Veteran Padres and the Idealism of Fellowship in Post-War Britain

Abstract

On 5 December 1918 a general election meeting was held in the small town of Tonbridge in Kent. The Labour candidate for the constituency, Jack Palmer, was joined on the platform by one Charles Earle Raven, a former army chaplain and Classics master at Tonbridge School. Raven was the son of a successful London barrister and the product of Uppingham School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He had excelled academically as an undergraduate and after his ordination in 1909 he returned to Cambridge to accept the position of Dean of Emmanuel College, where he soon established himself as an original and influential theologian. With his background of social privilege and strong association with elite institutions, Raven was quite representative of the generation of Anglican clergy that served as army chaplains during the war. When he addressed the meeting at Tonbridge, however, he went somewhat further than urging those present to support Mr Palmer. ‘I am’, he declared, ‘a member of the working class as I earn my bread with the sweat of my brow. I have seen hundreds of men die in one faith. We are therefore pledged to bring in a new order. If we fail we shall have lied to the dead, and those men will have died in vain’.¹ Raven’s initial interest in the plight of the working classes can be traced to ten months spent in Liverpool after his graduation, but the extraordinary identification with the cause of Labour that he chose to express at Tonbridge was the result of his experience as a padre in France.