Publications: Reviews

LOOSE CANON edited by Damian Thompson
Continuum 2004 163pp £16.99

Brian Dominick Frederick Titus Brindley (1931-2001) – hereafter “BB” – was an Anglican parish priest who was as large as his names, and about as much of a self-invention. He could be loved and loathed – and sometimes serially. A permanent fixture in the Church of England, he died as a Roman Catholic layman just over a decade after throwing his career away, when for once, as his mouth ran away with him, it wasn’t in the right place at the right time -- and with the right company.

Loose Canon is subtitled “A Portrait of Brian Brindley”. It is in fact a collection of nine portraits, at least part Impressionistic and Pre-Raphaelite. Wandering through this gallery, I recognized them all, to a lesser or greater extent. Now I must declare my personal interest in this book -- I knew BB when I lived in Reading between 1982 and 1987, and was a worshipper at Holy Trinity church. I was soon “taken up”, in all sorts of senses, and I think that I came to know BB quite well. Our main point of contact was architecture. (It certainly wasn’t politics.) Once he was aware that I knew my Corinthian from my Doric, and could recognise giant orders when I saw them, one barrier at least came down. (But many never really did, as this book will make clear. Good fences make good neighbours.) And I soon got to know the difference between a thurible and a chasuble. I became one of a small coterie that was allowed to tease him gently, and to get away with it – for instance one year telling him that there were a whole load of spelling mistakes in a “Christmass” issue of Battle (the lively parish magazine).

Damian Thompson’s Introduction is a perceptive and generally direct summary. It makes the vital point that, for his congregation, BB opened up “a path to God” (2). Thompson’s final, and correct, observation could serve as an epitaph: “As an Anglican priest and, later, a Catholic journalist, Brian enriched the fabric of two great churches – whether they liked it or not” (6).

Thompson’s own contribution to Loose Canon is the sensitive obituary that he published in the Spectator. The awful, absurd, and now legendary circumstances of BB’s last hours and death are narrated in a word-picture that leaves nothing more to say.

BB’s time at school (Stowe) and university (Exeter College, Oxford) are recalled in the next four essays. Colin Anson describes BB’s family background, and the tremendous and unconventional influence of their history tutor Bill McElwee. The portraits by P J Kavanagh, Ned Sherrin, and Alan Bennett show the young BB beginning to be that mixture of the wise, the witty, the extravagant, the bizarre, and the heaven-knows-what-else, that he seamlessly grew into further as the years passed. Kavanagh recalls one wise comment: BB told him that if he was ever disgusted by contemporary ugliness in a town, he had only to lift his eyes above the shop-fronts, and enjoy the architecture that remained (22). BB gave me that same sound advice about Broad Street and Oxford Road in Reading thirty or so years later. (It worked there and then, and still works anywhere else.)

Ned Sherrin’s and Alan Bennett’s contributions can easily be imagined as read by their authors. Bennett is the first to mention BB’s homosexuality, and he characteristically (for both men) transforms a simple remark into the recollection of a couple of meticulously funny anecdotes that otherwise couldn’t have happened.

The next two essays are more personal and intimate. They show the friend that BB could be, but sometimes wasn’t -- often for the apparently most petty of reasons. Nicholas Krasno’s “A Priest Remembered” is the only contribution to give away in its title the central aspect of BB’s life and work. It is a sudden and welcome recall to the facts. Krasno was an impressionable Reading lad who came into contact with BB by simply being brought along to Holy Trinity to worship. The other who stayed to pray was another Reading teenager, the “precocious” Peter Sheppard, whose portrait of the Old Master is painted with a sure and evocative hand. Both men played important parts helping BB to realise many of his schemes in the enrichment and running of Holy Trinity church and parish. (It is good to be reminded that it really was me, and not someone else, who once lived in Reading: many of their recollections of “life with Father” tally exactly with mine.)

Seán Finnegan contributes a delightful excursus on BB and his adventures in computing. He was never one to use merely a font or two when ten at least were available. My box of Battle and other Holy Trinity publications bears this out. BB embraced this technology and was usually able to make it his playful servant.

The bulk of the content of Loose Canon consists of Anthony Symondson’s essay (the title alone is worth the price of admission!) in which he also provides what is probably the closest thing we yet have to a biography of BB, and which begins to seriously touch on the core of its subject. As we move towards the end we see a portrait of a man – one whose experiences and transformed foolishnesses turned him into a better friend and a kinder human being. Perhaps they even really began to truly humanize him. As Peter Sheppard also points out, adversity can strengthen and renew friendship.

Here we not only get a portrait, but after the gallery itself we are seated in the café for something a bit stronger, and with a small but critical guide from the shop. This effectively means facing (quoting Andrew Brown) “the fact that he was gay but none the less trying to make a career in an organisation that officially reprehended this. Yet nothing about his life makes sense without this fact, not even his choice of career” (119). Perhaps that open secret was too obvious, we all took it for granted.

I have only one recollection of BB saying that he was gay, and even that was in a roundabout way. We were English and he was (then) Anglican, after all. Symondson’s estimation of BB’s character, setting him in context as a man of the decades he lived through and which inevitably helped to shape him, is a filling (for now) and fitting conclusion. “Not all moralize, and there are many whose eyes brighten when Brian is mentioned” (122).

But there did have to be the moralizing. After BB’s downfall there was still time for a vile campaign by several members of the Church of England’s General Synod who should have known better (or whose God just couldn’t get himself heard over the sounds of their own choruses). Its needlessness was what was the most shocking to us. It was scores being settled by homophobia disguised as homiletic. A black blizzard of photocopied text flew in one direction only, and it all edified no-one who mattered.

And then in his last years BB “made his soul” (121). I regret not knowing that Brian Brindley.

Loose Canon is garnished with a selection of “Charterhouse Chronicles” – BB’s own late-flowering paid journalism. These twelve pieces are delightful and eclectic, yet often with an edge to them. There is also a small collection of photographs, well-chosen and illustrative.

Brian Brindley was a mixture of John Betjeman, Dr Johnson, and Mr Pooter. There could be hints of Tiberius Caesar or even Petronius Arbiter. Miss Mapp, Lucia, and Georgie Pillson could sometimes be recognised, and all at once. But it is Richard Harries’ quip “Glory be to God for Brindled things --” (as I remember it) that remains in my mind. (The italics were verbal.) And all things counter, original, spare, strange; whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) with swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim...

(A much shorter version of this review was published in Renew.)

Copyright (c) 2004 John Howard