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Raising the Rafters at Westminster Abbey

Raising the Rafters at Westminster Abbey

Last updated on: May 19, 2026 at 3:09 pm by Dan Peterson

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Raising the Rafters at Westminster Abbey 2026-05-19T15:09:37-06:00 Dan Peterson

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While playing the organ of Westminster Abbey, in London, James Welch sat atop the “rood screen,” the gilded partition shown here in the background, and out of sight of the audience. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph.)

Almost all of our group headed to the airport at Heathrow very early this morning. But my wife and I didn’t. We’re staying just a few extra days. So we caught a Great Western Railroad train that headed out of London to Reading, then on to Taunton and, via Exeter St. David’s and Newton Abbot and Totnes, to Plymouth, in Devon. In Plymouth, we picked up a rental car and drove about ninety minutes to two hours to Newquay (pronounced NOO-kee), which is located on the north coast of Cornwall. I’ve always wanted to visit Cornwall, and this seemed a good chance. So here we are in Newquay, which is apparently the surfing capital of England. (Our condo is decorated with images of surfers. One of the photos even features a palm tree.) Thus far, as a native son of Southern California, I have to admit to finding the idea of Newquay as a surfing center quite funny. Admittedly, we’ve only been here for a few minutes as I write, but the rain has been heavy, gray, gusty, and cold. And I haven’t seen a single palm tree anywhere, except in the photo on our wall.

But the Brits have got to make do with what they have, I suppose. (And, in other respects, they have so very, very much!) Being here in Norquay, so far, reminds me a bit of our only visit to Leningrad, back when the Soviet Union was still in existence but increasingly senile. (We’ve been back since then, just once, but to St. Petersburg. Leningrad is no more.) Anyway, one of my favorite memories of the city was seeing about fifteen people wearing trench coats and standing by a stone wall along the Neva River. Large chunks of broken ice were still flowing down the river, and the weather was very chilly. Once in a while, though, the sun would break through the clouds and the trench coats would open to reveal pale skin, swimming trunks, and bikinis. These were desperate sunbathers, catching the occasional ray of sun. I took several photographs of them but, alas, I haven’t seen any of those photographs in several decades now.

I didn’t finish my account of our activities on Sunday, so I’ll give a brief report here: Our tour group had divided into two parts, one of which attended stake conference at the Hyde Park Chapel on Exhibition Road and the other of which attended the “Sung Eucharist” at St. Paul’s Cathedral. After our two factions reunited in front of the Cathedral — which, by the way, appears to have been fully restored since the deadly terrorist attack depicted in the 2016 film London Has Fallen — we walked over to nearby Stationers’ Hall, where the early Latter-day Saint apostolic missionaries registered the English copyright for, among other things, the Book of Mormon and then the Doctrine and Covenants. (There’s quite a story to be told for both of these, particularly in the latter case.)

An exterior view of Westminster Abbey, in greater London
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Paul Farmer)

Thereafter, our coach took us over to Westminster Abbey. Although one of its bell towers collapsed in the 2026 movie, instantly killing both the visiting Italian prime minister and his wife, the Abbey too appears to have been fully repaired since then. In fact, you would never guess that such an attack had ever really taken place.

We weren’t going to Westminster Abbey for a tour. That would come the next day. It turns out that James Welch, a brother of my lifelong friend and colleague John W. (“Jack”) Welch, was giving a recital there, and we managed to get our group in. It’s a wonderful and resonant venue in which to listen to organ music.

The British classic “Trapped by the Mormons” was made in 1922, but it was hardly the first anti-Mormon film — because such movies go back to the very origins of moviemaking. And British filmmakers continued to churn these out for quite a while.. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

While listening to that glorious music, I couldn’t help but wonder what an earlier British generation would have made of a faithful, believing, active Latter-day performing a Sunday organ concert in Westminster Abbey — in the same church where the bodies of St. Edward the Confessor and King Henry V and Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots rest, just across the street from where Parliament meets. Was the audience in the Abbey “trapped by the Mormons”? I suspect that they would have been shocked.

Following the concert, a number of us went out for dinner at Memories of India, on Gloucester Road near our hotel. With us were our friends Lew Cramer and his wife, Barbara Welch Cramer (sister to James and John Welch), whom we ran into (not very surprisingly) at the Abbey. They’ve been serving a mission in London as diplomatic liaisons for international and public affairs on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and whose apartment is just a short stroll from the restaurant. It was a pleasure to spend a bit of time with them again. (We saw them in London last year, too.)

The “key art” poster for our ongoing “Becoming Brigham” mini-documentary

Did you know that you can actually subscribe to the Becoming Brigham series? Doing so is absolutely free of charge, but it will prevent your forgetting, from one week to another, to watch the newest installment. Just go to the upper right-hand corner of the official Becoming Brigham website and click on the button that reads “Subscribe on YouTube.” Painless!

This photograph of the Fairview Texas Temple, taken shortly after its dedication in 2158 — having recently seen Back to the Future again, I’ve added time travel to my toolkit — shows part of the final solution (the Endlösung, as it were) to the problem posed by the temple. The building itself is situated fifty feet below the surface of the temple site. On the other hand, its entrance tunnel opens across the street, in the much more friendly and religiously tolerant town of Allen, Texas. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

I was pleased to see this in Meridian Magazine, and I hope that the mayor and the city council and the citizens of Fairview see it, as well: “An Open Letter to the Mayor of Fairview, Texas.” Unless I’m badly misreading things, city officials there in Fairview have behaved quite dishonorably and continue to do so.

A meme from the “Christopher Hitchens Fan Club”

Finally, though, I share with you a couple of items from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. I hate to do it. Really, I do. But it’s my duty:

Posted from Newquay, Cornwall, England

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