Perfection in Fleet Street

Every other Wednesday, I celebrate the Eucharist in the crypt chapel of St Bride's, Fleet Street.  This Wren church, with its famous wedding-cake steeple, was built after the Great Fire (and rebuilt yet again after being extensively damaged in the Blitz) on the footprint of its medieval predecessor - which had itself overlaid and replaced five other buildings going back as far as the sixth century.  In the crypt, which is now far below street level, you are surrounded by the relics of these former churches - isolated outcrops and abutments of ancient stone which will have echoed to the timeless rhythm of masses offered by our earliest ancestors in the faith.  Indeed you are, in a sense, surrounded by the ancestors themselves, since the crypt was used for burials for centuries until 1854.

The Crypt Chapel, St Bride's, Fleet Street

The altar is an ancient table, half-charred and planted on a huge tombstone.  To its south side is a tiny niche in the stonework in which the priest can sit silently and all but unobserved as he awaits the lunchtime faithful.  I use these few minutes to say a preparatory prayer or two; and to formulate mentally some words of introduction.  When there is a festival or other commemoration, these words often take the form of a brief reflection on the saint's life and its significance for us on (or under) the streets of 21st century London.

Today's commemoration (or "lesser festival" to give it its formal appellation) was of Margaret of Scotland, a ninth century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who fled England for Scotland at the Norman conquest, and subsequently married the Scottish king.  She is thought to have lived a life of great piety and philanthropy, caring for the poor and reforming religious houses.  The little biography provided by the Anglican altar book used for the celebration of such festivals, Exciting Holiness, says of Margaret that she "seemed to influence for good all with whom she came into contact".  This sounds rather bland, even saccharine, at first sight; but that does not characterise these usually nicely-judged and economical summaries.  So I am happy to assume that, as far as we can know 1000 years on, it must actually be true.

St Margaret feeding orphans

Influencing for good all with whom one comes into contact is indeed a holy gift.  We perhaps all know or have known someone who seems positively to radiate goodness; a person in whom we can detect no hint of selfishness or malice; and who in the eyes of the cynic, seems too good to be true.  None of us can be without sin, without flaw, since that is our inheritance.  Christians believe that perfection can be attained only by the grace of God, and perhaps never in this life.  Yet there are people who seem to approach it: not just peacemakers or philanthropists; not just those who are remembered for their good deeds or wise words - although all these and more surely have more than their "fair" share of holiness.  They are those who have been given such a measure of inner goodness that it cannot help but overflow like some healing salve.  They are those in whose faces we seem to see - albeit through a glass, darkly - a reflection of Christ himself.

One Hundred Years of Misery

A few years ago, my elderly mother got a call from a man called Steve who told her he was distantly related to her, and had discovered her name and address in connection with research he had done into their family background.  He asked if he could come and meet her and her family, bringing with him his Aunt Sue - a cousin of my mother's whom she had not seen since their youth.  There followed a rather nice reunion: my mother and her sister were able to reconnect with their cousin after many years; and we all met our "new" cousin who had made the call, and of whose existence none of us had been aware before.

Both cousins have since died - Steve rather tragically young.  But his gift to us was the fruit of his detailed research into my mother's ancestry, which he presented to us in the form of a carefully arranged dossier, and whose details he had linked and highlighted with his own narrative.  I took it home and read it.  Now I know other people's family histories are not guaranteed to fascinate (unless, I suppose, you're famous - like the subjects of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?) but perhaps you will bear with me for a sentence or two.

It took me the best part of a day to read the dossier in the untroubled environs of my warm and comfortable central London apartment.  When I had finished it, I poured myself a glass of rather nice claret, and wept.

Now, I had known my mother's family were from Bethnal Green (in London's East End) and, having heard tales of her own childhood at my grandmother's knee, I had known they were poor. But, until I read Steve's history, I had not realised how poor.  They were abjectly poor.  They were poor in a way and to an extent that, even as I read about it, I struggled to grasp.  They had come to London from Suffolk in the late 18th century.  They had been active in the wool trade, and were tolerably prosperous.  Then, with the industrial revolution, came the enclosures of common land and the collapse of the agricultural economy.  Huge numbers migrated from the countryside into the cities in search of a livelihood, creating what we now call the industrial working class.

The 19th century was, for this branch of my family, 100 Years of Misery. The dossier told of childhood death, disease, petty crime, violence, cruel misfortune, workhouses, and deprivation of every kind. It was as though I was reading a sensational Victorian novel.  And indeed, so notorious was the Old Nichol - the slum quarter in which my ancestors lived (if that is the word) - that it was the subject of just such a novel.(1)  Victorian philanthropist Charles Booth identified the Old Nichol as having the "blackest streets" - the worst poverty in London.(2)  So shaming was the Old Nichol's existence that the first act of the newly created London County Council in the 1890s was to demolish it and replace it with Britain's first council estate.  You get the picture.  In fact here is a picture:

Old Nichol Street, Shoreditch

I won't labour it further.  Suffice it to say, within two generations of coming to London from Suffolk, these people had gone from relative riches to the most ragged of rags - and stayed there for nigh-on 100 years.  At the other end of the 19th century, my maternal grandmother was duly born into pretty much the same poverty in 1903 in Bethnal Green.  Two generations later: one of her grandchildren is a doctor, one is an oil company executive, another is a priest - etc, etc.

I went for walk around Bethnal Green recently - ironically perhaps, it's within walking distance of my present home.  The area is still mainly "social" housing; the population largely Muslim.  The streets were quiet, even sedate. It was a lovely autumn day, and I took some photos.  I went into the parish church of St Matthew, where many of my forebears had been baptised, married and buried, and lit a candle for them. I prayed for Steve Abbott, whose work had shone a light into a very dark corner of my family history.  And I gave thanks for my utter good fortune.

(1) Morrison, Arthur: A Child of the Jago (Academy Victorian Classic)  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Child-Jago-Academy-Victorian-Classic/dp/0897333926

(2) Wise, Sarah: The Blackest Streets (Vintage) 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blackest-Streets-Life-Death-Victorian/dp/1844133311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320937959&sr=1-1

Which percent are you in?

We are the 99%, we're told.  Are we now?  Who's "we"?  And what or whom does that 99% comprise?  Well, the general idea is that there is 1% of the population (of the world, the West, the UK? - not clear) which is stupendously rich - and then there is the rest of us.  More specifically, the 1% is synonymous with those who have got rich quick as a result of the couldn't-give-a-damn, money-for-nothing culture which is the context for the current financial crisis.  The 1% are the guilty men: those whose greed has plunged the rest of us into water whose metaphorical temperature varies from tepid uncertainty to scalding penury, and who have yet to be held to account.

Well, since nearly all of us are in the 99% (in fact, 99% of us, I'd guess), it's pretty easy to demonise the 1%.  But that 99% is not a uniform block.  Sure, it contains people who are abjectly poor - from the third world, dollar-a-day multitudes whose plight intermittently attacks our collective conscience, to our own Western underclasses of the hopeless and excluded.  Yet I have to tell you that the 99% also includes people who are very, very rich.  They may not be among the "guilty men" of the current crisis; but they are largely people who have made large sums of money by selling goods and services to the rest of us at a profit (for that is what capitalism is) and perhaps not always doing so in a way that all of us would be comfortable with.  Then below them is a stratum of the slightly less rich and perhaps slightly less venial; and below them another, and another, and so on.  You take my point: between the very rich and the very poor are countless gradations of wealth/poverty and guilt (in terms of how money is made) which nonetheless together comprise the 99%.  If we're dividing ourselves up into percentages, are we seriously supposed to regard all these as a single block?  For that is what "We are the 99%" implies.

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) makes interesting reading.  Did you know that a salary of around 32k gets you into the top 25% of UK earners; £45k into the top 10%; £60k into the top 5%; and £120k into the top 1%?  You'll note that the top 1% threshold is well short of the £150k at which the 50p tax rate kicks in - people in that bracket are in the top 0.6% of earners.  If you are earning £21k, you earn more than around half the surveyed population (this figure rises to £26k for full-time work only).

Feeling (relatively) rich?  That may be because you are. The Wikipedia page on income in the UK begins "In terms of global poverty criteria, the UK is a wealthy country, with virtually no people living on less than £4 a day".  So if you are surprised by how well-off, statistically speaking, you are in UK terms, think how rich you are in global terms.  Well, you can find out.  Spare 30 seconds to look at http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/how-rich-you-are.php and follow the instructions.

My point, as you will have discerned, is that while I might be in the 99% in Occupy parlance, I'm almost certainly in the single-figures percent in global terms. It ill behoves me to point accusingly at the current super-rich culprits of western capitalism, while forgetting that, to vast multitudes worldwide, I am to all intents and purposes one of the former.  Seen in this way, the distinction between the supposed 99% and the 1% of the current crisis is not just crass and divisive, it's also rather distasteful.  How much better to proclaim, with the bankers of London and the rubbish-dump dwellers of Lagos :"We are the 100%.  Let's act like it."