Press Releases07 Jun 24

The Revd James McMurray–Taylor, Church of Ireland chaplain to the First Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, 1943–47

A reflection on the Revd James McMurray–Taylor, Church of Ireland chaplain to the First Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles 1943–47, who landed on Sword Beach, Normandy, on D–Day, delivered by Archbishop John McDowell at the Royal Irish Regiment Service at Ranville on Friday, 7th June 2024:

Although it is at the side of a main road leading into Enniskillen, the little Arts and Crafts Church of Saint Patrick’s, Castlearchdale, where the Revd James McMurray–Taylor is buried, is a tranquil enough spot. It wasn’t always so, and for the war years in the 1940s there was a large military presence, most distinctively of Catalina and Shorts Sunderland flying boats. Indeed, it was from Castlearchdale that two of the Catalinas which were instrumental in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck were launched.

It would be tempting to think that it was the rather glamorous presence of so many GIs that inspired James McMurray–Taylor to volunteer as a Chaplain to the Forces in 1943, but in fact he was a curate in the parish of St Mary’s on the Crumlin Road in Belfast at that time. As far as I know, there is no written record of why he volunteered but it is clear from all that we do know about him that he was a very dutiful man in an age when a sense of duty counted as a higher virtue than it does today.

Duty to his country and, overwhelmingly, duty to his God and to his vocation as a priest. There was a soldier in another war who, in an attempt to explain to his distraught wife why he had to go to war, reminded her that “I could not love thee half so well, loved I not honour more”. Honour and duty – old fashioned words which are now lost to ordinary speech, but which explain a lot about people like James McMurray–Taylor.

He was certainly someone who did not seek the limelight. All the accounts of how he conducted himself as a chaplain – blessing soldiers from every Christian tradition and none before battle, burying the dead, both British and German, with the respect due to human dignity, toiling in the warm stench of death and hot sun of a battlefield to recover name tags and personal effects also from German and British alike, to be returned to their loved ones – are evidence of deep faith and dedication.

There is one letter from James, I think, in the Regimental Archive. It was written twenty years after he had been demobbed and seems to be in response to someone who was writing up the history of either the Regiment or Chaplaincy, and also inviting him to buy a regimental tie! The letter in response, though short is very revealing. He remembers the parachute training in October–November 1943 and he “thinks” it was in February 1944 that he joined 1 RUR, which as far as he can remember was going to make an air assault on Japan.

Although in every sense a hero, there is nothing of the heroic in his style and manner. He was a man dutifully doing his job. He received no special treatment when he returned to the Church of Ireland in 1947. He was curate in charge of a small parish in County Donegal and then one in County Derry before ending up with two rural and parishes in County Fermanagh, where he stayed until he retired in 1980.

Interestingly he kept up his military connection after his demobilisation and was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for services to the Army Cadet Force in 1977. He clearly never sought preferment, was never made a canon of a Cathedral despite being editor of the Diocesan Magazine (the most thankless of all tasks) for twelve years.

I grew up in Belfast in a housing estate which included a long terrace for disabled ex–servicemen. All of the residents had been physically damaged – usually with the loss of a limb – although I cannot remember any sense of bitterness. In other words, I was surrounded by men like James McMurray–Taylor. Extraordinary, ordinary people who did their duty and did it cheerfully in often very difficult circumstances.

Pretty well all of my father’s and mother’s generation fought in the war. I had two Merchant Navy uncles who sailed on the convoy ships to Archangel and Murmansk and another uncle who had fought in both the First and Second World wars. One of our neighbours had fought south of the Irrawaddy River in Burma and another had been involved in the doomed attempt on Narvik in Norway.

The Great War had been the end of faith for many. Those who had grown up in an easy peace and a superior culture. Those who were confident in the onward march of civilisation, because they had never had their self–confidence tested; who did not know the wickedness that men were capable of. In the century before that war, the Churches had domesticated God and harnessed him to their purposes. He had become their asset and their patron, rather their Judge and their Redeemer.

That was not so much the way with the Second War, where the moral case for the destruction of Nazi Germany was unambiguous even before the men we are remembering today fought their way across Europe and found the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz. And perhaps the remarkable energy and clear–sightedness of that generation who fought in the war and then went on to create the welfare state in health and housing was a consequence of that moral clarity, so unlike the dark years of the 1920s and 30s when many of those who had fought in the Great War were left in poverty and misery by a system of class privilege which had not yet been broken.

That, of course, is speculation. However what is not speculative, but concrete and clear, is a life like that of James McMurray–Taylor. Confident in the rightness of the cause for which those whose souls he had the care of were fighting–confident but not self–righteous. Putting his trust in the God of all the nations, a God of justice and humanity, he did his duty on the battlefields of Europe during the war and his duty after the war, in a quiet corner of the country he loved, serving the God who he loved – and in his eyes there was no incongruity between the Lord of Hosts and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.