Three Historical Appendixes: Related in Different Ways to the Living Church
THREE HISTORICAL APPENDIXES
Related in Different Ways to the Living Church
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
This brief autobiographical sketch seemed to me to be necessary. It explains how I became so closely attached to All Souls Church. It also introduces the three historical appendices which follow. These record three significant dates in my developing story.1
I have had the extraordinary experience of being a member of the same parish church for almost the whole of my life—as a child, as a student, as a newly ordained curate, as rector and as rector emeritus.
I was only a few months old when my parents, my sisters and I moved from Kensington to Harley Street, the so-called Doctors’ Street where we made our home and my physician-father had his consulting room for seeing private patients.
My mother took my sister and me to All Souls Church for Sunday morning worship; it was barely 200 yards from our home. At first Arthur Buxton was rector (1920-1936) and then Harold Earnshaw-Smith (1936-1950). My most vivid memory of Sunday worship was of sitting in the gallery, making paper pellets out of bus tickets, and dropping them onto the fashionable hats of the ladies below. Little did I imagine that some twenty-five years later I would occupy the pulpit as rector! Such is the redeeming and transforming power of the gospel. Another memory of childhood was that my sister Joy and I were taken on Sunday afternoons to a Sunday school for doctors’ children in the rectory, led by Esmé Buxton, the rector’s wife.
I was at rugby school when I first knowingly heard the gospel and responded to it. Within a few months, astonished that I had never before heard the good news, I had a growing sense of vocation to share with others what nobody till then had shared with me. And because I had told this to my headmaster, I was exempt from military service as an ordinand. So I spent the war years at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying first French and German, and then theology. Soon after graduation, on one of his many visits to Cambridge, Harold Earnshaw-Smith invited me after ordination to serve my curacy at All Souls under him. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that I should begin my ordained ministry in the parish in which I had been brought up—though using different ammunition from bus ticket pellets!
I was ordained by the bishop of London in St Paul’s Cathedral on December 21, 1945. The Earnshaw-Smith family befriended me, and I was fortunate enough to have Harold as my mentor, who inducted me into the rudiments of pastoral ministry. There was only one snag: his health. Half way through my first year in the parish, he was taken ill with his first coronary. He was away for several weeks, and even when he returned he was convalescing and able to manage only a little work, so that at least for a while the weight of the parish rested on Gordon Mayo, my fellow curate, and me. In 1947 Harold Earnshaw-Smith was again taken ill, and for the next two or three years he was back and forth between the parish and convalescence. In early March 1950 he again left London to convalesce on the south coast, and one week later he died in his sleep. I was put in charge of the parish, and four months later to everybody’s astonishment (especially mine) I was appointed to succeed him as rector.