KELHAM, until its closure in 1972, was clearly a remarkable training college for ordinands in the Church of England, as well as the home of a religious community. Training boys and men from a wide variety of backgrounds and teaching them to think for themselves within an ordered life of prayer, it clearly appealed to T. S. Eliot, who had long been concerned about the defects of the national education system.
We know from the visitors’ book in the college that he first visited it in September 1933, and the connection continued until 1948. Vincent Strudwick who lived at Kelham for 20 years from 1950 to 1970, first as a student and then teaching history, is ideally qualified to write about the influence of Kelham on Eliot, besides giving us vignettes of the principal figures at the time, especially George Every. George Every, a scholar who eventually became a Roman Catholic, was in fairly frequent contact with Eliot over literary and theological matters.
Eliot’s relationship to Kelham and its influence on his poetry was already known, especially the formative visit in 1936 when he visited Little Gidding. It was also known that some of the imagery in “Burnt Norton IV”, “kingfisher”, “yew”, and “clematis” were derived from a visit to Kelham. But Vincent Strudwick argues that the visits were more frequent and the influence of Kelham more pervasive than this. He writes: “Eliot delighted in the company and humour of the mainly working-class students, who accepted and lionised him.” Some of what Strudwick suggests, such as the claim he made his confession while at Kelham, is without hard evidence, but is plausible conjecture.
Apart from the question of influence, this book does raise the wider question what the real importance of Kelham was for Eliot.
By 1933, Eliot had formally separated from his wife. The following year, his relationship with Emily Hale had been rekindled, and she had become for him what Beatrice had been to Dante. Strudwick writes that Emily Hale believed “Burnt Norton” to be “a love letter to her”. This is not quite correct. In 1935, probably in September, he and Emily Hale visited Burnt Norton together. Emily wanted Eliot to write her a love poem, and Eliot replied that he already had done this, and in their correspondence he refers to “Burnt Norton” as “our poem”. Against the background of that relationship, as well as the increasing tension of the political situation, followed by war, I believe Kelham acted as a model for Eliot of Christian stability and enduring Christian values in a fraught world.
Strudwick has done a great service in bringing the life of Kelham so vividly before us, and showing how it could have been so important for Eliot. We know how disillusioned Eliot was with British society from his reaction to the Munich crisis in 1938. Kelham offered an alternative: a community rooted in something deeper, which daily sought to relate earthly concerns to eternal verities and to educate Christian minds for service in the world.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. He writes about Eliot in Haunted by Christ: Modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK, 2019).
Eliot’s Transitions: T. S. Eliot’s search for identity and the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall
Vincent Strudwick
Fairacres Publications £9.50
(978-0-7283-0409-3)
Church Times Bookshop £8.55
