Thank God for George Pitcher, who has said what I have been thinking but have not got round to saying for 40 years. Golly, how lazy we got.
David Davis
(edited for republishing 12.10.13, for the interest of recent attendees to this blog, who might not have seen earlier postings in our archives.)
Everybody knows that the Churches were used for all sorts of secular purposes , for centuries. Even I know that, bumpkin that I am: I just forgot. But if this nation is to be the first to be _De-Christianised By Law_ , which looks like happening and which I personally think to be a wrong thing to do, simply for the purpose of appeasing certain favoured-Nazi groups, then the way back is to be able to use churches for all sorts of stuff that they already were used for, that was moral and good.
When I was a student, I decided in my second and third year, to go about the nation on my Triumph Tiger Cub 200 cc motor-bicycle, “325 TPE”, and here is an example of one, which I bought for £65 when I was 19. I didn’t like its balck and grey colour scheme, so I painted all the static metal parts bright red with Humbrol enamel hobby paint and a coarse brush: it looked really hot.
I took with me on my travels a mottley ragbag of Olympus half-frame camerae which I still possess, one of them even being a “single-lens-reflex”, which was the last word in photographic penis-size-comparisons that you could utter, at the time. It even had “through-the-lens-metering”…which actually was more trouble than it was worth if you were inside a dark building and trying to look out.
I also often took on my back “brass-rubbing” apparatus: you know….a big roll of “all-rag paper”, in a waterproof wrapping, and some “heel-ball” in black and other colours for a laugh.
I photographed about one sixth of the Southern English medieval churches, based on the objective that what I did would be the only substantive record of where they were, what they looked like, and what interesting details they had – all this was in case they ever fell down.
Yep, I was a bit autistic.
It was all in B/W on Ilford Pan-F (50ASA) (if I was rich that term) or HP3 (400 ASA) (if I was short of funds.) I wound the cassettes myself in a darkbag, from 100-foot rolls, and often could get 90-100 half-fram-frames into a standard 35mm cassette.
The archive still exists in my library. I was not a libertarian then, but libertarians ought to be conscious of the desire of ordinary people to understand and record and preserve their history, sothat they will not be forced by tyrants to forget what is to happen in the future.
Here are just a few places I went to. These are not my pix or records, all newer ones:-
http://www.castleacre.net/gallery/c1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Elmham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidlington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterperry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloxham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinnor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higham_Ferrers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Minster
I expect that someone, in the night, tonight, will comment the following: that these building projects were fascisto-collectivist Gramsco-Hitlerite makework scams, which were the “Public Private Partnerships” of the tyrants of the day. Or that they were “the tyrannical works of organised religion”. But I don’t think that people like Henry III, say, or Edward I, thought quite like Gordon Brown did, or David Cameron or “Nick” “Clegg” do now.