Sir, – Patrick Corkery’s statement (Letters, October 8th) that Neville Chamberlain, as a Unitarian, “would not have been overly familiar with” the “peace in our time” prayer from the Book of Common Prayer is absurd. And his anti-Unitarian barb spoils an otherwise good letter.
When William Robertson, Rector of Rathvilly, Co Carlow, left the Anglican fold in the 1760s because of his Unitarian leanings, he favoured a prayer book shorn, as he put it, of all “controverted points”. And his friend Theophilus Lindsey’s Unitarian Book of Common Prayer was published in 1774 thus continued to include the “peace in our time” prayer because in no sense was it a “controverted point”.
For the same reason both Dublin Unitarian Church's Service Book of 1915, edited by Ernest Savell Hicks, and the 1932 Unitarian Orders of Worship, the use of which would have been widespread in Britain in Chamberlain's time, include similar prayers. It is clear, therefore, that a 1930s Unitarian would have known the imagery involved perfectly well.
But in any case, for the record, and for Mr Corkery’s enlightenment, Chamberlain was not so much quoting from the Book of Common Prayer as echoing a remark made by Benjamin Disraeli upon returning from the Congress of Berlin in 1878. – Yours, etc,
(Dr) MARTIN PULBROOK,
Enniscoffey,
Co Westmeath,