If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I have been posting letters that my brother Stewart wrote my dad 75 years ago when Stewart entered the ASTRP at age 17, went to college at the army's expense in Lincoln, NE and Brookings, SD, and then when he turned 18, went off to Basic Training in Texas. Stewart was writing dad in Europe where he was serving as a Chaplain in the army. I haven't said much about what dad was doing during this time Stewart was writing him. Unfortunately we do not have the letters that he wrote back to Stewart. ButI do have a lot of other sources of information about what he was doing. He kept a journal as a chaplain, and it in he recorded a lot of detailed information. I have those journals. We also have a lot of photographs. When he went abroad, he bought a very compact camera called a Kodak Bantam, which took a very unusual film - 828. It was very similar in size to 35mm, but it utilized more of the film for the actual picture as opposed to sprocket-holes, and consequently it had slightly larger negatives than 35mm. and thus somewhat higher quality prints, which did not require quite as much enlargement from the negatives.
Dad used both b&w film and Kodachrome film, with which he produced b&w prints and color slides. We have a lot of both. I just ran across a bundle of b&w prints, and - thank you, dad - they have inscriptions on the back identifying that subject of the picture. This is a huge help, to say the least. They cover his time both in London and in France. In May, 1945, he was in London and visited two centers of English Congregationalism: Westminster Chapel, which at that time was the Congregational church in London, and every May was the site of the annual meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. It seated 1500, and dad attended that meeting and took a photo of that assembly, as well as a shot of the exterior. He also visited Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street, which housed the offices of the CUEW and the Congregational Library. That building . . .
" . . . was built to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Great Ejection of Black Bartholomew's Day, resulting from the 1662 Act of Uniformity which restored the Anglican Church. The two thousand Puritan ministers who refused to take the oath of conformity thereby established non-conformism."
Here are his three photos:
What has been the fate of these two buildings in the intervening 75 years? Westminster Chapel still stands, but today it houses what I guess you could call an evangelical megachurch. In the 1960's. the pastor decried the liberalism of the Congregational Union and pulled the congregation out The Memorial hall was torn down in 1968. A new building was erected on the site and houses business offices.
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