On the Memorial to Sydney Smith in Bristol Cathedral



I was visiting a friend in Bristol. Quite what business I had in Bristol is of little interest to anyone and indeed I would have omitted any context, only the great man himself was so assiduous and, for the most part, charitable in describing his own friends, and so I felt compelled to- against my own instincts- follow his example. I was visiting a friend in Bristol, now a doctor. It is friendship of a decade and a half’s standing, formed in the fiery pits of adolescent bickering- though the crude teenage caricatures we painted of one another have given way to good-natured slander and silent pride in the other’s achievement. It was a Friday and a day off for me but not for my friend, the bodies of Bristol requiring more tending to than the souls of Liverpool, I took advantage of a day on my own before an evening of beer and misremembered stories.

I love aimless wandering at the best of times- but stop; can any clause reek of quite as much injustice and privilege as that? A confession that I enjoy what to so many is the drudgery of long, ignored days padding unfriendly streets! What saith the Preacher again?[1] Still, like many things that make me uncomfortable, it is true. I particularly like wandering an unknown city- doubling back down side streets after taking turns no local would dream of, trying at heavy doors which all who live round about know to have been locked for decades, marching into pubs that natives of that place would look upon in fear and trepidation- from Bristol to Buenos Aires, these stumbling acts of folly fill me with joy. So wander Bristol I did until, with a tragic inevitability that puts paid to any pretensions I might have to being a true libertine, I found myself within the dank and stony embrace of its cathedral.

For all that city’s world shattering aspirations- from the vision that inspired it to back Cabot to the vile arrogance that sent its sons on their grim reaping trips to the Gold Coast and Ghana- its cathedral is modest. It is almost as if the Virgin Queen’s praise, so heaped upon the parish church of St Mary Redcliffe as ‘the fairest, goodliest, and most famous parish church in England’, allowed Bristolians- with all their aspirations- to be content with one of our more modest cathedrals. The nave is a short one- no trace of St Alban’s great panelled bowling alley, nor of Exeter’s vaunted gothic catwalk to be found here and, for all their maritime similarities, we seem as far from Liverpool and its cavalcade of living brick as it is possible to be- and so quickly shuffled up, even by a dawdler such as I.

As I go my eyes flit across the walls crowded with memorials- names inscribed in crisp Georgian and voluptuous Victorian fonts, speaking of grief and whispered greatness across the centuries. So transfixed am I that I scarcely notice my own turn into a modest transept. Here, arranged with all the dignity of a pet cemetery in some corner of an English country estate (which, as you can probably imagine, is as almost much dignity as our race of strange Barbarians can muster), my eyes dance across a wall given over wholly to memorials to cathedral clergy. I hop from Dean to Precentor to Chancellor until ‘aha’- I let out an involuntary yelp, drawing a swiftly shot Bristolian stare from the elderly ladies inspecting a brass some 70 or so years along this cluttered wall of stories. 

Involuntary though my cry was, it was not one of pain, as if I, like a prisoner of American rather than English Gothic, had found my own name inscribed on a memorial in a mist clad burial ground. It was a yelp of recognition- the sort which might be elicited when unexpectedly spotting a friend across a busy road or, perhaps more appropriately, the sort of short laugh of recognition that will echo across the country in a month or so’s time, when friends or lovers or relatives meet once more.

The tablet that had drawn forth my odd voiced recognition read thus:

To the Glory of God
and
To the happy memory of
THE REVEREND SYDNEY SMITH, M.A.
A Canon of this Cathedral Church
1828-1831
This tablet was erected and inscribed by members of the Anchor Society
In the year of Grace 1909
As a tardy recognition of one who reasoned liberally,
Illuminating civic wisdom with Christian charity,
Political judgement with social wit,
And common sense with uncommon insight.

But how stupid I felt at first to have reacted so- to eject a laugh of happy recognition at a mere name, at a person I never met (and would, I am sure, have been certain to find me a veritable troglodyte if we had), at that which was nothing more than stone, and even then, tardily erected.  What I had recognised, of course, was not just a name. I had recognised those qualities of his which shine through in his work and, clearly, as likely to curl the lip into a smile in 1909 as 2020, and in doing so, I had recognised friendship in a strange city- for what else is that state but a happy confluence of shared joys, no matter how stupid they may seem?

I had recognised too, I think, something of Christian cosmology too. For, if I mean what I say in the Creeds about life after death and about the communion of saints, why should I not greet the name of one whose hopes for eternity were the very same as mine as if he were an old companion? Was not our faith as much a happy confluence as the pranks and fights and drinks I had partaken of with the friend I was supposed to be visiting? Recognition flashed across me again- though merely in the form of a smile rather than a yelp. This was, is, always the way with Sydney Smith; he tempts one into the lightest of fancies- dwelling on friendship and food and drink and then, with that uncommon insight, he tricks one into contemplation of the Divine.

When such thoughts were all done, I traipsed back across College Green, in the direction of the pub set for the start of an evening’s marvellous, hoppy oblivion (those confluences of shared joys can, of course, take much less lofty forms). I did so grinning like a fool- as one does when has bumped into an old friend.

[1] A reference to the introduction of these celebrations of place, itself a reference to The Warden, which in turn references Ecclesiastes 1:2. Such grim archaeology behind every phrase; I thank God I idly construct them for pleasure rather than having to deconstruct them for toil.

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