White Head versus Red Woolly Hat

Press, 11 February 1983, Page 15

White Head versus Red Woolly Hat

By

JOHN WHALE

‘Sunday Times,’ London

Sharp at 12.30 p.m., under a drizzling sky, a whiteheaded figure in cassock and raincoat climbs a couple of steps up a portable green stepladder and begins to talk. The Rev. the Lord Soper believes in continuity. He was 80 last week; yet he still gives voice to his convictions — Methodist, pacifist, socialist, teetotal — every Wednesday lunchtime on Tower Hill. Barring summer holidays, he has'been doing it for 56 years. As a probationer minister just down from Cambridge in 1926, he was posted to a mission church in the Old Kent Road. But there was hardly anyone to preach to..

“I had such a poor time indoors,” he remembers, “I thought I’d better do something out of doors." So he did: and a few years later he added Sundays at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park; and he looked after London down-and-outs, and wrote, and broadcast. In consequence. says the new. third volume of the official history

of Methodism in Britain, “Methodist social and political witness was for many years personified in Donald Soper.” But he is not ready to be interred in a history book just yet. He speaks with the Tower of London at his back, and behind that the high framework of Tower Bridge. “At one time,” he later -recalls wistfully, “I could get an echo from the other side of the Thames." During the Second World War he answered a doodlebug back: he shouted St Paul’s line about spiritual wickedness in high places.

Now the volume is a little muted. But he still forgoes a loudspeaker, and tops the bells of All Hallows in front of him when he needs to. and shows no sign of hoarseness at the end of his hour. On this latest occasion his thread, returned to after all

interruptions, is the Franks report and the Falklands war. Fighting, he says, is immoral. “Can you really organise society on the basis of violence?" Snowy eyebrows up; wait for the challenge; at first none comes. “The answer is no."

Pressing close to him on the wet cobbles, his audience is mostly middle-aged men of very varying degrees of prosperity. A citizen in a flat cap now objects that you need violence to meet violent crime. A man in a red woolly hat takes the cue: he insists that crime — and, for good measure, unemployment — is caused by immigration. “I think you will agree," says Soper blandly to the little crowd, “that our friend is talking pitiable balderdash."

Red woolly hat starts shouting about the British suffering “racial genocide."

A man in khaki earflaps roars: “Don't you talk to the lord like that. He’s a good man." Red woolly hat persists. Soper invites him to go and conduct his own meeting: "Nobody will interfere with it — I shouldn't think anybody'll be there.” The lord returns to his theme. "It would have been infinitely better to take all those Falklanders and house them in the north of Scotland.”

“Why don’t you bring the British people out of Brixton?” askes red woolly hat satirically. Khaki earflaps offers to break him in half. This remonstrance in turn becomes prolonged. “With such friends,” Soper murmurs, “you don’t really need enemies.” The crowd laughs.

In the interstices, the lord’s unrehearsed and cultivated prose flows on. At the end he says briskly. “I'll be here next week,” climbs down, sees the stepladder carried away by two friends, and stumps off to do his stuff in the House of Lords.

There proves to have been a certain magic in the performance. When red woolly hat tries to inherit the audience, it melts away.