The Bremen Bod Blog

  'His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is... where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there... in peace. War will make corpses of us all.' Captain Faramir The Two Towers   I'm assuming we're all just going to carry on as normal, as if North Koreans aren't on European soil? North Korea is participating in the invasion and occupation of a sovereign European nation and yet it has barely made the news. Obviously, there's the usual omerta from all the Morning Star, Socialist Worker and Stop the War, Trots and Tankies. Similarly, there is an equal measure of silence from all those supposedly virulent anti-communists, who like to hysterically brand any form of socialised healthcare and welfare as 'communism', amid an actual communist invasion of Eastern Europe. There is also silence from the so-called 'defenders...

I am making this fraternal appeal for solidarity to all trade unionists, socialist friends and ‘comrades’ in Scotland on the Left, who care about defending the marginalised and fighting against inequality, because this issue is truly a social justice issue. I appeal, not on behalf of social conservatives or religious fanatics but on behalf of ordinary families with elderly relatives who are concerned about the new Assisted Dying Bill. I appeal on behalf of parents and grandparents of disabled children and grandchildren, who are deeply worried about the future implications of this proposed legislation and the message this most recent Assisted Dying Bill sends to their loved ones. At first glance, the Assisted Dying Bill Scotland looks and sounds a little like the type of good end of life care that goes on in all our fine hospices, with its somewhat misleading language around freedom from suffering being made available to all those who are terminally ill. Or assisted dying only being off...

Someone recently asked me why I don't write columns and articles for magazines and other publications anymore and why I now mostly post banter, junior football, hiking, cycling and music stuff on my socials, rather than serious theology and political content.  The answer is simple, the climate of online debate within both faith and political circles, is increasingly toxic and I am done with rancour and resentment, it is totally unhealthy and unfruitful. I am done with theological bickering and polemics, it is embarrassing for us Christians to be slagging each other off so much (myself included).  Especially, while we all sit back and watch an ongoing genocide in Gaza unfold and wait to see how Iran will respond to Israel's recent strikes against Hezbollah. Or how Putin will respond to Ukraine's incursion into Russian territory in the last few days, or how the UK race riots will eventually play out, or what the diabolical Trump-Musk alignment means for the world. It is also ...

  It’s probably worth stating from the outset that I am not actually opposed to Orange Walks and I didn’t submit an objection to the upcoming parade through Gourock. This is because, like many people on the west of Scotland, my own identity, religious heritage and ethnicity is a rich mix of Scottish Free Church Presbyterian, Irish Catholic and German Lutheran, alongside Episcopalian, Welsh, Ulster Scots and Highland Gael on my wife’s side.  As such, I can generally see things from both perspectives and I often suspect that much of the tension which surrounds marching season, is rooted in suspicion, rather than reality. For instance, a significant number of Scottish Catholics feel that those banging the big Lambeg drum outside the chapel each summer, are the descendants of the very same ‘Peep-o'-Day Boys‘, who once carried out the mass wrecking of Catholic cottages and burned their Irish forefathers out their homes, centuries ago. For some within the Catholic community, the...

  Today's object is my 1842 edition of John Bunyan's The Pilgrims Progress which was first published as a Christian allegorical work of theological fiction in 1678. The Pilgrims Progress is important and significant for some Christian Socialists because it influenced the Beveridge Report. William Beveridge’s lifted Bunyan's same allegorical language contained in The Pilgrim’s Progress, to inspire his own ‘Beveridge Report’, written in 1942. Like Bunyan, Beveridge speaks of slaying the five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The Beveridge Report, together with Archbishop William Temple’s ‘Christianity and the Social Order’, formed the basis of the post-war settlement and the creation of the Welafre State, NHS, Council Houses, National Insurance etc all implemented by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Government. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour Government’s was quite Christian in both its ethos and origin. All the new council houses built after 1945 were rega...

  The other day I wrote about my Granda's Pacific Star medal from the war and how he struggled to find work after WWII . By way of contrast, today's object is a Glasgow Corporation Peace Medal from 1919, to mark the ending of hostlities, set into a white poppy. These brass peace medals were issued by nearly every town and local authority across Britain to commemorate the Versailles Treaty and given out to children as part of the Peace Day public holiday of 19 July 1919. It is perhaps helpful for us to remember just how unhappy the British public were about the various military parades and extravagant victory celebrations which took place immediately after WWI. Especially when so many ex-servicemen were now unemployed, ex-soldiers suffered greatly after the war and also during the 1921 economic slump. In Manchester, demobilised soldiers marched with banners proclaiming ‘Honour the dead - remember the living’, and ‘work not charity’. Just like their forbearers before them, f...

  I mentioned in yesterday's post, the history of the strict Presbyterian Highland Gaels in Greenock and in a previous post, I discussed the history of the temperance movement Inverclyde. My Papa Robert 'Robey' Ritchie Ahlfeld was also a lifelong teetotaller who never touched alcohol. We think this was possibly due to the fact that he was descended from a long line of strict Presbyterians on his Mother’s side, Margaret ‘Meg’ Ritchie. Although, others in the family did enjoy a drink.  The Ritchies are a very old Gourock family who joined the dissenting party during the great disruption of 1843. It is said that Gourock’s Free Church adherents belonged to families descended from Covenanters. As such, they spent sometime during the early days of the disruption, holding their services of worship at old conventicles out on the open moors above Gourock, just as their ancestors had done centuries earlier during the ‘Killing Time’ of the 1680s. The location of one such conventi...

  I mentioned in yesterday's post that my Grandfather Dennis Haggerty worked as a docker for period after the war. Granda Haggerty was in the Royal Navy during the war and was awarded the Pacific Star but he never wore any of his medals or ever wore a poppy either. This is because Granda was still fighting the Japanese in the Pacific right up until VJ day and by the time he got home, he couldn't get his old job back or find any other work or receive any financial help from the Earl Haig fund. For Wee Dinny, post-war Scotland wasn't 'a land fit for heroes'. However, my Granda came back from the Pacific Campaign with a deep respect and admiration for Australians, and he actually wanted to move to Australia but my Gran didn't want to move way. The other thing my Granda brought home from the war was a dislike of what he called "Teuchters' and 'Wee Frees' from the Isles and this antipathy towards Highlanders continued into his working life at the...

  My Granda Haggerty worked as a docker for a period after the war, so today's object is my dockers brass tally which originally comes from East London. Y esterday I wrote about Cardinal Manning's involvement in the Temperance movement here in Greenock. Manning was also instrumental in resolving the London Dock’s strike of 1889; many of the Dockers were Irish, whereas lots of the shipyard workers at Thames Ironworks in East London were Scots mainly from Dundee, while Germans were mostly employed in the Sugar refineries in places like Whitechapel. Indeed, Cardinal Manning’s sincere empathy for the Irish poor informed his political outlook and his strong support for workers rights and trade unions. This brass tally of mines is a ' Docks and Inland Waterways Executive' brass tally from 1948 following nationalisation of the Docks by Attlee's post-war Labour Government. Before the Dock Labour Scheme was created in 1946, bringing with it at least some guarantee of p...

  This beautiful little pin of the Sacred Heart came down to me from my Mum's Haggerty and McGarry side of the family, it once belonged to a Great Aunt who had been a member of the 'Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart'. PTAA members were known as pioneers and they had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, pioneers wore a lapel pin just like this one. Abstinence and temperance have always been a big deal in Greenock, John Dunlop established Britain’s first temperance society in Greenock in in 1829. A few years earlier in 1820, the famous sugar baron Abram Lyle was born in Greenock, in the same year the Scottish radical James Wilson was executed for breaking prisoners out of Greenock jail during the Scottish Radical War. Abram had been the grandson of a weaver and the son of an alcoholic cooper, who left his son in debt and it was Abram's deep Christian faith which drove him to promote sugar and confectionary as an alternative to alcohol. Lyle once ...

“The hand of Vengeance found the Bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled The iron hand crush’d the tyrant’s head And became Tyrant in his stead.” William Blake I was very pleased to read that our grand old neoclassical 18th/19th century municipal building here in Inverclyde is having some maintenance work carried out. Even during these times of austerity and dwindling public funds, it is important that our symbols of civic pride and architectural beauty are maintained. The Municipal buildings are A listed and the Grand Corridor and Council Chambers are very fine examples of Georgian and Victorian splendour. Years back on Doors Open Day, a lovely long serving Council official informed me that it is unclear which statues once stood on each plinth within the now empty alcoves dotted all around the outside walls of the building or even what some of the remaining carvings represent. This sad state of affairs is down to the fact the original plans are apparently lost? I don't know about the ...

In the 90s I was possibly the only teenager in Scotland listening to Redskins and Billy Bragg, rather than Oasis and Blur. In fact, e xactly 28 years ago this February in 1996, aged 19 years old, I attend a meeting at the T&G Halls in Glasgow on a Saturday afternoon, to listen to Arthur Scargill and the late great Bob Crow from the RMT, launch the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland. Bob Crow talked about attacks made on the working classes, through the anti-trade union laws, which New Labour had condoned by refusing to repeal them, if they won the upcoming General Election. Describing the crappy train service, since the Tories had privatised British Rail, Crow quipped in his quintessential Essex accent, 'Never mind leafs on the track, there's theives on the track!' Meanwhile, the typically passionate Scargill railed against recent change in the Labour Party under Tony Blair's leadership, especially the dropping of clause four. I vividly remember being on my feet...

T here are those of us within the Church who self-identity as 'Evangelisch-Katholisch' or 'Augustana-Catholic', whose dearest wish is to live to see a reconciliation between Lutherans and Catholics, or at the very least, more provision for inter-communion and joint worship.  This is especially true of both post-war German Churches, where it is hoped that the recent Synod gathering in Rome will go some way towards healing the schism. As such, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Synodical Way (Weg) would be right up our ' Straße' but you'd be mistaken. The Synodical Path is pretty much entirely spirit led and seems mostly based upon personal revelation, with delegates constantly deferring to each individual listening to what the holy spirit is telling us and where its leading us. In his Smalcald Articles part 3 article 8, Martin Luther talks about 'enthusiasm' and totally rejects what he describes as the inward Word, the secret Word and the ...