Five Stones and a Sling: Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar

155 Pages·2009·1.82 MB·English

by  Michael Goulder

FIVE STONES
AND A SLING
MEMOIRS OF A
BIBLICAL SCHOLAR
MICHAEL GOULDER
F S S
ive toneS and a ling
To Clare, my companion through the life of which this is the narrative,
my support in good times and bad, who took down the text at my
dictation, and materially improved it with her comments.
F S S
ive toneS and a ling
MeMoirS oF a BiBlical Scholar
Michael Goulder
SheFField Phoenix PreSS
2009
Copyright © 2009 Sheffield Phoenix Press
Published by Sheffield Phoenix Press
Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield
Sheffield S3 7QB
www.sheffieldphoenix.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the
publishers’ permission in writing.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Typeset by ISB Typesetting
Printed on acid-free paper by Lightning Source UK Ltd, Milton Keynes
ISBN 978-1-906055-84-4
Contents
Chapter 1
eduCation 1
Chapter 2
Jardine Matheson’s 7
Chapter 3
st John’s Cathedral 10
Chapter 4
oxford 16
Chapter 5
salford 20
Chapter 6
st luke and Genesis 26
Chapter 7
st Christopher’s, WithinGton 30
Chapter 8
the lord’s prayer 36
Chapter 9
honG konG 43
Chapter 10
all saints, kinGs heath 53
Chapter 11
the university of BirMinGhaM 56
Chapter 12
the speaker’s leCturership 60
vi Five Stones and a Sling
Chapter 13
the synoptiC proBleM 69
Chapter 14
The MyTh of God IncarnaTe 77
Chapter 15
the BlaCk and White Christian partnership 82
Chapter 16
the path to reCoGnition 90
Chapter 17
the old testaMent 104
Chapter 18
the psalMs 109
Chapter 19
visitinG leCtureships 118
Chapter 20
the BirMinGhaM ConferenCe 127
Chapter 21
the end of the road 129
Chapter 22
ConClusion 132
Bibliography 140
Index of Names 143
Chapter 1
eduCation
My father, Douglas Goulder (to rhyme with shoulder or boulder), was
a broker on Lloyd’s; that is, he arranged insurance for ships and their
cargoes both British and European at competitive rates with Lloyd’s
underwriters in the City of London. A large man—he was 6 ft 4 and six­
teen stone—he was friendly and active, a popular and respected figure in
all aspects of his life; when he was killed in the War my mother received
something like 230 letters of condolence, from people in many walks of
life and half a dozen countries in Europe, all testifying to his kindness and
friendship. He had married my mother Daphne, a kind and intelligent
woman, in 1925, and I was born in May 1927 in South Kensington, a
suitably middle­class area of London. My parents were not churchgoers,
so apart from my baptism I had little introduction to religion in early
days; I was escorted, unwillingly and irregularly, to Sunday afternoon
service in St Jude’s, Courtfield Gardens, by the Stapletons, a pious family
with a pretty daughter, Mary, who lived across the square from us. But it
was at Wagner’s, a pre­prep school, the best, it was believed, in London,
that I joined the Church of England from the heart. There Mr Lefroy,
scarlet with emotion, told us the terrible tale of the Marian burnings,
and of Latimer’s brave words, ‘Be of good cheer, Master Ridley; we
shall this day light such a candle as I trust shall never be put out’. No,
I thought, and while I live, that candle shall not go out. Wagner’s told
my father that I was clever, and this suggested to him a great series of
hurdles which I should leap in life—public school, Cambridge, and ‘the
diplomatic’. With this progress in view, he made plain to me his high
expectations. In the many letters he later wrote to me, he never ceased
exhorting me to shine in all departments of life. His advice was the same
that Peleus gave to his son Achilles, ‘Always to come first and to excel
others’ (aien aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai allon). I should come
top in both languages and maths, and be in the teams for cricket and
football, and learn to ride, and to box. Where my gifts were lacking he
felt he could supplement them by arranging coaching for me. Although
2 Five Stones and a Sling
these expectations sometimes felt oppressive, I have no doubt that his
constant support and encouragement set me on the right path in life and
inspired me to hard work and to success.
At the age of eight I left Wagner’s and was sent to Highfield, a boarding
school eighty miles away in Hampshire. Canon Mills, the Headmaster­
owner, known to the boys as ‘Bug’, had built the school up since the
beginning of the century, and established it as a respected ‘feeder’ to
the public schools; he had retained the services of an excellent staff of
assistant masters. Perhaps he was a little too fond of the slipper and
the hairbrush, but he was by no means the sadistic tyrant that we liked
to paint him. In his own view he was a kind old man, never happier
than when reading Nicholas Nickleby or All Quiet on the Western
Front to a roomful of boys in his study; and I remember such readings
with pleasure. He always did his best for me, and quickly sensed that
I might gain an Eton scholarship, an idea totally acceptable to my
father. I was, however, not happy at the school, and some blame for this
must rest with Bug himself. Wagner’s had told him that I was clever,
and had mastered the elements of Latin and French, so I was entered
into the fifth form from the top of the school, in which the boys were
mostly aged eleven. Week by week each form was stood up in line and
its marks read out to the school; and week by week I went up to the top
of the class. Bug’s solution to this was to give me a double remove in my
second term; so I was in the third form from the top of the school, in a
class of mostly rather slow boys aged thirteen. It was not until my final
year that my coevals caught up with me in the top form. This meant
that I had to contend with loneliness, because there were never boys
in my class with whom I could become friends; and also with a certain
resentment, for naturally my classmates did not take kindly to being
outshone by a boy three years younger than them. Bug had built a fine
chapel in the middle of the school, and he was serious about our religion,
preparing us for Confirmation. But his religion was on the dry side: he
gave each of us a copy of The Holy Communion by W. Walsham How.
The service was printed on the left­hand page, and on the right some
edify ing comments—’You are coming to God. God is coming to you.
This is not a thought lightly to be dismissed.’ As a biddable lad, I did
not dismiss it lightly, but I found the weekly practice of meeting these
words somewhat daunting. I did not greatly value Bug at the time; but
I remember him now for two things in the Chapel. One was his practice
of reading Ecclesiastes 12 on the last morning of each term, ‘Remember
now thy Creator in the days of thy youth…’ The other was the moving
tune which he composed to the hymn ‘Souls of men, why will ye scatter?’
1 Education 3
Bug prepared me well for the Eton Scholarship, and I sat the exam in
May 1940, while the Army was being evacuated from Dunkirk. When the
results came out I had won the Second Scholarship, and in the September
began five delightful years at a school which might well justify its claim
to be the best in the country. There were many good teachers, foremost
among whom for me was Richard Martineau, whose kindliness and
intense love of the Greek and Latin classics made his teaching a blessing
to all his pupils. But above all I made friends for the first time, some of
them friends for life; I was a mild social success, and even rose to the
high point of being elected to ‘Pop’, the Eton Society, to whom much of
the school discipline was deputed. The only shadow on my Eton years
was my succumbing to polio in August 1941; this involved three months
away from school, in the Wingfield Hospital at Oxford; and a difficult
January term, when I came back to school half­time, and was not kindly
treated by some of my fellow­Scholars.
Eton education was based on two foundations, which stood in some
tension. One of these was Christianity. The School had been founded,
exactly five hundred years before I was admitted, as the College of the
Blessed Virgin Mary. Each morning at 9.25 the school assembled in
College Chapel; there, between the soaring Perpendicular pillars raised
in the Wars of the Roses, to repeat, in creed, hymn and psalm the articles
of Christian belief. Every evening at 9.30 the scholars would assemble
in Lower School for evening prayers, on Sundays said and sung in Latin.
Between these two times the main staple was the Greek and Latin classics.
The authors who had the greatest impact on us were Plato and Homer.
Plato thought that one should be wary of accepted wisdom, and sceptical
of anything proclaimed with confidence and authority. Richard Martineau
was an enthusiastic disciple of Plato and of his teacher Socrates; we were
constantly urged to think for ourselves and to challenge all dogmas,
which in fact included Christian dogmas. Above all, the search for truth
had primacy. Socrates represented himself as like a midwife, delivering
the truth which was latent in even simple people; one had only to ask
questions, and to follow wherever the answers led. Homer thought that
life was a tragedy. On the whole the gods were against us, and were too
strong for us. We could not win in the battle of life, but we could live
nobly. Although the Gospel also urges us to live nobly, it has a happy
ending in the Resurrection, which is lacking in the Iliad.
Eton prepared me well for the Scholarship examination to Cambridge,
and I won a Major Scholarship to Trinity, the most prestigious of the
Cambridge colleges. But I owed the award in part to my native wit. I
had to translate an English poem into Greek verses in the metre used by