God is with us for our Captain



‘So wickedly, so devilishly false is that common objection: They are only poor because they are that idle’

John Wesley

 


Way back in 2007 I climbed Ben Nevis with my wife’s cousin Chris and her Uncle Samuel (our youngest son is also named Samuel) from South Shields and a great bunch of lads from Newcastle, who were raising money for a local charity. 


It was wonderful day out and we had a brilliant laugh. I still recall some of the banter as we were half way up the mountain, with some other lads wearing Sunderland shirts, who appeared out the mist, on their way back down. It was all quite surreal!


If you look at the photographs below, you’ll notice I’m the only person wearing actual hiking gear, the Geordie boys just rocked up in the morning wearing t-shirts, Newcastle shirts, shorts and trainers, to climb Brtian’s highest mountain...which still had snow on the summit at that time of the year.


Regardless, they all still made it to the top with ease, despite absolutely canning it the night before, you could actually smell the alcohol being sweated out of team, as we climbed up.


However, it was all done for a special reason and these good natured, big hearted young men raised a lot of money for a good cause that day. 


Interestingly, there is a long tradition of groups of young men from industrial towns and working class communities in England, coming north to climb Ben Nevis.

 

For example, if you’ve ever climbed Ben Nevis then you’ll have noticed the Ben Nevis Peace Cairn which was built by the famous Methodist preacher Bert Bissell on VJ-Day, 1945, when he took a group of Black Country boys from his Bible school to the summit, where they constructed the cairn. Bert Bissell was a life-long peace activist who was awarded the prestigious World Methodist Peace Award.


Interestingly, Manchester United legend Duncan Edwards, who tragically died of his injuries following the Air Disaster, attended Bert Bissell’s Young Men's Bible Class at Vicar Street Methodist Church in Dudley. Duncan Edwards remained a teetotaller in the Methodist tradition until he died and today Edwards is commemorated by a beautiful stained glass window at St Francis’s Church in his native Dudley.


Perhaps controversially, it is exactly these kind of well established social and cultural links with England and those deep bonds of kinship with English communities, rather than any political or economic arguments, which often makes the thought of Scottish independence quite difficult for me.


Are we really saying the young men of Dudley who built the cairn came from a foreign country? Do we honestly believe the boys from Shields are not ‘our own people’, living the same lives, living in the same streets, drinking the same pubs, working in the same jobs as lads from Glasgow, Paisley or Greenock, Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds?


For me, contained within these two examples alone, are aspects of unity found in heritage, faith, family, politics and football. Especially the life and witness of the Christian peace activist and community worker Bert Bissell, of blessed memory.


Similarly, Bissell’s optimism for a more peaceful post-war world, free from war and killing is part of that same hopeful spirit of 45’ which seen the creation of the welfare state, NHS and social housing.


As Michael Foot describes it - ‘I remember the mood which swept this country in the years after 1940. Overnight almost, Britain became a country suffused by what I would describe as a socialist inspiration. The sense of common purpose for the whole community took command; the class barriers started to come down; the unrivalled skill and ingenuity of the British people, so long stifled by the pre-war Tory establishment, was unleashed’.


In the same spirit, back in 2020 Justin Welby the Archbishop of Canterbury said there is the possibility of a better society after the pandemic, calling for a “resurrection of our common life”. 


Welby felt that there was an opportunity to be seized, a moment akin to 1945 when a group of people many of them Christian like RH Tawney, and his predecessor archbishop William Temple and William Beveridge came together to reimagine a new country that could rise from the ashes of WW2.


Sadly, the exact opposite has happened - Post covid society has left us with nearly all dentists privatised, it’s left our NHS in tatters, A&E and trying to get a doctors appointment is a nightmare. Similarly housing, poverty, pay and conditions have gotten worse over the last few years.


Instead, the pandemic has actually been an opportunity for the Tories and the capitalist class to dismantle many of the lingering achievements from 1945 -welfare, education, healthcare, decent affordable housing.














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