Morden College, 17 June 2026
Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark
Blackheath has an amazing history. Getting its name from the colour of the soil, the Roman Watling Street crossed it, the marauding Vikings camped here having captured the Archbishop of Canterbury, who they then killed in Greenwich. Wat Tyler assembled his peasants’ revolt here. Henry V was welcomed here after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and didn’t want any pomp or show about it. Unlike Henry VIII, who just over a hundred years later came here to meet Anne of Cleves. Charles II was welcomed back to England here and, later, revivalist meetings with Wesley and Whitefield assembled on the heath. The first English gold club was founded here, and the first fair, a cattle fair. It later developed a reputation for highwaymen, but meanwhile in the village, schools were being built. Some had pupils that went on to greatness – Disraeli and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor in England. But not all the schools were wonderful. Salem House, where you may remember David Copperfield suffered under Mr Creakle, was modelled on one of the worst of them.
And it was here in 1669, the same year that Christopher Wren was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works and Samuel Pepys wrote his last entry in his diary due to poor eyesight, that John Morden, back from his spice trading in Aleppo and doing nicely, came, with his wife, to live in Wricklemarsh Manor. ‘Wrickle’, by the way, is an old Saxon word meaning ‘chirp’, so you get the picture, chirping birds and chirping streams, he had just bought over 200 acres of country land. And it was here 26 years later, that he began building what was to become known as Morden College.
You will know that the first five residents moved in in 1700. It was only after the deaths of both Sir John, in 1708, and Lady Morden, in 1721, that funds were sufficient to support the full complement of forty single or widowed men. And those men were, stipulated Sir John, in days before the welfare state or pensions, to be merchants of the Turkey or Levant Company or the East India Company, engaging in transmaritime trade, and to have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. In other words, people who had lived similar lives to him, but with a very different end. It might have been like that for him if things had been different, he seemed to be saying, and he wanted to help those for whom life had not turned out so well. He wanted the blessings of his own life to be some blessing to others who needed it.
And in those early days, when they were giving thought as to how such a group of disparate men, probably some a bit rough around the edges, some with physical or mental health problems, some probably distrustful of do-gooders or the well to do – when you bring a group of people together like this, what are the rules? What is the ethos or culture we need to have to make it work? What has to happen to make it a community? Blackheath had seen men fight, rob, march, preach, die and show off over the years. But what was needed now for them to live together?
Sir John said one thing they needed to do was attend Chapel. When St Benedict formed a community of monks for the first time, he said that they had to have a rule of life, an agreed way of life, to ‘safeguard love’. For Sir John that same safeguarded love was to be rooted in here. The commandments for living well, and the words for praying well, were placed before them in the Chapel. And that question, how can this place be a blessing to the injured and those beaten up inside by life, and the things it can throw at us, that question was never far from his heart. Because when you listen to Jesus preaching on the mountain, as we just did, and hear that the ones close to God’s heart are the poor in spirit, the bereaved, the meek, the persecuted, those who hunger for some justice in life – well, these were the people Sir John was seeking to help. And the Chaplain, as they preached here over the years, will have been trying to help those bruised men to see that the blessed are those with fragile spirits, those who live with loss, those whose ego doesn’t take over, and those with some mercy in them, those who believe that there is something called righteousness, who want justice, those who make peace, and those who get put down and injured because they believe all this to be true and the good news that this world so urgently needs to hear. And when you get stuck and you don’t know how to give your soul a chance, well, there’s a simple refrain: love, love with everything you have, love God, love your neighbour.
But what about us, sitting here in the same place, 300 years later. The world such a different place. Blackheath a different place. Morden College expanded and serving in ways Sir John would never have dreamed of. How do we live together? We have our own knocks and bruises, we have loved and lost, we live with memories and maybe some regrets, the body plays up and illness can pull down, we can wonder who we are without our jobs and titles, and yet, this place is a place of blessing still if you can come here and discover deep down that gratitude in your heart for life, and breath, and the new day, and for friends and for help given and received, for food, for laughter, for shared moments of quietness, for the fact that life has a different chapter and yet I’m still becoming as a human being, nothing is completed as yet. You’ve given so much to me, prayed George Herbert, give me one more thing, a grateful heart.
At the moment there are so many words and pressures to forget our dignity. There are so many voices shouting at us and implanting themselves in us from every side. They can be as destructive as much as they are convincing. We flick through thin pages and get accosted by adverts on screens: “be beautiful”, “be thin”, “be rich”, “vote for me”, “eat quickly”, “don´t trust them”, “save your money here”, “get a better car you sad person and you might get an affair with it”. These voices from outside begin to become loud voices inside. I’m ugly, I’m a failure, I need what they have. We can end up beating ourselves up or showing off – both variations of the feeling that we are not loveable. We pursue the enviable life and not the good life.
Social media algorithms can easily become tools for seeding isolation, outrage and addictive behaviour. What outrages us the most, we get more of. This culture of contempt surrounds us and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ world quickly turns into an un OR them world. The news industry shifts from giving us a dispassionate and balanced view of the events of the day to selling anger and peddling out stories about hatred.
Sir John Morden knew that to listen to such voices in the autumn of life is a stupidity. He wrote in his will that ‘it pleased God to bless me in this world’. He wanted that blessing to be shared out to those who felt worthless and hopeless. He knew that it was in here in chapel, and in a community shared together, that their dignity would be restored, a place for maritime men to build a solid ship on which to sail their final days. The blessing of John and his wife reaches down to us all these years later. How, to honour him and the God he served, can we now and here be a community of beatitude, how, with all that we have and enjoy, how can we most importantly and with all we have, safeguard love, and safeguard gratitude for life, which is such a precious gift?
