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LISTEN TO WILLIAM TEMPLE

 
This is worth viewing. It was shot in 1944, after Canterbury Cathedral had suffered from bombs and incendiary raids. One hears the choir singing some classical Anglican settings. The “Red Dean of Canterbury”, Hewlett johnson, looking like a medieval abbot, emerges from on high and processes to the rear door where he admits Archbishop William Temple, with solemn bows, and they return to the altar area. The cathedral is packed. Temple, the Christian Socialist, sounding like an ecclesiastical Churchill, but with rather more tortured aristocratic vowels, preaches an extraordinary sermon, in which he invokes Augustine and Ethelbert (with Bertha), Henry II and Becket, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell and Hitler, and then proceeds to lay out his vision for a Christian post war England. 
 
I’d never heard Temple’s voice before, all the more poignant because he was filmed shortly before his sudden death.
 
Tony

One Response

  1. It seems more likely, from the description of this clip elsewhere, that the sermon itself was delivered sometime between the summer of 1942 and the late spring of the following year. Apparently there were disagreements which led to the postponement of its release until just after Temple’s death.

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