Expository Times, Oct 2004
David Stenhouse is a journalist and academic, who in his early broadcasting career with BBC Radio Scotland worked with the Religious Broadcasting Department. His recently published book, On the Make borrows its title from a line in J. M. Barrie's play, What Every Woman Knows: “My lady, there are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make”.
I found a couple of points which Stenhouse makes very intriguing, though they are hardly central to the theme of this fascinating study of the influence of Scots in London not just at the present time (Stenhouse quotes a cynical commentator who, reflecting on the number of Scots in positions of political power, claimed that a Welshman had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury because there was no suitable Scot available!) but historically too.
The first is the number of Scots who have occupied archbishoprics within the Church of England such as Cosmo Gordon Lang (whose brother was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk) at York , where he succeeded a Scot William Dalrymple MacLagan, and Canterbury ; where he succeeded another Scot, Randall Davidson. The first Scot to be Archbishop of Canterbury was A.C. Tait, educated at Edinburgh High School and the University of Glasgow . Stenhouse could have mentioned the latest, Robert Runcie, who was born in Kilmarnock where his father James had a draper's shop.
In the course of reflecting on Scots at Bishopthorpe and Lambeth, Stenhouse asks why there have been no Moderators of the Kirk's General Assembly who were English. The answer is probably that while there was a relatively strong indigenous Episcopal Church in Scotland whose upwardly mobile clergy found full communion with the Church of England a considerable advantage, there was no great reverse Presbyterian traffic, though in recent years two Kirk Moderators, John Cairns and John Miller, though indisputably Scottish, both spent most of their early years and gained their education in England.
The other intriguing issue which Stenhouse raises is the number of sons of the manse who have entered politics, across the spectrum, and gone on to achieve considerable success, climbing the greasy pole. I suspect that the number of ministers' sons who have successful careers in politics is disproportionately higher than the sons (or daughters) of those in other professions. One minister's son who became leader of his party and subsequently the first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, Sir David Steel, attributes the attraction of politics for children of the manse to the principle of public service and open availability which is part of the culture of a Scottish manse.
Sir David Steel, who has just completed two spells as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, considered for a brief time in his late teens following his father into the ministry but, he has written, “I could not see myself settling down to church life. My own Christianity is encapsulated in my father's address as Moderator in 1974 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: ‘The Church and Christians are given too much to easy moralizing and too little to the task of converting individuals and reforming society……Until the Church takes the ethic of the New Testament Communism of the early Christians, according to which possessions and goods are given to all men as every man has need, the Church itself will not be taken seriously by the world.'”
In a radio programme I made with him, Sir David Steel said that the other thing which prepared children of the manse for public life was that they were brought up to recognise in their father a public role and a public responsibility which they find it natural to inherit.
In On the Make , David Stenhouse sees that public role reflected in the treatment of ministers in Scottish literature. “If they aren't being cloying and couthy, ministers are controlling and cruel: either way, they are seen as central to Scottish life and identity in a way which the Church of England, for all its establishment, is not. Famously, the Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn declared that Scotland would only be free when ‘the last minister had been strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post. ‘ No one could suggest that strangling a vicar would transform the state of England .”
* David Stenhouse, On the Make, Mainstream Publishing, £12.99 240pp