Revd Sally Muggeridge R.I.P.

At the beginning of December 2025 I received the sad news of the death of The Rev Sally Muggeridge, who served with me at St Stephen Walbrook as our curate. Sally's obituary has recently been published by The Telegraph, who characterise her as an Anglican priest who defended the reputation of her renowned uncle Malcolm Muggeridge. Ordained a vicar after a career in business, she ministered to ‘stressed City workers’ while at St Stephen Walbrook.

The opportunity to minister at St Stephen Walbrook together with Sally was one that I greatly enjoyed and appreciated. I greatly valued having her as a colleague. She was a special colleague with great insight and ideas coupled with real humility and a servant heart. We were very fortunate to have enjoyed Sally’s assistance and ministry at St Stephen Walbrook during her curacy and were particularly grateful for the links she established with the City and with businesses locally. 

Her pastoral heart combined with her business experience and insights was absolutely the right combination for ministry at Walbrook. Her understanding of the pressures of life in the City helped her provide the support others needed. As she said in an FT profile, “My role is now one of pastoral care of stressed City workers. So many seek chats, prayers, a quick discussion [about] a worry about family life and work. A prayer needed, a smile, a service — I can help with examples and encouragement.”'

Her time with us, as well as creating new links and initiatives with the business community, also broke down barriers as she was the first woman to preside at the Eucharist in St Stephen Walbrook. It was a privilege to be at the ‘At Home’ for WATCH during which she celebrated her first Eucharist and became the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist in that church. Her legacy also includes all she did to work on the legacy of Malcolm Muggeridge and I also remember our conversations about him and his impact with real pleasure. I will always remember her time with us and all she brought to ministry with deep gratitude.

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Choral Classics with the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Sally Muggeridge - Priesting

Sally Muggeridge, curate at St Stephen Walbrook who was profiled in Thursday's Financial Times, was priested at St James's Sussex Gardens this afternoon along with five other of her priestly colleagues. The Service was splendid with excellent music and was led by The Rt Revd Nigel Stock, Bishop at Lambeth.

The FT profile noted: "Throughout her career, Revd Muggeridge has been a vocal advocate of increasing the role of women in business and the church. At Pearson, she was head of diversity and in 2010 became the first woman to be appointed to the board of Total, the French energy group."

Accordingly, as part of her ministry at St Stephen Walbrook, Sally is currently organising our 'Women in the City of London - More than just a place of work' event on Tuesday 12th July from 6.30pm. This is an evening which will highlight the civic, cultural, charitable and social opportunities in the City of London, including networks as a route to fuller participation. We also look forward to welcoming WATCH (London) to St Stephen Walbrook for their At Home this Wednesday.  

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Joseph Haydn - Missa Sancti Nicolai.

The myth of greater private-sector efficiency

On the basis of my experiences in the Civil Service prior to ordination, I am fully with Aditya Chakrabortty who writes in today's Guardian "that the myth of greater private-sector efficiency in doing public works is just that: a myth":

"There is one problem. Time after time, these public-private partnerships (PPPs) have turned out to be a great deal for the companies, but a terrible bargain for the taxpayer. And on occasion, as with what happened on London's tube network just four years back, they can lead to outright collapse of the services involved.

How could it be anything but a bad deal for the British taxpayer? The private sector can't raise money more cheaply or easily than the government. According to an FT analysis done towards the end of last year, paying for PPPs with private-sector cash costs taxpayers well over £20bn extra. The public sector calculated this as "the equivalent of more than 40 sizeable new hospitals".

Or is there some magic private-sector dust that means whatever company executives do is just far more efficient than those Soviet realists in public service? Not a bit of it. The typical PPP experience is of a multiplication of middlemen and transactions designed to benefit the private sector."

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Quantic - Ticket To Know Where feat. Ohmega Watts

Airbrushed from Art History (24)

Albert Houthuesen has been described by Souren Melikian in the International Herald Tribune as a "virtually unknown master." Melikian wrote in the same article that he suspected that "Houthuesen will come to be seen as one of the great figures in post-World War II Western art." Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic at the Financial Times, wrote in a listing of the best books of 2008 that "Houthuesen was a Dutch-English modernist, whose life story forms one of the most sensational, offbeat, affecting artist's biographies I have encountered."

Melikian suggests that one of the reasons for the "deafening silence surrounding Houthuesen’s oeuvre" was that he "found his way to modernity in isolation, without ever trying to fall into line with any group." Although he met "Henry Moore, Edward Burra and other future luminaries on the contemporary scene" at the Royal College of Art, as a loner, "he did not keep in touch." Houthuesen expressed this sense in his view that the artist and the poet were inseparable in spirit from the clown, who he often portrayed as philosopher and saint.

A further reason for the wall of indifference towards his work may have been the visionary nature of the work. Melikian writes that Houthuesen, "transcribed visionary scenery, remote from material reality" where "movement is conveyed in masterly brushwork and color applied with a rare sense of harmony."  "A kind of explosive exultation" comes out in some of these "mental landscapes" where his "sophisticated brushwork is as complex as are the harmonies."

In Rocks and Storm, for example, "a hurricane seems to be blowing apart primeval elements, disintegrating into colored shreds" while in Invocation, "a red hot sun disc shot through with yellow is framed in a swirl of black. The sky, too, is ablaze in shimmering red with faint yellow streaks. The sea could be a torrent of lava springing up from a volcano." His ambition was "to paint things which are so rich and intense that they will annihilate what has gone before."

Houthuesen "was a profoundly religious man" who once said, "Today, for many artists, it’s ‘out’ to be interested in these things." Yet, "going to the moon for instance – this incredible thing that has happened in our time – doesn’t make the Bible any less wonderful. If anything, it makes it more marvellous." He remarked to his biographer Richard Nathanson that, ‘We walk in mystery’ and Nathanson has written, in the introduction to Walk to the Moon, that Houthuesen introduced him to the notion of ‘an inner journey’; "that an enquiring, ‘seeing’ imaginative mind could, without travelling the globe, gain an understanding of the underlying, universal elements that link all living things and Nature, regardless of time or place."

Houthuesen said, "I used to like going to church. Most of it I didn’t understand but I always had this feeling that there was a great and profound mystery which had tremendous meaning. When you are a child and you read in the Bible of miracles, you wonder very much. Later all that changes and it becomes an amazingly imaginative idea of the world, based on truth, and written by great poets. Man, through this poetry, is trying to express about his life what is so terribly difficult to understand. He stands in mystery and through it he is trying all the time to understand. At certain times, one may begin to make drawings and paintings of biblical things. The Bible is full of these tremendously imaginative ideas. They are profound symbols. The richness of the Bible is terrific. It is the greatest stuff that has ever been written."

The secret, he thought, is that some men and women (like Christ) are born with an intense imagination; "this imaginative power gives their thinking great clarity" and "that is why their thoughts carry on and on and become a universal thing, of all time and for all time."

Wullschlager brings both the isolation and spirituality together by writing of Houthuesen's "isolated but luminous imaginative world" as seen in the painting Walk to the Moon which has "at once a lightness of being – art’s escape into interiority – and a sense of painting as a tragic language that never left Houthuesen." In Walk to the Moon:

"a strange, elongated figure in a tight-fitting white costume, legs twisted like a gauche ballerina, face like a mask, emerges from a translucent blue ground, bearing a single flower. It is a figure out of time, one who might have walked off the moon, yet carries long art-historical echoes: the heart-breaking pathos of Watteau’s white-robed “Pierrot”; almond-wide, still, sad Modigliani eyes; the religious intensity of George Rouault’s clowns."

Ultimately, Houthuesen said:

"One can only paint anything at all, whatever the subject, through knowing it. And one must love it and be moved more than one can say."

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Low - Witches.