Various commentators and rioters discovered Southport this summer, following the tragic killing of three young girls who were stabbed to death at a dance studio. The seventeen year-old attacker also inflicted serious injuries on other little girls and on adults who tried to protect them. He was soon arrested back in the place where he lived, Banks, just north of Southport. He has appeared briefly in court in Liverpool. His mindset is, for now, unfathomable.
We might learn more at his next court hearing later this year. Those who took to the streets and attacked people and property are being dealt with swiftly by the legal system. Judge after judge has emphasised that there was no excuse for the violence which followed in various towns. In particular, there were nasty attacks by a mob on a mosque in Southport. It was uplifting, in contrast, to see Southport residents clearing up the mess left by the rioters and helping to restore the mosque and the confidence of its community. This is the real spirit of Southport.
While keeping the victims and their families in our thoughts and prayers, is there something else that we can do when tragedy strikes? In particular, is there something that we can learn from what has been missed by mass media and social media coverage?
When my wife, Patricia, was a little girl, she moved with her family to Southport in 1967. We were married in Southport in 1982. We visited frequently until my parents-in-law died in 2006. We have continued to go there. Those who have never left, of course, know Southport better. And some of those who came to it for the first time this summer seem to think they know all they need to know about it. But having moved to the west, east and south of Southport, while frequently visiting over decades, gives a certain perspective that might be of interest.
Commentary hitherto has almost completely omitted the history and geography of Southport and Banks, the flows of people and of the sea. Yet the erosion of the Sefton Coast has had practical and economic consequences for Southport’s tourism and can be seen as a symbol for a perception of receding opportunities. Or, more positively, it can be seen as an early warning of the environmental crisis and an encouragement to foster sustainability. Certainly, a glorious history repays careful study. At the very least, those interested in theology in the public square, the domain of the William Temple Foundation, might wish to know a little of the background to the places and communities thrust so wretchedly this summer into national consciousness.
I have drawn attention before to the pioneering Christian witness of a principal of our William Temple College, Mollie Batten. She was the only woman to participate in the Lambeth Conference of 1968. Mollie Batten went to school in Southport during the First World War.
I have also advocated tracking the path of William Temple across the North of England, way before he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Parts of a speech he gave when he was the Bishop of Manchester in 1926 are well-known to Temple scholars for what he said about the Labour movement. This is worth re-reading at the end of a summer where Labour formed the government and took the seat of Southport, which has had Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs in recent decades. But perhaps the occasion and the location have been forgotten. It was when the Church of England held their Church Congress in Southport. You can see the bishops processing along Southport’s magnificent Lord Street in a clip from Pathe News. Temple observed, as if anticipating this summer’s rioters, that, ‘Mobs are capable of a degree of deliberate and callous cruelty of which their individual members would never dream’. But equally, he noted that those with ‘no conspicuous courage’ of their own ‘may perform prodigies of valour under the inspiring influence of the corporate spirit’.
Southport in general and Banks in particular also has tremendous form in Non-Conformist history, especially in Primitive Methodism. For example, in 1921, Christiana Hartley became the first woman to be mayor of Southport. She was from a committed, philanthropic Primitive Methodist family. Her father Sir William Hartley was the founder of the great jam business. His family home was in Banks. It is not only Southport school-children who can learn from the fact well-known locally that Christiana was a Liberal who gave her Southport mayoral salary to a Labour party project which she judged to be best placed to help the most disadvantaged.
This spirit of reaching out is exemplified in our time by Southport’s Shoreline Church’s Green Pastures project which applies the parable of the Good Samaritan to finding accommodation for the homeless.
I have argued that our Foundation should return to its roots as a College, but this time as a virtual one, offering short courses on such topics and encouraging those equally fascinated by the lives of Mollie Batten, Christiana Hartley and other faith-filled pioneers of social justice to pursue Masters by Research. Some will wish to study individuals, others a particular church community or project, such as Green Pastures, or a denomination, such as Primitive Methodists. Two years after the Church of England Congress was held in Southport, the town hosted the Primitive Methodist annual conference of 1928
There is much more to Southport than this summer’s notoriety. In 1915, Rudyard Kipling spoke in Southport, encouraging men to volunteer to fight in the War. The Southport Guardian of 23 June 1915 reported that he ended his speech thus: ‘there used to be a saying which ran: “What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” (Applause.) Let us change that saying for three years, or for the duration of the war, to “What Lancashire does to-day, England will do to-morrow.” (Loud applause.)
(Southport Guardian, 23 June 1915)
If England does what Southport has done in resisting and rising above the mob this summer, the children will not have died in vain. Local church and educational leaders have reacted perfectly and national figures have visited appropriately, including the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and the King. Royalty have been received well in Southport from King George V (hence the school, now 6th form college, KGV) and Queen Mary in 1913 through Queen Elizabeth II’s visits and on to the Princess Royal last year, while a statue of Queen Victoria is prominent in the town.
But I suggest we could also benefit from recovering that past practice of churches, and now other faith communities, as well as political parties and the TUC, taking their annual gatherings around the country (as our Foundation does, in our own small way) to come to know a little of diverse places and communities and to learn from them. Perhaps people of faith could gather in Southport in 2026, one hundred years after that Church Congress there? The agenda from 1926 stands the test of time although the line-up would now be more diverse. The two speakers immediately before William Temple were the only women to give main talks, Miss Evelyn Underhill and Mrs Louise Creighton. They spoke of the Spirit in the individual and in the home, respectively, before Temple spoke of the Spirit in the community. Could England, or society in these islands more broadly, do tomorrow what Southport has done this summer and learn from the Congress it hosted a century ago?
Simon Lee is Chair of the board of trustees of the William Temple Foundation
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