St Mary's Butts is the unlikely name of one of the major streets in the centre of Reading. It is more like an elongated square than a traditional high street and has been a focus of religious and commercial life for centuries. The ancient church of St Mary dominates the east side. Parts of it date back over 1,000 years. Its welcoming vicar, Canon Brian Shenton, explains that the name has nothing to do with Our Lady's backside. The Butts were archery targets; the usage still survives in expressions such as "the butt of a joke". In the Middle Ages, when archery practice was compulsory as part of the defense of the realm, the men would come out of Sunday Mass and practice their marksmanship in the meadow in front of St Mary's. It is a very long time since there was a green meadow or archery targets in front of St Mary's. Nowadays the weapons are guns and the targets are real humans.
On Friday 2nd May I was travelling on a bus towards St Mary's Butts. Most of the bus routes in town go through the Butts. But then I heard the radio controller instructing all drivers to detour round the west side of the town centre. Sure enough the bus went straight on instead of swinging right into the Butts as normal. I hopped off at the next stop and walked back round the north side of the Butts. The northern half of the Butts was screened off by police tape with officers guarding the north and south tape barriers. I asked one officer what had happened and he politely replied "I'm afraid I cannot tell you, sir". So I made a detour round the exclusion zone to the open air market where I buy my fruit and vegetables. One of the stallholders told me that there had been a fatal stabbing in the early hours. Police forensics teams in full-length white plastic suits were combing the excluded area for evidence.
The local rumour machine was of course working overtime. One of my colleagues has a friend who works at the police station, which is only 300 yards from the murder scene. His friend had told him it was a fight between two drugs gangs and that at least one shot had been fired. From the point of view of the local newspapers it could hardly have happened at a worse time. The weekly Reading Chronicle appears on Thursday morning, so would have to wait 6 days to deliver its version. The Reading Post is printed daily from Monday to Friday, so a murder on Friday would normally have to wait until Monday's edition. But Monday 5th May was a public holiday, when the Post does not appear. So the story finally ran across the Post's front page on Tuesday 6th, by which time it was pretty stale news.
But the delay meant that there was plenty of time to get quotes from all and sundry. Behind the usual smokescreen of politically corrected verbiage, you could do your own translation into English.
The 17 year old murder victim (Robert Spence) had left Ryeish Green, a local high school, in 2007. The school is due to close in 2010 after an undistinguished academic history. The head teacher made the usual futile appeal for "No more knives" and explained how the deceased had successfully studied several topics in the vocational courses offered at the school (i.e. he was not academically inclined). His 15 year old sister lamented his demise. No one was so cruel as to emphasis that her surname was different from his, a pretty good hint at a disordered family background. But the distortions of language which are routine in the British media made me even more suspicious of the accuracy of the report. Was she a full sister, a half sister, a stepsister, a foster sister, an adopted sister or something else?
The ideological falsification of language which the British press now employ beggars belief. The most monstrous recent example concerned Shannon Matthews, a little girl in Yorkshire who was apparently kidnapped, but recovered alive. All the media referred to her "stepfather". Er, no, he was not. This poor little girl was only one of 7 children her mother had conceived by 5 different fathers and the "stepfather" in question was merely the latest of her mother's numerous paramours. "Stepfather" used to be a title confirmed by matrimony and characterised by a long-term stable relationship and commitment to looking after the stepchildren. No one could accuse Shannon's mother of committing matrimony at any time in her life. But she is now in prison accused of perverting the course of justice and the stepfather/paramour is facing charges of downloading child pornography. A superb article in the Christian "Touchstone" magazine argued that sexual liberation for adults inevitably leads to the sexual abuse of children and this sordid case provided yet more evidence, if more were needed, to support that argument.
But back to our equally sordid Reading killing. The police made the usual futile appeal for witnesses. Seeing that the murder happened at 4am, the only witnesses in the town centre would most likely be criminals and/or stoned on drink and/or drugs. Even by British standards of drunken debauchery, ordinary revellers would have dispersed by 2am. The police would have been conspicuous by their absence, as they are most of the time, day or night. The local hoodlums plainly had no fear of having a showdown only 300 yards from local police HQ. To compound the confusion, not all the newspaper appeals for information contained the most relevant information - the time
of the stabbing. I could not help wondering if this vital piece of information was deliberately suppressed to avoid the impression that the victim might have been the author of his own misfortune. Not a single media report has yet hinted at the drug gang circumstances reported by the rumour machine. The way the Post presented the story made him look like a lovely innocent young lad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, 4am is certainly the wrong time for a 17 year old in any place but his own home.
Inevitably a carpet of flowers appeared in a corner of St Mary's churchyard. In the ever declining strength of real religious belief and practice, it is one unifying ritual which all can join in. Any murder or accidental death in Britain now attracts such a carpet. It was obviously not on the insane scale of Princess Diana's floral tributes. In 1997 around $40 million was squandered on a gigantic pile of flowers outside her palace in London; these were soon reduced to a foetid garbage heap. After a day or two in the spring sunshine, the plastic-wrapped bouquets in St Mary's were already wilting and fading when I checked them out. (
Link to movie of flower carpet in front of St. Mary's.)
Plainly the horrible murder of Mary Ann Leneghan in May 2005 has had no long term impact on the local drug scene's viciousness and general depravity. Her disgusting torture, gang rape and killing provoked a frenzy of police and media activity which made even local drugs barons cautious for a few weeks. Martin Salter, one of our local Members of Parliament, appeared on TV to urgently warn youngsters that it was not just drugs that are dangerous -the people trafficking them are even deadlier. Mary Ann was a high school dropout and the child of divorced parents. She was hardly a sweet innocent victim either; she peddled drugs on a small scale and a local gangster believed that she had set him up for a robbery. But the media circus moves on to other priorities and sensations; the drugs gangs can bide their time and move back in when the coast is clear.
The only worthwhile moral you can draw from this sad episode is the usual blindingly obvious one: the vital importance of a stable loving family background in producing happy productive human beings. Without the Christian formation and culture to sustain marriage, there is no hope for a substantial section of the British population. Without a powerful religious basis, traditional stable marriage is not viable for a large percentage of the population. So much of British culture and public policy might have been cleverly designed to destroy marriage as thoroughly as possible. The catastrophic background of Shannon Matthews is inexplicable without the cooperation of two huge factors: public subsidy for serial polygamy and polyandry via the social security system and the cultural assumption, trumpeted from the majority of media outlets, that sexual morality is the individual's own business, no matter how much misery it heaps up for other people in the form of sexual abuse, abandonment, poor academic performance and resulting vulnerability to criminal recruitment and an early squalid death.
------- A few hours later---------
Dear Stan,
Many thanks for posting and illustrating my article on our latest sordid murder. Another bizarre omission from local media reports was any mention of the dead boy's parents. Usually the first thing the reporters do is find the parent(s) and get a quote about what a lovely lad he was, etc, etc. If the parents are too prostrate with grief, an uncle or other adult relation (or at least an adult family friend) will make a statement. Yet, despite having ample time to track down the family, they quoted only the 15 year old sister (if that was her true status). Part of the problem is that categories such as "sister", "half-sister", "stepsister", etc all depend on a presumed background of stable marriage and orderly relationships. With the utter chaos in relations between the sexes, language itself is degraded into near meaninglessness. We almost need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-father" to denote someone who is in some sort of semi-familial relationship.
I attach below the excellent article to which I referred in the last post. It is from the April 2002 issue of Touchstone Magazine (www.touchstonemag.com). I cannot recommend the website too highly; it has a huge back catalog of thought provoking articles which would keep you busy for months. As the articles are nearly all on issues of long-term importance, not transitory sensation, they provide a priceless resource for lectures on religious topics.
Link to the article Bill refers to:
Dare We Get Real About Sex?
“Pedophilia Chic” & the Challenge to Conservatism
by Carson Holloway
9:15 P.M. update: F.I.X.E.D!
