My mother’s and, I think, my grandfather’s hero was Arthur Shearly Cripps (1869–1952). He had attended Charterhouse and Trinity College, Oxford, where he knew the poet Laurence Binyon (remembered as the composer of ‘For the Fallen’) and won a prestigious poetry prize. His theological education was at Cuddesdon College, near Oxford, relatively Low Church, but he was much influenced by the Roman-leaning Charles Gore and the Pusey House Group, greatly moved by its pronounced social conscience. In 1893 he was a curate at Icklesham, Sussex (my great-grandfather Revd Charles Bedford was twenty miles away at Denton).
Then, whilst Vicar of Ford End, Essex, he read Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, a bitter satire on Rhodes’s and the BSA Company’s subjugation of the rebellions: the frontispiece was a photograph of nonchalant white troops lounging below a mimosa tree, hanged black ‘spies’ weighing down the branches, which made a deep impression upon him, one that stayed with him for the length of his life, one which persuaded him to work as a missionary in Africa. He became a strident if erratic critic of ‘settler’ attitudes.
Cripps was variously described as awkward, rangy, shy, impractical, set-jawed. He lived from 1901 until 1926, apart from a period as a chaplain to the forces in East Africa during the Great War, on Wrenington Mission, where he built a church with a round nave and two round transepts and lived in a hut in Franciscan simplicity. Wrenington, in the deeply conservative Charter District, was bordered by Afrikaans farmers. The nearest town was Enkeldoorn (Chivhu) and Cripps walked eight miles each way each Sunday to take a service there.
In 1926 he returned to England for a period but from 1930 until his death lived, no longer attached to the Anglican Church, in a lone hut on his own farm. There he encouraged his converts to work as tenant farmers and build a new church, the famous Maronda Mashanu (‘Five Wounds’). Naturally enough, various legends attached themselves to him: for example, that as he never owned a car he used to run everywhere, that he made a visiting dignitary ride bare-backed upon a donkey, that he would refuse gifts of new furniture. His clothes were old, his tobacco atrocious.
As a Puseyite, though inspired by the idea of a ‘Black Christ’, Cripps (and his flock) were not averse to adopting formal European attire and due ceremony, as witness a famous picture of his converts dressed in white wedding gowns and veils and white suits and ties. His material accomplishments, as a backward-looking idealist, might not have been great, but there is little doubt that he was respected by Africans, who came from afar to see him, and he was widely recognised, mostly after his death, as a secular saint. However, he was despised by most Europeans: a typical tale is of a farmer who offered him a lift but on discovering his opinions dropped him beside the road, many miles from town. It must be said that he rather exulted in his outsider reputation.
Cripps wrote pamphlets on the hut tax, a book on land segregation and innumerable letters to the newspapers, along with children’s tales and a school story. And here we must make room for a few words about his poetry. He was old-fashioned, a classicist, pedantic sometimes to the point of strangulation, a lonely English voice who made little use of vernacular terms or African myth or imagery inspired by the veld. He spoke of a ‘hoe’ rather than a ‘badza‘, of Pan or Penelope rather than the Mambo kings or the M’limo. This is an example of his more accomplished work:
Now go, a veldsore in each lifted hand, Go with two blistered feet your altar's way; With pity's wound at heart, go praise and pray! Go, wounds to Wounds; why you are glad today, He, whose Five Wounds you wear, will understand.
The tormented poems composed during the war in East Africa meditate upon his mission, his patriotism, his homesickness, his wearied abhorrence of the slaughter. Frankly political, however, is this poem directed at ‘our rulers of natives in Africa’:
He's but a child. You say so, do you not, To prove his need of stripes, to prove your right To lock his hand away, and to requite His work with wages of a child? You blot His franchise out. You mildly murmur: 'What Use has he for a vote? His needs are slight, His name upon a hut-tax roll indite, And tax his blanket too, or cooking pot!' A child? He bears the burthen and the heat Of grown men's war (How fast child-porters die! Who forced their labour, halv'd their pay, let ply The hippo-hide?) A child! Your task how sweet – To speed on blood-trails child-askaris' feet, And set babes' hands to murder, standing by!
And here is a frequently-quoted refrain, one of many that reflect his isolation:
Tell the tune his feet beat On the ground all day – Black-burnt ground and green grass Seamed with rocks of grey – 'England', 'England' 'England', That one word they say. Now they tread the beech-mast, Now the ploughland's clay, Now the faery ball-floor of her fields in May. Now her red June sorrel, now her new-turned hay, Now they keep the great road, now by sheep-path stray, Still it's 'England', 'England', 'England, all the way!
I can remember listening to him at a service he was conducting for the newly confirmed at the Church of St Paul in Marlborough, Salisbury, in about 1955, fearful of catching my mother’s eye, but to no avail. We collapsed in giggles.)
Whilst on the subject of religion I shall recall the terrible tale of Mrs Murphy’s daughter, Ada – it says rather too much about attitudes of the time. When Ada was in her teens, and her mother terminally ill with cancer, in the late 1920s, she became pregnant by a married man. He refused to accept responsibility, and though Ada was a Catholic, as her father had been, and attended the Convent School in Bulawayo, her Church would not have anything to do with her. Nor would the Dutch Reformed Church, though that was her mother’s faith. Even the maternity home would not accept her so she was forced to give birth at home with her dying mother (who was at least a midwife!) in attendance. Mercifully the Salvation Army, newly active in Bulawayo, took it upon themselves to come round and check up on her. They were there to help Mrs Murphy deliver the baby, a little girl, and helped to get Ada a job as a waitress in a cheap Greek restaurant. Of course the scandal spread across the town. My grandmother Winnie was dead by then and at first the gossip was kept from my mother’s, Ivy’s, tender ears. My Aunt Violet, as undisputed head of the household (my grandfather too mild-mannered to intervene) was unbendingly censorious and forbade anyone in the family to see the disgraced Murphys. My Aunt Rhoda, however, broke ranks; unable to face the quandary alone she explained the situation to Ivy, a young teenager, and together they visited the old family friends, just before the baby was due. Thereafter they dropped round regularly. The story has a happy ending. Ada married a Greek, a new immigrant, and their daughter kept in touch with Rhoda.
Cripps’s political ally, incidentally, was Canon Edgar Lloyd, from humble background and trained at an SPCK college, who was stationed at Rusape from 1903 to 1936. He saw his duty clearly; he bore the White Man’s Burden steadfastly; he made 500 mile journeys by donkey round the reserves.
References
Brettell, NH ‘Three Rhodesian Poets’ Rhodesiana 1958, no 3, pp 29–39.
Finn, D.E. ”Kambandakoto’: a study of AS Cripps 1869–1952′ Rhodesiana 1962, no 7, pp 34–43.
Rhodesian Verse, 1888–1938, ed by John Snelling. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938.
Welch, Pamela Church and Settler in Colonial Zimbabwe: a study in the history of the Anglican Diocese of Mashonaland / Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1925. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008 (Studies of Religion in Africa: supplements to the Journal of Religion in Africa, no 34). Crockford’s 1920 & 1930 Rhodesia Directory 1939.
Born in Zimbabwe in 1941, Digby Hartridge has worked on three continents in diverse occupations, including archivist, oral historian, lecturer, librarian and training officer.