St Mary-le-Bow public debates

Long description:

Recordings in this collection are available for Higher and Further Education institutions only.

At one o’clock every Tuesday lunchtime for fifteen years (1964-1979), Joseph McCulloch, the Rector of St Mary-le-Bow Church in the City of London, invited a well-known public figure to debate an issue of the day. Popular amongst city workers, guests included Enoch Powell on race, Diana Rigg on single parentage, A J Ayer on moral responsibility, Edna O’Brien on fear, and Germaine Greer on free will.

Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past.  The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective.  The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.

One of the regular guests, Bernard Levin, has described how ‘we descend at one o’clock, climb into our pulpits, drape microphones round our necks (for he has taped the debates for a good many years now), he states the theme and asks a question and we are off’. In 1970, plain clothes detectives and television cameras watched as Enoch Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge debated race. Margaret Drabble remembered her visits as ‘a curious mixture of the sacred and the profane’.

Much of the success of the dialogues was due to the subtle yet controversial questioning skills of Joseph McCulloch himself. Even before he was appointed to St Mary-le-Bow in 1959, McCulloch had developed a formidable reputation for unconventionality. At Chatham Parish Church after the war he had used drama, mime, music and speeches to greatly increase the depleted congregation. St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, a Wren church, had been badly bombed during the war and whilst it was being restored McCulloch decided to install twin pulpits. When the church was reconsecrated in 1964 the debates began, initially as a series of talks between Christian clergy, but later a wide range of people from entertainment, business, politics, science and the media were invited. More shrewdly, McCulloch recognised that as the City is largely non-residential, lunchtime events could attract non-churchgoers and those who would never be there on a Sunday. Yet his aim was not to recruit Anglicans nor to offer his audience any answers, but ‘to stimulate the thinking of the people’. By the early 1970s the dialogues were packing the church to the doors and had become so well-known that in 1974 McCulloch selected twenty of the best for a book, Under Bow Bells (Sheldon Press). His slogan was ‘I do not know says the Great Bell of Bow: certainties divide us and doubts bring us together’.

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