5 Ridley – Still under the Radar: 1945–9

5 Ridley – Still under the Radar: 1945–9

5

Ridley – Still under the Radar: 1945–9

According to Leon’s view of how he ended up in Melbourne, somehow Bishop Donald Baker found out about him and for some reason offered him the job of vice-principal, a newly created position at Ridley College. The college was an independent evangelical Church of England training college for Anglican ministers. Leon was not convinced that a minister in charge of the Minnipa Mission would have attracted much interest for a teaching job in Melbourne. Intuitively he was right, because another man had been offered the new position at Ridley College and declined.

Tom Jones from BCA had recommended Leon to Bishop Donald Baker, even though he and Leon had not always seen eye to eye. Leon had the advantage of being known by Sydney’s clerical leaders who in those days had a close rapport with their Melbourne colleagues. Leon travelled to Melbourne for a single interview, met some people at Ridley and got the train back home. Mildred was at the station to hear the good news. Around the same time he was asked to consider applying for the position of the rector of Holy Trinity Adelaide,¹ but he chose Melbourne.

Leon kept his links with BCA,² and later, in 1952–3, he accepted the job of part-time secretary of BCA Victoria for two years while still at Ridley. He had plenty to be thankful about regarding his time with BCA in Minnipa: he had learned a great deal about human nature, life’s realities and how to apply his faith. He had learned to be pastorally attuned when encountering illness or speaking about death, and had benefited from the company of Betty and Brenda Bockelberg. He kept the friendships he made with Livingstone and others and, importantly, he learned how to live and work with Mildred.

Melbourne in the 1940s

Today, Melbourne’s dining and sporting culture surpasses anywhere else in Australia. Cited as ‘the world’s most liveable city’, its quality of life is higher than better-known Sydney. If Melbourne could drag Sydney’s harbour further south, the city would be perfect. Not surprisingly there is a long-standing rivalry driven by residents of Sydney and Melbourne.

In the 1940s, Melbourne was a city that bred many of the nation’s leaders. It had a strong manufacturing base in clothing, cars, food, plastics, furniture and wool products, and it was supported by primary industries in the fertile Victorian countryside. Furthermore, the 1850s’ gold rush had injected vast amounts of wealth into the infrastructure of the city’s buildings and businesses.

One of Melbourne’s most famous landmarks is the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), Australia’s home of cricket.³ When Australia’s most famous cricketer, Don Bradman, played at the MCG, crowds were drawn to the ground like iron filings to a magnet. Workers would wait until his innings was established and then leave work and pour into the ground just ten minutes from the city centre. Bradman scored twice as fast and averaged nearly twice as many runs per innings as other batsmen. In two hours he could score one hundred runs. Few Australian men write poetry but they watched it at the MCG.

Crowds also pour in to the MCG to watch Australian rules football, which originated in Victoria as a way to keep fit between cricket seasons. It is a tribal game, and it is played with religious fervour. It is not unusual for Melbournians to ask a stranger to declare their religion – ‘Who do you barrack for, mate?’⁴ – when they first meet.

The MCG has also been commandeered for non-sporting uses. In March 1942, soon after the Japanese attacked Darwin during World War II, the American Air Force used the MCG as a staging post, naming it Camp Murphy. Later the marines arrived, renaming it Camp Ransford. With 14,000 troops at its peak, the MCG was one great dormitory. By Melbourne Cup Day in November 1943, the Americans had left and the MCG was returned to its proper use. In later years, Leon participated in important events associated with the ground.

Ridley College

Before becoming Ridley’s principal, Bishop Donald Baker had worked in country Victoria. He was well-loved, overstretched and in his last ministry. Ridley’s resources were sparse; there were no large bequests, little administration and the college relied on its network of friends for support. In 1946 Baker recorded: ‘Since our last report, we received among other gifts a noble one of thirty sacks of potatoes and six sacks of swedes from the generous minded parishioners of Lancefield. This was organized by the Vicar, the Rev A C Donnelly, than whom Ridley has no more loyal son.’⁵

Baker believed the good news of Jesus and what he had done to be central to the Christian faith. He did all the lecturing at Ridley, supplemented by a few outside lecturers in specialist subjects. Most occasional lecturers were senior clergy who happened to have skills in one area or another. The college students joined Trinity College down Royal Parade for some occasional common lectures when theological differences in the 1940s were far less marked than today.

It seemed like Baker needed to be everywhere at once. He once walked past an upstairs student room and heard the gifted Bert Neil giving a credible imitation of his voice. Baker called up the stairs, ‘Is … that me … up there … or me … down here?’ He desperately needed help from a like-minded colleague. When Leon arrived at Ridley, it was much to Baker’s relief.

Leon and Mildred arrived in August 1945, when Leon was thirty-one. At that time, the college consisted of a Victorian mansion, in which the principal lived and where the library and dining-hall were located, a nearby accommodation block for the single male students and a few old buildings including army huts.

In those days Ridley was bordered by Walker Street on the south and The Avenue on its west, within a crescent of highly sought-after property in Parkville. It was only a five-minute tram ride away from the University of Melbourne, so it took in a number of the university’s students as boarders. The home ground for the Australian rules team, Carlton, was seven minutes’ walk from the college, and Leon made an early cultural decision to support this team. The club was strong, so it was an astute choice to support the ‘Blues’.

Teaching at Ridley

Leon’s first years were spent doing his share of whatever he and the principal divided between them. Leon was largely responsible for the lecturing in the preliminary year as well as ThL doctrine classes. He had never been a vice-principal of anything and Donald Baker had never had one. ‘There was no recognized way of managing the job. So I did what I thought was right.’⁶ Apart from his few informal tutorials with T.C. Hammond ten years before, Leon had not the faintest idea what the expectations were for a theological lecturer in a formal setting. Nevertheless, after Leon had been at Ridley a short time, Baker recorded that ‘already the Rev LL Morris has made an excellent beginning, having proved himself an able scholar and an efficient teacher’.⁷

Working to Leon’s advantage were his respect for Scripture and his intellect and discipline. He gained added confidence from his academic achievements, having topped his year of the ThL in Australia and gained a first-class Bachelor of Divinity degree, as well as his continuing Master of Theology work.

It helped that he could think on his feet and his logical presentations enabled even the least capable student to follow him. The students quickly realized they were in the company of a man with a rare combination of gifts and abilities now being honed for their benefit and God’s greater glory.

One of Leon’s main strategies was to stay one step ahead of the students, although there were times when he failed to see just how far ahead he was. For example, even the more capable students were not always interested in subject matter on the periphery of core material. One student recalled a murky night when the shafts of dawn light began appearing over Royal Park while a majority of the students were still awake:

The only time he went close to losing his ‘cool’ was when he had introduced a once a week lecture on the Apocrypha. It was then the last examination at the end of the year. Nobody had done any work on it and the early morning hours of the night before were given to a communal cramming session. Subsequently Leon announced that nobody had passed and displayed a most unusual lack of sangfroid.⁸

Students recounted how the Bible would become clear as Leon explained terms often glossed over by others. Clearly he used his scientific training to inform his Bible study and the deductions he would draw: ‘I may not have been much of a scientist but at least I knew that if you put something forward there had to be evidence. If there’s no evidence, the theory is no good.’⁹ Students enjoyed his added witty observations and sometimes seemingly ordinary but appropriate illustrations. They could feel the Spirit of God speaking through Leon and resolved to follow God more whole-heartedly. Similarly, when Leon preached in Ridley’s chapel he brought out the meaning of the text, illustrated it and applied it. The sharp but largely untaught city-born Ridley students benefited from his analytical preparation and penetrating analysis that was preached in a deceptively easy style. He would say more in twenty minutes than others who preached for forty.

Leon maintained a lifelong belief in doing his paid job well and completing the day’s work before he did his own research or private speaking. In contrast to many academics, he refused to shut himself away. ‘In his days as Vice Principal and later as Principal of Ridley College his accessibility was symbolized by the open door – his study door was deliberately kept wide open, no matter how urgent the task which occupied him within as a sign that people were his priority.’¹⁰ His love for people was genuine, and interruptions were a part of life. When the day didn’t fit the plan he’d record, ‘Life’s like that.’

An interview with ‘Dr Morris’ was a bit of a trial. He refrained from speaking if he had nothing to say and so developed an interviewing style that suited him. In addition to the awe they felt about being in Leon’s presence, students were unnerved by his habit of gently humming a tune during silences in conversation. One recalled ‘interviews with “The Doc”, when conversation lagged, he would audibly hum to himself’.¹¹ Brian Bayston similarly recalled, ‘At a dinner table, if there was a lull in the conversation, particularly if Leon had just scored a bull’s eye with some deft aside, a gentle humming could often be heard, a sort of sotto voce cry of triumph.’¹²

Within the constraints of his retiring personality, Leon worked hard to engage people. For example, when he found out about a person’s interests, he would spend time finding out more about the subject. The incident of studying pig-farming in South Australia was a case in point. He used his humour more in talks and began publically to express his thanks to God by including illustrations of God’s actions in his sermons. While his disciplined methods limited his social life, they were also one of his greatest strengths; his ability to communicate clearly was the result of long hours spent concentrating on the subject at hand.

Leon’s Involvements outside Ridley

While at Ridley, Leon ministered in several Melbourne churches. On a Sunday, he would preach and lead both morning and evening services and then do preparation and pastoral visiting midweek. Leon and Mildred’s first church was St Peter’s East Coburg. They ran the Sunday school together, including teaching classes. Dorothy Percy, one of Leon’s original students, radiated joy when reminiscing about Leon’s teaching: ‘It was a great assistance towards my eventual conversion and ministry.’¹³ Leon then became honorary assistant curate at Holy Trinity Coburg¹⁴ and would preach when the elderly vicar, Cecil Crossley, was ill. It was thirty minutes by a northerly tram up Sydney Road from Ridley. This parish had over two thousand Anglican families.

Leon was also regularly invited to speak at other gatherings. These included Bible studies held in the city and run by the League of Youth, an organization connected to the Church Missionary Society. Tom Morgan, a young railway apprentice and chairman of the league, recalled: ‘Leon came and spoke several times in those years on John’s Gospel. On other occasions he taught aspects of belief using the Church of England Thirty-Nine Articles as a basis. There were over a hundred there regularly. Leon spoke clearly about complicated things. He could tell the most profound truth in the simplest language.’¹⁵

Ridley had developed a track for those exploring the possibility of ordination studies. Again, Morgan recalled: ‘In 1945–1950 we could come back to the Thursday night “late chapel” as it was called. There was a meal and later a time to talk about things … There were Church of England Boys Society leaders and others. My friend and I were still railway apprentices.’¹⁶ Leon would stay back with Donald Baker and host the next generation seeking to find God’s way for them.

His influence was wide. Morgan reflected:

An armature winder Harold Burt was a Christadelphian who knew his Bible but of course didn’t believe in the Trinity. I said, ‘You ought to talk to Leon Morris’, and he said … ‘Yes’ … Anyway after we had talked to him we got him to do some Greek with Leon. Leon was not too proud to meet with this guy from an odd bod religion.¹⁷

Another group was the Evangelical Union (EU) at the University of Melbourne. Brian Bayston studied there from 1949 to 1952. ‘My first vivid recollections of Leon was him taking Bible study meetings on a Friday – at the Melbourne University EU meetings. He took a series on the doctrinal basis for the atonement. He helped shape the EU’s theological emphasis by his scholarly presentations on the authority of the Scriptures and the centrality of the work of Christ as a penal substitution.’¹⁸ Leon would comment later about the atonement: ‘There is nothing more central to Christianity than that.’¹⁹ The group gave Leon the opportunity he needed to test himself by teaching the bright minds of those sharp enough to make it to university in the 1940s.

Leon’s ideas were gaining a wider audience through his speaking and writing. Articles in this period included ‘The Atonement in Christian Thought’, ‘The Atonement’, ‘The Eclipse of Liberalism’ (with S.B. Babbage and J.A. Thompson) and ‘A Ransom for Many’.²⁰

The Cross of Christ

When and where did Leon begin focusing his theology on the cross of Christ and the fact that Christ died for our sins? It doesn’t appear to have been overly emphasized in the subjects he studied for his ThL or the London Bachelor of Divinity. He was certainly influenced by the ministry and message of Robinson and Hammond’s emphasis on the cross of Christ.²¹ Indeed, Hammond’s In Understanding Be Men has a section on the atonement. Yet in writing the foreword to a book about Hammond Leon did not refer to this aspect of Hammond’s theology, rather his encouragement to concentrate on learning and thinking well. In Leon’s words, ‘He taught me to concentrate on evidence rather than scholarly opinion.’²²

In my view, it is entirely possible Leon decided on the importance of the cross for himself and then decided to study the doctrine of the atonement in greater depth. He kept studying because it was the obvious thing to do rather than as part of a plan to end up an academic.²³ As it turned out, his contribution concerning the cross of Christ was so significant that he changed the shape of thinking about the cross for some sixty years.

Leon developed one of the most incisive theological minds in Australia without any mentoring or formal direction. How was he able to do this? The facts are that he had a logical mind able to hold a vast amount of information in sequence. Furthermore, he was able to identify important information within the vast amount gathered. He could recall information that had bearing on a question or position being considered and reject information that complicated or confused a matter. He was able to be clear, using simple language to explain complexities without losing depth. This was a key feature of his communication style. Importantly, Leon had a humility and faith that trusted God’s revelation and trusted that it made sense. Still, in the end, his combined abilities defy logical explanation.

Leaving Ridley

After working with Baker at Ridley for four years, Leon moved to Cambridge, UK, to study for his doctorate. He was thirty-five. By this time he had worked in paid employment for fourteen years, studied on and off over a period of fifteen years and had five tertiary qualifications under his belt. He had graduated from all three theological degrees with first-class honours. For his master’s thesis, he focused on the work of Christ, particularly his death.

Leon had helped Ridley during a critical period after the war but now it was time to leave and develop his wider thinking. Baker appreciatively recorded that Leon had ‘left an influence, the results of which will endure for many a long year’.²⁴

To take up his studies in Cambridge, Leon needed some financial help. He was encouraged to apply for the Lucas Tooth Scholarship available to Anglican clergy, which had helped many who had become leaders. He declined when he learned that the scholarship was financed by shares in Tooth’s brewery. He was a teetotaller and his conscience overruled convenience.

In the end, the funding for Leon’s higher studies was gathered from a number of sources, including the Anglican Evangelical Trust in Melbourne, which made an exceptional allocation for his further study;²⁵ the Intervarsity Fellowship (IVF) university student group in Sydney;²⁶ Tyndale House, which provided a small expense amount;²⁷ and ‘Pa’ Salmon in England, from his fund for ordination candidates.²⁸ Leon also had BCA links to the English Colonial and Continental Church Society,²⁹ through which he accepted various preaching engagements in England that each provided a fee of three pounds sterling. As Leon would have more costs than just fees and travel expenses, Mildred decided to resume her nursing career in Cambridge so the bills would be paid. Her income was their most significant source of money, and there would have been no full-time study possible for Leon without it.

In late 1949, Leon and Mildred visited Sydney and Lithgow to say goodbye to their family and friends. In December, Mildred wrote in her diary: ‘This is the day we commenced our great adventure to England. A lovely day with lots of folk to wave us good-bye. The sea extremely smooth.’³⁰

A network of friends gathered on 3 December to farewell Leon and Mildred from the pier at Sydney’s Pyrmont 13 as they left for England on P&O’s Otranto. Their journey began by travelling south and west through the ports of Australia’s southern capitals. On the next day, Leon agreed to celebrate at the Sunday 7 a.m. Communion and 10.45 a.m. morning service. Mildred noted, ‘This was a most impressive service’³¹ as the lounge was comfortably full. A 3 p.m. Sunday school had about fifteen children. Leon noted, ‘Not bad.’³²

When the ship berthed in Melbourne, they collected various belongings in between spending time with friends. Mildred noted in shorthand: ‘Our goods are there: bed and mattress, 2 lounge chairs, desk, Fowlers outfit, box kitchenware, small box crockery, large box crockery and glassware and silverware and the Glory chest. We are due to sail from Melbourne at 5.30 p.m. but we didn’t get away until 9.30 p.m.’³³ Soon Leon began ‘bashing the typewriter’.³⁴ After Adelaide it was out to sea, travelling across the Great Australian Bight to Perth. Sailing was generally calm, although one day a swell rocked the ship one way while a breeze moved the ship the other way. Many people fell ill, including Mildred.³⁵ By 13 December she wrote: ‘We were in Fremantle when we awoke. It was good, feet on land for a while and I completely recovered from feeling seedy.’³⁶

On 14 December Leon and Mildred left Australian shores for the first time: ‘A queer feeling to have left Aussie behind and we are now out in the Indian Ocean.’³⁷ Their week-long journey to Colombo was occupied with the usual round of meals, games and looking over the side of the ship at the sea life. Leon’s routine was devotions, breakfast, ten pages of typing, exercise on ‘A’ deck, lunch, serious reading, afternoon tea, deck sports, shower/writing, dinner and reading. He entered almost every tournament on the ship, including chess, yarning, mixed table tennis, quoits, draughts and quoit tennis.³⁸

On 21 December the ship dropped anchor in Colombo, and Leon and Mildred went on their first outing on foreign soil, taking a tourist bus to Mt Lavinia. Mildred noted, ‘I was surprised to see such a modern looking vehicle, I was expecting a bone shaker.’³⁹ On their way, they passed ‘a cricket ground … where Don Bradman made a large score at one time’.⁴⁰ On their return they visited the Church of England Seamen’s Mission before taking a launch back to the ship for a 6 p.m. departure.

Back on board, Leon won a chess tournament, beating an American reputed to be the best chess player on the ship. He spent the prize money on a shirt, thinking that to keep the money would have burnt a hole in his pocket. Leon assisted at the Christmas Day services at 7 a.m., 7.30 a.m., 10.45 a.m. and 5 p.m. and spoke at the 10.45 a.m. service. A classical music concert at 6 p.m. and a grand meal at 7.30 p.m. filled the remaining hours of Christmas Day. The ship took a full day to sail through the Suez Canal; Mildred was intrigued at how narrow it was, and how easy it was to peer into people’s living quarters on either side. While the ship was waiting for passage, a number of dhows drew alongside, and Leon and Mildred had the opportunity to bargain with various traders. Leon must have driven a hard bargain, as an Arab referred to Leon as an ‘Aberdeen man’ and a ‘wee McGregor’.⁴¹

As the ship entered English waters Leon observed that ‘the Pommies have been going around with corker⁴² smiles as they feel almost “home”’.⁴³ The ship berthed on 9 January 1950. Mildred was feeling seedy again, noting that it was ‘a dull and cool day but the Londoners call it mild’.⁴⁴ After catching a train to St Pancras, Leon and Mildred took a taxi to the IVF office⁴⁵ where they met the clear-headed IVF general secretary, Dr Douglas Johnson, for a luncheon appointment to discuss Leon’s study options.⁴⁶

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