It is amazing how much I remeber from Chapel

[linda_joyce]

div style="width: 320px; border: 1px solid gray; padding: 6px; font: normal 12px arial, verdana, sans-serif; color: black; background-color: white;">You know the Bible 93%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

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[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

I've no idea how I did so well as I did. I last attended church when I was 5. I think I'm just good at multiple choice guessing.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

It's a good memory in my case. All my friends went to the Baptist Chapel in my home village so I went too. For the treats rather than the religion. They concentrated on frightening you out of Hell and teaching you the Bible and I have a tenacious memory. I think that if you are well read you learn an lot about things you don't think you're learning, The Bible and the works of Shakespeare are the most widely quoted books in English IIRC

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

I don't think I got past the coloring in Xeroxes of Bible scenes stage and singing 'Jesus Loves Me', so I must have picked it up by osmosis. Also, some of the questions had enough blatantly wrong answers to make selection odds better.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I got 100%; many of the questions only had one sensible answer, and I must have made good guesses on the others. :-)

I wanted to ask you: I'm reading Chronicles of a Vicar by Fred Secombe, brother of Harry. It's funny and occasionally sad, but I'm amazed he got away with describing his parishioners and curates so... honestly. Even if he changed the names, surely people would guess whom he meant.

Anyway, it's set in Pontywen in an Anglican church with two small attahced churches, one a country one in Llanhyfryd. Any such places? And I didn't think Anglicans were so big in Wales. Do they call them something else there?

He has characters like Idris the Milk. Do they still use that form of address still?

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

The Anglican Church here is called the Church in Wales and to day isn't very big. There was a big revival in the 20s though, when huge new churches were being built all over the place. Abercarn has one of those St' Luke's on the ehill was built about 125 and could seat 500 in the pews alone, up to a 1000 if the chairs were brought out from the vestry and the school room. My mother could remember the pews being full on most Sundays and all the chairs out and people still standing on high days.

Fred Secombe's parish was unusual for it's day in that he serviced more than one church. That is fairly common now but back in the 40s and 50s each church usually had it's own vicar. It's been a long time since I read his books, is Pontywen the parish with the iron clock up in the valleys or is it the big town down in the south? Either way the reasons for the for the three church parish would probably be the same, lack of vicars due to the war. The old country church would have been the mediaeval church that served an enormous area, with Abercarn that would be Mynyddislwyn Church on top of the mountain and difficult to get at and the other small one would likely to have been a small Victorian Chapel of Ease built by a rich and slightly cracked church member who didn't believe in making his servants or himself work on a Sunday. The Vicar didn't matter, he was supposed to work Sundays. Unlike Abercarn these three Churches remained part of the same Parish for Fred. Here Mynyddislwyn stayed in a parish on it's own and Chapel of Ease Chapel was sold off when the Llanovers died ( the building had never been signed over to the Church).
The Iron clock parish is easy to name there is only one in the whole of South Wales and it does have a small mountain church in it's parish, that is Abertillery. The other one is somewhere on the outskirts of Swansea but I don't know exactly where.
As for the Idris the milk, it did happen if the were more that one person with the same name in a small area, especially if they had the same surname as well. The father of one of my childhood friends was one of a pair of identical twins. They did have different given names but nobody used them. The one that stayed in the village was called twin coal and the other one was twin rail, we didn't bother with the 'the' or at least the adults called them that we called them J's father and D's father. we did have Jones the Bread delivering the village but that might have been his firms name, I can't remember.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

He does just say 'the church' (as opposed to chapel) but it sounded Anglican to me (bishops etc) and I think the other two churches, esp the country one, were fairly small. That's quite common here too in country towns. Did your mother go to church, then? What's the main difference between church and chapel? Formality?

He hasn't mentioned an iron clock, but it's in the south. I borrowed a collection of three of them in one book (Hello Vicar, A Comedy of Clerical Errors, The Crowning Glory) which are him as a new vicar post war, ending with the coronation. I gather from his references that there were earlier ones with him as a curate. I might see if I can get them.

Idris was Idris Shoemaker, not a common or very Welsh name I'd think, but there is a Bread as well. I so like that custom, though it's how many people originally got their names (Baker, Chandler...)

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Oh yes Fred was definitely an Anglican vicar, as was the Chapel of Ease that gave it's name to Chapel of Ease. Under both Catholic and Anglican domination in the UK the only difference between a chapel and a church and a cathedral was size. A free standing chapel was often not much bigger than the side chapels you find in big cathedrals, basically a single room with no side isles and little or no differentiation between knave chancel and sanctuary. It was only with the coming of nonconformity that the term Chapel meant something very different than small church. The Non conformists very often called their chapels by the alternative of meeting halls. They were a single room with possibly a raised dais at one end on which who ever was leading the service stood. There was no ordained vicar, the elders of the chapel taking it in turns to lead the service and there was no set service as you get in the book of common prayer in the Anglican church. There was no alter and little ornament very often not even a cross. They had the better hymns though.
Did your mother go to church, then?
Yes as did I from 11 years old until I went away to college. We were unique in this village in being Anglicans. I attended the Baptist chapel from 4 to 11 because the nearest Anglican church was about a quarter mile away. Mam was to busy to take me, Gran too infirm and me to young to be trusted to walk all that way by myself so I was sent to the Baptist Chapel Sunday school up round the corner. Mam was born in 1917 and was old enough to remember the new church in Abercarn being built (1925 in case you hadn't worked out my typo.) and the revivals of the mid twenties and thirties.
Fred Secombe wrote 6 books in all the first three are published in a collection called Chronicles of a Curate and individually as
How Green was my Curate.
A Curate for all Seasons .
and
Goodbye Curate

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'll have to get hold of them; the books are interesting insights into a culture and time I don't know.

Here, a chapel is either a small part of a church for small services, I suppose, or is attached to a school or organisation (there was once a chapel at the Ports of Auckland where I worked, but was only the name for a container storage are by the time I was there.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

the books are interesting insights into a culture and time I don't know.

That is what I found fascinating about them too, the world he was writing about had just about died by the time I was old enough to think about culture and history as it affected me. I do have vague memories from my very early childhood of going to the local pantomime performed in a church hall by my friends parents and siblings. And i remember being scared out of a years growth coming face to face with the larger than life clowns head my Dad would be wearing in the carnival parade.

And talking about different cultures and time have you read Twopence across the Mersey by Helen Forrester. That is the tale of a childhood set in Liverpool during the 30s. It is a difficult book, depressing but compeling reading, I recomend it as lonfg as you are in a cheerful frame of mind to start with.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I stay away from depressing stuff; it's better for my health. I have a friend who loves a good wallow in misery though; I'll rec it to her.

the larger than life clowns head my Dad would be wearing in the carnival parade

Is that before Lent? Because they still do that in Germany and Switzerland and it's heaps of fun. When I lived in Germany, we used to have a riot. Their Halloween (Fasnacht) is wonderful too; we went to Basel for that one year. It's a procession of light using paper lanterns and the traditional food is onion pie, yum!

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Is that before Lent?
I can't remember, I wasn't quite 2 at the time. I know the carnival was a regular thing but I remember good weather for it so it was more likely to be after Easter.

I've never been to any of the European celebrations but I would love to, I do regret that our own traditions died very quickly after TV became freely available in the valleys. I also regret not taking notes when my parents and grandparents told me about what went on.. We had a mummers group when my father was a boy and young man and all I now know of it is a brief and incomplete cast list and one line . 'Here come I old Father Christmas. Welcome here or welcome not, I hope old Father Christmas never will be forgot.' Dad was father Christmas and that's all he could remember.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

The carnivals in Europe and South America are before Lent. There's some discussion where the word comes from, but it could be carne vale, Latin for "goodbye, meat".

The British get pancakes instead. :-P I'm going to a pancake race this year; I even won the only other one I went to, years ago, but I don't expect to do as well this time because I no longer have the light non-stick pan I used. :-)