Two significant deaths have taken place in the past week in the UK. Two very different people have left this planet, two persons which in some way have influenced our own lives.
As a sixteen-year-old, browsing through my school library, I noticed a book titled ‘The Duke of Edinburgh speaks.’ Not particularly drawn to royalty I was curious to know what sort of things Prince Philip was speaking about. And in that book he brought to my attention themes which are now considered to be of urgent concern to our lives on Earth: from nature conservancy to, more controversially, the argument that the world population explosion cannot carry on the way it is doing without drastic consequence to the planet’s ecosystem.
Prince Philip also played another significant role in our lives or at least in the life of my father-in law cavaliere Dino Cipriani, the secretary-general of the Italian institute of culture in London’s Belgrave Square for it was part of Dino’s job to help organize the royal family’s visits to Italy, whether state or informal. The Royal couple’s visits to ‘iI bel paese’ must surely have been a much loved highlight of their world tours and clearly Prince Charles has more than inherited his parent’s love of our Mediterranean peninsula.
Hodge, Southwark’s cathedral new cat and successor to the much loved Doorkins Magnificat, Sandra photographed Hodge at the end of the Eucharist memorial service dedicated to Prince Philip which she attended last week. Clearly he misses the prince as well.
The other death that occurred recently was that of a great lady with a very particular political influence. The daughter of another significant figure, Vera Brittain, author of ‘A testament of Youth’, Shirley Williams was a key figure in that hopeful decade in British politics when the boring two-party system seemed doomed for a considerable part of the electorate clamouring for a centrist movement. It was a time when one could walk all the way from London Bridge to Erith in either Liberal or Social Democrat territory. There was Simon Hughes in Bermondsey, Rosie Barnes in Greenwich and John Cartwright in Woolwich. Rosie’s victory and her electrifying inaugural speech are still recollected by many who lived through those heady times. I was present when John Cartwright linked with the Social Democrats and opened a campaigning office in Anglesea Road, Woolwich. He was joined by Roy Jenkins and Shirley who amusedly remarked on the very earnest portrait of himself Cartwright had plastered on his campaign poster.
British Labour politician Shirley Williams, the Labour MP for Hitchin, UK, 28th June 1966. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Some years later the dream was shattered. The ghastly Tories moved further to the right and espoused a parochial policy which we all now have to suffer under, in particular the people of Northern Ireland and the fishermen of Scotland. Labour dithered under a succession of opposing leaderships. Yet even here there was a last encounter with Shirley Williams. Sandra was quite recently shopping in Pimlico’s Waitrose branch, her favoured stomping ground when she met up with Mrs Williams (whose previous husbands included the provost of my old Cambridge college). I quote from Sandra: “I met Shirley at Waitrose Victoria. She was shopping there and could not find her shopping. I with staff tried to help her. She was a very lovely friendly lady!”
May Prince Philip and Shirley Williams rest in peace for they both carried that word in their hearts which is so important for all humanity, ‘Service’.