Events
2023 AGM and Annual Lecture
This year’s Church of England
Record Society AGM was on Monday 26 June at 4.15pm in the Bancroft
Room at Lambeth Palace Library. The AGM was followed by our Annual
Lecture at 5pm. Our lecturer was our Vice-President, Canon
Professor Michael Snape, who is Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican
Studies at the University of Durham. He spoke on ‘The “Glorious
Glosters”: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Captivity in Cold War Korea’.
The Korean War (1950-53) is often billed as a forgotten war, and
yet it was the scene of the fiercest fighting seen by the British Army
in the sixty-year period from 1945 to 2006. It also saw the biggest
surrender of British troops since the Second World War, with hundreds
of soldiers of the First Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment (or
‘Glosters’) falling into Chinese hands at the Battle of the Imjin River
in April 1951. Although ignored by religious historians of the Cold War
and by historians of Britain’s disputed post-war religious ‘revival’,
the fate of the ‘Glosters’ in Communist captivity, and the reception
they received on their return to Great Britain, was emblematic of the
resilience and even belligerence of British Christianity in the early
years of the Cold War. Returning after the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II, which represented an international showcase for Christian
Britain, the ‘Glosters’ were hailed for their staunch refusal to
succumb to atheistic Communist indoctrination. This example stood in
contrast to many American POWs (prompting something of a moral panic in
the Pentagon) and their Church of England padre, Sam Davies, was
acclaimed and publicly honoured for his role in providing religious
leadership in captivity, an experience he (rather ironically) equated
with the plight of Catholic martyrs in the Reformation era. Seventy
years after the end of the conflict in Korea, this lecture considers
the role of the ‘Glosters’ in redeeming a costly and stalemated war on
the other side of the world.
2022 Annual Lecture
We met this year in person on July 6th at Lambeth Palace
Library. The
lecture will be at 5 p.m. and the AGM at 4.15 p.m., both in the
Bancroft room.
W.M. Jacob spoke on the topic of ‘Lived religion’ in
eighteenth-century England: the education of poor children.
Drawing on the insights of ‘lived religion’ the paper
investigated evidence from a wide range of eighteenth century archival
sources, including diocesan parochial and borough records, to
illustrate the religious commitment of Anglican lay people of the
‘middling sort’ in a wide geographical range of parishes. It suggested
that their devotion of money and time to provide, by a variety of
means, access to spiritual development, literacy and numeracy for poor
children is evidence of their living out Christian faith. Schooling was
usually reinforced by providing and overseeing occupational training
through apprenticeships, and providing godly literature and devotional
works for apprentices and their masters and mistresses to lift children
out of poverty and improve their prospects in life.
The 2021 Annual Lecture was held online on Tuesday July 6th at
5.00pm BST.
Dr Grant Tapsell (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) gave the lecture,
entitled "Archbishop William Sancroft's Life in Letters."
A video of this lecture is presented below: