Chapter Seven - Reformation, 1941–43

Summary

Several members of my mother's choir had been suggesting that the Bedford Musical Society should be revived. As I had often had to conduct the Mary Palmer Choir when she was ill, and had formed and conducted the Clarendon Male Voice Choir in the thirties, it was to me they turned to set things in motion.

Actually the meeting to re-form the Bedford Musical Society took place the week after we were married in September 1941 and Marshall was in bed with a high temperature and an ear infection, so I represented him at that meeting and cycled home the thirteen miles to Woburn Sands afterwards! Devotion?!

Until the beginning of 1941, Marshall Palmer had been the paid organist of Woburn parish church, but his contract was terminated by the twelfth Duke of Bedford. The Duke, who inherited the title in 1940, was opposed to the war against Hitler. Before succeeding to the title the Duke was well-known as a pacifist, and was prepared to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt. He founded the right wing British People's Party in the summer of 1939 with two others, one of whom had been a member of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The new party was suspiciously pro- German. In his autobiography A Silver-plated Spoon, the Duke's son John, later the thirteenth Duke of Bedford, describes his father's treatment of the vicar:

At the beginning of 1941, he [the 12th Duke] was off on another tack. One of our oldest family obligations had been to pay the vicar's stipend at Woburn Parish Church. My father had made up his mind that the Church of England was supporting the war and decided to stop these payments and join the Plymouth Brethren … Things got so bad that I felt I had to make some gesture to retrieve the family honour, so my wife and I went down to pay a courtesy visit on Archdeacon Martindale the day before he left the vicarage.

Just weeks after his mother's death, Marshall Palmer received similar treatment from the Duke.