John Beckett and Prof. Joseph Loconte Revisit the Great War in Third Annual Founders Day Address

John Beckett, trustee emeritus of The King’s College, delivered the third annual Founders Day address on April 18. A founding board member of The King’s College in New York City, Beckett also serves on the board of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and is the author of Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul.

In the lunchtime event, titled “The Great War: A Conversation,” Beckett and Associate Professor of History Joseph Loconte spoke separately on the significance of the Great War, anticipating the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day this November. Loconte then moderated a question and answer period between Beckett and the audience.

WATCH: John Beckett and Joseph Loconte’s Founders Day Conversation

In honor of Founders Day at King’s, Beckett began his address by sharing how he became the first member of the College’s new board when it reopened in New York City. “It’s Founders Day, and The King’s College has the distinction of being founded twice. The first of those foundings was in 1938 and I had nothing to do with it,” Beckett quipped.

When Dr. Bill Bright approached Beckett to ask him to serve on the board, Bright had an ambitious vision: “In 10 years, we’re going to be in 100 cities, we’re going to have 10,000 satellite organizations, and we’re going to be educating 2 million people.”

“If nothing else, what I’ve just described underscores that [Bright] was a person of vision,” Beckett said. “In several lifetimes we may be catching up to just a little bit of that original vision. But somebody has got to cast a vision.” Energized by the possibilities of a Christian college in New York City, Beckett agreed to join Bright and the others on the steering team, including Stan Oakes, who would later become the fourth president of King’s.

In 1998, the College had a few assets: a library; an idyllic property in Tuxedo, N.Y.; a name (“and not a bad name at that,” Beckett said); and a president, Dr. Friedhelm Radandt, who would continue as the College’s third president when King’s reopened. The steering team determined that reopening the College in Tuxedo would distract from the mission Bright, Radandt, and Oakes were developing and opted instead to rent the basement of the Empire State Building. “Subterranean” as the location was, Bright turned it into a selling point for the school: “It became part of our branding.” The location in the Empire State Building made it clear to everyone that King’s was truly in the heart of New York City.

Beckett recounted another story of vision and sacrifice that made possible the second founding of King’s. Beckett and his wife Wendy had agreed to pay the airfare for Beth Clark, the wife of a British Bible teacher, to attend a prayer conference in the U.S. At the conference, Clark had heard Bright speak about the plan for reviving King’s. When Beckett gave Clark her check after the conference ended, she refused to accept it. “I’d like that to go to the College,” she insisted. Clark’s sons had studied at some of Britain’s elite institutions and lost their faith, and she wanted to prepare a generation of young people “who are not only intact in their faith, but thrive there.” Clark’s modest gift triggered the first large $5 million contribution to the College. “It was our rocket fuel,” Beckett remembered.

“Foundations do matter,” Beckett said, and then turned to explore the connections between his own life and another foundational event of the last century: World War I. He affirmed Winston Churchill’s judgment that, through the war, “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface.”

Beckett spoke more specifically about his father’s experiences in the war. Reg Beckett of Hamilton, Ontario was 16 when Britain entered World War I. (Canada, as part of the British Empire, did not control its own foreign affairs and was drawn into a formal state of war in 1914, when Britain squared off against Germany.) Reg’s parents refused to let him enlist underage—though the draft agencies weren’t paying close attention—but they allowed him to start artillery and horsemanship training at a military school in Ontario. On July 4, 1916, three days after the brutal beginning of the Battle of the Somme, Reg finally enlisted, proving his eagerness to serve his country despite knowing the dangers.

By March 1917, Reg had crossed the English Channel for his first battle, seeing up close the hand-to-hand combat and rat- and lice-infested trenches. Reg was in Mons, Belgium, the day the war ended, November 11, 1918.

In the years Reg Beckett was abroad, Reg’s parents wrote or sent parcels every other day. Reg’s letters to his parents survive, since his father would type them up and distribute them to everyone in the family. John Beckett has since collected these letters in his book The War Letters: Reg Beckett, A Canadian Soldier in the Great War. In Reg’s letters, John Beckett sees the character traits that the war drew out in his father: love for family, a sense of responsibility, and perseverance.

Like Beckett, Loconte has a family connection to the Great War. Loconte’s grandfather, an Italian immigrant to the United States, decided to fight on the side of the Americans rather than the Italians, swayed by the promise of United States citizenship. In his brief talk, Loconte reviewed the impact that World War I had on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who are the subjects of his book A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. Tolkien lost most of his closest friends in the war, and his children said that the war created in their father “a kind of lifelong sadness.” Tolkien grieved that he was “pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn, and I never picked it all up again.” What else would the author of The Lord of the Rings have written, Loconte wondered, had not the war interrupted him?

Lewis, too, went through great hardships in the war along with “incredible moments of grace.” Lewis entered and left the war as an atheist, but God was at work in him. From a hospital bed in London, Lewis wrote, “Can you imagine how I enjoyed my journey to London? First of all the sight and smell of the sea, that I have missed for so many long and weary months, and then the beautiful green country seen from the train.” Elsewhere in the letter he wrote, “You see the conviction is gaining ground on me that after all Spirit does exist. . . You see how frankly I admit that my views have changed.”

Out of the war emerged the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, “one of the most consequential friendships of the twentieth century,” Loconte said. When he learned that The Lord of the Rings had been accepted for publication, Lewis wrote to Tolkien, “So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away [without a trace] into the past, is now in a sort made permanent.”

The story of Lewis and Tolkien shows God’s provision even through the war, Loconte said. “It was the war that makes possible the friendship between these two great authors, and it’s their friendship that makes possible these great works of moral beauty.”

In the same way, Reg Beckett honed his character on the Western front. When he returned, he founded a heating company that, in later years under his son’s leadership, became an industry leader. John Beckett believes that the traits that shine through Reg’s letters are the same ones that made possible the bold undertaking of rebuilding King’s in New York City.

“Love for family, a sense of responsibility, and perseverance: these three all form life lessons,” Beckett said. “I tie it into the twenty-year run that we’ve had at King’s: a passion for the mission, a sense of responsibility that what we’re doing here really matters and it’s worthy of our best efforts, and have we had to persevere! Many times we were at the point of despair, and then God would take us to the next step.”