The Henson Journals
Fri 29 November 1929
Volume 48, Pages 477 to 478
[477]
Friday, November 29th, 1929.
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I finished reading through Robert Graves's Autobiography. It is both disgusting & revealing, the first because it fastens with monotonous persistence on every aspect & episode of the War which was nauseous, blasphemous& obscene, the last because the author is plainly the representative & spokesperson of a considerable section of his contemporaries. He was 34 on July 24th, 1929. Thus he was born in 1895, and when the war broke out in 1914, he was just 19. But his narrative shows that before the War he had fully disclosed his character. He was at Charterhouse, & describes the famous school as a sink of iniquity. His own behaviour was clearly such as to lay him open to the gravest suspicions, & his very particular friend 'Dick', a younger boy, whom he 'loved' so ardently as to provoke the remonstrances of the masters & the gibing comments of the boys, subsequently got into trouble with the police for indecent advances to a Canadian soldier. Clearly, he saw in the War just what he wanted to see, & what alone he was morally competent to see.
[478]
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Pattinson and I motored to Gateshead, where I addressed the Parochial Church Councillors of the Rural Deanery on the subject of 'Church and State'. There was a good attendance of the clergy, and a very fair number of councillors. The weather was foggy enough to act as a deterrent. The questions disclosed more anxiety for the suppression of Ritualists than resentment at the action of the State! Nothing is more apparent in all these meetings than the depth of the feeling against the 'Anglo–Catholicks'. Having once been persuaded by the Protestant agitators that the Revised Prayer Book represented an 'Anglo–Catholick' victory, these good folk can see nothing but cause for satisfaction at its rejection. They are too ill–informed and too mentally undeveloped to be able to follow an historical argument. However they listened attentively, and applauded decorously! We carried Spencer Wade home, and then proceeded to Auckland Castle, being much hindered by fog.