6 Cambridge – Scholarly Boldness: 1949–51
Cambridge – Scholarly Boldness: 1949–51
One of Leon’s first tasks upon arriving in England was to decide which qualification to work towards: a Doctor of Divinity (DD) or a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). Not long after their arrival, Mildred noted, ‘Leon interviewed a professor (Tasker) this afternoon who thinks two years is not enough to do the DD. We are disappointed but it would be a terrible thing to have a failure.’1 Although Leon had originally planned for two years of study in England, he decided in favour of a three-year Cambridge PhD, as the advice he received suggested that a DD was for ‘older fellows’.2
A brief interlude allowed a rugged-up Leon and Mildred to explore the cold London streets. The British Museum was the highlight, and Mildred recorded: ‘Leon is intrigued with the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Bible – early 4th Century.’3 Shortly after his arrival in London, Leon felt led to give a short manuscript that he had written on the preaching of the cross to a man from Paternoster. After hearing later that it would not be published, he noted this was ‘too bad’.4
The choice of a PhD meant moving to student lodgings in Cambridge by 17 January. Leon and Mildred were allocated a top-floor room at 16 Selwyn Gardens in Tyndale House. Even the modest belongings they brought were a bit of a squeeze in the room. Still, Mildred’s first impressions were positive: ‘Mrs MacLean who runs this place is a very nice bright person and very easy to get along with.’ Mrs Maclean remembered Leon:
Leon went to classes – he got his PhD without any fuss and was very unassuming … Leon was very interested in cricket and David Sheppard [who became a test cricketer] stayed and had supper at Tyndale House … Mr Minn who was just 5 feet tall produced vegetables for me from the garden. John Moroney was there [later] and had the job of carving the Sunday joint. John Taylor, ‘Dear John’; he was a help when people got edgy. He was able to tell stories that went on and on and on and we were helpless with laughter.5
Leon loved living at Tyndale. He recalled one meal when those who went to the kitchen to fetch the pudding returned to find three of the residents had moved their table to the lounge; they were back in the dining-room sitting there with no table waiting to be served. Leon smiled but Mrs Maclean was not amused, refusing the trio any pudding until everyone else had finished.
Mrs Maclean got on well with Mildred but by accident she got under Leon’s usually placid temperament one day. ‘I made a comment about something Mildred said. Leon became quite animated. “Mind your own business, Mrs Mac,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry Leon, I didn’t mean it that way.” “Perhaps it would have been best not said,” replied Leon.’6 Mrs Maclean and Mildred were able to accompany others to a speaking engagement in Switzerland. ‘I stayed with Mildred in a guesthouse run by some very austere Methodist ladies. It was so hot that we took our stockings off but the Methodist ladies were horrified, so they gave us some pink stockings to wear. Mildred and I wore them until we were out of sight, then discarded them under a bush.’
Job-Hunting
Early on, Leon and Mildred’s top priority was finding Mildred a job. She had contact with several doctors and nursing homes. She was feeling the strain of not having work; despite her best efforts, nothing eventuated. She had reached her lowest point, bewildered that even her ‘can do’ attitude could not get her over the line, when she received two offers. She accepted a job at Evelyn Nursing Home, Trumpington Road, and began immediately. Mildred worked six days a week for £23 per week plus a £200 per annum living-out allowance. Soon after beginning work, she recorded, ‘I find the work OK but the other nurses very lazy.’7
Some experiences made life interesting. For example, she nursed the Dean of Ely at Easter. The man insisted on having Holy Communion on Easter Day, a reasonable proposition, so Mildred arranged a room and a chaplain to take the service. When the dean insisted on fasting before the service it threw her arrangements out and she forgot to bring him his late breakfast. The staff just laughed when the dean pronounced: ‘She doesn’t understand. Of course she’s a Presbyterian.’8
Mildred worked for two years at Evelyn Nursing Home. It was a tiring job with long hours: the day shift started at 8 a.m. and finished at 8.30 p.m., with a three-hour break in the morning or afternoon. At times she found she was tired in the extreme. Difficult relationships with some of the staff and emergencies arising during patient care added to the stress of the job. Of particular concern was a deteriorating relationship with a night sister that significantly added to her stress levels, and eventually Mildred refused to work with her. Another evening a patient suddenly took a turn for the worse. With lightning speed Mildred moved to the drug stash, grabbed the necessary injection and saved the woman’s life. Leon was glowing: ‘Good show’.9
Mildred missed out on much of the rich cultural life that Leon enjoyed in Cambridge, but she was prepared to do so for Leon’s benefit. John Taylor, a young student living at Tyndale House at the time, described her as ‘a heroine’.10 The term sounds overly generous, but it has to be close to the mark in describing Mildred’s sacrificial ‘can do’ nature.
A Theological Battleground
Leon and Mildred fell in love with Cambridge, the learning and the books. The place was full of ancient colleges and chapels surrounded by manicured grounds, and the main streets bubbled with student activity. Along with Oxford, Cambridge was ‘the place to be’ for intellectual high achievers. For those who were students of theology, it was an interesting time to be studying at Cambridge.
By the end of World War II, theology faculties in places of learning throughout Europe and North America were heavily influenced by liberal scholars, who held the view that the Bible was not God’s special revelation. Choosing which parts of Scripture to believe became a matter of personal preference. Many conservative Christians believed their faith would be corrupted if they opened themselves up to academic study of the Bible, at that time influenced by liberal views, and therefore avoided studying theology altogether. This anti-intellectualism persisted for some decades.
In England the Christian Union, which was influenced by the ‘Bash’ movement,11 ‘argued that any evangelicals that did theology went off the rails so better to not do it … or do it with a closed mind’.12 American movements like the Navigators shared this sentiment, as did many groups in Australia, even though they worked largely on university campuses.13
This suspicion that any books or viewpoints other than the Bible might be error-ridden filtered through local churches to individual Christians. While it was quite acceptable to study for a secular degree using the benefits of modern scholarship and research, the same was not the case for biblical studies; it was important to prevent contamination from higher research methods.
Tyndale House
In contrast to these prevailing winds of Christian conservatism, Tyndale House was set up in Cambridge in the 1940s to advance academic theology among evangelical Christians. Believing that it was possible to do academic theology and treat the Bible as the written word of God, Tyndale’s founders asserted that conservative Christians could be credible godly academic scholars.14 They aimed for ‘constructive and original research, and the production of up-to-date conservative literature … to the better understanding of Holy Scripture’.15
After searching for a place of learning with a suitable library, the founders compiled a list of suitable high-quality young scholars to invite to study there. At their 1942 meeting, Australians D.B. Knox, S. Barton Babbage, E. Nash and E.W. Swanton appeared on this list but Leon Morris did not. He was toiling away in the middle of South Australia at the time. The first time Leon appears in the records of Tyndale House is in a programme for the 1950 Tyndale Lectures, a summer school programme. Clearly Leon’s acceptance for a Cambridge PhD and his arrival at Tyndale had raised his profile.16 The format for the presentation of papers was:
New Testament 1. D.J. Wenham
2. Rev Leon Morris
New Testament 1. Prof. Blaiklock
2. R.A. Cole
Tyndale House was a small house of residence with a dozen residents. Some of these were studying divinity at Cambridge while others were enrolled in secular degrees at the university. Students living at Tyndale included John Taylor, who held Mildred in such high esteem. Taylor ‘came on the scene in 1950’ after meeting Dr Douglas Johnson, who told him: ‘We are looking for the right kind of person, able scholars, to study theology at Tyndale.’17 There were lodgers like the Czech Peter Schneider, later involved in the Rainbow Project in Israel. In Leon’s second year, mathematician Alan Weir became a resident. He later became Professor of Education at the University of Sussex.18
When Leon commenced at Tyndale House he was its only PhD candidate. The conventional higher qualification for those in the ministry was a master’s degree. According to Taylor, ‘At that time a Cambridge MA was very good so most of us stuck with that.’ Tyndale House encouraged Leon to work towards a two-year PhD as there was a good chance Cambridge would accept it, and if not he could ‘shove it into London’.19
Leon settled. He had brought three standard New South Wales Department of Education ruled exercise books. In a note to himself about study at Cambridge, Leon wrote:
read as much as possible
knowledge of the literature is essential
try rabbinic conceptions – field untouched.20
Tyndale House was a family-like community. Taylor recalled:
There was always a Finnish Au-Pair so we learnt some Finnish, and there was a dog named ‘Rakas’ a Finnish word for ‘darling’. We had a lady who cleaned … we called her the ‘whirlwind’ … she would leave everything upside down to show us she’d been there. We practised holy singing after lunch while washing dishes! Our housekeeper thought we should stop … that we might annoy Professor Norman Sykes who lived opposite. Sunday lunches were special. We’d talk about where we’d been. Some had heard a great sermon at St. Paul’s and so on. At times Mr. Oldham, a retired missionary there, was not impressed where he had been and reported: ‘Well, it was a very good text.’21
Visitors also dropped in, including Marcus Loane from Sydney. Loane was a tall, angular man who made quite an impression on those he met. He leant towards the serious if not austere, with a deep puritan-based spirituality. Economically his middle name could have been ‘frugal’. Mildred and Leon later recalled Loane’s account of his recent Paris trip. He had been taken to a nightclub with an exorbitant entry fee and was forced to drink expensive champagne as nothing else was available. Tickled pink by Loane’s story, Leon jovially commented: ‘I was amused at the thought of Marcus buying champagne at three pounds a bottle. All in all we were highly diverted by the account.’22
In the warmer months, a number of the Tyndale residents would enjoy a game of quoits. Leon and Mildred were invited.
‘Are you going to join us, Leon?’
‘And … what … are we doing?’ Leon replied.
‘Quoits.’
‘Quoits … aahh … nice thought.’
‘Come on, Leon old chap, not afraid of the English are you?’
‘No …’
‘We’ll be gentle on you, you know.’
‘Okay … I guess I could give it a go.’
On the lawn Leon played like a man possessed while Mildred stood by grinning broadly. The others had no idea that Leon had played quoits during his study breaks as a boy. Some sixty years later, when he found out Leon’s secret, Taylor exclaimed: ‘Is that where he learnt it! … Leon … He was a demon at quoits.’23 But why declare your hand when you are playing the English?
If Mildred had a chance on her day off, she and Leon would do a little shopping on a carefully worked-out budget. Even the purchase of an alarm clock was researched for quality and price before the precious purchase was made. There were also breaks for leisure trips. On one of their most memorable trips, Leon and Mildred visited the Tower of London to see the crown jewels. While they were there, a gun salute was fired to announce the birth of the infant Princess Anne.24 On another occasion, Leon and Mildred saw a television for the first time, with Leon commenting that he hoped the invention would not get to Australia as ‘I’d never get any work done’.25
Preaching and Teaching
When he first arrived in Cambridge, Leon was given interim permission to officiate from the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was extended once the Archbishop of Melbourne’s letters of support arrived. Having gained permission to officiate, he was able to accept invitations to preach.
Pa Salmon in Harrington gave Leon his first chance to preach in England in the church of St Peter and St Paul. Subsequently, Salmon issued several more invitations for Leon to preach at Harrington in that first year. Salmon was considered an ‘extreme’ Protestant and had an excessive disregard for ‘non-essentials’, much to the concern of the Anglo-Catholics. While Leon was a strong Protestant – his ceremonial commitment could be described as low church – he could understand the Anglo-Catholics’ concerns. Other preaching engagements accepted by Leon included Leicester’s Youth for Christ and the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. While the CICCU was wary of this new academic, Leon was impressed by the group’s spiritual depth and quiet lack of flamboyance.
Over time, Leon’s preaching and teaching trips increased. They included:
• Going first to York to speak, and then to the IVF conference at Swanwick in Derbyshire, where some 350 students heard him.
• Regular preaching for the Colonial and Continental Society, at one stage virtually every weekend across England in a total of twenty-five locations.
• Preaching at the Round Church.26 On one Sunday alone, he preached at the 8 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. services for a fee of ten pounds. He noted that the usually reserved English people slowly warmed to his style. At another location before an evening service, a choirboy was putting numbers onto the hymn board when he looked up shyly and said, ‘I think you are a lovely preacher’,27 and promptly popped another number on the board.
• Local assistance given to Fitzwilliam House.28
• Speaking at Newnham College.29 One night he spoke to the young women until he was kicked out at 10 p.m., after a long session answering questions about baptism, wearing hats in church and apostolic succession.
• Filling in for the vicar – who was on sick leave – of St Mary’s, the parish church of Rushden.30 Leon spent some four months taking Sunday services on and off, extending into his second year. For Christmas 1950 he and Mildred moved into the vicarage in the absence of the vicar and by kind invitation enjoyed an English Christmas in an English home.
• A Swiss chaplaincy in Spicz over the second summer. Leon stayed in the classiest hotel he had seen, the Spiczenhof. Huge meals were served – mixed grills, steak, veal, fry and bacon, with various beautifully cooked vegetables. (Mildred and Mrs Maclean stayed down the road at a hostel as the mission allowance didn’t cover them!)
• Preaching at St Botolph’s Cambridge at the invitation of the vicar C.T. Wood, who was single and preferred to stay in rooms at Queens rather than the vicarage. He invited Leon to high tea:
We went into the combination room and yarned with such blokes as turned up until a waiter in evening dress came to let us know all was ready. Woodsy led the procession, I following, and then the rest as we took up our places at the High Table, students being already at their tables and standing as we entered. One of the students said a long grace in Latin and away we went.
The meal was a little beauty with rockmelon to start off, then chicken omelette, and finally ice cream and strawberries. The whole was washed down with beer, cider or just iced water according to taste. By about 8.15 p.m. we returned to the combination room where Henry Chadwick poured port for all and sundry, an interesting sidelight on being a College Chaplain. Presently the waiters trotted up with coffee in good respectable cups and I was able to join in … lots of fun … but I came away thinking it must be an awful waste of time to go through that every night.31
Leon was building a reputation. His scholarship and style impressed the English and his contacts steadily grew as he rarely refused an invitation. Among those he met was a young preacher who impressed him as a nice young man who gave a good sermon. He would become friends and a technical mentor for the young John Stott.
Leon’s work progressed through the English autumn, the long winter and then spring. Word by word, chapter by chapter, quoit by quoit. The pattern was repeated in the second year. Over this time, he was pleased to find that the soundness of his conservative position was vindicated not just generally but in the detail.