The Archbishop’s 40 years with Martha
Ican’t express how much I have been enjoying The Confidential Diaries of Alan Don, who was for a decade from 1931 chaplain and secretary to the strange Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang.
Both were Scots, both upper-middle class, and both had wife trouble. Lang’s trouble was that he had never married, though he proposed twice – to the same woman. Don, 20 years his junior, was married, but increasingly unhappily, until his wife (“a scold and a sourpuss” in the words of a nephew) lived apart from him.
I haven’t room enough here to give the 500-page diaries a review. They have been brilliantly reduced from 1,764 closely written pages by Robert Beaken, who wrote a marvellous biography of Lang in 2012. Although Don (called Faithful Witness in the main title of these diaries) is writing all the time about his never dull boss (“CC” – Cosmo Cantuar), we learn, of course, a great deal about the diarist.
There is a tragicomic thread through the diaries provided by Martha Savill, Lang’s housemaid for almost 40 years. “She was the Archbishop’s personal valet,” wrote another chaplain at Lambeth, “fiercely possessive, allowing no one to invade her territory, which was the care of his rooms and his clothes and packing and everything that appertained to him, barring only the sphere of His Grace’s work.”
She was almost like some wives, one might think. But Martha, aptly named after Jesus’s friend in the Gospel who was “troubled about many things”, had a lot to put up with. It must be understood that Lang sought to be holy, to pray, to preach well, to work – indeed overwork for years. None of this removed what he called his “surface irritation”. He was irritated by his visiting brother, by the head of the Salvation Amy, by “a singularly tiresome deaconess”, by less nimble-witted brother bishops.
At the beginning of a service he took at Broadstairs, his surface irritation was plain to see. “It is always regrettable when he appears irritated in face of a large congregation which has turned out in his honour,” noted Don. “He is apt to produce a feeling of acute discomfort in those in attendance on him who do not know his little ways.”
In the diaries Martha makes her entrance early one morning at Lambeth Palace, with “CC trying to get abreast of his correspondence – rather irritable – ‘These constant interruptions!’ when poor Martha brought him his milk.”
Visiting Don and his wife Muriel for tea on a rare occasion, Lang “spoke of the way the faithful Martha fussed over him and how greatly it irritated him and how penitent he was afterwards when he said his prayers at night”.
The relationship was not one-sided. At the house in Scotland where Lang spent weeks in the summer, the
cook had got hold of some sheep’s brains with a view to introducing some variety into the Archbishop’s diet. “Martha offered the dainty dish to His Grace – ‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘These are brains, your Grace,’ said the guileless Martha, ‘you haven’t had any for a long time.’ ‘You needn’t tell me that,’ said CC.”
It was Martha who looked after Don at Lambeth for a fortnight, while his wife stayed away, when, aged 48, his heart nearly did for him.
But in 1941, “when the Lambeth household was broken up following the bombing of the palace,” Beaken writes, “Martha was obliged to leave the Archbishop’s employ and moved to live with friends in the country. She died three years afterwards; perhaps, one wonders, of a broken heart.”