Quarterly E-News - September 2026

Dear Friends

MICHAELMAS GREETINGS!

On Sunday we celebrated the patronal festival of Coventry Cathedral and a recorded service to mark the occasion will be broadcast on BBC Radio Four on Sunday 11 October at 0810 BST. Bishop Sophie will be preaching and it will then be available on BBC Sounds. An opportunity for Friends throughout the country and around the world to share in worship from Coventry Cathedral.

FRIENDS SUPPORT FOR RECONCILIATION

Sunday was also International Community of the Cross of Nails Day. 

At the Cathedral Eucharist we welcomed the new Interns from Germany, who come to us through ASF. For over 60 years, Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace) has been working as an organisation for remembrance, understanding and human rights. This year we are joined by Emillia from Berlin and Konrad from Frankfurt. As part of Friends support for the Cathedral’s reconciliation ministry, we help fund one of these intern places each year. To find out more about ASF, visit their website. https://asf-ev.de/ 

Earlier in the summer the Friends supported the reconciliation ministry in having presence at Greenbelt, when your chair spent a very wet Saturday on the stand.

SUPPORTING THE CHOIR

Our support for the music department has strengthened the choral clerks and further funding from the Cathedral Music Trust is seeing this embedded in the evensong services during the week as well as at the weekend. Along with the boy and girl choristers the choir delivers a very rounded and fulsome sound. This was greatly appreciated by members who attended the dedicated Friends choral evensong after the AGM on the 20 September.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

At that meeting we had a very informative talk by Harry Foley, who curated the current 75 exhibition, sponsored by the Friends. He will be making his text available to us and it will be circulated in a future mailing. It was fascinating to learn of his approach to ‘reading’ the design entries for the new cathedral as a narrative o post war British modern design applied to ecclesiastical buildings.

At the AGM the annual election of the officer team took place, resulting in the following appointments: 

Chair: David Porter; Vice Chair: Phil Morris; Secretary: Paul Warren; Treasurer: William Howard; Membership Secretary: Julie Barnes.

Emma Griffiths was elected for a three year term on the council, joining Christine Camfield, Jane Edwards and Sandra Graham.

Earlier this year Heather Wallace, one of our five life time vice presidents, was a sad loss for both the Friends and the Cathedral community. Our former chair, Martin Williams was elected by the meeting as a life time vice president, honouring his long service to the Cathedral Friends and wider community.

Over the summer we also said farewell to Rex Satchwell, at 93 a long serving member of the Cathedral community and a member of the Friends. A fitting tribute was held at the Cathedral in August, where among his many contributions to our life together, his annual role as the voice of God in the Form of a Servant service was fondly remembered.

FRIENDS IN CONVERSATION

We are greatly looking forward to our new series of Friends in Conversation. The first is with Dr Katya Hoyer and is on FRIDAY 13 NOVEMBER at 7 pm in the Cathedral.

WEIMAR: a warning from history

Historian Katja Hoyer explores the remarkable story of Weimar, the German town that became both the birthplace of the Weimar Republic and a symbol of the rise of Nazism. Through the lives of its residents between 1919 and 1939, she reveals how democracy, culture and dictatorship collided in one extraordinary place, offering a compelling portrait of a society teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on the lessons of Weimar's past, she will also reflect on what this history can teach us today about the fragility of democracy, political polarisation and the choices societies face in times of crisis.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the bestselling author of several books on German history, most recently Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. Her previous book Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for PEN's Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Katja is a columnist for Berliner Zeitung and a regular contributor to British and American news outlets such as the BBC, Bloomberg, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.  Katja also co-hosts the popular podcast Reichs & Republics and runs a bi-weekly blog called ZEITGEIST. She was born in Germany and calls the UK home.

Registration is free with a suggested donation on the evening of £10 towards the work of the Friends. The main purpose of registration is to help us gauge numbers, so please register if you plan to be there. Either visit the website 

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/weimar-a-warning-from-history-in-conversation-with-katya-hoyer-tickets-2002203854627?aff=oddtdtcreator

Or scan this QR code.

On 16 September I attended a reception on behalf of the Friends at the German embassy in London to mark German British reconciliation with the reopening of the German military cemetery education centre at Cannock Chase. https://cannockchase.org.uk/care-for-the-chase/heritage-and-history/german-military-cemetery/

Rev Canon Kate Massey and Andrew Hines represented the Cathedral and it was good to hear from the Dean of Windsor and the former Bishop of Coventry, Rt Rev Christopher Cocksworth, who was one of the guest speakers. 

In particular it was a delight to meet Dr Katya at the event. The next day she posted a moving reflection on her Substack blog, Zeitgeist. I include this reflection below in the hope it encourages you to join us in November. If you are in the Coventry and Warwickshire region, encourage your friends to come along. It promises to be a stimulating evening.

Yours in Friendship 

Canon David Porter, Chair

German War Dead on British Soil

A sombre note on Cannock Chase, Coventry and memories of war

KATJA HOYER

SEP 17, 2026

We historians are supposed to be hard-nosed analysts. Well… or at least fact-minded academics with our emotions about the subject matter left outside our study door. But that’s not always possible. We all have areas of study that get to us because they touch upon something personal. For me, one such theme is British-German conflict.

By now, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in Britain — entirely by choice. I love it here. Yes, the chips can be a bit soggy, and I will never understand why anyone would put taps with scalding hot and ice-cold water at opposite ends of a sink. But there’s much to enjoy and admire about these isles and their people. The thought that Germans who lived here just a few generations ago were faced with the prospect of the nation of their birth going to war with the country that has become their home is a terrible one to me, not just as a historian but also as a person.

Today, we tend to take the reconciliation of Germany and Britain for granted. Despite Brexit, both countries’ interests are largely aligned. Both face similar challenges in many areas, including and crucially on security and military matters. Just a few decades after the vicious devastation of two World Wars, it seems inconceivable that Germany and Britain would go to war with one another.

But Queen Victoria and her German husband Albert would also have found it hard to envision the horrors of the First World War that unfolded just 13 years after Victoria died in the arms of her oldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. It pays to remember how brutally fast things can change.

Such sobering thoughts ran through my Anglo-German mind yesterday as I stood in the dining room of the German Ambassador’s residence in London and listened to a couple of songs being performed live about courage in war and the spirit of reconciliation in peace. They came on the back of a powerful speech by Christopher Cocksworth, Dean of Windsor, who had previously served as Bishop of Coventry. Coventry is twinned with Dresden, sharing a deep historical connection with a fellow city that was destroyed in the Second World War. Cocksworth explained in moving terms how visiting Dresden had “changed my life.”

The event last night was held to mark the inauguration of the new History Centre at the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery. Set among the Staffordshire countryside, it’s a remarkably peaceful place with row upon row of carefully maintained graves. The men buried there were German servicemen who died during both World Wars, far from home and, in some cases, under very different circumstances from those who died on the battlefields of continental Europe. Their presence on Cannock Chase is a reminder that the consequences of war reached deep into Britain itself, even if it was never invaded by Germany in either conflict.

The UK and West Germany agreed on 16 October 1959 that there should be a central burial place for German nationals who lost their lives in the United Kingdom during the two World Wars. The German War Graves Commission, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, organised the transferral of the graves of German servicemen and civilian internees from the various burial grounds elsewhere to the new cemetery established at Cannock Chase and inaugurated in 1967. It now contains almost 5,000 German and Austrian graves. Today, its newly refurbished exhibition and history centre will be inaugurated.

There’s more than symbolism in this, I feel. Most of the people laid to rest there fought the people on whose soil they are now buried in war. Britain and Germany were opposing nations in conflicts in which millions of lives were lost. Yet a few decades later, maintaining these graves has taken on another meaning as an act of reconciliation.

One of the speakers last night reminded us that a crucial aspect of reconciliation is our ability to mourn the dead as human beings rather than as representatives of an enemy nation. That’s what’s happening, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. It’s utterly remarkable that we got here.

Two young women – both 18 – spoke about that last night, reminding us that we’re just a few generations away from those deadly conflicts. One was English, with a great-grandfather who had fought as an infantry soldier. The other was Russian-German, with grandfathers who had fought one another in the Second World War, rendering one “badly injured and traumatised” and the other dead.

Now both girls attended a summer project at Cannock Chase and say it has completely transformed how they see the world. One said she’d previously felt the World Wars were ancient history but has now realised they really are not, and that preserving their memory is crucial to building a peaceful future. The other smiled sadly and said: “We’ve become good friends. A century ago, we may have ended up as enemies.”

That thought ran through my mind as I contemplated my own upcoming reconciliation speech. The Friends of Coventry Cathedral have kindly invited me to speak there on 13 November — a hugely important date in the city’s history. That day in 1940 was the last one St Michael’s Cathedral was still in one piece.

On the evening of 14 November, a terrible air raid began, with 515 German bombers dropping 500 tons of high explosives on the city. The cathedral was hit and burnt out almost to destruction. To stand in that space as a German 86 years later and address a British audience feels like a huge weight of responsibility, but it is also a great honour and a moving sign of how far we have come.

Yesterday evening has given me much to think about as I prepare for my visit to Coventry in November. One snapshot from last night that has stayed with me was British military musicians playing in harmony with a Bundeswehr brass band while a descendant of the Moltke family drank wine with a British mayor. We’ve come a long way on the road to reconciliation, but we should never think we’ve reached the end of that journey.