Thanks to Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982) and its adaptations for stage and screen, many people nowadays are familiar with the plight of animals in wartime. Our colleague Joseph Hardwick reveals how ephemera uncovered as part of his research into ecclesiastical history can reveal more about links between animal welfare and religion during the First World War.
The starting point for this ephemera story is a picture of a litany – meaning a series of petitions or prayers – that was issued by a British animal welfare organisation, the ‘Our Animal Brothers’ Guild’, in the early months of the First World War. The Guild claimed in early January 1915 that they had sold over a hundred thousand paper copies of the litany. One of the litany’s prayers in particular – the one for the ‘humble beasts’ – received much attention in the letter pages of newspapers (1). Today, the litany can be found in the Church of England’s records at Lambeth Palace Library, London (2).
Controversy over animal prayer
The popularity of the wartime prayer reveals much about the emotional attachments that people on the home front developed with the horses and dogs that served and suffered on the western front. But this prayer was also controversial because its provenance was unclear and because it represented the animals that served in war in unconventional ways, as creatures that had wills and made decisions. Many Christian clergymen would have been troubled by the idea that a human might pray for a non-human animal, and indeed that an animal might express something like ‘agency’. In late 1914 and early 1915 there was much debate about whether the prayer should be used at all. The paragraphs that follow consider the controversy that the prayer generated in England’s national religious body, the Church of England. This piece also suggests some of the larger issues and questions raised by this – largely unknown – episode in the religious history of the war.
A ‘Russian’ prayer?
The Guild said the prayer was ‘adapted’ from the ‘liturgy of the Russian Church’. The prayer was striking because it represented horses and other military animals as patriots that had spiritual souls, wills, and agency in the sense that they gave their lives for their countries:
And for those also, O Lord, the humble beasts who with us bear the burden and heat of the day, and offer their guileless lives for the well-being of their countries, we supplicate Thy great tenderness of heart, for Thou has promised to save both man and beast, and great is Thy loving kindness, O Master, Saviour of the world. Lord have mercy. (Westminster Gazette, 11 November 1914)
Letters appeared in church newspapers to say that the prayer met a ‘real want’, that it was ‘beautiful and touching’, and that it reflected the ‘British conception’ that animals had souls and afterlives (Guardian [church newspaper], 31 December 1914 and 7 January 1915). A woman named Rosa White who lived near London told local newspapers that the prayer was justified on both spiritual and practical grounds. ‘Our Redeemer has promised to save them [the animals] as well as mankind’, she said, and ‘where would the cavalry and transport be without them?’ (in the Bromley Chronicle on 29 October 1914 and in the Harrow Observer, 23 October 1914).
What is known about how the prayer was used? In December 1914 Edmund Knox, bishop of Manchester, authorised the use of the prayer among his clergy and elsewhere clergymen included the prayer in the services of intercession in their parish churches (Guardian, 31 December 1914). The prayer circulated also among soldiers in France and Belgium. Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London used the litany and a revised version of the prayer during services on a tour of the western front in spring 1915 (3). Prayers printed on sheets of paper would have been used privately at home and in quiet moments during church services. According to one recent account, worship in the Church of England during the war provided more room for lay participation and had an intimate and personal quality. More time was allowed time for silent prayer (4). Litanies and prayers printed on paper suited these new styles of worship.
The notion that animals might be the focus of prayer would have been not entirely unfamiliar to British Christians, but traditionally those who campaigned against cruelty to animals had prayed that humans might treat animals in better ways, and with more consideration for animal pain and suffering (since the 1870s those who objected to scientific experiments on live animals – anti-vivisectionists – had distributed such appeals and petitions on prayer cards) (5). The so-called Russian prayer was more controversial, because it raised the question of whether, theologically, it was appropriate to pray for animals that, it was conventionally supposed, could not sin, experience salvation, or be redeemed. In late 1914 the high church Slavophile William J. Birkbeck wrote to Anglican newspapers to explain that one could not offer a prayer that presented animals as patriots who made decisions. The notion that animals sacrificed their lives for nations was not consistent with ‘common sense’, Birkbeck added, or ‘compatible with what orthodox theologians teach on the subject of man’s free will’ (in the Church Times on 11, 18 and 24 December 1914; and in the church newspaper Guardian on 17 and 31 December 1914).
It then emerged that the prayer was not Russian at all, but had been composed by an amateur Slavophile, a woman named E. M. Hewlett. Birkbeck and his clergymen colleagues disparaged Hewlett in their private letters as an ‘excitable’ animal enthusiast and ‘not a very well balanced…nervously’ (6). Birkbeck’s findings prompted Charles Gore, bishop of Oxford, and Handley Moule, of Durham, to prohibit the use of the prayer in their dioceses (7). When the prayer was used it was reworded so that there was no suggestion of animal agency. The version that Winnington-Ingram used in France referred to animals ‘whose guileless lives are offered for the wellbeing of their countries’.
The prayer, in its original, more controversial wording, continued to be used after 1918. Sometime in the 1920s, the RSPCA issued the prayer on a card (the card, along with other animal protection ephemera, can be found in the society’s archives in Horsham, West Sussex). There was much public demand for prayers in the interwar period. It became common for laypeople to write to newspapers to debate whether it was meaningful to pray for animals (8). The appetite for such prayers was perhaps influenced by the experience of war and may have reflected a sharper public awareness of animal pain and suffering, as well as the debt humans owed to labouring and military animals. The prayer also reappeared in the second world war, and interestingly it circulated for longer, was applied to a broader range of animals, and was received more positively by some church authorities (9). In 1942 William Temple, the archbishop of Canterbury, even considered recommending use of the prayer for a ‘day of prayer’ when the nation would gather to appeal to God to intercede on behalf of those who served and suffered in war (10).
What can we learn from this ephemera story?
The story of this curious prayer connects to a range of issues, questions, and themes in the history of religion, war, and human-animal relationships. The prayer shows how a growing interest in human-animal intimacies and interconnections could be reflected in British religious life. There is also a sense that animal service and suffering was a problem for Christians, one that was not easy to include or represent in existing cultures of prayer and worship.
The story is also another demonstration of how war ‘amplified the emotional bonds’ that people had with pets and the animals that contributed to the military effort (11). Sometimes these relationships took a religious form. Historians cite examples of soldiers – quite late in the war – awarding military pigeons rough funerals and burying the birds in graves marked by small crosses (12). Hilda Kean has pointed out that the animals that humans ‘conscripted’ into the war effort could be represented as possessing human emotions and qualities (13). The prayer, and the images of grieving riderless horses that appeared in animal welfare publicity during the war, are, perhaps, best regarded as further examples of this old tendency to attribute human faculties and character traits to certain animals, such as thought, compassion, fellowship, sagacity, fidelity, and patriotism.
Notes
(1) To learn more about the prayer and the history of animals in English cultures of prayer and worship, see Joseph Hardwick, ‘Animals, Anglicans, and cultures of prayer and worship in England, c.1900-c.1950’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (forthcoming; available here). Philip Johnson, in his blog, Animals Matter to God studies the origins and subsequent use of the prayer in prayer anthologies and animal ethics literature (blog post last accessed 18 July 2023).
(2) More specifically, in a file titled ‘Correspondence, 1913-1916’ in the papers of W. J Birkbeck at call number 1/12/9.
(3) G. Vernon Smith, The Bishop of London’s Visit to the Front (London, 1915), p. 93.
(4) Philip Williamson et al, National Prayers: Special Prayers since the Reformation. Volume 3: worship for national and royal occasions in the United Kingdom 1871-2016 (Woodbridge, 2020), pp. xcii, xcv.
(5) E.g., the Society for United Prayer Against Cruelty to Animals: Our Dumb Animals (Dec. 1876), p. 52.
(6) Lambeth Palace Library, London, W. J. Birkbeck Papers, 1/12/19, Gerald Maxwell to Birkbeck, 15 December 1914, ff. 27-8.
(7) Daily Mail, 4 January 1915; Modern Man, 16 January 1915.
(8) Hull Daily Mail, 4 April 1927; Gloucestershire Echo, 31 August, 3 and 12 September 1932; Bexhill-on-Sea Observer, 4 August 1934; Daily Mirror, 4 December 1935, and 6 October 1936.
(9) Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, Daily Prayer (Oxford, 1941), 79. The so-called Russian prayer in its original, 1914, form was circulated by the Liverpool Echo, 5 October 1942, and other newspapers in late 1942. It also appears in a local RSPCA appeal in the Royal Leamington Spa Courier, 27 September 1940.
(10) Clare Campbell, Bonzo’s War: Animals Under Fire 1939-1945 (London, 2013), pp. 252-3.
(11) Hilda Kean and Philip Howell, ‘The dogs that didn’t bark in the Blitz: Transspecies and transpersonal emotional geographies on the British home front’, Journal of Historical Geography, 61 (2018), p. 52.
(12) John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, and the Great War (London, 2016), pp. 32-3.
(13) Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London 1998), pp. 165, 171-5.