How Toc H Began
BY THE BEV. P. B. CLAYTON, M.C.
Toc H began upon the old stage of Flanders, crowded by actors single-eyed and sincere. In 1914, the Salient had been the scene of exploits of a small pro- fessional touring company. - In 1915, a body of amateurs had come, conning their parts in the wings, and impro- vizing with impervious audacity. The English reserve their praise for men who do what they were never meant to do. When I first saw the Salient, the Durham miners were laughing at the clerkly hands of the Westminsters, who wielded the spade so clumsily beside them ; but there was a new note of friendship in their laughter,- a note now lost again outside Toc H. Death was a high price to pay for these discoveries ; but, if man is man's proper study, there never was a school with readier scholars in it.
Talbot House or Toc H—a high, white, battered mansion in a narrow street in Poperinghe—came into being to consecrate all these curious friendships. It stood to teach fidelity. Brotherly love almost seems to have selected the place as a point for a fresh beginning, en- riching it most days by the promotion of several of these men into a life where mud and misunderstanding are alike unknown. Their legacy was not a series of private griefs or of public hatreds, but a binding and constraining confidence in each other.
In 1919, Toe H began its civil work, with £9 in the bank, and about two thousand names and addresses representing the homes of soldiers reputed to have sur- vived the Great War, and known to have been lovers of Talbot House in Poperinghe. It had not at the time a single younger member, and we were told on all sides that it would be fatal to admit them. We took the step at once, with a united mind among our forty London mem- bers. " The Old House "—as it soon came to be called— was, after all, entitled to its convictions. In '16, '17, '18 it had welcomed the newcomers, and helped them to find their best selves. It now began to take on board another year's enlistment, and to find for them far happier modes of cheerful, active service. Peace also had its perils. The spirit of the house rose up again to help her men to meet them.
The real disaster was that, when the War was over, the men were encouraged to believe that a period of ease and plenty would permanently ensue. A sterner note, warning us to expect hard times, but bidding all true people stand and work together, might have saved bitter disillusionment. As it was, the tone of politics in 1919-20 was lower than it had been since the days of Walpole. The old firm spirit vanished in a cloud of cajolery. Nothing could have taken its place, save an ideal of peace as passionately maintained and as ardently pursued.
Meanwhile, the now re-born fraternity started to climb its foothills. It realized, early on, that the most mature statements of a general principle will not, by themselves, harness an oncoming generation. A genera- tion can only be won outright by those within its ranks. Its contemporaries must convert it ; and if Toe H has a strong point at all, it is that it endeavours to consecrate the group spirit of service among a series of teams ; selected,. not from men of maturity, but from the grand climateric of the age of indiscretion. Toe H is not a series of pronouncements from the past, most readily dismissible. It is not a pathetic effort to sustain a fading .splendour of an age of romantic sacrifice. It is, rather, a society which, once set going, brings gaily to itself a great variety of contacts, thus focussing for many, then rising to their full responsibilities, those elements of Franciscanism which are never long absent from any brood of men in Christendom. It is literally true that hundreds of the younger men, drawn in the first place by the most casual curiosity to some Guest Night of Toc H, date the beginning of a new outlook from the experience.
There is no feature of our civilization more fraught with the gravity of evil than the fact that every city contains many thousands of younger men, unchallenged to the work of any great cause outside their own career. If you doubt the gravity, re-read Barbellion. If you doubt the remedy, a glimpse of Toc H will begin to show it you.
The War had revealed to every thoughtful Chaplain the fact that men, at the age when they had most to give, were most alienated from organized Christianity.
Donald Hankey had proved in the Spectator that this indifference was not due to their misconduct or to their unbelief. Nor was the alienation caused by the sole fact of war. War tore aside the curtain, and showed us men on all sides who were unconscious Christians ! As the hero of the French comedy talked prose without knowing it, so these men exhibited by their life and death attributes which are jewels in the New Testament. What was the barrier then between these men and the Christian Churches ? Was it inexorably true that they must stand apart ? Was there no way at all whereby organized religion could so amend its presentation as to re-harness them to tasks which halted everywhere for lack of manly energy ?
The Englishman's mind is obdurate. He views life as a game to be played worthily, and in a true team spirit. His training and his instinct unite in inclin- ing him to help, where he sees suffering met with cheerfulness. He is not in the least disposed to sit and be given good advice by people who don't seem to know life's circumstances. Any form of religion which tends to produce introverts cannot hope to command very wide allegiance among a race of men whose whole ideals march with the extrovert. Toc H arrives at doctrine vid duty, not duty vid doctrine. It recalls men to God, by making them less selfish in their leisure, by undergirding their unselfishness with a team spirit conse- crated. Their humour and good will are found, aroused, employed ; then led by fine example into the joy of worship. They are as men renewed.
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