Richard Thomas Church

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

(26 March 1893 – 4 March 1972) was an English writer, poet and critic; he also wrote novels and verse plays, and three volumes of autobiography.

Early life

Church was born on 26 March 1893 in Battersea, in south-east London. He went to Dulwich Hamlet School in

Dulwich Dulwich (; ) is an area in south London, England. The settlement is mostly in the London Borough of Southwark, with parts in the London Borough of Lambeth, and consists of Dulwich Village, East Dulwich, West Dulwich, and the Southwark half ...

. The second son of Thomas John Church and Lavina Annie Orton Church. His mother was distantly related to the novelist

George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrot ...

but kept quiet about this because of her bohemian lifestyle. His father was a sorter for the General Post Office and his mother was a schoolteacher who suffered ill-health and died in 1910 when he was only seventeen. After leaving school at sixteen, he started work as a clerk in the Customs and Excise branch of the Civil Service. In his first volume of autobiography he recounts the physicality of his father, the intelligence of his mother, his resourceful older brother, privations, and the difficult relationship of his ill-matched parents. His first book of poems, ''The Flood of Life'', was published in 1917 when he was 24, but he remained in the Civil Service until 1933, when he left to write full-time at the age of 40.

Career

Church became a respected journalist and reviewer, and wrote extensively on country matters. His first poetry appeared in

Robert Blatchford Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom. He was also noted as a prominent atheist, nationalist and opponent of eugenics. In the early ...

's ''Clarion'', and he contributed verse to periodicals for the rest of his life. His first post as a literary editor was with the ''

New Leader ''The New Leader'' (1924–2010) was an American political and cultural magazine. History ''The New Leader'' began in 1924 under a group of figures associated with the Socialist Party of America, such as Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. It was p ...

'', organ of the

Independent Labour Party The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates ...

. He was director of the Oxford Festival of Spoken Poetry during the 1930s. His much-anthologised

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

poem "Mud" first appeared in ''Life and Letters'', January 1935. The first volume of Church's autobiography, ''Over the Bridge'' (1955), was awarded the Sunday Times Prize for Literature while the novelist

Howard Spring Howard Spring (10 February 1889 – 3 May 1965) was a Welsh author and journalist who wrote in English. He began his writing career as a journalist but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels for adults and children. The most su ...

described it as "the loveliest autobiography written in our time," pointing out that the writer had "found life full of enchantment, and how not the least of its enchantments was its challenge." The second volume, ''The Golden Sovereign'', appeared in 1957. That year Church was named a

Commander of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established ...

by Queen Elizabeth II.

Mystical experience

While young, Church had a mystical experience at a convalescent home, which he recounted in his autobiography, ''Over the Bridge'', and which was also recounted by the British

occultist The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...

writer

Colin Wilson Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his phil ...

. Looking out of some French windows, Church saw a gardener chopping down a dead tree. What struck Church after a while was that the sight of the axe hitting the tree and the sound of the axe hitting the tree were not synchronised. The sound was delayed. At first he did not believe his own powers of perception, but after concentrating his vision and hearing, he came to the conclusion that he was experiencing an error in the laws of physics. He came to the conclusion – which would remain with him for the rest of his life – that "time and space are not absolute. Their power was ''not'' law." He experienced an incredible freedom in this epiphany. "(...) I was free. Since time and space were deceivers, openly contradicting each other, and at best offering a compromise in place of law" After this epiphany another soon followed. From where he stood he sensed that "(...) my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground, out of the tyranny of gravitation". He then left the ground and glided "about the room" some twelve or eighteen inches above the floor. He returned to the ground only to take off once more.

Personal life

Church married three times: firstly to Caroline Parfett in 1915, with whom he had three daughters, this marriage ending in divorce. He married his second wife, Catherina Schimmer on 19 November 1930, and the couple had a son before her death in 1965. He married his third wife, Dorothy Beale, a widow, on 25 February 1967. He had a great love for the

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

countryside and this is reflected in much of his writing. He published an anthology of works on Kent.

Death

He and Dorothy initially lived at The Old Stable, they subsequently moved to The Priest's House at Sissinghurst Castle in Cranbrook where he died suddenly, aged 78, on 4 March 1972.

Works

Poetry collections

*''The Flood of Life'' (1917) *''Hurricane'' (1919) *''Philip'' (1923) *''The Portrait of the Abbot'' (1926) *''The Dream'' (1927) *''Theme with Variations'' (1928) *''Mood without Measure'' (1928) *''Mary Shelley'' (1928) *''The Glance Backward'' (1930) *''News from the Mountain'' (1932) *''Apple of Concord'' (1935) *''Twelve Noon'' (1936) *''The Solitary Man'' (1941) *''Twentieth-Century Psalter'' (1943) *''The Lamp'' (1946) *''Collected Poems'' (1948) *''Selected Lyrical Poems'' (1951) *''The Inheritors'' (1957) *''North of Rome'' (1960) *''The Burning Bush'' (1967)

Novels

*''Oliver’s Daughter'' (1930) *''High Summer'' (1931) *''The Prodigal Father'' (1933) *''The Porch'' (1937) *''The Stronghold'' (1939) *''The Sampler'' (1942) *''The Cave'' (1951) AKA ''Five Boys in a Cave.'' *''Dog Toby. A Frontier Tale'' (1953) * ''The dangerous years'' (1956) * ''The Nightingale'' (1958) *''The Crab-Apple Tree'' (1959) *''Prince Albert'' (1963) *''The Room Within'' (1940) *''The White Doe'' (1968) *''Little Miss Moffatt: a confession'' (1969) *''The French lieutenant: a ghost story'' (1971)

Autobiography

*''Over the Bridge'' (1955) *''The Golden Sovereign'' (1957) *''The Voyage Home'' (1964)

Other books

*''Calling for a Spade'' (1939) Essays on country themes. * ''Plato's Mistake'' (1941) * , essays on contemporary writers *''A squirrel called Rufus'' (1941) For children. * ''Green Tide'' (1945) Essays, mainly on country themes.Illustrated by C.F.Tunnicliffe * ''British authors : a twentieth-century gallery with 53 portraits'' (1948) *''A window on a hill''

951 Year 951 ( CMLI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * King Berengar II of Italy seizes Liguria, with help from the feudal lord Oberto I. He re ...

Essays, mainly on country themes *''Books and Writers'' (Robert Lynd) Foreword by Richard Church (1952) *''The prodigal: a play in verse'' (1953) * ''Down River'' (1957) For children. * ''A country window; a round of essays'' (1958) * ''Small moments. Decorated with wood-engravings by Joan Hassall'' (1957) Essays. * ''The bells of Rye. Front. by Michael Hubbard'' (1960) For children. * ''Calm October, essays'' (1961) * ''The growth of the English novel'' (1961) * ''A stroll before dark : essays'' (1965) * ''The royal parks of London. With drawings by Victor Cooley'' (1965) * ''Portrait of Canterbury'' (1968) * ''Speaking aloud'' (1968) * ''The wonder of words'' (1970) *''A harvest of mushrooms: and other sporadic essays'' (1970)

Notes

External links

Richard Church Papers
at the

John Rylands Library The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is a Victorian era, late-Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, neo-Gothic building on Deansgate in Manchester, England. It is part of the University of Manchester. The library, which opened to t ...

Richard Church Collection
at the

Harry Ransom Center The Harry Ransom Center (until 1983 the Humanities Research Center) is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the pur ...

Richard Church bibliography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Church, Richard People from Dulwich 1893 births 1972 deaths English male poets 20th-century English poets 20th-century English male writers English World War I poets