The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939

Report of an address at Southwark Cathedral

The Times(3 Feb 1938) 8

Under the heading “Where Chaucer Worshipped / Needs of Southwark Cathedral / An Appeal for £25,000,” the Timesreported on an event at Mansion House on 2 Feb, at which TSE was one of the principal speakers, with the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress presiding. Speaking in support of the preservation appeal, the Archbishop of Canterbury described the continuous history of “this great treasure-house of beauty” over the past 800 years, including its associations with Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, the printing of the first complete English Bible, and “that accomplished scholar Lancelot Andrewes, who represented the Church of England at its best when it had emerged from the throes of the Reformation.”

Other speakers included Lord Fermoy, president of the Harvard Club of London, who expressed “the great debt that graduates of Harvard University owed to John Harvard, their founder, who was baptized in the Cathedral in 1607.” The Bishop of Southwark “pleaded that the Cathedral at the very gateway of the City . . . was the mother church of a populous, hard-pressed, and very poor diocese . . . and now they found that the Cathedral was in imminent need of repair.”

Though no direct quotations from the speech can be securely identified from this report, the journalist’s outline of TSE’s ideas are of historical value in context of his continuous support and defense of English churches and his ongoing vision of enhancing communal life within them.

Mr. T. S. Eliot, representing the literary associations of the Cathedral, said that Southwark Cathedral had something that even the Wren churches in the City could not give. It had a more venerable antiquity, a greater authority, and more numerous august associations. It was not mere piety that drove City workers into City churches and, sometimes, into Southwark Cathedral, at luncheon hours, but the physical peace gained in that way did something to pave the way to another peace, and it was to those people who had learned to know the City churches that those buildings meant most. ¹ He refused to think that Southwark Cathedral was a monument only; it was still a living church and, as such, should not have to beg its annual pittance to keep body and roof together.