60 mins
’I feel blessed to be part of all this’
PROFILE
“MY ffirst experience of the Church of Scotland was when Susan and I were married at Dumbarton Riverside Parish Church in 1986 and I have never looked back!” Hugh Pym, BBC Health Editor and a well-known face on TV, is talking about his life and his latest interest, a book about the Scottish soldiers who passed through London on their way to (and from) the trenches of the Ffirst World War.
“Susan is a ‘daughter of the Rock’ and was part of the Riverside congregation as a girl. (The Very Rev Dr) John Cairns married us – he was minister at Riverside then – and we have so much enjoyed keeping in touch with John and Liz since then including during his stint as Locum Minister at St Columba’s, Pont Street, in London.”
Born in Malmesbury in Wiltshire, billed as the ‘oldest borough in England’, Hugh seems an unlikely advocate for the Church of Scotland, but his close personal involvement, with that of his wife, Susan, for eight years a member of the Church of Scotland’s Social Care Council CrossReach, is undoubtedly honest and heartfelt.
“There are links back to the Anglo-Saxon kings in Malmesbury, and there is a ine Norman Abbey, now an Anglican church, where we worshipped as a family. My father was a church warden. I was educated at schools in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and went to Oxford University. I then did a postgraduate diploma in radio journalism in Cornwall at a centre which is now part of Falmouth University. From there I got my first break in journalism in local radio,” says Hugh.
His links with Riverside Parish Church are deep.
“During a stint as Scotland Correspondent for ITN in the early 1990s we worshipped at Riverside. Our two sons were baptised there. It is always a joy to return from time to time when we are visiting Susan’s mother Joan. We were even privileged, and somewhat overawed, to be invited to speak at the Church’s Burns’ Supper one year,” he says.
But the life of a newsman is a busy one, and almost inevitably, a move to the big city of London is on the horizon, and so it was for Hugh and his family.
“We moved to London in the mid 1990s and were advised to go to St Columba’s Pont Street – ‘Go and introduce yourself to Sandy and you will get a warm welcome’. That of course was the Rev Sandy Cairns, associate minister at St Columba’s at the time and brother of John. We were certainly given a very warm welcome by Sandy and John McIndoe, who was then minister. The late John Laurie, who served as beadle, went out of his way to greet us on Sunday mornings. We immediately felt at home and it was a vivid illustration of how first impressions count for so much.
“St Columba’s is thriving and there is always a ‘home from home’ for Scottish visitors or those moving south for study or work.”
Hugh with award recipients at the CrossReach Awards. Picture by Hugh Brown
“2018, then, has been a busy year. Working with Susan I helped with the ‘In Conversation’ strand of the Heart and Soul day at the General Assembly. We were pleased with the numbers who visited our programme of talks and discussions.”
“Our daughter Kfirsty was baptised at St Columba’s and with a thriving crèche and Sunday School our family were all quickly involved in church life. Encouraged by the Very Rev John McIndoe, I became a church member in 1999. I felt very comfortable with the liturgy and style of worship. Susan was ordained an Elder in 2002 and I followed ten years later.” It’s a position Hugh and Susan value and work at with humility and respect.
“St Columba’s is thriving and there is always a ‘home from home’ for Scottish visitors or those moving south for study or work. It is a cosmopolitan congregation with Presbyterians from around the world who have settled in London as well as Anglicans and those from other faith backgrounds,” he says, genuinely warm and enthused by his topic.
“The Rev Angus MacLeod, the minister, is the great grandson of the first minister of St Columba’s, Donald MacLeod from the origin of the church in the 1880s. Angus spent 16 years as a chaplain with the British Army. The Rev Andrea Price is associate minister, having previously served more than a decade as minister at Birsay, Harray and Sandwick in Orkney. They are a good team and and lead a varied and far lung congregation from around the capital.
“With 2018 bringing the centenary of the Armistice and the end of hostilities in World War One, Angus was keen to ensure that the event was marked appropriately. He approached other Scottish organisations in London and the result is an exciting project ‘Scots in Great War London’. This draws in our fellow Church of Scotland kirk in the capital Crown Court as well as other groups such as the Caledonian Club, London Scottish regiment and London Scottish FC (the rugby club),” explains Hugh.
“St Columba’s has an amazing story to tell from the World War One years and Susan and I have been privileged and humbled to be involved in the research around it. During those years St Columba’s provided hospitality to 50,000 Scottish troops passing through London. They would either be returning on leave from the trenches in France and Flanders or heading back to the Western Front after time spent at home.
”It started in 1915 when church elders realised that the troop trains from the ports arrived in the very early hours of a Sunday morning but Scottish soldiers would have to wait till that night for trains heading north of the border. Realising how frustrating and demoralising it must be for the soldiers to have to waste a day of their leave wandering the streets of London, a small group of St Columba’s folk went speculatively to Victoria Station very early on a Sunday morning. They approached men in kilts alighting from the leave train and invited them back for a wash and a bite to eat in the church hall. A few soldiers in mud stained kilts just out of the trenches accepted the invitation. And so began the programme which became known as ‘Soldiers on Furlough’.
“In an astonishing efort led mainly by Mary Blackwood and women in the congregation hundreds of troops were fed and entertained in the church hall at weekends. Sightseeing trips around London were organised, entertainment was laid on and psalms and hymns were sung around a piano. Long lost friends scattered among Scottish regiments would meet and sometimes brother would encounter brother after years apart. One soldier asked how he knew about the work at St Columba’s replied: ‘It is known about, up and down the line out there’.
“This St Columba’s story forms part of a book ‘Scots in Great War London’, published by Helion. ”
“All the information about ‘Soldiers on Furlough’ has come from church magazines published in the wartime years. Remarkably they escaped the destruction of much of the church during a bombing raid in World War Two though the kirk session minutes and other records were lost. The new church was built on the same site after the war.
“The magazines provide a rich seam of information for historians and will soon be digitized. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading them and learning so much about church life one hundred years ago. It certainly helped that the minister at that time, the Rev Archibald Fleming, was a superb writer and it is uplifting and inspiring to read his magazine editorials and the text of his sermons. “
“Stuart Steele, a longstanding elder at St Columba’s, was a very useful source. His mother Peggy Leonard served as one of the volunteers in the wartime hospitality team and can be seen in some of the photos of the work. Stuart told me his mother remembered writing letters for the soldiers to wives and girlfriends.
“This St Columba’s story forms part of a book ‘Scots in Great War London’, published by Helion. The other organisations have contributed chapters and we have all learned so much about Scottish folk in the capital at that time, as they worked, worshipped and enjoyed recreation. Many served their country on the battleields and never returned while many on the home front supported the war efort and their ‘ain folk’. “
Crown Court church has an interesting story to tell too with a chapter written by Sheena Tait, an elder at the church. There is a fascinating account of the discovery of a copy of St John’s Gospel in 2009 in a safe at Crown Court with a soldier’s name, Private Small, written inside. He was from a Canadian regiment and Sheena and the Session Clerk Alan Imrie started research on him. They found that his battalion had been based for a while in Kent and deduced that he must have passed through London and visited Crown Court.
A combination of detective work and good luck led Sheena and Alan to Private Small’s home town in New Brunswick. A letter in the local paper asking for information took them eventually to Private Small’s daughter Annie Andrews. His St John’s Gospel was returned to Canada and presented to her by the local MP. It was a timely presentation as she died just eight months later.
Paul McFarland recounts stories of London Scottish rugby players who joined up. Of sixty players who turned out for teams on the last Saturday of matches before hostilities began, just fourteen returned. There is a wealth of other material in the book including chapters on the forerunners of the charities Scotscare and the Royal Caledonian Education Trust, and a relection on the faith of Earl Haig, who was ordained as an elder at St Columba’s after the war.
Picture by Susan Pym
“If I sound like a World War One enthusiast (or even bore!) that’s probably because I am one! ”
Helping to produce the book has had to be squeezed in between Hugh’s other duties as Health Editor at BBC News – and with the NHS seldom out of the headlines, it’s a full-on job. But Hugh is only too pleased to be involved.
“If I sound like a World War One enthusiast (or even bore!) that’s probably because I am one! My grandfather, the Rev Tom Pym served as a chaplain in the trenches and his letters and a short biography written by my grandmother are moving to read. His experiences working with frontline troops under ire profoundly afected his view of the role of the church. He realised it had to reach out from its comfortable pre-war place in society. Working with other chaplains he pushed for reform of the Anglican church after the war though they found it hard to pursue their goals after returning home.
“My great aunt Dr Frances Ivens was a pioneering member of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals movement started by Dr Elsie Inglis in 1914. Ofering their services to the British Army they were told to ‘go back home and sit still’. Undeterred they ofered their services to the French and Serbian authorities and were immediately commissioned to run hospitals close to the frontlines. I was pleased to take part in a service to make the centenary of the death of Elsie Inglis in November last year at St Giles’ Cathedral.
“I feel it is so important to remember the eforts and sacriices of the Great War generation as the centenary of the Armistice approaches. It has been a privilege to be involved in the Scots in Great War London project. As well as the book there is a programme of events over the autumn including an evening of words and music at St Columba’s on Saturday, October 20.
“2018, then, has been a busy year. Working with Susan I helped with the ‘In Conversation’ strand of the Heart and Soul day at the General Assembly. We were pleased with the numbers who visited our programme of talks and discussions. This included publicising Scots in Great War London. I was also delighted to participate by giving out some of the awards and paying my respects to the people who do the incredible work that CrossReach do, in the annual Crossreach awards ceremony.
“I feel blessed to be part of all this and join others of faith to celebrate and publicise the work of the Church of Scotland in London and Scotland. Do come and say hello if you are ever at Pont Street in London on a Sunday. “I promise you will get a warm welcome!”
More details are on the website, scotsingreatwar.london
This article appears in the August 2018 Issue of Life and Work
If you would like to view other issues of Life and Work, you can see the full archive
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