George Bell : T.S. Eliot Speaks

For another independent opinion on Bishop George Bell, anonymously accused of sexual offences many years after his death, I am grateful to 'Haffers' who has commented on my article on the Spectator site, for this recollection of George Bell by T.S.Eliot. I think this might be seen as the words of a character witness, and to underline that this was an actual person we are talking about, not a shadowy and forgotten figure in some elevated pulpit:

 

On 30 Dec. 1958 T S Eliot recorded a contribution for the programme ���The Way of Life��� (broadcast on the Home Service, 18 Jan. 1959): ���In my memories of Bishop Bell, four
meetings stand out. The first memory is of a weekend, which must have been in 1930 or 1931 [actually Dec. 1930, when TSE had recited Ash Wednesday to a party which was at
once impressed and bewildered], when I was a guest at the Palace in Chichester. Mr Martin Browne had been appointed by the Bishop [in 1930] his Adviser on Religious Drama for
the diocese, and Mr and Mrs Browne dined with us: out of that meeting came the invitation in 1933 to write the Church Pageant which became ���The Rock���. I remember also that Dr
Bell travelled up to London with me on the following Monday; not having consorted much with bishops in those days, I found it strange to be journeying with a bishop in a third-class
railway carriage. On that journey, the Bishop spoke to me about Dr J. H. Oldham and his work for the Church and the World: and so that weekend brought about my acquaintance with two men, Mr Browne and Dr Oldham, with whom I was later to be closely associated in quite different activities.

 

The second of those four meetings which are clearest in my
memory was also to have important consequences for me: it was on a summer afternoon in 1934 walking in the garden of the Palace that Bishop Bell proposed that I should write a play
for the Canterbury Festival, the Festival which he had originated when Dean of Canterbury and in which he retained a warm interest. The result was ���Murder in the Cathedral���. A third
meeting was in Stockholm in 1942: the Bishop arrived on the day on which I was to leave. We all know now, what I did not know then, why Dr Bell had come to Sweden: it was no
fault of his that the conversations he had there led to nothing. [While lecturing in Sweden for the Ministry of Information, Bell had been made privy to a German plot to assassinate
Hitler: when he conveyed this information to the Foreign Office no credence was given to his report ��� but it turned out two years later that the names he had vouchsafed to the British
authorities turned out to be those of officers executed by Hitler after the attempt on his life.] And the fourth meeting was at a conference which he had assembled in Chichester, I
think also during the War, to discuss the place of the Arts in the life of the Church: among others present, I remember Mr Henry Moore, Sir Edward Maude, and Miss Dorothy Sayers.

���These four meetings, chosen by my memory from among others, illustrate the varied interests and activities of the Bishop, outside of the regular duties of a diocesan which he
carried out so faithfully: his interest in the service which Art could perform for the Church,and no less in the inspiration and employment which the Church could give the artist; his
interest in the Oecumenical Movement, of which there is ample documentary evidence; his interest in foreign affairs and his sense of the international responsibility of the Church and
of churchmen. He and another of my friends, Duncan-Jones the late Dean of Chichester,were men of very different type, but in two respects in which they were both outstanding,
they had much in common. The Dean made the Cathedral the musical centre of the diocese; the Bishop, by his patronage and encouragement of drama and of the plastic arts, made his
diocese an exemplar for all England. And both Bishop and Dean, during the 1930s, were tirelessly outspoken in their protests against the religious and racial persecution taking place
in Germany.

���My first impulse, in speaking of the impression which George Bell has left upon me, is to say that he was a ���loveable man���. On reflection, I find that in applying this adjective, I am making it a compendium of all the qualities for which I loved and admired him. These include a dauntless integrity: no ambition could ever have deflected him from whatever course he felt to be right, no fear of the consequences to himself could ever have prevented him from speaking the truth as he saw it. With this went modesty and simplicity of manner, the outward signs, I believe, of inward humility. A friendly man, and a man of genuine piety ��� in short, a good man and an honest man.���