“WOODBINE WILLIE"

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29850, 16 June 1962, Page 3

“WOODBINE WILLIE"

IReinewwl by GM.)

Woodbine Willie. By William Purcell. Hodder and Stoughton. 224 pp.

Of all the figures that impressed the mind of the ordinary man during and after the 1914-18 war none was more vivid than “Woodbine Willie.” It was a curious name to give a parson, but like so many of the spontaneous, and often irreverent, terms of the ordinary man it meant much both in emotion and respect. "Wild Woodbine” was the name of a cigarette that sold for five a penny in those far-off days. The Rev. Studdert Kennedy, a Church of England padre, gave away thousands of slim packets of “Wild Woodbines” as he passed through camps and trenches, sharing the life of the common soldier. “Woodbine Willie” became almost a household word in England. Kennedy was an Irishman with an ugly face and batlike earg. He was a heavensent orator who could sway people yet could speak tenderly to broken men and women who came to him for counsel. He swore and smoked, and often played the clown. Some of his antics and attitudes in the pulpit outraged many. He was also a prophet and like the great prophets he was misunderstood and ignored by those who ought to have known better, but he was understood, even if dimly, by the working class of England, whose affection he won. The reviewer stood near him in Hyde Park. Lon-

don, and listened to his burning and torrential words against war. He knew he was standing beside a prophet. As a poet, “Woodbine Willie” expressed the longings, feelings, doubts and hopes of the inarticulate. As late as 1947 the fourteenth edition of his collected verse was published. He had no sense of money value nor of clothes. For years he practically lived in trains, rushing from one place to another, to preach and lecture at street corners, halls and churches, for the Industrial Christian Fellowship. His flaming invectives against social injustice startled the easy-going and gave hope to the dispossessed. As a preacher he was unique. There is no doubt that at times he was “possessed." His tremendous and searching preaching was evidenced one Easter when he tooK the Thiee Hours Good Friday service in the Strand Theatre, London. The following nay tnc. "Morning Post" had this to say: “On the stage, through the whole of :ne time, stood the priest, burning with nervous zeal. Men—there were hundreds of them—and women sat as it hypnotised moved often to tears, held prisoner by the eloquence of a man whose soul was on fire The stage was. at leng’h. towards the end invaded.” Studdert Kennedy died on March 8, 1929. The writer of this biography, Canon Purcell, gives us not only a vivid picture of “Woodbine Willie," but describes with accuracy the social and religious background of the First World War and the years that followed.