The Christmas diary of a parish priest, from Church burglaries to deathbed vigils

From telegraph.co.uk 

Father Ben Bell shares the joy, challenges and sense of belonging the festive period brings

The role of a parish priest is rarely predictable. One of the questions I’m asked most often is what, exactly, I do.

My answer usually involves some mixture of plate-spinning, presiding at services and pastoral encounters that can sound faintly implausible.

December, however, brings a sudden clarity. “It’s your busy time of year, isn’t it?” people say. So I decided to keep a diary, to record what the festive season actually entails, and what it asks of a priest, a church and a community.

Christmas is the busiest time of year for Father Ben Bell, pictured in St George the Martyr Church in London Credit: Rii Schroer

10 December: Fireworks for the homeless

The day began with Morning Prayer at St George’s, joined by a handful of colleagues in the sustaining discipline which roots parish life in prayer and scripture. The theory is sound – the practice rather less so, given the insistent mental catalogue of urgent tasks in the run up to Christmas.

Dave has slept rough for the past 20 years and visits us most days for coffee with seven sugars. He used to steal our candles for light and heat, so I bought him a gas heater and gave him cylinders every few days. A couple of weeks ago, he asked me out of the blue if I could buy fireworks for him if he gave me the money – he wanted to do something to remember the anniversary of his brother’s death.

I said yes, confident he wouldn’t come up with the cash. That’s now come back to bite me. This morning, he slapped a bundle of notes on the table, saying, “I just want rockets and air bombs.”

11 December: A troublesome street preacher

I unpacked the new figures for our nativity scene. They’ve been lovingly made by a community of French nuns and are beautiful. That is apart from the donkey, whose eyes look a little frightening. He’s been sitting on the vestry table, glaring at me all morning, to the point that I had to turn him around. I think we’ll go traditional and put him “out the back” of the stable, where his intense glare can’t unsettle members of the holy family.

We had a regular visitor asking if I could help with something to eat. I walked down to Tesco with them to get them a sandwich and a drink. On the way back, I passed the street preacher who’s been setting up next to the church, drowning out any sense of reflective space with amplified warnings of eternal damnation.

I went to talk to him about possibly moderating his approach, or at least his decibel level, but he would only converse via his PA system, resulting in a bizarrely amplified one-sided conversation. Ironically, despite the assumption that we might be on the same team, he wasn’t remotely interested in supporting us in creating a quiet space for our lunchtime Mass, preferring instead to continue shouting at passers-by about the consequences of their choices, as if volume were a reliable indicator of theological truth.

At Evening Prayer, the Advent antiphon (a short chant or verse) tonight is about the Key of David – opening doors that are shut. I thought about all those in our parish who have experienced endless doors being shut in their face. It’s why we try and keep the church doors open.

12 December: ‘George Clooney’s glove’

After long and complex negotiations with my team, I’ve secured consent to use confetti cannons at our primary school’s nativity service. This won’t be my first deployment of confetti cannons in church, hence my colleagues’ reticence – they reminded me that we’re still finding pieces of coloured tissue paper in the building’s crevices after a spectacular celebration of Easter. My offer to bring in my leaf blower to aid the clear-up operation was met with expressions of disdain.

I popped down to the food cooperative and encountered Jenny, one of our long-standing volunteers, wearing a diamanté glove on one hand à la Michael Jackson, whilst sorting through a crate of Brussels sprouts with the ungloved other. When I questioned the meaning of this sartorial choice, she explained that she’d met George Clooney at the National Theatre two evenings ago and shaken his hand, and the glove was preserving the moment for posterity.

It’s this sort of cheerful incongruity that makes parish life endlessly surprising and occasionally incomprehensible to those outside it.

Father Ben Bell with Jenny (and her ‘George Clooney glove’) at the cooperative  Credit: Rii Schroer

Evening Prayer was themed on that great Advent carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. I’m reminded that the incarnation happened in the mess of real life, not in the aesthetically pleasing version we curate for carol services. This is, frankly, a relief.

13 December: A bell-ringing crisis

Our prayers this morning focused on those for whom Christmas is a difficult time of year – which is to say, a considerable portion of humanity, though we tend not to mention this during the more determinedly cheerful carol services. I will seek to find a carol or poem that speaks to this, a little at least.

I spent the morning writing the nativity script for tomorrow’s carol service. Eighty biscuit-fuelled wrigglers will be singing their hearts out – so much joy, so much chaos. I’ve learnt to keep these scripts simple: shepherd appears, angel appears, everyone sings.

The theological profundity will be discovered in the joyful singing, inevitable tantrums and utter chaos of the service. Still, it’s our hope that many of these children will have enjoyed their day of singing and will want to come back in the new year to audition for our junior choir, the Borough Choristers.

The church’s nativity set has been lovingly made by a community of French nuns Credit: Rii Schroer

The bell-ringing situation has become critical. We don’t have our own in-house team and, predictably, most churches have their carol service on the same day, so finding willing ringers is increasingly challenging. We do, however, have one faithful ringer who tolls the tenor bell beautifully before funerals. The issue is that tolling a single bell before a carol service sounds identical to a funeral announcement.

Still, he comes and faithfully rings the bell 200 times, as he has done for many services this year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the modern railway. The connection between bell-ringing and train enthusiasm isn’t immediately clear until you spend time with campanologists.

14 December: A profound sense of belonging

This morning began with the discovery that someone had broken into the church overnight and stolen our sanctuary lamp, leaving wax spilled everywhere – not the ideal preparation for worship. Yet an hour before the service, a number of our teenagers arrived for altar server training, and the morning service proceeded with its usual energy and remarkably high attendance.

Our congregation is a wonderful mixture of people who’ve made St George’s their spiritual home – long-time parishioners alongside those who’ve joined us in the past couple of years, creating a community that’s genuinely growing rather than simply maintaining.

Father Ben Bell is frequently reminded that the incarnation happened in the mess of real life Credit: Rii Schroer

Refreshments afterwards revealed what the service had already shown – people genuinely enjoying being together. Watching this diverse assembly interact with such obvious affection and ease, I find myself wondering, “Where else in London would all these people have such a profound sense of belonging to one another? Where else would their paths even cross?”

The answer is almost nowhere, which makes the church either a beautiful anomaly or a reminder of who we actually are. Probably both.

15 December: Winter partying with Tina Turner

During Morning Prayer, we prayed for Dave during the intercessions. Wondering if “rockets and air bombs” is an appropriate way to remember the dead. Decided it probably is.

Earlier in the year, I offered to host a carol service for a local charity working with pensioners, an offer made in a moment of seasonal generosity that I’m now questioning. After considerable back and forth, the proposed traditional carol service has metamorphosed into a “winter party” in our crypt, complete with a music hall singer banging out Tina Turner covers.

Evening Prayer consisted of O Rex Gentium (O King of Nations).

16 December: Death, love and God

The barrage of turkey and tinsel was punctured by a call this afternoon to say that a parishioner was in his final hours. I hastily grabbed my purple stole, some holy oil for anointing and my prayer book, and made my way past the Christmas parties spilling out onto Borough High Street to the stillness of his ground-floor flat.

As I stood next to his bed, his wife quietly keeping vigil, I was reminded of the inevitability of death and the invitation of the Christmas angels to not be afraid.

Surely, there is joy in embracing what we have no control over. I often encounter a deep sense of peacefulness in the rooms of the dying – such a contrast to the street preacher’s apocalyptic shouting earlier. He died soon afterwards, and we will now find time to plan a funeral amidst the hectic festivities that once focused on the unlikely birth of the divine in human flesh.

‘The gift underneath the Christmas busyness is Emmanuel, God with us,’ says Father Ben Bell Credit: Rii Schroer

Through all this, I hold fast to the reading from John’s prologue that is read each year at Midnight Mass. It’s about the Word becoming flesh – God didn’t wait for us to have our liturgy sorted before showing up. Probably just as well.

Come what may, we’ll get on with telling the story of God born among us. And somehow, amidst all the chaos and bizarre requests, that story still has the power to stop me in my tracks.

In this season where everyone tells me, “It’s your busy time of year”, what they don’t see is that the busyness is just the wrapping. The gift underneath – in Dave’s remembrance, in the dying man’s peace, in Jenny’s Clooney glove, in children’s voices raised in song – is Emmanuel. God with us. Even here. Even now.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/23/parish-priest-christmas-diary/

‘I spend too much time on trifles’: a glimpse of Victorian Liverpool through the diary of a ‘serious’ woman

From livpost.co.uk

An era of sailing ships, grief and self denial

It was a cold February day in 1949 when Edward Hall went into an unknown second-hand book shop. Browsing shelves of leather-bound tomes and battered volumes, he finally stopped at a thin notebook with a marbled cover. A quick thumb through the handwritten pages told him all he needed to know; it was another diary he could add to his collection. He paid two pounds and five shillings for the book, equivalent to two full days’ work for the average labourer – not a trivial sum of money. Hall then took the notebook back home to Surbiton, where it joined his collection of some 200 other diaries. Some years later he donated it to Wigan Library. He provided only a glimmer of context about the writer: ‘Miss Henrietta Bell, Liverpool 1839-40.’

An image of Edward Hall, c. 1932. Photo: Unknown

For the past 50 years Henrietta’s diary has sat in the temperature-controlled strong rooms of Archives: Wigan & Leigh, just 24 miles away from where it was originally created. It now lives nestled in a box between the diaries of an 18th century apothecary, a Victorian vicar and an Edwardian musician.

Over the years her words have been digitised and transcribed, but the mystery remained: who was Henrietta Bell? I thought it would be a straightforward task. A name is key to unlocking histories. In the past few decades official records have been digitised and uploaded online through genealogy websites and archives, now conveniently available at my fingertips. Packed into neat little rows on the screen are names, ages and addresses which means Victorians, like us, now have a digital footprint. Except Henrietta’s was that bit harder to follow. 

I turned detective. Leafing through Henrietta’s words, I realised that whilst she was vivid in her detail of emotion, she was sparse on facts. Family are mentioned but never named, with the exception of her brother-in-law, Reverend J. E. White. Edward Hall noted that Henrietta was a ‘Miss’, so I assumed the maiden name of her sister was also Bell. 

I looked for marriages between Bells and Whites in Liverpool. Nothing. I expanded my search to Lancashire. Success! Some hits, but completely the wrong period. Anyone who has ever attempted to do their family tree will probably empathise here with the emotional rollercoaster I was on.

Deflated but not defeated, I returned to the 1841 census, and eventually made a breakthrough. A 33-year-old Henrietta Bell living not in Liverpool itself, but at Rock Park in Bebington, an exclusive suburban retreat from the hustle and bustle of the early Victorian town. Verifying her details by tracing other family members, I was finally able to piece together Henrietta’s story. 

Her maiden name was Birch, and  she was born in Stirling in August 1808. Her father, John Birch, was a captain in the 73rd Regiment, who had eloped with her mother, a 15-year-old heiress named Mary Arabella Forbes. John’s regiment took his young family across the world. By the time Henrietta celebrated her 10th birthday back in Stirling, she had already lived in Sydney, Sri Lanka and South Africa. In 1829 she married Charles Cowan Bell. 

The diary of Henrietta. Photo: Thomas McGrath

Now we’ve established who she was, I know you’ll be wondering what she wrote about. Let’s start with Edward Hall’s summary of the diary:

This diary concentrates on Christian values in their most narrow sense. She must have been very annoying to live with, for she always seems to be criticising everyone and everything. She often receives ‘notes from friends who have taken amiss what I did in kindness.’ Miss Bell’s type of Christianity is hard and harsh, and this is reflected throughout the diary.

Doesn’t exactly sound like a page-turner does it? It may be heavy on the evangelical Christianity, but it is also a fascinating insight into the mind of a young woman of the period. Her words speak to us across the centuries. We might not understand her religious viewpoint, but those of us who keep, or have attempted to keep diaries and journals, will understand why she felt compelled to write.

The diary begins on 14 April 1839. Henrietta was 30 years old. Her husband, Charles, had died in Calcutta six years earlier, and her father died two years after that. She had ten siblings of which she shared the responsibility of raising the youngest. Religion was her comfort, helping her navigate the sadness which pierced her twenties. It was also a burden of an unachievable example, no doubt amplified by her preacher brother-in-law. Her first entry was a self-analysis:

[I] give way so much to Self-indulgence, to worldly conformity in dress and conversation […] giving way to irritability of temper, and not making allowances for the temper and capacities of my pupils - being pleased when flattered - a reluctance to show myself a Servant of Christ in distributing treats in public, and afraid of the displeasure and sneers of my worldly relations, […] Spend too much time on trifles - do not cultivate my talents, nor give a portion of it to study - do not live in the Spirit of prayer - am not watchful over my thoughts and words

The diary records a scant period of just two months in 1839 and four months in 1840. It is highly personal and charts these struggles of self-identity as Henrietta attempts to reflect and better know herself. She was caught in a battle between being a regular person and living up to her own ideal of a higher self. 

On the first day of 1840 she prayed, successfully, to change her pew at St Andrew’s Church. Yet three days later she lamented: “my thoughts were very distracted during divine Service, and discomposed by the novelty of our new pew.” 

For Henrietta every daydream, every flare of emotion, every incident was an obstacle and test of faith, pushing her back on the right path. When she lost her bible she saw it as a sign from God because “I fear it was the utility and beauty of the edition, and not the Word of God contained in it, that I most praised”.

She held Sunday, the sabbath, with the utmost reverence, to the point of self-denial. The rest of the household did not follow suit: “The inconvenience of Company visiting us and dishonouring this holy day by worldly conversation and waste of its Sacred and valuable hours.”  This was not an isolated incident; she preferred sermons to socialising. It’s becoming obvious why Edward Hall said she must have been annoying to live with.

The child of one friend described her as “a very serious Lady, and that I appeared to love God very much”. This love of God she took too far. Harsh on herself, she could be equally as harsh on others, receiving disappointed letters when she espoused her views too freely. She saw the rebuttals as lessons in controlling her judgement. The regularity of these events would suggest it was a lesson she had to re-visit often. 

Those beneath her in class or age, such as the Sunday School children or her servants, could not escape her half-maternal, half-authoritarian attitude. She admonished the cook for being engaged in “unnecessary work” on a Sunday, and another time seems to have terrified one maid: “The Servant was affected by what I said to her regarding her soul - but was sorry at having so distressed her.”

Living in Liverpool in the 1830-40s, Henrietta was witness to the vast social schisms between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, immigrant and non-immigrant. Her diary only tantalisingly, and somewhat inadvertently, reveals her thoughts and feelings on these subjects. She often attended lectures and sermons which focused on the “errors”, “danger” and “guilt” of Catholicism. She was also more concerned with the poor’s lack of faith, than their lack of basic amenities or sanitation:

In one Court alone there are 142 persons living, two only of whom regularly attend Public worship and keep the Sabbath, and 2 only have a bible, so that the others are actually living “without God in the world”, and in a worse state than the heathen.

As a middle-class woman, Henrietta did not mix with the lower classes unless in strictly controlled circumstances, though she may have encountered black workers on the dock when she took the steam ferry from Bebington. But her ancestral links to slavery are not difficult to uncover in today’s digital age. Her grandfather, Dugald Forbes, was a Scottish merchant who had emigrated to Philadelphia in 1777, before moving to South Carolina in 1783. Losing his land during the War of Independence, he was compensated with a land grant in the Bahamas. 

A document now held in the National Library of Ireland details the sale of 45 enslaved people from James Stevens to Forbes for £4,000 in 1798. On the back of the document are the names of 17 men, 15 women and 13 children. Some of the men were re-named after locations, such as ‘Dublin’ and ‘Glasgow’. Others had family names belonging to their owner: ‘Dugald’, ‘James junior’, ‘Tom Forbes’. Some of the children, perhaps too young to work, were only known by their enslaved mother: ‘Nanny’s child’ or ‘Rachael’s child’. 

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh

Forbes and his family left the Bahamas, settling briefly in Liverpool. He died in 1820 in Stirling, when Henrietta was 11. We will never know if her mother or grandfather told her stories about the plantation but we do know from her diary that Henrietta’s view of other peoples and cultures was undoubtedly influenced by her class and era. On May 13, 1839 she recorded her attendance at the annual meeting of ‘The Church Missionary Society’:

Mr Boyd’s was more a political speech, showing the Supremacy of our Nation above all the Nations of the World, and the Providence of God in allotting her so large a proportion of dominion, the blessing she possessed, and the obligation she lay under to dispense the light of the Gospel to every part of her dominions […] Mr White related some amusing anecdotes of the Natives in New Zealand and in the South Sea Islands.

Born in the era of sailing ships and dying at the age of 97 in 1905, just after the first aeroplane, Henrietta lived a long life, of which her diary is just a snapshot. The document was too easily dismissed by Edward Hall and without proper context, the writing had stood isolated from the writer. Henrietta was not recording day-to-day trivia of life, or big events like the invention of the railway, nor was she revealing saucy secrets and gossip. 

Instead, this thin notebook was a private journal to pour out her thoughts, feelings and frustrations; much as we might do today through ‘brain dumping’ into our diaries or notes app. Clearly a prickly character, paper and pen were a friend to which she could turn to unpack her spirituality and morality, and her struggles with those closest to her. This, together with archival records, has revealed enough fragments to piece together the parts of a life, and gives her diary new meaning and importance, especially as a little window into Victorian Liverpool.

https://www.livpost.co.uk/i-spend-too-much-time-on-trifles-a-glimpse-of-victorian-liverpool-through-the-diary-of-a-serious-woman/