Letter: First in the Pulpit

Sir: Our father, the Rev D R Davies, who had an international reputation as a theologian in the Forties and Fifties, is no longer alive to challenge the Gummer brothers' family myth about the starting of Pulpit Monthly, described by Deborah Ross in her article on Peter Gummer, Lord Chadlington (8 December).

So we offer the following quotation from our father's autobiography, In Search of Myself, published by Bles in 1961, to set the record straight.

While at Brighton . . . I published a monthly magazine called Christian Renewal . . .This was an immediate success and I continued it until another idea more in harmony with my particular outlook and love for preaching came to me and in co- operation with my very good friend Selwyn Gummer, as co-editor, I started Pulpit Monthly.

It was our father who had the idea and was the energy behind the setting up of the magazine.We do not think that the Rev Selwyn Gummer would disagree.

DIANA LEAP

RACHEL BOULTON

RICHARD DAVIES

London N10