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THE GUARDS’ CHAPEL - REMEMBERING THE 1944 BOMBING
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The Bishop of London, The Rt Revd & Rt Hon Richard Chartres,
giving the sermon during the service |
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the destruction of the Guards’ Chapel on 18th June 1944 during a Sunday morning service. Just after the first lesson, a V1 flying bomb fell and exploded onto the concrete roof constructed following earlier bomb damage during the Blitz. The roof collapsed, 121 members of the congregation were killed and 141 seriously injured. The Bishop of Maidstone, standing at the altar, remaining unscathed. The officiating chaplain, The Revd Ralph Whitrow TD was killed. The altar candles continued to burn; the same cross and candlesticks on the altar remain in regular use to this day.
On 22nd June 2014, a service of commemoration and thanksgiving took place at the Guards’ Chapel to mark this tragic event. The service was conducted by The Chaplain to the Household Division, The Reverend Kevin Bell and The Lord Bishop of London, The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Richard Chartres, was the preacher. Below is a transcript of the Bishop’s sermon.
WHAT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GUARDS’ CHAPEL MEANS TO US TODAY
The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Richard Chartres,
KCVO, DD, FSA, CStJ
The Lord Bishop of London
Just a week after D-Day with Allied troops still struggling to break out of their positions in Normandy, the first of the V1 flying bombs fell on London. On Sunday June 18th this Chapel was hit and there was a tragic toll of dead and injured. Today we remember them in company with Mr Keith Lewis, last of the survivors together with relatives of those who were here on that fateful day.
In World War I the casualties were mainly on the battlefield. By World War II civilians were also in the front line and the trend has continued since 1945 with women and children the typical victims of the internal wars, like those being waged today in Syria and Iraq.
Today we remember those who fell here that June Sunday morning and also salute the courage of the Heavy Rescue Service and the other agencies, uniformed and voluntary who helped so many to safety.
We cannot change the past but we are responsible for how we remember it. Memory is more than lifting down a file from a shelf to recall a past event. Memory is a creative and responsible art which involves highlighting certain aspects of the past and identifying significant resonances. Memory informs our attitudes in the present and opens up or closes down possibilities for the future.
One of the things we remember today is the courage and spirit of resolve which equipped the forces of the Crown and civilians alike to endure long years of war and the terrors of aerial bombardment without losing the will to resist. Civilizations die in the night when no one can be found to give their lives for them. In this Cathedral of the Guards, we honour those who have served in the past and who continue to serve to protect international peace and what John of Gaunt called ‘this dear, dear land’. Afghanistan has taught us once again how costly such service can be.
But this is a Christian place of worship where we gather to honour and remember the Prince of Peace. We remember him in our worship and refuse to dismember him as we do when we are filled with bitterness and scorn. We remember him and so make his spirit present in the here and now.
We are alive to the horrors of war and indeed in my experience of those who have seen action on the battlefield, they are often much less belligerent than armchair warriors because they know the cost and the chaos of war at first hand. Only a short time before World War I, Norman Angell in his book The Great Illusion proved that war between states with developed economies was irrational because victory merely impoverished customers and destroyed markets. Nevertheless the irrational happened and some even exulted in the fact. The so called Futurist Manifesto published in 1909 glorified war and technology in a way that was echoed by the states which emerged from the ashes of the old Europe to plunge the continent once more into war in 1939. Communism, fascism, national socialism they all promised to build a heaven on earth without God but according to their various ideologies and succeeded merely in constructing their laboratories on top of a vast graveyard.
Some Christians have been so conscious of the horror and irrationality of war that they have taken a consistent position of pacifism. Theirs is an important and proper protest but for most churches their remembering of history has compelled them to come to a different conclusion. As it says in the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England - ‘It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the Magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars.’
Organised force enables the peaceable to go about their daily life undisturbed and provides a breathing space in which the slow business of building a better moral order can be undertaken. Force by itself, however, without the moral effort can often stoke up the animosities which lead to more violence. The effort after World War II to build a more moral international order at the same time as maintaining our guard against aggression has contributed to a fortunate period in the history of Europe. It is something to be thankful for.
Now the tectonic plates of the world are shifting once again and after two hundred and fifty years of unchallengeable Western hegemony we must navigate into a new multi-polar world in which the civilizations of the East will play the significant role they have occupied for most of human history.
At such a time and in such a place as we remember the events of 70 years ago, we should have no illusions about the human capacity for irrational violence or our need to remain vigilant and prepared. At the same time in this chapel and in the lesson from the first epistle of St John we have heard the yearning for something better. Without a vision of a better world we are left with the despair expressed by Robert Lowell the American poet:
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children as they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war - until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
So-called realism without a vision fails to rise to the heights of which human beings are capable but here we are nourished by an even deeper faith. In the last century the blueprints for the future drawn up by any number of secular ideologues led to untold suffering. By contrast, in this holy place so marvellously maintained over the past twenty four years by Sergeant Fred Barrett we look beyond human wisdom and our partial affections to a divine wisdom which embraces us all.
This is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his son Jesus Christ, God’s human face and his plan embodied in flesh and blood for the spiritual evolution of the whole human race and that we should love one another. The person that keepeth this commandment of God dwelleth in him and he in us as we know by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.
This restored Chapel where even the bomb blast fails to extinguish the light from the candles on the altar does not represent the sanctification of the latest human ideas for a secular utopia but the living hope for a future kingdom of peace and justice that there is in Jesus Christ. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, present with us just as those who have suffered and died or who are remembered here are present with him.
The Choir of the Guards’ Chapel with Mr Keith Lewis, who was singing in the choir when the bomb
struck on 18th June 1944. On the right, Sgt Fred Barrett
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