St. Mary's, Sandwich
I was standing in an old country church these holidays when two elderly men in shorts and with walking sticks and haver- sacks came in to examine it. One was smoking a pipe and the other brought a dog with him. I took them to be fresh- complexioned freethinkers of the 1910 Wellsian vintage and was therefore not surprised that they should have no sense that a country church, where the Holy Communion had been celebrated for many centuries, was the House of God. My companion, a younger man than me and a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, was scandalised. I do not think it is unduly optimistic to make the generalisation that the younger generation has a greater sense of reverence than people who are in their fifties and sixties today. The latter are still under the influence of those who reacted from the mawkishness of Victorian parents. But if the fighter pilot was scandalised by these jolly old devout atheists, I think he will be more scandalised if he reads the East Kent Mercury of August 19. There the Rector of Sandwich, Kent, the Rev. A. R. Ferguson, presumably a ' modernist,' declared in glaring headlines that one of his mediaeval churches ' has no use whatsoever and the Church's policy is to rid itself of St. Mary's, both as an exist- ing structure and as a future drain.' There must be few clergy- men of the Church of England who have publicly described their churches as drains.' This clergyman was protesting against efforts made by the Historic Churches Trust to save this. one of three old churches in the attractive town of Sand- wich. A silly know-all writing in The Times about this church dismisses the building as merely old and not first rate as architecture. It is just this academic attitude about what is first and second rate in our heritage of old buildings which is going to turn our country into a vast new building estate with a few dead museum pieces, approved by experts, allowed to survive from the past.
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