June 2024, on Dr Lisle
TALES FROM THE HILLS
(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)
The poem by Alexander Pope in praise of the sisters and their grotto at Crux Easton is often printed with a contemporary note to this effect: “Dr Lisle, the brother of the Lisle sisters, was Chaplain to the Factory at Smyrna.”
That’s intriguing.
First, one wonders why he wasn’t the rector of Crux Easton. His father owned the place and held the advowson (the right to appoint the rector). But perhaps the sitting incumbent wouldn’t budge, and Dr Lisle had to look elsewhere.
The question of the ‘Factory at Smyrna’ is easier. The dictionary says that a ‘factory’ can mean, strangely enough, ‘a trading settlement in another country.’ Just as rectors lived in rectories, so factors lived in factories. And Smyrna was not just any old Factory: it was the chief commercial centre for the whole of the Levant. The trade was in tobacco, raisins, figs, carpets, rugs, and so on – the luxury end of the market.
It was hardly a case of missionary work amongst the heathen: Dr Lisle was attending to the spiritual needs of prosperous English merchants there. He probably preferred such prosperity to a thin living, with his sisters and a few villagers, in Crux Easton. And the weather’s better too.
Add to that, he’s a Doctor of Divinity and a learned man, living in a land especially rich in biblical and classical associations. The ruins of Ephesus lay close by – an ancient city, the home of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and famous of course for its role in the Acts of the Apostles, for Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, and for the great temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” chanted the locals, drowning out Paul, as he tried to convert them.
Curiously, 200 years after Dr Lisle, another Chaplain to the Factory at Smyrna appears, only this time he’s a fictional character in a novel by Vita Sackville-West. An archaeologist, dying of cholera in the 1920s, asks to be buried amidst the ruins of Ephesus, and not in the English cemetery at Smyrna. But the Chaplain refuses to read the burial service over a grave among the ruins, so Malory, the book’s hero, reads it instead.
Agricola, June 2024
