Leeds and the Priesthood
In September 1934 I headed for Leeds to begin training for the priesthood. I travelled by SS Bendigo, calling at Colombo, where I had an introduction to a businessman and my first glimpse of colonial life when I dropped in for a coffee. He was in an enormous room in a flat and called “Boy!!” and in stalked a tall man in a turban who handed him his pipe from four feet away and stalked out again. My cabin companion from Colombo to Southampton was perhaps the most brilliant youngster I have ever known. I remember him being able to give me the names of every member of the Australian cricket XI who had visited his school two years earlier. We filled up the washbasin in our cabin with limes, a fruit I had never met before except in the sea-shanty “Lime juice and vinegar boys, according to the Act”, learned from Mikka Forbes.
In Leeds I was at the Hostel of the Resurrection attached to Leeds University. The Mirfield course, run by the Community of the Resurrection, lasted five years, three at Leeds and two at the College at Mirfield itself. I had never seen the north of England before. I had never seen such poverty, only read the descriptions of slums in Dickens and thought it was a thing apart. I thought I had seen poverty during the 1929 depression when the price of wool collapsed and young men were applying to Mike to work “for their tucker” which meant for no pay at all. Poverty seemed more supportable in an Australian climate.
I remember approaching Leeds by train and all I could see was grey slate roofs through the drizzle, with everything dripping. I could not imagine how anyone could live in such conditions. A Yorkshireman in the compartment asked, “Where’s tha goin’ lad?”
“Leeds”
“What t’ hell for?”
I began to wonder. In those days you never saw the sun because of the thick smoke, except perhaps on a Sunday when a dull red disc might float in the grey sky. If a library shelf had not been dusted in the morning it would turn your fingernails black.
The only other colonial was Hugh Harker from Natal. We found each other on the first evening and wondered aloud, leaning over a canal bridge, whether we could take it. We did, and although Hugh has died, his wife and I are still in touch, 60 years later. That is also true of Dick Herrick, a little older than the rest of our year and (believe it or not) the only one who had worked for his living. We two often broke the rule of Great Silence, from 10pm to 8am, sharing thoughts and uncertainties about everything in earth and heaven. You could get no slovenly talk past him. “Donald, why do you talk about things you haven’t thought about?”
Leslie Cumberland took me up and down most of the major Lakeland peaks at my first Easter in England and in our second year we shared the ‘married quarters’, the only double room in the Hostel, at the top of the tower. Dick Tatlock took me and Alan to his home in St. Helen’s on the coast in Lancashire to show me what ‘the real England’ looked like. I only remember a rowdy evening in his house with a couple of Lancashire girls and being reproved by his mother, “I think the devil must have got into you two tonight!”. Alan was always having trouble with celibacy and surprisingly ended up being admitted as a member of the celibate Community of the Resurrection, though that lasted for only a few weeks, after which he switched career to the prison service.
At the end of each year, we spent a fortnight at Mirfield itself, rehearsing for Commemoration Day, when we presented a play to 5,000 people in the quarry theatre, out of which the stone for the College had been taken. It was long before sound equipment became available and we had to compete with trains puffing up and down the busy railway linking Huddersfield with Wakefield in the valley just below. After returning to England in 1981, I went up several times to attend Commemoration Day to reminisce with old friends, including Dick Herrick, Tom Butler and others.
In our final two years at Mirfield, my closest friends were Ernest Southcott and George Tidey. Ernie had come from Canada. Ernie was a free spirit. He and I were active in the Anglican People Association (AYPA) founded by a Canadian priest and recently started in England. He later became Provost of Southwark Cathedral. In December 1962, Jane and I stayed with him and his wife Margaret in the lovely Provost’s house on the edge of the Thames. Ernie died in 1976.
Before Mirfield, George had taught in Burma. After Mirfield, George returned to Burma with his wife Rosmaund, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), arriving in the Karen Hills before the Japanese invasion in 1941. His SPG booklet ‘Trek from Burma’ vividly describes how he, Rosamund and thousands of others survived the grueling seven-week trek out of Burma to India. They served in Burma for many years after the war. It was wonderful to meet them in London in 1981 soon after returning from Malawi. George died soon afterwards.
As a student, I took part in several work camps of the body then called IVSP – International Voluntary Service for Peace. This was inspired by a Swiss Quaker, Pierre Cérésole, who had been gaoled for refusing military service. I worked with IVSP on two projects in Switzerland where Quakers had organized an exit route for anti-Hitler activists when the Gestapo were breathing down their necks. With them, I helped dig out a coal-drift in Brynmawr, Wales, alongside miners from the four pits that had been the life-blood of the town, but were now all closed. A co-operative set up by Jim Forrester, a Friend who in alternate weeks was Lord Forrester of Verulam, sold fire-damaged goods, faulty but edible tins of food and other necessities of life – but, until then, not coal. The mine-owners refused access to unemployed volunteers. But Jim had persuaded one of them to open up a disused drift in the mountainside and volunteers and unemployed miners worked together to get the coal out.
One day, Jim took us on tour to show us what life meant for an unemployed miner’s family. In one street a smouldering slag-heap reached up to the bedroom windows, its sulphurous fumes seeping into the room where the children slept. It was there that I first made the connection between Jesus’s sayings about the rich and the poor and the realities of a life I had never imagined.
I have also always been attracted by the Friends (Quakers) who seem to me to put into action the life of Jesus and The Twelve better than most of us.
Felix came over to work for his Member of the Royal College of Physicians.We climbed Yorkshire’s Three Peaks together after which he nearly collapsed with exhaustion. During holidays, Dad would hire a small car which I would drive. We had memorable times together visiting his favourite places around the country. It was lovely to hear in 1940 that my brother Mike had become engaged to Elizabeth, who came from Austria. Dad died in Worthing in 1942. Mum and Rosemary returned to Australia in 1945 when Rosemary was 11.
Kennington and the Blitz
I was ordained deacon in St Mary’s church, Kennington, in the Southwark Diocese on 24 September, 1939, a couple of weeks after war was declared. Wearing a dog-collar for the first time while sitting in a tube on the way to the church is a lasting memory. The sirens went off at the beginning of the service but no one took any notice.The ‘all clear’ went off just as it finished.
I served in St Catherine’s Church Hatcham, near New Cross in South London where Fr Bill Fenton was the much loved Vicar.
London, 1940
A year later, on the first day of the London blitz, the planes arrived at 6 o’clock in the evening whilst it was still light. I was visiting a sick woman, she was in bed and her husband was also in the room. Suddenly there was an almighty row from aeroplanes and falling bombs. The man dived under the bed and I found myself holding the hands of both of them, the woman in the bed and the man under the bed. When the noise stopped, I went outside into the street expecting to see devastation. Boys were playing football andone shouted out, “Hey, Mister, your church is on fire!”
The planes had dived through the canopy of barrage balloons and dropped a canister of incendiary bombs on top of the church. This was quite deliberate. It had a spire and being on a hill, was a prominent building about four miles from Rotherhithe. The plan was that when the bombers were over the fire the crew would press the release buttons and then the high explosives would fall on the dock area. The Old Kent Road gas works was also set on fire. Every fire brigade in the district was sent there and the church was left to burn. The congregation managed to pick up all the incendiaries with shovels, except for one that lodged in the peak of the wooden roof of the high Victorian gothic building. There it smouldered happily for two hours with no way of getting near it. Finally it burst into flames and the whole of it caught fire. The fire brigade arrived a quarter of an hour later, just as the roof crashed in.
At 8 o’clock the proper air raid began. Fortunately an Air-raid Warden’s post had just been completed in the church grounds, built to withstand light bombs with deep concrete foundations. Some hours later, when the raid ended, I went out to have a pee and nearly fell into a big hole bored at an angle underneath the shelter. We discovered later that the hole went 15’ deep into the back-filled earth where it failed to explode. It was still there at the end of the war.
Early the next morning we prepared for the 8 o’clock Communion service in Haberdasher Askes School across the road. I recall being reprimanded by Fr Bill Fenton for being improperly dressed. Somehow my green Leeds BA hood had disappeared in the turmoil of the night. I have never worn one since. About three weeks later, our temporary church at the school was bombed and blown to pieces so we moved back to the vestry, the one part of the church that had not been burned out.
Many people in the parish lost their lives. I remember one night when the Christmas Club was having its pay-out and the men were all in the pub. The basements of the terraced houses opposite had been shored and joined together to form a common shelter. The women and children were there. A bomb fell on the pub killing about sixteen of the men. In the shelter opposite, where I was, none of them knew till the next morning who was dead, who was alive, who was in hospital.
One of the images I will never forget was when a lone bomber dropped a bomb on a house early in the morning. Rescuers knew there was a woman in it. The house was just a pile of rubble. They dug down. The woman had been in bed on one side of the room and a baby in a cot on the other side. In the instant between the bomb hitting the house and exploding she had thrown herself right across the room and spread-eagled herself across the cot in order to try and protect the baby, sadly to no avail.
On another occasion I was conducting a funeral. We were processing from the chapel to the grave when the sirens went and German planes came overhead. I kept on walking but had the feeling that nobody was following me. I turned round and found I was alone with the coffin, the pallbearers had all jumped into another open grave. I could just see their heads sticking out.
Amazingly people adapted to the situation. They were quite put-out on nights when there were no raids. They would be sitting in the shelter and they would say, “What’s going on, it’s eleven o’clock? I’m going to bed!”
With the church burned down and the children and many of the adults evacuated, it was decided the new curate was bad luck and I was told I was free to look for another job.
Potten End and Charing Cross Hospital
I joined the vicar of Holy Trinity Church at Potten End in Hertfordshire. Nearby was Ashridge House, the main Sector-4 evacuation address of Charing Cross and University College hospitals and a few smaller hospitals. Potten End itself was full of children from Stepney. Green Line coaches would arrive in the morning with the people from the inner London Hospitals. There were a few military wards, full of men picked up from the Dunkirk beaches.
I recall Desmond, aged 14, with cancer of the spine. He was undersized and could have passed for 9 or 10. He had spent most of his life in bed and in very considerable pain but there was nothing they could do for him. He was one of the brightest lads I have ever known.
Desmond wanted to be confirmed so I prepared him for confirmation and the service was arranged to be on his birthday. A week before his birthday I went to see him and asked how things were going and he replied, “Not so good, I couldn’t get to sleep last night.” He said he had come to a big decision. If he came through his illness he would become an M.P. My reply was, “For crying out loud, who wants to spend his time polishing his bottom on a hard wooden bench?” “No, I had a good idea about midnight while I was watching the night nurse. She was so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open. She told me she had been on duty for twelve hours. I want to get a law passed that no nurse in this country should work more than eight hours at a time.”
They moved him into the ‘other ranks’ ward from the civilian ward because they thought he would do their morale good. Some of them were sorry for themselves because they had lost a limb. Here he was, a chap who was going to lose his life. They loved him so the confirmation was held there. The Bishop of St Alban’s, a great character from South Africa, standing about six foot four inches strode into the ward with his gold cope and mitre and we had a wonderful confirmation. Then they joined in the birthday party. He died four days later.
I was active in the Student Christian Movement and was able to attend a memorable conference at Swanick in Derbyshire. There I sat at the feet of William Temple, then Archbishop of York; spoke with George Macleod, from the slums of Glasgow, who was founding the Iona Community and beginning on the building of its Abbey; listened to C.F.Andrews, missionary and friend of Gandhi. I was given enough to think about for years to come. In 1988, Jane and I had a wonderful day visiting Iona and Macleod’s glorious Abbey.
At about the same time, I heard that my Vicar was intending to join the navy and discovered I would be left to run Potten End and Ashridge forever, so I went to SPG (The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, now USPG) and asked what the possibilities were of work overseas. While at college, I had signed a form to say I would give equal consideration to work overseas or in the UK. I intended to go back to the Far East some time. All my family traditions and our private family language were connected with Malaya and the place fascinated me. SPG had a scheme where they were going to train people to reignite the church as soon as the war died down a bit, either in China or S.E.Asia after training people in mission work in Basutoland (now Lesotho) in a kind of bush brotherhood.
I spoke on the telephone with the Appointments Secretary and said I would like to join the scheme. He asked me a few questions and said there were six or eight members on it, most were leaving the next week, but I could join them on the next convoy. This was the nearest to an interview I had.
I sailed in a convoy from Liverpool in October 1943. We were dodging the German ‘U boat’ submarines most of the way to Cape Town.
— End —