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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2020
Percy Dearmer’s time as a visiting lecturer at Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut, USA, at the invitation of Dean William Palmer Ladd, from July 1918 to February 1919, marked a turning point in his life and career. As author of The Parson’s Handbook (1899) and Vicar of St Mary’s Primrose Hill (1901–1915), he was immersed in the Church of England. From 1919, when he left Berkeley Divinity School, with no offer of a clergy post until 1931, he worked on the margins of the church as a university lecturer, writer, and co-director of an experimental worshipping community. The experiences he had between 1915 and 1919 shaped this ‘second’ Dearmer: loss in the war; a second wife and new family; work with the YMCA in France and India; travels in the Anglican Communion and, not least, time at Berkeley where he consolidated these experiences, becoming attuned to those who wanted a spiritual life but were disillusioned by institutional religion, as expressed in The Art of Worship (1919).
This article was developed from a talk given at a conference on Percy Dearmer and William Palmer Ladd, In the Spirit’s Tether, held at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale in January 2019. Thank you to all who attended for the stimulating discussion, and especially to the organizer Andrew McGowan. Thank you also to the librarians and staff at Lambeth Palace Library and the British Library.
Jane Shaw is Professor of the History of Religion, Principal of Harris Manchester College and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford, UK.
3 Nan Dearmer to Marian Knowles (her mother), September 6, 1917. N. Dearmer, Indian Diary, BL Mss. Eur. C326 (hereafter referred to as Indian Diary).
4 Indian Diary, September 17, 1917, p. 308; October 12, 1917, p. 329; December 12, 1917, p. 384.
5 Nan Dearmer, The Life of Percy Dearmer (London: The Book Club, 1941), p. 214
6 Indian Diary, May 30, 1918, p. 563
7 Nan Dearmer, The Life, p. 218. For general biographical details on Percy Dearmer, see Donald Gray, Percy Dearmer, A Parson’s Pilgrimage (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2000).
8 Nan Dearmer, The Life, p. 217.
9 Quoted in Nan Dearmer, The Life, pp. 217, 218.
10 Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook (London: Grant Richards, 1st edn, 1899), p. 1.
11 On Ladd, the influences on him, and his impact as a liturgical reformer, see Michael Moriarty, ‘William Palmer Ladd and the Origins of the Episcopal Liturgical Movement’, Church History, 64.3 (1995), pp. 438-51.
12 William Palmer Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves: Some Thoughts on how the Book of Common Prayer might be made more Influential in our English-Speaking World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018), pp. 166, 128.
13 Percy Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1919), pp. 97-98.
14 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, p. 141.
15 Quoted in Nan Dearmer, The Life, pp. 240-41.
16 Quoted in Nan Dearmer, The Life, p. 138.
17 Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook, p. 5.
18 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, p. 82.
19 Swanwick is a Christian conference center in the north of England, host to many of the significant liberal theology conferences of the early-mid twentieth century.
20 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, p. 82.
21 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, p. 2.
22 Clive Field, ‘“The Faith Society?” Quantifying Religious Belonging in Edwardian Britain, 1901–1914’, Journal of Religious History, 37.1 (2013), pp. 39-63.
23 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, p. 2. Callum Brown has written about the ways in which this period saw the feminization of religion: see his The Decline of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001).
24 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, p. 117.
25 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, p. 167.
26 Ladd, Prayer Book Interleaves, pp. 167, 113, 159.
27 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, pp. 146-47, 148.
28 Dearmer’s letters in this exchange are now in Lambeth Palace Library (they run from January 4 to March 21, 1916, almost the whole time he was working for the YMCA in France). What is striking about them is the frankness of his desire for Nan, and the intimacy that quickly develops in the correspondence (Lambeth Palace Library MS 4910).
29 Indian Diary, May 30, 1918, p. 563.
30 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, pp. 5-7.
31 Indian Diary, Advent Sunday, 1917, p. 375; December 17, 1917, p. 396; October 24, 1917, p. 342; November 26, 1917, pp. 370, 372.
32 Indian Diary, May 11, 1918, p. 537; April 16, 1918, p. 502. The Bishop of Singapore at this time was Charles Ferguson-Davie, who was consecrated as Bishop of Singapore in 1909 at the age of 37, and stayed in the post until 1927 when he went to serve in Natal, South Africa. Originally a USPG missionary in India, he spent the vast majority of his career outside England.
33 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, p. 15.
34 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, pp. 50-51.
35 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, pp. 75, 76.
36 Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship, pp. 83, 81.
37 Indian Diary, September 10, 1917, p. 303; December 8, 1917, p. 381. Four years later, Temple was appointed Bishop of Manchester, after working for the Life and Liberty Movement, which promoted self-government for the church. See Stephen Spencer, William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy (London: SPCK, 2001), pp. 30-34.
38 Nan Dearmer, The Life, p. 222.
39 On Maude Royden, see Sheila Fletcher, Maude Royden, A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
40 Nan Dearmer, The Life, pp. 246, 245, 247.
41 Harold Begbie, Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality (London: Mills and Boon, 1922), p. 110.
42 Nan Dearmer, The Life, p. 270.