Make Typewriters, Not War

Ban Barmy Bishops, Not Typewriters

The typewriter peace sign

Was this Blighty’s Biggest Buffoon?

-class clown, Archbishop Fisher

Pius XII in 1949

While Pope Pius XII typed on the pontiff's Olivetti Studio 42 portable in the Vatican City, at Lambeth Palace in London a goofball Archbishop of Canterbury pointlessly pontificated – on typewriters, the H-Bomb, Catholics, Communism, divorce, Sunday afternoon jaunts in the country and wide American roads.

And in each case, that archbishop, a feebleminded fool called Geoffrey Francis Fisher, made a complete and utter idiot of himself.

Of typewriters, this ignoramus told the British Council of Churches in March 1955 “the dangers of a world war would be reduced if typewriters are abolished”.

Yes, Typospherians, that's right – throw away your typewriters now, or risk the threat you pose to world peace!

According to a page one story in The Canberra Times on March 19, 1955, Fisher Gump went on, “If typewriters were abolished tomorrow, there is a general feeling that a great mass a vapid thought, which goes on between human beings, would be vastly reduced and the danger of war would be vastly deceased.

“Everybody is so busy talking about things and circulating memoranda and having meetings, that a great deal of truth is lost at the bottom of the well.”

The real truth here is that this blockhead bishop was as nutty as a fruitcake and completely lost at the bottom of the well of intellect.

Dolt of the Year

In case one is wondering - yes, this blunderer really was being serious, and yes he was living in the 20th century - right in the middle of it, no less. But thinking? No way, Jose …

The world has moved ahead, even if ever so slightly, in the past 60 years. What one of the world’s two most influential religious leaders could get away with in 1955 nobody would be so stupid as to think they could say today.

Utica Daily Press, March 18, 1955

According to the novelist Roald Dahl, Geoffrey Fisher was a sanctimonious hypocrite who took far greater pleasure from beating to a bloody pulp the naked backsides of Repton schoolboys than he ever did from gently tapping the keys of a typewriter. Dahl remained adamant about the joys Fisher got from smoking a pipe while flogging a bare adolescent bum.

Australian newspaper headline

Fisher Gump was the duffer who, after being a headmaster at Repton, became the Archbishop of Canterbury – and thus the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion – from 1945 to 1961. In those 16 years, this klutz cleric’s proudly and openly expressed opinions probably did more harm to the Church of England than any other single person had done since Bloody Queen Mary in the mid-16th Century.

Fisher was a slow-witted, thick-skinned dunderhead who in one year alone – 1955 - expressed some of the most extraordinarily reactionary, bigotted and insensitive statements ever uttered by a church leader in the 500 years of Protestantism. More than any other Archbishop of Canterbury before or since, this bonehead exemplified the man who - while whatever passed for a brain inside his moronic head remained strictly in neutral - opened his mouth and put his slippered foot fairly and squarely in it. This act became, for Fisher, truly an art form.

Where's me blessed glasses?

Fisher's statements in 1955 alone –

Archbishops were frequently maligned “and I don’t give two hoots”.

The hydrogen bomb: “At its very worst, all that it could do would be to sweep a vast number of persons at one moment from this world into the other and more vital world, into which, anyhow, they must all pass at some time.”

Wipe ' em out, bish ...

Communism: “Our statesmen and country must, under God, take every possible political step to to deliver us from the threat of Communism.”

Progress: “Mankind as a whole has bitten off more than it can chew, and instead of helping man forward, every invention and discovery really lands him in more of a mess.”

Roman Catholics: “The greatest existing hindrance to the advance of the Kingdom of God among men”.

Divorce: “The Church of England will not tolerate divorce under any circumstances.” Britain’s divorce rate was as “beastly as the Mau Mau”. (He said that in Kenya!)

Support for Princess Margaret to marry Peter Townsend: “A popular wave of stupid emotionalism”.

People who go on Sunday afternoon drives in the countryside: “The greatest enemies to Britain.”

The real enemy

Commercial TV: Freedoms extended the press (“for good or evil) are out of the question for television.”

Newspapers: Offer “journalistic exploitations of sex”.

Race: “Although all men are equal within the love of God, they are not equal within the sight God.” “The colour bar is not the sort of thing we should get excited about or fanatical over.”

United States roads: “I would much rather have our [British] roads, where at least we only kill each other one by one.”

Very funny, Fish ...

Frankly, even now, I find these Fisherisms offensive in the extreme, and not in the least bit amusing.

Here are a few from other years to be going on with:

"The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder."

"Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book."

"I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters."

"There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities."