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Royalty

6 May 2023

5 min read

The art of encouraging

After uncovering the enchanting story of how Prince Albert encouraged Queen Victoria, Belle Tindall explains why it's not only children who crave the art of encouragement.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Under a gilded arch, a statue of a young Queen Victoria sits, between two standing figures.

The Queen Victoria statue in the House of Lords.

Queen Victoria 1819-1901 Reigned 1837-1901 Supporting figures: Justice & Clemency Bas-reliefs: Science Commerce Industry / Useful Arts, Fully-rounded carving by John Gibson , © UK Parliament, WOA S88 heritagecollections.parliament.uk

In the Prince’s Chamber of the House of Lords sits a mighty marble statue of Queen Victoria.

She is sitting on her throne, holding both her sceptre and her crown, hemmed in on either side by two figures who represent justice and mercy. Her expression is strong, her posture is powerful, she is visibly assured and confident in her identity and role as Queen.

You can view the statue, in all its glory, on Parliament's website.

To say it’s striking is an understatement. It’s simply unmissable.

And yet, the most remarkable thing about this statue is not that it exists, there are nine similar figures in London alone. No, what’s so notable about this statue is where it exists, and why.

The story is an admittedly enchanting one. Prince Albert commissioned this particular statue of his wife, and had it precisely placed so that it greeted her head-on as she stepped out of her Robing Room and made her way to the Chamber of the Lords. It had one purpose and one purpose only - to give Queen Victoria courage when she was likely to need it most.

And that’s exactly where it still sits, its colour may be long faded, but its impact is not. It sits as somewhat of an alter to this historic romance, but more profoundly, as an ode to something that is notably overlooked in our culture: it is an ode to the practice of encouragement.

Psychologist and Professor Y Joel Wong powerfully defines encouragement as

‘The expression of affirmation through language or other symbolic representations to instil courage, perseverance, confidence, inspiration, or hope in a person(s) within the context of addressing a challenging situation or realizing a potential’.

When defined this way, it is clear to see just how integral such expressions of affirmation are to the cultivation of a flourishing life. And yet, Prof. Wong also observes just how underestimated, understudied, and undervalued the art of encouragement is. The vast majority of research that has attempted to theorize encouragement places its focus exclusively on early childhood development, implying that they believe it to be an essential need that humans simply outgrow. And yet, while such an idea floats around on an academic level, it’s likely that we each feel a sense that this is simply not congruent with personal experiences. The delight we feel upon learning the story behind Queen Victoria’s statue in the House of Lords is surely evidence that this kind of encouragement from another person is something that we continue to crave well into adulthood.

I would suggest that the underestimation of the practice of encouragement may be a subtle symptom of the individualistic culture we now find ourselves in.

What individualism may starve us of

The political and social philosophy of individualism can be dated back to the late 1700s, primarily as a reaction to the French Revolution. Since then, it has been re-framed and refined countless times, perhaps most influentially by Emile Durkheim in 1893 and Max Weber in 1947. Each philosopher foresaw a society that looks strikingly like ours, here in the 21st Century. A society which expects individuals to grow, learn and flourish independently of each other, which values self-definition, self-sufficiency, and self-actualisation, which ultimately encourages a self-centred and goal-oriented life.

In his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that ‘nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind’. According to this school of thought, the rights and convictions of the individual supersede the duties of the community, and the Western world is arguably steeped in this very notion (of course, there are exceptions to the rule - the NHS and welfare system being two prime examples).

To condemn individualism completely seems to me to be too simple of a judgment; the notion that one is responsible for their own actions undergirds much of our justice system, our right to question institutions and power structures is integral, while the freedom that each person has (in theory) to pursue their own passions and convictions is a wonderful thing. And yet, it could be argued that the emphasis it places on individual success feeds competition and comparison, which is consequently starving us of empowerment and encouragement.

Perhaps this is one reason the theorizing of encouragement is notably neglected in so much psychological study.

Further to that, maybe this is why stories such as Prince Albert commissioning a statue of Queen Victoria, or Marilyn Monroe famously sitting front row at every one of Ella Fitzgerald’s shows in a notoriously segregated club, or the Barcelonian crowd at the 1992 Olympics who erupted in applause as Team GB’s 400m runner, Derek Redmond, weepingly limped across the finish line with a freshly-torn hamstring, affect us so profoundly. Because encouragement is profoundly absent from our culture - and we miss it.

Christianity and the emotional life

Christianity, as you can imagine, has an awful lot to say about the emotional life of humanity and the key ingredients involved in human flourishing. Although it stresses the individuality and dignity of every single human being, while also emphasising the agency (or ‘free will’) of every person, that is largely where its relationship with individualism comes to a halt. To untangle the inherent value of community from Christianity is a mean feat indeed.

In his book, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, Francis Spufford writes that Christianity is supposed to make us

‘full of passion for each other’s minds, hearts, souls, and bodies’ because it is in this curiosity and passion that we ‘recreate as best we can some fraction of the absolute and inimitable love behind everything.’

This certainly doesn’t leave much room for an exclusively self-actualising existence.

If Francis Spufford is correct, if Christianity’s worldview has even a little sense to it, then it’s possible that our success is directly linked to the success of others. Individual victories, communal victories, collective losses, personal losses – they are, to a point, inseparable from each other. If this is the case, it is worth suggesting that the art and the impact of encouragement may well be worthy of far more of our attention.

Interview

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Politics

S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.