Every book we own has a story which belongs to us. How we come to have it in our possession. It was given to us, perhaps as a present or a prize. It was loaned to us and never returned to its owner for some reason. We bought it. We found it.
The Pilgrim Shrines of England is a book I treasure for a variety of reasons. I have a 1st edition, published in 1928. On 17th March 1932 it was given to a Margaret Sandford ‘In remembrance of her Confirmation… from her Aunt & Uncle Dorothy & John Pheysey.’
It came into my possession via my mother, Betty Gillies, in about 1980. From 1976 until she died in 2006 she lived in Eastbourne, East Sussex, with my step-father, Jimmy Gillies. He was Head Porter at the town’s hospital and running the town’s branch of the British Red Cross as a volunteer, which had a shop he had opened and they did ‘house clearances.’ Eastbourne was full of old people, who went there to spend their last days, and it was easy to see why.
Over the years, my mother gave me and Susan all manner of things, and I could tell a story about every thing they gave us. And this book was one of them. My mother was a churchgoer until she died, days before her 86th birthday in 2006. I had given up on the evangelical church I attended from when I was seven when I was sixteen and had become an active Young Socialist. The Church of God in Wembley didn’t get involved in politics and tried to persuade me to abandon my interest, but I was having arguments with them about nuclear disarmament and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was very active at the time, but I didn’t lose my interest in spiritual matters, having Unitarian, Quaker and Jewish friends. I also continued to attend ‘camps’ organised by the Othona Community in north-east Essex (I will do a separate post about this wonderful out-of-the-way corner of England and those I met there in my later teenage years).
My doubts about religion began in my Sunday school class. Six or seven of us, all teenage boy, and I remember a boy called Jeff, a little older than me, asking Les Hardy, our Sunday School teacher, a public librarian and a lovely man, ‘Is God vain?’ As a result, those of us who took Jeff’s side were given this book: The Story of the Bible: A Popular Account of How It Came to Us.
You can see my name is shown as ‘Bobby Gillies’. The ‘Prize’ was for attendance. Everyone got a prize! I was yet to become ‘Bob’ and becoming ‘Robert’ was another four-five years away. My Sunday School nickname was ‘Dodo’ because I was seen as odd for a variety of reasons. My step-father’s surname was ‘Gillies’ and my mother spend many years trying to change my surname from Howard to Gillies and this was one of the ways she tried to achieve her ambition - by telling the Church of God in Wembley that Gillies was my surname. If she put too much pressure on me I would tell my nanna, who was bringing me up, and she would reduce my mother to tears, who would then back off.
In 2019 I found out that my father was Irish, he was a Catholic and his name was Peter Burke, so I had a narrow escape, as I could have grown up as ‘Kevin Burke.’ I never knew him and don’t feel as if I missed much, but I am curious about the man. Sadly, my half-brother died last year aged 89 and was suffering from dementia. We met once in 2019, then lockdown overtook us. He could have a conversation for about ten minutes before he had to start again, so when I asked him about our father he described him as ‘a bit of a lothario.’ My mother was one of many victims and he was married at the time. The records seem to indicate that when he left that wife he married his third without bothering to get a divorce. Three half-sisters all died many years ago, so I know next to nothing about them, but there are a good few members of the Howard family I have no contact with. The strands I have are not all direct and, again, I will go to my grave not too bothered by this fact.
These matters didn’t seem to bother me growing up, nor as an adult, and so it is in old age. Perhaps my love of old churches free of adornment is how I see life too.
On my travels through life I have visited a good few historic ‘shrines’, a number of which are in the book, including my favourite: Sempringham in Lincolnshire and Beverley Minister, which I never visited until last week, having read the pages I have re-printed below. The book is out of copyright, so I am okay. The author, B. C. Boulter, is a good story teller, so I hope you will find the time to read his chapter about St. John of Beverly, ‘A Man of Peace’.
We spent a lovely couple of hours at the Minster, looking around and making connections with some of the volunteers. I will go again I’m sure
I hope you have enjoyed reading this story about St. John of Beverley.
Would you like me to share more chapters from The Pilgrim Shrines of England, perhaps beginning with Sempringham?