By Matthew Harper, Archives Assistant
On 1st April this year, we received a slightly unusual donation. A pair of Archbishop Runcie’s socks. Found by Tony Pilmer in a charity shop in Whitstable and purchased for the sum of £8. How the socks found their way to the north coast of Kent is still a mystery, but some of the story can be told through the collections of Lambeth Palace Library.
The papers of Archbishop Runcie contain the file Runcie/MAIN/1981/71 which contains material relating to these socks. This file contains a letter in which a David Bendix, on behalf of the Amnesty International group at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to Archbishop Runcie in December 1981 requesting an old pair of socks for a raffle. A note on the letter, presumably written by Runcie, reads ‘I can do this, have plenty of old socks!’.[1]
He promptly sent a response reading ‘These socks once belonged to me – I give them gladly in a good cause. + Robert Cantuar’ along with the socks. We know that the socks were won by a R. Cracknell, as the letter congratulating them also survives following the raffle in January 1982.
They were then kept safe for the following four decades, perhaps being produced as a conversation piece at parties, before they were donated together to the British Red Cross charity shop in Whitstable.[2]
The existing archival collections of Lambeth Palace Library are now supported by the accession of Artefact 128, which contains the socks themselves, the letter congratulating the winner of the prize, the card signed by Archbishop Runcie, the envelope it was sent in, and the receipt from the charity shop in which the material was purchased in November 2024.
Following a period of quarantine (standard archival procedure), the socks have been added to the catalogue and have joined the rest of our collection at Lambeth Palace Library. To see more artefacts from different Archbishops through time, visit our upcoming exhibition, Primate of All England, which runs from 28 January to 4 May.
[1] LPL Runcie/MAIN/1981/71
[2] LPL ARTEFACT/128
A Monument of Fame 