A Poet: A Prophet:

A Passionate

seeker after Truth

Revd Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (1883–1929)

A very different

kind of war hero.

Went to school in Leeds.

University in Dublin Worked as a teacher in Liverpool.

Then became a Vicar.

St Pauls, Worchester

‘Blockhouse Fields’

He felt passionate about helping and supporting the poor and would spend hours listening to people after his services.

Army Chaplain in the First World War (1915)

Began writing poems that were as passionate as his sermons in St Pauls.

They gave me this name like their nature,

Compacted of laughter and tears,

A sweet that was born of the bitter,

A joke that was torn from the years.

Their name! Let me hear it--the symbol

Of unpaid--unpayable debt, For the men to whom I owed

God's Peace, I put off with a cigarette.

Yet men are dying, dying soul and body,

Cursing the God who gave to them their birth,

Sick of the world with all its sham and shoddy,

Sick of the lies that darken all the earth.

Peace we were pledged, yet blood is ever flowing,

Where on the earth has Peace been ever found?

Men do but reap the harvest of their sowing,

Sadly the songs of human reapers sound.

“War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it

at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real

war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that’s all there is in it.”

“ He cracked jokes, laughed with

them, sat on the edge of the

speaking platform with his legs

dangling, and used salty language.”

'And here's the bloody vicar'.

‘a box of fags in your haversack,

and a great deal of love in your heart’

‘You can pray with them sometimes; but pray for them

always’

A soldier challenged him, asking who he was, and he said "The church."

When the soldier asked what the church was doing out there, he replied "Its job."

“I wish we could have got those chaps down. It was murder to attempt it though. That poor lad, all blown to bits – I wonder who he was. God, it’s awful. The glory of war, what utter

blather it all is ...”

WASTE

Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,

Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,

Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,

Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,

Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,

Waste of Youth’s most precious years.

Waste of Glory, waste of God,– War!

Despite being a chaplain to the king, Revd Studdert Kennedy proved he was no establishment figure by becoming a fierce critic of the hardships faced by returning soldiers.

"We let him work himself to death… he gave his life for us".

A PoetA ProphetA Passionate seeker after Truth?

Small kindness.