Leonard Cheshire - Change of Direction

Change of Direction

On his 103rd mission, he was the official British observer of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. His vantage point was in the support B-29 Big Stink. He did not witness the event as close up as anticipated due to aircraft commander James Hopkins' failure to link up with the other B-29s. Hopkins was meant to join with the others over Yakushima, but he circled at 39,000 ft instead of the agreed height of 30,000 ft. He tried to justify this by the need to keep the VIP passengers out of danger, but Cheshire thought that Hopkins was "overwrought".

"Many assumed that it was Nagasaki which emptied him. In fact, as he kept pointing out, it was the war as a whole. Like Britain herself, he had been fighting or training for fighting since 1939." He was earlier quoted as saying: "...then I for one hold little brief for the future of civilization".

Cheshire left the RAF in 1946 and the time immediately after the war saw him start several new ventures. One of these was a community called VIP (standing for the Latin phrase Vade in Pacem, meaning Go in Peace) which eventually settled in a house called Le Court in Hampshire which Cheshire bought from an aunt. VIP's aim was to provide an opportunity for ex-servicemen and women and their families to live together, each contributing to the community what they could, in order to help their transition back into civilian life. He hoped that training, prosperity and fulfillment would result from united effort and mutual support. He saw the community as one way of continuing to work towards world peace. But the idea did not prosper and the community came to an end in 1947.

At the beginning of 1948, Cheshire heard about the case of Arthur Dykes, who had been one of Cheshire's original "VIP" community at Le Court, Hampshire and was suffering from cancer. Dykes asked Cheshire to give him some land to park a caravan until he recovered, but Cheshire discovered that Dykes was terminally ill and that this diagnosis was concealed from him. He told Dykes the real position and invited him to stay at Le Court. Cheshire learned nursing skills and was soon approached to take in a second patient, the 94-year-old bedridden wife of a man who had just been taken off to hospital after suffering a stroke. She was followed by others, some coming to stay and others to help. Although Le Court had no financial support, and his situation was financially perilous most of the time, money somehow always seemed to arrive in the nick of time to stave off disaster.

Cheshire had been brought up a Christian, but had lapsed. In 1945, in the Vanity Fair club in Mayfair, he joined a conversation about religion. "It was absurd," he said, "to imagine that God existed, except as a convenient figure of speech. Man had invented God to explain the voice of conscience, but it was doubtful whether right or wrong existed outside the human mind. They were words affixed like labels to customs and laws which man had also invented to keep social order." To Cheshire's surprise, as he sat back, "pleased with his worldly wisdom," he was roundly rebuked for "talking such rot" by a woman friend who "was one of the last persons on earth he would have credited with" religious convictions.

Arthur Dykes died in August 1948. After completing the arrangements for his funeral, Cheshire idly picked up a book a friend had sent him. It was One Lord, One Faith by Vernon Johnson, a former High Anglican clergyman who, against every cherished instinct and prejudice, had converted to Roman Catholicism because, as he put it, "I could not resist the claim of the Catholic Church to be the one true Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ to guard and teach the truth.... She alone possesses the authority and unity necessary for such a Divine vocation." On Christmas Eve, 1948, Cheshire was received into the Catholic Church. That day there were eight patients staying at Le Court. By the end of the following June, there were twenty-eight. Cheshire dedicated the rest of his life to supporting disabled people, combining this with lecturing on conflict resolution.