Expository Times, July 2007
No one demonstrated more clearly the truth of W H Auden’s saying that
Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces n private places
than Lord Reith of the BBC.
The biography of Reith, written by his daughter Marista Leishman, and published last year, makes it clear not only that he was so obsessed with his work – he would probably have called it his vocation – that he badly neglected his family, but that Reith himself was severely damaged by his own father’s treatment of him, which ranged from curt dismissal to patronising indifference.
John Reith’s father was a powerful minister in the United Free Church of Scotland who became moderator of its General Assembly. Dr George Reith’s congregation in the west end of Glasgow raised a lot of money for the building in 1902 of the church where my father much later became minister. It was because of this connection that Reith was invited to read the lessons at a service to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Stevenson Memorial Church. The sermon was to be preached by the Kirk’s Moderator that year, Dr Archie Craig, and both were to come to lunch at the manse afterwards.
The day of the service dawned, but long before it did my mother was up, cleaning floors, polishing the dining room table, preparing the lunch. It would be a mistake to say that she was “up to high doh” about this lunch. Her anxiety had climbed several octaves beyond high doh! My father left for the church early, and I was lounging around as university students did on Sunday mornings, when the doorbell rang. Through the frosted glass of the door I could see the figure of a hugely tall man, and when I opened the door, Lord Reith of Stonehaven stood there, and explained that he had just got off the sleeper from London, had not had breakfast and he gave me to understand – I think that is the best way of putting it – that he expected fed at the manse.
I knew that if I brought him in my mother would not only never forgive me but would probably never recover, but Reith did not seem to be the kind of man to be denied a breakfast with impunity. So I explained that my father was already at the church and had, indeed, anticipated that his distinguished guest would require breakfast and had, I was sure, arranged that the church officer would provide it. And with that Lord Reith made his way the few hundred yards up the road to the church, while I telephoned the vestry to tell my father that he had better work out quickly what to do!
When Reith arrived at the vestry he saw a little plaque on the desk saying that the desk had belonged to Dr George Reith and had been rescued from his College Church when it burned down in 1903. Apparently, his son glared at it, then told my father that it was out of alignment with the edge of the desk and he had to have it repositioned the next day. It is still out of alignment.
At the lunch afterwards, Reith asked the Moderator if he remembered the first time they had met. Archie Craig said that it must have been around 1930. “Yes” Reith growled, “it was in St Andrews and at the time I was considering whether I should put you in charge of religious broadcasting at the BBC, but I thought you weren’t up to it.” Archie Craig, the most self-deprecating of moderators, simply smiled, and then enquired of Reith from which version of the Bible Reith had earlier read the lessons. “I looked them all up and didn’t like any of them, so made my own version”.
I cannot now remember anything about the readings, but I can recall quite clearly the sermon Archie Craig preached. It was on the text “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all”, and contained a story which Dr Craig said he heard at a sermon class held by Professor High Macintosh, about the celebrated nineteenth century preacher, Murray McCheyne. One Monday McCheyne asked another minister what his text had been the day before. The minister replied grimly that he had preached from the seventeenth verse of the ninth psalm, “The wicked shall be turned into hell”. And McCheyne asked quietly “And were you able to preach affectionately from that text?”