceylon, India and Japan, effectively contrasted with what he justly calls the empty glitter of western civilisation. We are given an unusual insight into the main kinds of Buddhism, which the western world knows so little about. In due course circumstances, as circumstances will, brought him back to Europe and soon to a resumption of the earlier difficulties. He once went with me to a Quaker meeting, an hour’s silence broken only by a few quietly-spoken sentences. This, he thought as we walked away, seemed to come nearer to the real thing than any previous experience. He refers to Humanism in his diary as inadequate because “When a man is ill or dying in terror of the unknown, no humanism will avail him.” One could only point out that for the convinced Humanist, such terror was the outcome of false beliefs and disappears as the falsity becomes exposed. Richard Rumbold’s untimely end at the age of forty-seven would no doubt in the view of commonplace Christianity, be looked upon as a tragedy to deplore. Yet it was manifestly the end of a life perpetually and inescapably tormented by periods of intense and un-deserved unhappiness. Whether he died by accident or whether he followed the examples of mother and sister remains uncertain. But either way a saner and more humanistic opinion could regard his death as being in that homeliest pf phrases, a happy release. Indeed if it were actually premeditated, it could be seen as a bravely wise decision. Death is preferable to a living death. If one could think that there were another personal existence beyond our human apprehension, then we might imagine that Richard has at last found the key and decoded the message. But no convincing reason has ever been shown to suppose anything of the sort. (28)

Reginald again took up the cudgels to defend what he saw as an absurd point of difference between the words ‘readable’ and ‘audible’ as described by Neville D’Esterre, a somewhat pompously self-inflated music critic of the thirties whose real name was Peter Hugh Reed (1892-1969), in an article in the British Musician and Musical News which is best left to the angry pen of Underwood to explain:

 

A CRITICISM OF THE CRITIC

 

Mr. Neville D’Esterre is so cross with both reviewers and novelists that it is with some diffidence I take up what seems to be a sort of challenge in the last sentence of his article on “Readable Books and Audible Music” in the December number of the British Musician. Yet, what does his scolding amount to? He says that a combination of musical critic and novel reviewer is absurd; that to suppose a man capable of doing both things effectively is like expecting him to be capable of deepest philosophy at the same time as he designs fashionable women’s hats. Apparently all musical criticism is equivalent to the deepest philosophy and all reviewing to designing hats.
He then goes on to say that any competent musical critic could well and easily review a novel; could do it on his head in fact. Clever man! But what is this but putting the other way about the very combination that Mr. d’Esterre has just dismissed as absurd?
And also, is one to presume that although the deepest philosophy is quite beyond the designer of hats, the designing of hats would be child’s play to the philosopher. I know nothing of the designing of hats, but I wonder!
After giving the poor reviewers another rap or two on the nose by referring to their ‘idiot-like ability’ to read much in a short time and to their type of mind which “disports itself” for reviewing, Mr. d’Esterre has a go at the novelists themselves.
He declares he speaks with feeling, which seems obvious; and humility, which, considering he is assuming the role of musical critic speaking ex cathedra, is not quite so obvious. He practically tells the novelists that they are as bad as the reviewers and says to their faces (the rude man!) that they are in fact a lazy lot with minds so superficial that they write novels merely to get out of hard study and serious meditation.
Well, well, well! I have written a novel or two myself. I know many others who have. And I don’t believe one of us has ever realised that novel writing was just as easy as all that. Is not Mr. d’Esterre’s heavily solemn view of the novel as permanent literature (I wonder where he draws the dividing line) rather misplaced? All that many novels ever aspire to or claim to do is to provide mental relaxation and entertainment for those who feel they need it or desire it. Obviously we can’t all be philosophers or musical critics and those who find novels such a vast ocean of boredom as Mr. d’Esterre says, are under no obligation even to look at them. But I do think they are under an obligation to let other people read in peace if they wish.
Novel readers are not necessarily in search of intellectual exposition nor yet a mirror of life – as Mr. d’Esterre sees it. Why should they be when they have only to turn to the philosophers and the musical critics for such high-souled pabulum?
Returning to the reviewers, Mr. d’Esterre says that if he were caught advising the guileless public (is the public really so guileless?) that a novel was readable he would shrink, etc., etc. And he then goes on to make a confused comparison between readable books and audible music. Confused, because not only does he, and with seeming deliberateness, mistake the meaning of “readable” analogous to “audible”.
For a reviewer to commit a similar “lunacy” to the supposition of a musical critic beginning: “This composition is quite audible”, he would have to say: “This book is quite visible”.
All the words “readable” can mean to anyone who is not wilfully perverse is, that although a book may not attain to any great height of artistic excellence, it still has, in the reviewer’s opinion, this quality or that which makes it at least worth looking through.
As for anyone finding “ordinary words arranged in grammatical order unreadable” of course they can. I have known any amount that I couldn’t read though I could see plainly enough that they were there. “Unreadable books and inaudible music” is a false analogy and leads the whole argument astray. I see no absurdity in talking of unreadable books. And a true musical counter-part would be, not inaudible music, which is merely impossible, but, so to speak, un-hearable music; that is music which may not be worth listening to, though it must of necessity be audible as the printed word must be visible. As for fiction giving less than half the truth, well, Mr. d’Esterre, what is truth? And if worshippers grow in time to resemble the gods they worship, why not? (
29)

A month later, in February 1937, Neville d’Esterre responded with a letter to the editor of the British Musician and Musical News (volume 14, number 133, p. 27), with more than a touch of venom, saying, ‘a writer should never reply to criticism; he should just go on with his job. However, there is a brief word that may be said about Mr. Underwood’s strictures, without much harm to anybody. The analogy between readable books and audible music is not a false one, since it is in the nature of music that the sense of it is given forth with the notes as they are uttered. Music, in other words, is not mere noise without meaning, but a noise essentially eloquent. The two propositions, therefore, are closely analogous. The merely visible properties in a book are its size and shape, the colour of its bindings, the quality of its print, and so forth; and so there is no analogy between what meets the eye in a book and what hits the ear in a musical composition. “This book is visible” must be balanced by “This music is also visible” – the notation, the title of the work, the name of the composer and publisher. One hears music as one reads words; but, inasmuch as wisdom enjoins that we always take the perfectly obvious for granted, it is quite as superfluous, and therefore absurd, to describe any book as readable, as to describe any composition as audible.
For the rest, Mr. Underwood’s reactions to modern “fiction” in general seem to differ radically from mine. Well, I have always suspected that there was somebody about who liked that sort of thing. The fortunes made by publishers and literary agents had to be accounted for somehow. – London. W8. January 10th 1937. Very sincerely yours, Neville d’Esterre.’

The editor of the British Musician and Musical News felt the need to write an explanation on the history of the word ‘readable’ meaning ‘legible’ and saying that the ‘word in dispute between Mr. d’Esterre and Mr. Underwood has even been used as a noun: “The book is definitely one of the read-ables of the year.” But it has never risen above the level of colloquial speech or journalism.’ The word ‘hearable’ (audible) gets the same treatment bringing Southey and Huxley into the argument which no doubt deflated through lack of further wind.

Once again Underwood tackles religious matters in this next article which appeared in The Humanist of March 1963:

 

THE NATURE OF BELIEF

 

Belief accepted on faith because there is no evidence of make-believe.
 
Belief can have reference to many subjects just as one subject can have reference to many beliefs. The outstanding subject in this respect is, of course, that muddled conglomeration of beliefs we know as religion. In the western world ‘belief’ in its wider sense is now used almost exclusively in association with religion, and when we speak of belief or unbelief we nearly always mean the acceptance or rejection of Christianity. It is not so many years since that Church of England schoolchildren were taught not to recite the Creed but to ‘say the belief.’ The Belief was for long and probably still may be the more popular name for that kernel of Christianity the Apostle’s Creed.
 
Believing is Knowing
 
It can hardly be said that the term ‘belief’ in this connection is a particularly happy choice. Doubt is implicit in the very word. For belief is a very different thing from knowledge. It is different from matter of opinion. Whether a belief is clear as spring water, as few beliefs are, or whether it is as clear as mud, as most beliefs are, belief, no matter how fervently it may be held, can never be more than the expression of unproved and unprovable conviction. Whereas definitive knowledge, in so far as within our human limits we can be said to possess it, consists of proven truth. It remains unaffected by fervour and it cannot be refuted.
There are still people who persist in asking the stupid question: Do you mean to say, then, that we cannot believe anything that we cannot prove? Of course we can. It is just the things we cannot prove that we can believe. It is the thing we can prove that we cannot believe, for proof gives knowledge and knowledge annuls and supersedes belief.
When we say that two and two make four we are not saying something we believe to be true, we are saying something that we know to be true. The statement is not merely self-evident, it is mathematically demonstrable. On the other hand, such numerical juggling as ‘three in one and one in three’ is certainly not self-evident and is a purely theological device. There may be those who believe in it as in some esoteric formula of truth, but nobody has ever been able to demonstrate it as such.
There are innumerable past events which we know to be historical facts. To say that we believe them is beside the point. Anyone who professes not to believe then will be regarded not as an unbeliever but as a fool. But that somebody named Jesus was, two thousand years ago, born of a virgin and then later came back to life three days after he had been murdered is certainly not historical fact. If it were, we should all have no option but to acknowledge it. Yet many people, some of the declared Christians, are unable to acknowledge it. They regard it as no more than historical fiction. They find it literally incredible.
Similarly, we can make statements about the cosmos which, however fantastic to the lay mind, are scientifically verifiable. But when we are told in all seriousness that the late Pope Pius XII saw the sun dancing in the sky, we can hardly be expected to take it as an authentic account of some unusual astronomical manifestation. It may be celestial but it is not scientific.
 
What cannot be Proved
 
Belief is often paraded as knowledge. It is a dangerous venture because there is always the imminent risk of its being exposed as absurdity if not as fraud. Oftentimes people who cannot bear to have their beliefs disrupted by argument will, as Gladstone did with Huxley, abandon argument and take to pontificating. For the tentative ‘I believe’ they will substitute the didactic ‘I know’. When challenged to explain how they know they always dodge the issue by proclaiming that such superior knowledge transcends reason. So it does. It comes, so they say, from authority out of revelation. They further triumphantly point out that nobody can disprove it. Perhaps not. But neither can we (nor they) disprove that Mohammed was translated bodily into Paradise. Neither can we (nor they) disprove a mental inmate’s claim to be a reincarnation of Julius Caesar. Neither can we disprove a thousand other things which both they and we are nevertheless unable to believe.
Lack if disproof does not constitute proof or even credibility. If it did, or even if we were to rely on self-styled authority (and there is no other sort), there could be no limit to the nonsense put forth as truth.
When Doctor Johnson, in answer to the pertinacious Boswell, booked ‘Sir, I know the will is free and there’s an end on’t,’ he may have been expressing a perfectly sincere conviction, but he was nevertheless making an arrogantly unwarranted assertion – though of course it is conceivable that such a pesky quibbler as ‘Bozzy’ could drive an impatient man to say anything. The old doctor, for all his sagacity, knew no such thing. The only way he could have known would have been through irrefutable proof. And in spite of all the verbal ingenuities on behalf of free will that the world has so far seen, no such proof has ever been forthcoming.
 
Appeal to Faith
 
However, belief is not only an essential, used intelligently, it can be an asset to a well-ordered life. It may be that all of us live more by belief than by knowledge. When we compare what we can be said to know with all we may be sure we do not know, when we compare what we know with what we believe, we soon see that our knowledge is not only infinite, it is comparatively infinitesimal. It has been hardly won over immense stretches of time. Its great virtue is that it can be tested and safe-guarded in a way that belief cannot. It can be used and built upon in a way that we cannot use and build upon belief.
Religion is made up of belief – when it isn’t make-believe. The two are like identical twins, difficult to distinguish. If religion were made up of knowledge, we should all either have to be religious or kept under lock and key. But in religion the very words ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ have to be qualified. They demand and deserve what the junior grammarian with delightfully innocent aptness called perverted commas. They have to be called ‘religious truth’ and ‘religious knowledge’, which, to a rational mind, is no better than saying ‘ersatz truth’ or ‘synthetic knowledge’. As if truth could or would tolerate any such impertinent limitations.
Now belief is primarily the acceptance of some form of statement as true, for the truth of which there is no conclusive evidence. If there is no evidence at all it depends on what is called an act of faith. And as the schoolboy said, ‘Faith is believing what you know to be untrue.’ which, though perhaps not quite accurate, is not such a howler as it may at first appear.
Yet although belief cannot be tested and confirmed in the way that knowledge can, it can be tested in another fashion. It must satisfy at least two questions: firstly, What do we believe? and secondly, Why do we believe it? They are not as easy as they look. A ruthlessly honest and exhaustive inquiry into what we suppose we believe is bound to have some extremely disconcerting results. It may even prove painfully fatal to more than one long-cherished illusion.
 
Wishful Thinking
 
We shall find that much we thought we had been believing in we had not been believing in at all. We shall perceive that the nearest we have got is to a sort of second-hand belief in belief. We may find that we never have actually believed in this ancient story or that antique doctrine, this tenet or that dogma. We have never got beyond merely believing that we believed them.
But once those beliefs which are felt to be sadly and sincerely held have been sorted out, it requires an even deeper insight, a higher courage and a greater skill, to face the second more important, more searching question: Why are they held? It is commonplace that most people believe what they want to believe. They believe anything that pleases them and especially anything they find expedient.
There was once an old lady who, in church, was observed to bow her head not only at the name of Jesus but also every time the Devil was mentioned. When reprimanded by the curate she replied: ‘Ah young man, it’s all very well to talk, but you never know what you may be glad of.’ And there you have in a nutshell the prime motive that goes to the root of practically all non-professional religious beliefs, the wish to be on the safe side. (
30)

Another article from the British Musician and Musical News in April 1937 gives us some insight into Underwood’s piano tuition:

 

THE EISTEDDFOD

 

I wonder why the promoters of so many musical festivals will insist on calling them by the clumsy and ugly word Eisteddfod. That is to say it is ugly and clumsy on English tongues however euphonious it may be in the original Welsh. English people give it the weirdest variety of pronunciations, not one of them correct to Welsh ears. What is wrong with Contest or Festival? In my part of the country we have our annual “Eisteddfod” and I am regularly asked every year whether I think these contests on the whole have a bad or a good effect. It is a question impossible to answer by a comprehensive affirmative or negative. In the first place, I can of course speak only from my own personal and therefore limited experience as an individual teacher. And even within that limit my answer must necessarily be qualified, though on the whole I think it would be in favour of competitive festivals. Nevertheless I should not subscribe to the dictum that competition is an excellent stimulus and leave it at that. I find it a stimulus to certain types, no doubt the majority. To others however it can certainly be a damper and the thought of it can tend to discourage natural aptitude. Many pupils, and I believe, a few good teachers instinctively dislike the idea of direct competition, mainly because I suppose they are afraid to face up to the possible effects of failure. But granting the undeniable value of musical competition, the first thing that strikes me is the small number of entrants compared with the great number of people who are interested in musical performance, especially among the younger students. I speak mainly from the point of view of a teacher of the pianoforte. And in musical festivals as in examinations, the piano classes almost always outnumber the rest. The number of children say, up to the age of eleven, who in any given district are being taught to play the piano must be enormous compared with the meagre thirty or so, who will be found competing. Why? However much indifference may exist among the particularly nervous types, it cannot account for such a disparity. And it is certainly not on account of the expense since the entrance fees are so small. I believe the reason is that many of those pupils who would enjoy entering for competition are never given the chance. And they are not given the chance because so many of them are demonstrably in the hands of the veriest charlatans, the majority of whom seem to be married women, able (or even unable sometimes) to strum a few bars of the latest popular rubbish and who give “lessons” at a very cheap rate in order to provide themselves with pin-money. In one street of about two hundred houses, I know of four such married women teachers. Not one of them has the faintest shred of either academical or practical qualification to teach. Not one of them could play the simplest tune artistically or has the most rudimentary knowledge of pianoforte technique. Yet it is known that these four persons take over sixty pupils a week between them! Looking upon music teaching as a remunerative – one might almost say fraudulently remunerative – hobby, such so-called teachers are not going to the trouble, even if they were able, to train pupils for competing in musical festivals. And in cases where parents may broach the subject such teachers have been known to declare that they don’t believe in these competitive festivals. They even assure parents that the whole thing is ruled by favouritism and wire-pulling, and many parents – often the most credulous people on earth where their children are concerned – believe them, and in a blissful delusion continue to send their children to have whatever musical aptitude nature has given them mutilated beyond redemption. These bogus teachers usually score on account of their cheapness. So many parents, particularly amongst the poorer working classes (where there is quite as much talent as amongst those better off) understand little or nothing of musical art and appear to think that one teacher is as good as another until, after they have wasted a good deal of hard-earned cash, they find out by the results that that is not. And then it is too late. The mischief is done. All too often the unfortunate pupil is for ever violently set against all musical art. So, one might almost assume then that those pupils who do enter for the competitions are the cream of their district so far as training goes. For these, the first advantage of a competition is that it gives a definite goal to aim at. The piece chosen has to be studied and mastered with a thoroughness that could scarcely be given to lessons with a less definite object. The drawback here is that so many children, especially the quicker ones, are apt to get very tired of sticking to one piece for so long a period of practice. Slower ones of course need the time, though they too, often show signs of wearying. And this more especially if the chosen piece is one they dislike. And herein lies I think an important point for the consideration of executive committees. Out of all the vast literature of music there is surely no need to select pieces for performance that are likely to appeal to only a very limited number of musical tastes. I see no cogency in the argument that some of these dubious selections are chosen to give them a chance of becoming not only themselves known but of making more widely known new ideas and modes of composition. I contend that that is not the purpose of music festivals. The purpose should be to give all performers the best chance of comparing their powers and to that end I think the music chosen should have the widest possible appeal to general musical taste in so far as it is consonant with the standard required. For instance, this year in the Kettering and District Eisteddfod (with which I have most association) the pianoforte solo in the highest class was Dance for the Harpsichord by Delius. I began in this class with five pupils. Four dropped out because they found the piece an unmitigated bore for practice. I admit, I am in sympathy with them. Having tried this composition on a number musical friends I have failed to find one to whom it appealed. They all said it was ugly. And I confess I agree. It may be a successful attempt to make the piano sound like a harpsichord. But to what purpose is that? It remains to our ears a concatenation of dismal discords. And perpetually listening to it in practice instead of stimulating your imagination merely stultifies it. In the same class last year John Ireland’s Darkened Valley was the piece selected. This too proved to be so irrepressibly dreary that I understand even the judge found fault with it on that score. I am willing to believe that there are those to whom both compositions may seem ravishingly beautiful, but I am quite unable to believe that they are so, to any but a very small majority and as long as such depressing subjects are chosen – whatever certain individualists may think of their musical content – competitors will never be numerous. One wonders what is the real motive behind this kind of choice. Competitive festivals can be an excellent training ground for overcoming nervousness, but it should not be forgotten that at the moment of competition they can also induce nervousness in varying degrees according to temperament and that only a few fortunately self-assured performers are at their best during the actual test. An understanding of this fact, particularly in the younger solo performers would alleviate a good deal of the discouragement that arises from disappointing results. It would be also well to remember that although the judge is a man who knows his job, his opinion is not infallible. Different judges would almost certainly give differing results. It is always amusing to note how the judge is considered a good judge when he awards high marks and a bad judge when he gives low ones. But it is saddening and even at times disgusting to hear the rancour with which occasional disappointed persons revile him and the bitter expressions one can sometimes hear about the more successful competitors. As for the poor teacher behind the scenes he has to take his chance. If a pupil does well then what a clever pupil is he! If he does badly then the teacher is no good and he probably loses the pupil. Very few trouble to recognise that a dozen little matters may arise at the time to blunt the fine edge of the teacher’s careful tuition, or that when Paderewski Jones hopefully begins on his piece, if he is one part Paderewski and ninety-nine parts Jones by nature, no teacher on earth can reverse the decision! At the same time competitors do provide an outlet and a chance of development for that one per cent, even if it is no more than a gruesome trial to both judge and audience. (31)

The following three articles show Underwood’s religious thoughts prior to his death in 1964, much of which is quite inflammatory. The final article ‘On Coming Back to God’ is certainly the last thing Underwood wrote which was published shortly after his death and it is filled with all the fury of a dying man towards a God, if indeed there is a God, who remains inaccessible and apart from human affairs.

 

SAYING YOUR PRAYERS

 
“It’s neither prayer nor providence but a load o’ muck as does it,” the outspoken old farmer told the reverend gentlemen who was officially handing out pious reasons for a good crop. The farmer evidently set more store on the knowledge of earthly experience than the ignorance of heavenly theorising. But although experience is the best of teachers, experience, like most teachers, often has some uncommonly dull pupils. And there are none so dull as they who won’t learn. In spite of the stark staring fact that prayers by the shoal go blatently unheeded many people still continue unabashed to say their prayers – though it must be conceded that there are also many people who will say anything rather than their. The commonest explanation for this disconcerting failure of response from the Almighty is, that there is a vital difference between the mere mechanical action of saying your prayers and the profound spiritual concentration which is the open sesame to genuine communication. That may do for those who are able to accept it. But not everybody can accept it, even among those who, in their day and way, have done their share of both saying and praying. For it cannot be denied that saying and praying are equally liable to be dashed by a complete lack of recognition. One delightful reason for this is, that God always does answer prayer, but sometimes the answer is No. trust a theologian for finding a way out and then calling it a right of way. She was a knowing old lady who, when she lost her purse, said she hoped it wouldn’t be found by a theologian, - A man on his knees has been not inaptly likened to a dog on its hind legs. It could be added that the dog seems to show superior sense in sitting up to something that is at least more apprehensible than thin air. John Buchan once described an atheist as somebody who had no invisible means of support. (John Blunt has been known to describe theists some theists as doing very well on no visible means of support.) However, Buchan’s idea of invisible support bears for too strong a resemblance to Hans Anderson’s idea of the Emperor’s new clothes to carry much weight. It is true that the invisible is not always the non-existent, but it is well to remember that the non-existent is always the invisible. The begging dog follows a natural canine instinct. He sticks to what is visible or its equivalent. The Kneeling Man follows a sub-natural human delusion. He submits himself to the invisible. But for all Francis Thompson’s “invisible we view Thee,” the invisible in this connection has never been shown to be anything but a wish-begotten self-deception. The dog may cringe before a man, but the man abases himself before a myth. This, of course, will be and often has been hotly, though always undecisively, disputed. It has never been coldy and conclusively refuted. Once it is, we may all safely promise to go down on our knees with due gratitude – if any is due.
Now if on the one chance in a hundred the desire that engendered the prayer by some coincidence becomes gratified, then that, needless to say, is proof that God has graciously listened and favourably replied. The prayer is answered. If on the remaining ninety-and-nine chances the result is nil, we still have the same sort of proof that God has withholden instead of granted, because God always knows best. Or nearly always. For it is on record that devout worshippers have been heard to hint that there are occasions when they know even better, as when the old Wee-Free prayed: “Grant O Lord that we may be in the right as Thou knowest we shall never change our minds.” Whether or not, the kind of proof here advanced is quite beyond the skill of any Freethinker and is not amenable to Freethought kind of test. Sceptics, therefore, have no option but to take it or leave it on their own responsibility. The method by which such proof is established may be considered by normal logicians as exhibiting a rum sort of logic, but it is a thoroughly typical example of the best theologic. (And if “theologic” is not in the dictionary so much the more for the dictionary.)
There are ways in which praying does indeed look very like a game of chance. You plump your request and hope for the best. Praying attracts some minds as gambling attracts others. The extraordinary thing is that, with rare exceptions, no amount of disappointment ever seems to bring disillusionment. Both praying and gambling appear to lead to the sort of unbreakable habit which it is difficult to regard as anything but a vicious appetite. It grows with what it feeds upon. It is a state of mind sadly unable to put up any rational resistance. The gambler will stake his money on a horse. The suppliant stakes his faith on the unseen. If a well-balanced experience condemns gambling as a mug’s game, it can hardly be blamed if it repudiates praying as a dupe’s pastime. Just as it requires no Socrates to demonstrate that no horse ever runs as fast as the money that is put on it, so it needs no Solomon to show that no power humanly conceivable could ever keep pace with the impossibly conflicting demands laid upon it as prayers. While Catholic Peter is imploring God through Our Lady that so-and-so may speedily come to pass, Protestant Paul is beseeching God through Our Lord that the very same so-and-so may be for ever frustrated. Two adversaries simultaneously apply for a crushing victory over each other. J. C. Squire was thus moved to express an agnostic’s ironic sympathy with the divine dilemma: To God the embattled nation’s sing and shout, God Save England and God Save the King, God this, God that and God the other thing. “Good God”, said God, “I’ve got my work cut out.”
We have constantly been informed by all sorts of religious instructors that there is no limit to the reach and power of prayer. We are not informed how this is known or what exactly it means. Romish prayers, for instance, are far from being the monopoly of God Almighty. They may be addressed to that rather mixed-up lady elegantly known as the BV or to any of the large assortment of saints manufactured, hall-marked and guaranteed by the canon. The saints come cheapest if the votive candle usually offered to them is anything to go by. As we may expect, that vested interest of a wily and ambitious priesthood, the Roman Catholic Church, practices the worst extravagances. Romanists do not stop at the living. With equal assurance they offer prayers for the dead, although no more than anybody else can they possibly know anything of the dead beyond that they are dead. Nevertheless, at an early date, some bright intelligence thought up the useful idea of a posthumous region called Purgatory, through which the souls of the departed must pass on an interim purgation. This might be entirely visionary, but there was nothing visionary about the very solid cash return that soon began to accrue from the sale of special prayers to help afflicted souls get through their purging with a maximum of dispatch and a minimum of discomfort. The living were given every encouragement to buy masses for their dead. For no matter how bad you are the tough old Romish conscience never hesitates to pray for you as long as it can prey on you. – If Protestants are less accommodating, they are on the whole less mercenary. Even that C of E minority who are neither Catholic nor Protestant and whom the Guardian delightfully, though misprintedly, recently referred to as Angelicans, do not so openly retail their prayers on a commercial basis. Non-conformists pride themselves on putting praying before saying. Their prayers are mostly extemporary. Apart from the Lord’s Prayer they rarely recite set pieces. They pray with all their hearts and hardly with all their minds. Among them it is a distinction to be what is called “gifted in prayer”, which apparently means the ability to provide the richest feast of unreason with the warmest flow of soulfulness. But since prayers have the advantage of being immune from any measurable indication of their success or failure, nobody can prove that the fervour put into them is repaid by the favour got out of them. Informal prayers may avoid liturgical aridity, but they, too, slip very easily into the familiar stereotyped jargon that can be every bit as mechanical without being every bit as professional. Such criticism would no doubt be enough to provoke one of those tedious reiterations of the wondrous psychological value of prayer. But such value is too remote from any real assessment to enter into considerations of the more literal and practical aspects of prayer. It is a value which probably manifest itself more strongly in that invariably impassioned, often grotesque and, to out-siders, always repellent form of prayer known as praise. For those whose souls do not magnify the Lord and whose spirits are unable to rejoice in God their saviour, it is difficult to understand, let alone sympathise with the fawning, the flattering, the cravenly ingratiating fulsomeness Godfearing is the word for it that goes under the guise of glorifying God. No God worth the capital G he is given could ever desire or appreciate such servile tribute. No man without hidebound prepossessions could pay it. – This world, on inescapable evidence, is a cruelly real if pointless purgatory for the bulk of mankind. If, as Christianity testifies, it is to be taken as the crowning work of the Christian creator, then no wonder that sensitive poet A. E. Housman dubbed the Christian creator brute and blackguard. No wonder such a creator’s grovelling eulogists suggest the dog on its hind legs chin wagging and tail wagging can be callously akin. Even if we knew what we cannot know, that the intended recipient of so much prayerful adulation had indeed an objective personal existence, it would still be impossible for any man in possession of a free intelligence and a clear eye to look upon the world as it is and not think or speak of its author as a this, that and the other old. However, this is a highly respectable journal. For the time being, it may perhaps at this point be more discreet to let the matter drop. (
32)


 
THE SCARLET WOMAN
 
“That was a remarkable sermon on married life his Eminence preached to us this morning.” said the young and impressionable unmarried lady to her elderly and less impressionable much-married companion. “Well, yes, my dear,” came the reply, “it certainly was. Remarkable is the word for it. I only wish I knew a little about the matter as he does.” Whether or not the old lady was aware of it, she had plumped her finger with the nicest precision on one of the most familiar and irritating impudences of the Roman Catholic Church. The handing out of official advice by those without experience to those with ample experience but in no way official. But before considering its shortcomings, we must consider what is meant when we speak of the Roman Catholic Church. In the ordinary everyday sense we mean that vast, seething organisation of human beings of all sorts and sizes, who, having been formally baptised into the Catholic faith, subscribe, or pretend to subscribe, to its tenets and practices. In short, all those who are nominally Roman Catholics. It is quite a different matter when we speak of the Church in a more specific sense, as when we say, not not without justice that the Church teaches this, preaches that old practices the other. We are then using a misleading abstraction. We are using a linguistic device which does more to disguise than to describe the reality. An abstraction cannot possess explicit attributes or exhibit practical performances. Yet the Romish Church possesses the most explicit attributes and as an exhibitory performer it has no religious equal. It is obvious therefore that in thus referring to the Church we are not thinking of that welter of the ostensibly faithful who loosely constitute the great lay body. We are not even thinking of the huge general run of the menial priesthood. Left to themselves these could not even cohere let alone do any preaching or teaching. All the same we are definitely referring to human beings. We are in fact referring to that comparatively small company of the elect who, however remotely they may sit aloft and aloof, nevertheless rule the roost. They are the animating core on which the life and activities of the Church in its entirety depend. They are the Catholic chosen people, in Milton’s phrase, “by merit raised to that bad eminence.” For notwithstanding the saintly qualities attributed to them by Catholic piousness, they are every bit as vain, ambitious and self-seeking as the place-hunters and time-servers in any other sphere. Common mortals with an uncommon astuteness. If they were not they wouldn’t be where they are. They are literally the executive committee. If they ceased to function as they do, Roman Catholicism would quickly disappear.
But they are past masters in the subtle art of effacing themselves, of achieving intensely personal aims with a deceivingly impersonal effect. In this way they can keep so diplomatically out of sight and so dangerously out of mind, which for them is a trick well worth two. It is most important to realise this and to be constantly alert to it, for if in any way these secretly high and mighty are forgotten or overlooked or treated as negligible, we shall never even begin to understand what is meant by the Church. There could be no such thing as the Church, apart from them. Whenever we see or hear of the meddlesome Romish Church overstepping the mark as it so grossly and persistently does, we must firmly remember that it is they who are the actual aggressors. They are the sinister power behind the papal throne.
It is astonishing that there are still such hordes of otherwise intelligent Catholics, as well as many non-Catholics, who seem unable to grasp this. They obstinately cling to the vague traditional superstition that there is in existence something called the Church which has a completely independent entity. They speak of it as though it were a sort of intermediate, supramundane agency, poised as a means of communication between heaven and the hierarchy. Hence the various complimentary or un-complimentary nicknames the Catholic Church has been given. In opposite camps, Mother Church and the Scarlet Woman are perhaps the best known and the most symbolic Romish Church cunningly knows how to turn such symbolism to its own advantage.
Mother Church makes a capital handle for those so fond of bothering that they like to know where they are, which means nothing more than where the Church tells them they are. And they are outraged if they are accused of preferring to sit down idly with a comforting delusion rather than stand up valiantly to a discomforting truth – the unspeakable truth signified by the Scarlet Woman. Both titles have their lighter sides. We may mercifully make merry at the motherliness exuded by that chaste selection of elderly single gentlemen in stately conclave met. Yet they have so long been adept in the feminine art of tricking themselves out to trick others in, they have so long indulged their incurable addiction to parading in elaborate fancy dress like a lot of ecclesiastical mannequins, that no wonder somebody has irreverently but delightedly called them a parcel of scarlet old women. Mother Church may be a lot of arrant nonsense and Catholics of course would say that the Scarlet Woman certainly is. But they superciliously refuse any challenge on the matter. Mother Church is the sort of nonsense the priests wholeheartedly foster. They exhort their flocks that Mother Church, thus truly understood, means the mystical voice of divine revelation and that just as the Church is the mouthpiece of God so are the priests the mouthpiece of the Church. For Catholics this seems to be an ineradicably ingrained idea. It enables the lowly priests to pontificate as badly as the high priests, that the Church always knows best, that the Church cannot err, that because to err is human, to forgive, and to punish, is ecclesiastical, the priests being the accredited representatives. Yet to those who have ears to hear it is plain enough that the voice of the Church in this sense is not in the least mystical. It is purely mythical. The real voice is unmistakably human. It may be collective, it may not always be as tunefully in unison as its oracles would wish, but it proclaims in anything but mystical terms its rigid goodwill and pleasure, just as it exercises whenever it can its ruthless badwill and displeasure on those who fell foul of Catholic intention. But Catholics, especially local priests, are not allowed to have ears to hear; it would quickly put an end to them as Catholics.
The education of Catholic priests is almost exclusively sacerdotal. They are trained to become as it were expert clerical mechanics. They have to live and move by rule and rote. They would certainly say that reason is the gift of God, but they evidently agree that it is better to give than to receive, so they abuse the gift by making little use of it. But perhaps that is inevitable since their only freedom is the freedom to do as they are told. It never seems to enter their ordained heads that their superiors are just as human and fallible as themselves, that the Pope and his myrmidons can know no more about the mystery of things than anybody else. They apparently have no inkling that their stereotyped clerical duties are futile to meet the needs of this grim and present world, whatever they may be for the imaginary next. They are mostly amateur actors of middling capacity. They can perform their little bit of magic with the wafer and wine. In their dog-Latin way, they can say a mass, sing a eucharist, recite a string of prayers and even on occasion, as the two ladies attested, deliver a remarkable if not exactly practical sermon. They sniff if they are called unworldly. If they are called worldly, they sniff twice. They do not so much want to have it both ways as to have it neither way. And in this they more or less succeed. They become that depressing, nebulous human commodity commonly described as neither one thin nor the other. Yet these are the activated puppets through which the Catholic Church maintains it meretricious ascendancy. Here we have an unequalled collection of dedicated male celibates, supported by a monstrous regiment of subservient, dedicated spinsters, brides of Christ. Jesus must surely be the very ace of all polygamists! The sorry joke is that though they are all devoid of marital experience (or if they are not they ought to be), they are unique and united with sublime effrontery to tutor the married and marriageable as to how, why, when and where love shall make the world go round. Truly, nothing so perfect as a presbytery wife and a virgin’s child. Many Catholics must sigh in secret sympathy with the much-married old lady, for they are not all so easily imposed upon. The priests glibly explain that it is all in the interests of human welfare, as if they are quite unaware that those who are not wilfully blind see perfectly well that it is all in the interests of the Church. Priests often think their parishioners are ignorant simpletons. Parishioners often know that their priests are. But anything approaching a full-size picture of the Romish Church cannot be got into so small a frame. It can only be emphasised at this point that the high-handed method by which the Church handles its conjugal problems, exemplifies the method by which it handles all problems. The Catholic Church knows as well as any Atheist, that as long as the existence of God remains unproved, everything based upon God remains uncertain. It therefore relegates God to a cryptic background and bases everything upon the certainty of the Church. To all thinkers, especially to Freethinkers, the Romish Church is doubly the world’s menace, a political institution craftily masquerading under the cloak of religion. It is the baleful foe of all freedom. Hereditary Catholics are in chains from the start. Converts are they who have exercised their freedom once to deny it for evermore. No wonder other religious sects identify the Catholic Church with the Scarlet Woman. She who still “sitteth upon many waters” as
St. John the Divine so ghoulishly portrays her, in the seventeenth chapter of his blood-and-thunder nightmare. The Romish Church being infallible is always right. Dissentients are always wrong. Nevertheless this outrageously silly claim does not conceal the perpetual Catholic defections. And in these days when the old vindictive Catholic vengeance is more effectually held at bay, it can fairly be seen and safely be said, that whatever is good in Romanism is not Catholic and that whatever is Catholic is not good. (33)


 
 
ON COMING BACK TO GOD
 
In what is nominally the Christian world and maybe in other religious spheres as well, two of the most persistent and outstanding of present-day topics are, what is said to be a marked rise in human depravity and what is seen to be an alarming decline in religion. According to prevailing religious opinion, not only are the two inseparably linked but as we might expect the supposed increase in human wickedness is confidently attributed to the undeniable falling away from religion. However, the evidence for such a conclusion is to say the least extremely shaky. In the first place it depends on what is meant by wickedness, not always as easy to determine as it looks. As for what is meant by religion, in this sense it is nothing more than churchgoing with all its usual and sometimes unusual concomitants.
 
Quandary
 
It is true we are solemnly adjured to come back to God, but when we inquire what is meant by coming back to God and how such a feat is to be accomplished, this also turns out to be merely a more rhetorical way of saying come back to Church – the one true church of course, despite their deep-seated and acrimonious differences, make claim to that nice distinction, to the exclusion of all other churches, priority is not easy to decide. We have only their very bare word for it. We are left in a more embarrassing quandary after the inquiry than before. Besides, although the invitation is always couched as an entreaty, it is transparently a demand. It is a veiled order for submission to an authority which has to be taken at its own valuation and subscription to a testimony which cannot possibly be verified. But the increasing number of people who now cultivate the habit of freely exercising their own intelligence, are unlikely to respond to demands of that sort, no matter how pontifical they may be.
Speculative belief, based more often than not on motives that would wilt before any rational scrutiny, is always paraded and defended with a  fervour demonstrable knowledge does not require. This injunction to come back to God, whether it emanates from the educated Archbishop of Canterbury in his Cathedral pulpit, or from the uneducated Salvationist on his pitch in the market square, is likely to be enunciated all the more passionately because it applies to a hypothesis rather than a reality. But no amount of fervour can transform hypothesis into reality. It cannot even provide unassailable assurance that it is dealing with something that could possibly be more than hypothesis. What it can do is to induce yet another delusion in a world already overstocked with delusions. It is difficult not to suspect that the most revered and highly sophisticated prelate is privately and therefore hypocritically aware that he is utilising a hypothesis. The unsophisticated Salvation Army officer could be completely, because ignorantly, sincere. For the nuisance if that sincerity, however universally blessed is one of the most desirable attributes, rarely escapes the curse of being under some form of undesirable limitation.
But that apart, we are impelled to the melancholy conclusion that, as so many clerics show signs of being despondently aware, this God to whom we are bidden to return is, not altogether unjustifiably, coming to be looked upon as nothing better than a clerical stooge. A popular passion for God can so readily be fanned into flame that it usually ends by going up in smoke, leaving nothing behind that it is possible to lay hold on. In spite of the desperate efforts of modern theologians to evolve interpretations of God more in keeping with sense and science, to pull as it were the Woolwich over our eyes, without disrupting orthodox supernaturalism, this exhortation to come back to God sounds pitifully like another of those drum-beat slogans which boom all the louder for being hollow. Sentiment is always more compliant than sense. And no doubt the exhorters know that an emotional appeal is likely to beget a wider response than any appeal that is calmly rational. If they see they never say that it is mere temporary. On the quiet they probably plume themselves upon possessing in this way an asset which reason cannot share. Yet they could well take warning from experience. Be not deceived, reason is not mocked. Emotion never wears like reason. When presently it peters out, there is indeed the metaphorical devil to pay.
 
Debatable Assumptions
 
It is curious how so many modern religionists sighingly take for granted that a present-day increase of wickedness is as well established as a present-day decline of religion. But it is only one of the sights of the times. There have been similar doleful assumptions in every age. And even for some of the religions as well as the non-religions, such assumptions have always been highly debatable. They could never be decisively tested. One generation’s virtue is another generation’s vice. The ethics of Deuteronomy may be wildly inappropriate to the space age. Irreligion is arbitrary in a way religion cannot be. In the last resort it is all a matter of opinion just as it will always be a matter of opinion whether the supposed increase in wickedness is the cause or the result of the decay of religion. It may be observed in passing that opinion either way makes a poor testimonial for the regenerative power of religion. As for the decay of religion, that is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact. This is at least sufficiently recognised to provoke anxious spokesmen, both lay and professional to constant outbursts of dismay and bitter diatribes against any kind of opposition. Religion is admittedly still full of fight, fighting for its life in a fight to the death.
 
Wickedness
 
It should be plain enough that wickedness (or for that matter goodness) cannot be defined or condemned for the non-religious according to the welter of contradictions euphemistically described as religious principles. When religious protagonists hold forth about the modern increase in human wickedness, they are not thinking half as much about the evils which they suppose men do through rejecting Christianity as they are thinking of the rejection in itself. It is that which is the prime wickedness. It is that which so effectually puts the churches – and the protagonists – out of gear. That is the basic evil which, once rectified would, they claim, automatically rectify all contingent evils. Maybe, on their definition of evil, or if it could be maintained that on the whole those who belong to the Church lead better lives than those who don’t. But can it be so maintained? To many, the truth often seems very much the other way about. In so far as the Church actually is in decline, it is, as Dean Inge saw, the Christians themselves who have done far more to bring it down than any outsiders. As with an over-ripe pear the rot hiddenly originates in its own interior.
Serious thinkers, especially Freethinker, governed by their backbone rather than their wishbone and un-hampered by religious possessions, are bound to take an aggressively critical view of churchianity. For them, churchianity is by no means inevitably to be equated even with Christianity let alone natural human goodness. They are neither perturbed nor surprised by the widespread indifference to empty pews and the growing distaste for the parson, who may be excellent as a man but anathema in what he represents professionally. They look with an irrepressible derision upon the ritualistic antics of eminent ecclesiastics or the capers cut by the big pots of the small denominations. For too many of these shining lights cast sinister shadows. It is not unknown, it is not even uncommon, for their own followers to express the caustic suspicion that they would no more dare to preach all they practice than they would care to practice all they preach. Sensible people, who are satisfied that one world at a time is as much as they can cope with, look askance, as well they may, at the worldliness so brazenly displayed by some of these dog-collared exemplars of the unworldly. As never before, people see through that sort of humbug, without any nonsense about a glass darkly. And the humbugs know it. That is why they wrangle so pertinaceously for early indoctrination in the schools. They know that at least a few young birds may almost certainly be caught with chaff.
Now whatever difference of opinion there may be about the nature and functions of human wickedness, it will hardly be denied, either by the religious or the non-religious that world-wide wickedness is indeed abundantly in evidence. If such rampant and ubiquitous inhumanities as greed, cruelty, rascality, tyranny and a hundred others are not wickedness to every honest mind, then there is no such thing as wickedness. And evil deeds, like troubles, are anything but few and far between. If it is a fact as many religionists contend that mankind is still no better, that mankind is even worse than it was two thousand years ago, what sort of compliment is that to the influence of Christianity, to the guidance of the churches, to the mystic power to whom we are besought to renew our allegiance? When the exponents of religion are plumped with this they hedge and dodge and trot out every conceivable casuistry to explain it away. They never succeed. But a still more striking feature is that while the apologists are so busy explaining away, while they are so vehemently expounding the cause or reviling the consequence of man’s stubborn recalcitrance, they are either blindly obtuse or craftily impervious to a third and, one may risk saying, more cogent point of view. It is that a great deal of modern wickedness, deplored by Secularists as strongly as religionists, is not the outcome of irreligion at all, it is literally and directly the outcome of religion.
But that is too complex a proposition to be dealt with here and now in detail. However this at least can be said. No other human activity has ever practiced more deceit than religion and no other kind of deceit has, in modern times, ever been so rapidly, so relentlessly and so widely exposed. No doubt two world wars did much to aid the process and to leave behind a trail of disillusionment probably unparalleled in history. Where religious faith among the older generation has not altogether evaporated, it has largely become diluted to such inefficiency that it is useless for handing down to a younger and more vital generation. All the same, the loudly lamented increase in general human depravity is questionable. It may well be that with youthfulness particularly, it is largely a matter of newer, unfamiliar and more baffling forms. But this much is surely certain. It is no use calling the unregenerate to come back to God until they can come to back God. And it is no more feasible to back God whose very existence remains in question than it would be to back an imaginary horse. Prove that God is and back we will all come. But if coming back to God merely means a resumption of the religious ruck that is being slowly maybe, but resolutely and sanely discarded, then the real hope and the right intent is not to come back to God but to back away from him as far and as fast as we possibly can. (
34)

 

 

NOTES:

 

  1. Reginald Underwood in The Freethinker, volume 84. 1964, p. 144, in reference to Colin McCall’s article on ‘Shakespeare and Religion’ in the 10th April edition.
  2. Daniel Underwood and Frances Abbot were married in Finedon, Northamptonshire on Friday 2nd August 1811 and they had the following children born in Finedon: Jesse Underwood (1812-1841), Samuel Underwood (1814-1874), Louisa Underwood (1818-1874), Keturah Underwood (born 1820), Absalom Underwood (1823-1824), Ambrose Underwood (1825-1864), George Underwood (1828-1864), Ruth Underwood (1832-1856) and Rebecca Underwood (1836-1897).
  3. Elizabeth is the daughter of Charles Lever (1802-1883) and Hannah Gillet (born 1802) who were married on Monday 28th February 1825. After Elizabeth’s marriage to George Underwood she worked as a midwife.
  4. Mary Ann Jacquest who was born in Northampton in 1867 was the daughter of Finedon-born shoemaker and later ‘fruiterer’ like his father (also named Richard), Richard Jacquest (1830-1902) and Ann Wright (1833-1911) who were married in Finedon in 1857. Richard was one of several children born to Richard Jacquest and Mary Sharp of Finedon who were married in Finedon on Wednesday 20th August 1823 (Mary Sharp was born in Finedon on 23rd July 1799 and was the daughter of Benjamin Sharp who was probably born in King’s Cliffe Northamptonshire in 1757 and was buried in Finedon on Thursday 28th July 1825 and Catherine Harlock; Benjamin and Catherine were married at Cranford St John, Northamptonshire on 10th June 1792 and they had the following children: Sophia Sharp, Christened 12th December 1792, John Sharp (1793-1882), William Sharp born 1795, Ann Sharp born 1796 and married William Vincent in Finedon on 21st February 1814; Samuel Harlock Sharp born Finedon 1798 who was a Baptist Minister, after Mary in 1799 came Catherine Sharp born and died in 1801, Benjamin Sharp (1802-1851), Edmund Sharp born 1805, Catherine Sharp born 1807, Allen Sharp born 1809, Richard Sharp born 1810 and Maria Sharp christened in Finedon on 27th October 1815 and buried there three days later on 30th October). The other children of Richard Jacquest and Mary Sharp were: William Jacquest born 1823, Catherine Sharp Jacquest (1825-1891), a dressmaker, Sarah Jacquest (1827-1909) a servant, Mary Jacquest born 2nd January 1827 (Christened 4th February 1827) and dying in 1841 [buried Finedon 9th September]; after Richard born 1830 in Finedon (and dying on 17th March 1902), the other children are all born in Burton Latimer in Northamptonshire: John Jacquest, a butcher born 1837, Benjamin Jacquest (1841-1919), Allen Jacquest (1844-1857), Ann Jacquest, a dressmaker born 1846 and Edmund Jacquest (1869-1954). Richard and Ann had the following children: Thomas William Allen Jacquest (1857-1942) who became a branch manager of a coal merchant’s and married Cardiff born Isabella Davies at St Pancras in 1886; John Jacquest born 1859, John was a boot and clog maker who married Emily Watson in 1859 (Emily died in 1899 aged 48 and John married Finedon born Sarah Tite Munns in 1903), Samuel Jacquest (1861-1936, carpenter who married Alice Ann Owen in 1891), Mary Ann Jacquest born 1867 and Edmund Jacquest (1869-1954 who worked as a clerk in a coal merchant’s and married Frances Rebecca Draper in 1886). Mary Ann’s mother, Ann Underwood (nee Wright) was born in Wellingborough on 15th March 1833 and she died in Bolton, Lancashire aged 78 in 1911 where she was living with her son Samuel (1861-1936) and his wife Alice Ann Owen (1858-1926).
  5. Richard Jacquest Underwood was summoned for riding a motorcycle ‘without an effective silencer’ in Kettering on 29th July 1926 and pleaded guilty and received a £2 fine [Northampton Mercury. Friday 13th August 1926. p. 3]
  6. ‘Hidden Lights’ quotation from Pleasures and Pastimes in Victorian Britain. Pamela Horn. Thrupp, Stroud [Gloucestershire], Sutton Publishing Ltd. 1999. p. 244.
  7. Hull Daily Mail. Monday 21st May 1934. p. 7.
  8. Daily News (London). Thursday 5th June 1924. p. 6.
  9. Daily Herald (London). Saturday 14th September 1935. p. 8.
  10. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Wednesday 19th July 1939. p. 5.
  11. All information concerning Cyril Wilson is from the Finedon Newsletter, June 2016 (Finedon Local History Society), pp. 9-11, by Mick Britton. Additional information is from English Poetry of the Second World War: a Biobibliography. Catherine W. Reilly. Boston. Mass. G. K. Hall & Co. 1986. p. 356; and the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Thursday 12th January 1939. p. 3 and the Northampton Chronicle and Echo. Friday 20th November 1987. p. 2.
  12. Printed as poems LXX and LXXI respectively. Cyril Wilson also had poems published in: ‘Oasis: The Middle East Anthology of Poems from the Forces’. Cairo. Salamander Productions. 1943., and ‘Return to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections from the Middle East, 1940-1946’. London. Shepheard-Walwyn. 1980.
  13. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Friday 5th May 1939. p. 7.
  14. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Wednesday 3rd May 1939. p. 5.
  15. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Wednesday 10th May 1939. p. 4. ‘Wellinburian’ is confusing the remarks which were made by another correspondent’s letter to the editor which begins: ‘Sir,- If I knew whether “Wellingburian” was of military age and what his bank balance was, I should be able to answer his letter more effectively’ which appeared in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph for Friday 5th May 1939. p. 7.
  16. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Friday 12th May 1939. p. 7.
  17. Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail. Friday 27th December 1940. p. 5.
  18. Northampton Herald. Friday 28th February 1930. p. 3, and Friday 14th March 1930. p. 3.
  19. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Friday 17th February 1939. p. 8.
  20. Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Wednesday 17th May 1939. p. 7. Underwood is also mentioned in another article which reviewed the book ‘Squires’ Homes and Other Buildings in Northamptonshire’ by the Northamptonshire architect (born Kettering) and historian John Alfred Gotch (1852-1942); the book was published in 1939 (London. B T Batsford) as a companion to Gotch’s earlier ‘The Old Halls and Manor-Houses of Northamptonshire’ (1936). The article in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph of Tuesday 8th August 1939, page 3, says that the reviewer was ‘a little surprised to see fragments of old Finedon in Mr. Gotch’s book. It is said to have the oldest Inn in England and the magnificent church was built, according to the historian of Finedon, Mr. Reginald Underwood, at the time when the Battle of Crecy was being won by the Black Prince at the age of sixteen.’
  21. British Musician and Musical News. volume 13, number 131. November 1936. p. 242, and volume 14, number 139. 1937. p. 153.
  22. ‘An Autobiography “Hidden Lights”’. British Musician and Musical News. Volume 15, issue 145. January 1938. p. 18, continued on p. 24. The text reads ‘in 1911, when 12 years old’ – Reginald was actually 16-17 years old in 1911. ‘Pachmann’ is the Russian pianist, Vladimir de Pachmann (1848-1933). Sir George Clement Martin (1844-1916) of New College, Oxford; organist at St Paul’s from 1888-1916 and Master of Choristers. Tobias Matthay (1858-1945), English pianist, composer and teacher.
  23. Letters to the Editor. Literary Guide. Volume 70. 1955. pp. 31-32. Underwood also had an article published in the Literary Guide, volume 71, May 1956, p. 25 titled ‘The Bewitchment of Language’.
  24. The Impotence of Omnipotence [Views and Opinions, Friday 31st July 1964]. The Freethinker. Volume 84. 1964. pp. 241-242.
  25. The Freethinker. Volume 84. 1964. p. 380. Colin McCall was joint editor of The Freethinker from 1957 and sole editor from 1959-1965. The Views and Opinions McCall is referring to is ‘On Coming Back to God’, Friday 27th November 1964, pp. 377-378. Also in the same volume are several articles by Underwood: ‘Saying Your Prayers’, Friday 1st May 1964, p. 139 (continued on p. 140); ‘The Scarlet Woman’, Friday 21st August 1964, p. 267 (continued on p. 271); ‘The Point of No Reward’, Friday 19th June 1964, p. 195 (continued on p. 196) and ‘Freethinker, Humanist and Christian’ (Views and Opinions), Friday 9th October 1964, p. 321.
  26. The Lure of the Ballet. British Musician and Musical News. Volume 13, number 132. December 1936. pp. 268-270.
  27. Wobble Wobble. British Musician and Musical News. Volume 15, number 145. January 1938. pp. 5-7.
  28. The Point of No Reward. The Freethinker. Volume 84. Friday 19th June 1964. pp. 195-196.
  29. A Criticism of the Critic. British Musician and Musical News. Volume 14, number 133. January 1937. pp. 15-17.
  30. The Nature of Belief. The Humanist. (published by The Rationalist Association). Volume 78, number 3, March 1963. pp. 78-79.
  31. The Eisteddfod. British Musician and Musical News. Volume 14, number 136. April 1937. pp. 74-76.
  32. Saying Your Prayers. The Freethinker. Volume 84. Friday 1st May 1964. pp. 139-140.
  33. The Scarlet Woman. The Freethinker. Volume 84. Friday 21st August 1964. pp. 267 and 271.
  34. On Coming Back to God. The Freethinker. Volume 84. Friday 27th November 1964. pp. 377-378.

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