In the beginning

I had a dream. And in this dream I was walking across the sand. And when I looked back I saw that sometimes there were two sets of footprints in the sand. And I said to the Lord, why are there sometimes two sets of footprints in the sand. And he said, that is when I accompanied you on your journey. Why then, I asked, are there sometimes only one? That, he said, is when I kicked your arse and told you to get on with it.

There are some christians who feel themselves to be held in the arms of god and who lead protected lives. I am not one of them. Although there have never really been times that I doubted the existence of god, there have been many times when I fell his absence more than his presence. But when I wavered I was always conscious that the shoe of god was not far behind.

And that is reflected in these memoirs.

They began as magazine articles: writing from Zimbabwe to my former parishes; marking thirty years in the priesthood; reflecting on a life on stage; and as a blog pointing up the absurdity of much that passes for church life. I have filled in some of the gaps and added a bit of my early life.

Some names have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. And I have tried to include some of the angels and saints that I have met as much as those that terrorised me. Those I tried to get to see how ridiculous they were.

Perhaps it has been a part of my own disposition that I have often gravitated towards those that others find most difficult. I have enjoyed the company of outsiders.

Posting dates have been changed to get the material into some sort of order. But they can be read in any order.

Was I worth it?

Well was I worth it?

I was born in a nursing home in St Albans (St Olive’s) and I cost 15 guineas plus 15 shillings for circumcision. That was getting on for two weeks salary at the time. My mother gave me the receipt. I’m not sure if I was meant to reimburse her.

I was baptised in St Albans Abbey. As we lived in Marshalswick my mother must have got on the electoral roll at the Abbey just to get me baptised there. We never went there for services. My parents had moved out of London after the war and my mother had elocution lessons to hide her roots. She did all the right things to get ahead. Join the Tory party, the Townswomen’s Guild, attend G & S; and among them cultivate contacts at the Abbey without actually having to attend.

My earliest memory is going to a children’s party. Somewhere back in Cricklewood, North London, through one of the last of the pea soupers; so called because it was like walking through soup, thick mushy pea probably. It was in 1952 or thereabouts. However fast my parents walked and disappeared round corners, I managed to keep up; and we came to the church hall where the party was held. And I looked in. And saw that there was nothing I could do or say that would help me join in. I simply wasn't part of what was going on. So I stayed on the edge of the room, where thankfully they left me. It was the first time I became aware that I was an outsider. I have been on the margins ever since. A watcher not a participant.

Read more »

Political awakening

Grammar School was very much a continuation of the prep school. I arrived a week late as we had been in Guernsey on holiday. So the friends and loyalties had already been fixed. I had few friends and the teachers were only interested if you did very well or very badly. I had learnt by then not to stand out and so was usually somewhere in the top half but not too near the top to attract attention. One wise teacher told us that examiners were as lazy as we were and set the same questions year after year – look through the past five year’s papers and you will know all the questions you are likely to get in the exam. I sometimes wonder if they ever thought about how I could be 28^th out of 33 in the spring term and then about seventh when the exams came around. I never tried for straight As. Bs and Cs were enough for me.

The school pretended to be a public school, with rugby as the main sport. I had never seen the point in getting my head kicked in and so pleaded asthma most sports afternoons. In the summer they made me a scorer for the cricket team, so at least I had to turn up. And sometimes on a Saturday I would go off with the team for matches at other schools. But when I was thirteen and joined a tennis club I wasn’t allowed out of school to play at the club. And I wasn’t allowed to play at school as the courts were reserved for the team. I never did find out how the team were selected. On a more sedate level I was part of the chess team and we went around many of the local public schools playing matches. And I went to the Hatfield Congress held at what was then a further education college, later to become a polytechnic where I was chaplain, still later to become the University of Hertfordshire.

Read more »

A welcome in the hillside

It was raining as I arrived in Cardiff

Three months later the only change was that it had turned to snow.

I had booked into the halls of residence for the first year so that I would get fed and they gave me a ground floor room. In a quiet corner, or so I thought. The first night I discovered that it was the room that everyone used to get in through the window after hours to avoid the hall porter.

In those days they were strict on security which meant that your every move was watched and visitors had to be signed in and out and only allowed to stay for a short time. It all changed over the years I was there and a year after I left I could go back and sleep on a friend’s floor without anyone noticing.

Needless to say the hall was for men only. The women’s hostels were either in the centre of town or out at Penarth – a half hour bus ride away from the centre. For them visiting was restricted to an hour in the afternoon and an hour in the evening until the principal decided to abandon attempts at propriety on the basis that “they can do what they like in the hour so we are not stopping anything”. But that was all too late for me.

University Hall is out at Penylan which is a couple of miles from the uni so we had to use the trolley buses which were still running then. It was a stop-start journey as the cantilever came off the wires or got tangled with them at corners and had to be reset. They phased them out over the next year or so by which time I had decided to walk and save the fare.

The first week as ever was a mad round of signing up for everything in sight. I joined the film club to watch dubious “art” films; the student paper, although I never did get around to writing anything; BUNAC, who organise working holidays in the States, although I never went; the drama group, Cardiff University Players, where I spent much of the next three years; and the Anglican Chaplaincy because they had a coffee bar for lunch.

I was also down to study law and accountancy for an economics degree so I joined the accountancy society since they did field trips. With them I got to see Concorde being made and several trips round the local Brains brewery.

And there were dances. Still to live music in those days. Local band Love Sculpture seemed to play at everything. 

I managed to turn up to most of the lectures and found the library, though I only used it in the run up to exams. I was still working on the principle that I could pass exams on a month or so of cramming provided I had the notes and a few years past papers. I don’t think I ever imagined that I would get a first and so was always aiming for a 2 something. In the end my predictions of the questions went wrong on the company law exam and I settled for a 2.2.

I was fairly quickly involved in drama productions. I went to the first audition and gave them my best Henry V before Agincourt after which they asked me to do the lighting. Which was fine by me as that meant there were no lines to learn.

So I learnt stage lighting from Russ Hunt who dropped out a year later to do lighting for stadium tours by rock bands. The lighting workshop, where we made up leads and tested and repaired the lights and stored spare equipment, was in the basement of the computer centre. Computers in 1967 were the size of a small semi-detached and required large rooms with sprung floors and air conditioning. What they never seemed to notice was that the cellar was running with water from a burst pipe. It came down the wall next to the mains cable for the computer. We did tell them, but they took no notice. Meanwhile we were standing in water checking our lighting equipment. Perhaps not a good idea, though we all survived.

The first play I was involved in was the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. An Elizabethan comedy which involved a head speaking and various apparitions. We also decided to blind the audience at one point by pointing several floodlights on them and switching everything on at once. That took more power than we were meant to use so we had to replace all the fuses with metal bars and hope the mains supply would cope for a few seconds. It did and it was a couple of years later that the college electrician blew the main fuse trying to unjamb our dimmer board by sticking a screwdriver in it. The screwdriver melted through and somewhere in left the arts block without power for most of the day until we could find the main fuse which was anonymously in a box that had been painted over many times.

There was a play every term as well as touring productions that came in. And for three years I helped to light them all. The old slide dimmers in those days were constantly overheating and we had to take the covers off to try to keep them cool. But it was useful for keeping the chips warm. Together with the sound guys we took it in turns to go to the Woodville for beer or the chippy in quiet moments of the shows and so I got to know a bit about sound as well, which came in useful later.

Some of the shows were truly weird. A group called the People Show came in for the Cardiff Arts Festival. They were largely improvised and so the show had no real beginning and no end. When they ran out of ideas they simply didn’t come back on stage. As I was responsible for putting the house lights back on it would have been nice to know the cue. But there wasn’t one. So each night I had to guess.

By my second year I had got to know some of the music department and became involved in the 20^th Century Music Festival which happens every year. That involved working in other venues around Cardiff. The Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre was the venue for the London Percussion Ensemble who were performing, amongst other things, the world premier of Howard Rees’s “Cat’s paw in the silence of the midnight goldfish”. This was a fairly anarchic piece written by a former Cardiff student and involved the performers walking around the stage hitting whatever they passed. Trouble was there was also a film being projected on the backdrop and a trumpeter up in the gods. So I had to give enough light for the performers to find their way around but not too much to overpower the film. With only limited equipment that wasn’t easy. But returning to his home turf to present his work seemed to be enough for Howard and he didn’t make too many rude comments about my lighting.

I was also part of the stage crew for the London Symphony Orchestra at the New Theatre when Tamas Vasary performed Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. Our job was to move the piano after the concerto to the back of the stage where it was need as percussion for the second half. Trouble was Andre Previn, conducting, decided it was going out of tune as we moved it, so it had to stay centre stage throughout the concert.

There were also variety shows to light. Each year the rag week culminated in an extravaganza with the usual student sketches and then a band or two. One year they had booked a new band, billed as waiting for a record contract. Unfortunately the contract came before the show and they cancelled at the last minute. So I never got to light the first performance by the Electric Light Orchestra.

We certainly did the first and last performances of “The Long Lonely Voyage of Chester Winchester”. Written by one of the students it was entered for the National Student Drama Festival but Francis Chichester’s widow threatened to sue if we performed it again. On another occasion I was lighting a play for another Cardiff college and the director would never get back to me on what lighting was needed, so I went away for the week before the play and only turned up half an hour before the curtain went up with the key to the lighting desk in my pocket.

In my final year there was talk of a new theatre being built and Liz Weston, our director, was asked to be part of the planning group. So we all dreamed of what we would really like in terms of space and sound and lighting. Some of which became a part of the Sherman Theatre.

There were of course other shows to go to. My experience of music broadened to include Stravinsky, Lutoslavski and the operas that Welsh National Opera put on each year. Then there was the Glenn Miller orchestra, Jazz at the Half Moon club, and poetry from the Barrow Poets and the Liverpool Scene.

After a year I left the halls of residence and moved into a flat in Tydraw Road in Roath with three other students. Allen Powell was from the valleys, I had met him at the Chaplaincy although he was Presbyterian. He invited me to share the flat and I moved in with two others. It was just up the road from the lake and I spent many hours along the lake taking photographs and watching the ducks. It was a bit like my Saturday afternoons in St Albans.

My mother loaded me down with Vesta curries – just add hot water and it tastes like wet cardboard. So after a week I decided to learn to cook. Allen was a reasonable cook as well and we soon were eating very well and very cheaply too.

With another four students upstairs we had a wide variety of musical tastes. There was always music on. From the Beatles, the Stones and Cream; Leonard Cohen or David Akles; to Blossom Dearie and Paul Simon withy occasional bursts of Dvorak and Stravinsky. Or if Allan was left in charge Josef Locke and Richard Tauber (useful for getting rid of those who always hang around at the end of parties). Allan also introduced me to the Presbyterian Church in Windsor Place and I started going there most Sunday evenings. After church we would go back to the manse ostensibly to discuss the sermon but more often to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In – the cult comedy of the time. Allan’s religion was eclectic, he was as often to be found in Anglo Catholic churches as Presbyterian ones. And he was an expert on the finer points of liturgical practice. I began to gather my own experiences too – studying the mystics with the Roman Catholic chaplain; attending Ash Wednesday ashing services at the Anglo Catholics and going to silent retreats at St Teilo’s Priory.

The chaplaincy had various days out – to the monks on Caldy Island; to St David’s; and to Exeter to the Cathedral. In Exeter I spent the whole day in a pub near Exeter City’s ground with Kay’s boyfriend, Dave (?), while the rest of the trip went round Britain’s least interesting cathedral. I had been to the Incredible String Band at the Festival Hall with Dave and Kay and her sister Mary. Mary and I had then had a passionate correspondence over a few weeks and I had gone over the summer to see them in Romford. Kay and Mary’s dad was the crossword compiler for the Daily Express. Which seemed a reasonably exotic job to me. But his conversations were equally cryptic. In the end Romford and Cardiff were too far apart and I found friends closer to home.

One was my second great love. Judy was a radiologist at the Cardiff Hospital but had a lot of friends at the university. We went out for much of my second year.  Even now if I hear Hey Jude my heart skips a beat. Also through the Chaplaincy I met Pat. She was from Bristol and gave me my first contact with that city. We also walked down on the beach on the Severn Estuary and saw the new bridge being built.

Cardiff was the main time I felt one of a crowd. There were always a lot of people doing things together. Glyn and Trish, Gill and Car, Gilly, Helen, Bob, Dave and Jill, Steve, Chris, Margaret and Linda Mary. All on a variety of courses and spread over different years, so we would never meet up on a conventional reunion.

In my second year a group of us decided to go off to Ireland. We went on the boat from Swansea to Cork and then got the bus down to Glengarrif on Bantry Bay. There we rented a cottage for a week. One night in the pub we were challenged to a darts match by the locals. As we had a darts board in the flat in Cardiff we were pretty proficient except that one of the locals could get triple twenty every time. Even so the resulting conversation led to an invite to go out on the bay the following day shrimping. The shrimps went straight from the sea into boiling water on the deck and were eaten within minutes of being caught. At the end of the first week we went up to the Shannon and hired a boat for a week. Sailing the Shannon we called at Clonmacnoise to look at the Celtic remains and then onto Lough Ree where we managed to run the boat aground in the middle of the Lough. For some reason it seemed to be my job to go ashore and call the owners to come and tow us off.

We also had a day out at Weston. Taking the ferry from Barry we went to the old pier at Weston (now derelict). Some went off to the Tropicana (now derelict) to swim while I stayed on the beach and watched the sea which seemed to be a good half mile away. There were also days out to Porthcawl to watch the sea crashing over the promenade and Llantwit Major. Little did I realise then that I would end up retired and living in Clevedon, watching the lights of Cardiff across the Bristol Channel.

Allen graduated at the end of my second year and I advertised for new flatmates and Eric Dobbin arrived. He rode a motorbike and spent most of the next year with the bike in bits in the sink as he tried to keep it going. It did mean that I could get a lift into college most days and sometimes a lift back. Saturday nights became cinema night. There was a fleapit cinema, The Globe, down the road, which went from a continental film season to an international film season and then back again. Either soft-core porn or deep meaningful Ingmar Bergman and Bunuel. The woman who took the tickets at the door came round at half time with ice cream while her husband projected the films. Occasionally rats ran along the front of the balcony. But they did show the spaghetti westerns, and Easy Rider, which Eric went to see every night for a week. After the film it was down the pub and then chips on the way home. As a result Sundays were a lazy day with enormous breakfasts at lunchtime – sausages, bacon, beans, eggs, black pudding and fried bread. Very healthy. The guys upstairs managed to leave their chip pan on and burnt the kitchen out so they too shared our kitchen for a time.

Every year there was a rag week to raise money for charity and part of that was a sponsored walk from Cardiff to Barry and back. Some of the runners could do the 26 miles in three and a half hours. I used to take about six. One year at the end and facing a two mile walk back to Roath I decided to kip down on Glyn’s sofa. As we were nodding off to sleep I suddenly realised that the gas fire was still on. So in my half awake state I said to Glyn, You’d better turn the gas off, if the shilling runs out when we are asleep we will be gassed. Well it made sense at the time. And he did turn the gas off.

The last of the trips for me was with the Windsor Place Presbyterians to Oberammergau. I had already graduated by the time we went in the summer of 1970. We started with a week at Lido di Jessolo on the Venice Lagoon. I did my usual thing of going off by myself and spent some of the evenings with the Swedish courier who took me to the places the couriers go after work.

By the time we got to Seefeld I had attached myself to one of the group who had a boyfriend back at Cardiff and we had a good time in the mountains. The passion play was a great disappointment to me. Everyone else thought it was wonderful. But it was overblown, too staged and unreal. I had just spent three years in student drama, small scale, intimate and largely improvised. And to see the whole village on stage for seven and a half hours speaking archaic German was too much. Also the group were getting on my nerves. Some of the British had taken primus stoves with them to brew tea in their rooms in medieval alpine thatched chalets. Didn’t seem a good idea to me. On the last night I went off with the courier again and got very drunk. The flight home was through turbulence and with the hungover feeling from the night before I never did get to say goodbye to the people I had just spent three years of my life with and would possibly never see again.

Luton airport seemed a very lonely place.

In my last year I had stirred up the chaplaincy by bringing in friends of all denominations and none and there were endless debates about whether the chaplaincy had to be just for Anglicans – which would have kept out people like Allen; or whether it was open to anyone. I even tried to get elected president to change things but received only one vote (I never voted for myself). At that point I left, which was a good idea anyway as it was my final year and I needed to spend time in the library. I am not sure if anyone noticed that I no longer turned up at lunchtimes. But the chaplain, Anglo Catholic to the core, was certainly surprised when I said I was going to be ordained.

As I was trying to work out what to do with my life I went to the milk round interviews with prospective employers. I really didn’t want to spend the rest of my life behind a desk. I had something of a reputation as someone that people could talk to and my interest in spirituality had grown over the years. People often ask when I decided to become a priest and the answer is I don’t know. It was a path I seemed to be guided down without any one specific moment of enlightenment. Almost everyone was surprised not least my parish priest in St Albans where I had not so much as read a lesson and the Cardiff chaplain who thought I was a troublemaker.

But at some point I turned up on the doorstep of the Director of Ordinands at Little Gaddesdon and without too much questioning he set the ball rolling for me to go to a selection conference at Almondsbury retreat house and begin the process of applying to colleges.

My family were against it. My father wanted me to go into the city to follow in his footsteps and even got a friend of his to write a dubious reference that later came back to haunt me; and my brother, born again and a true believer simply didn’t think I was “A Christian”.

But somehow I got through the hurdles and arrived in August 1970 at Lincoln Theological College.

It wasn't meant to happen

It wasn’t meant to happen

I wasn’t meant to be ordained. When I turned up on the vicar’s doorstep and said I wanted to be a priest, he almost said “who are you?” but restrained himself. I went off to Lincoln Theological College and then the Director of Ordinands visited and told me I shouldn’t be there. There had been a mix up. Finally after three years the principal recommended that I should not be ordained. But my Bishop, Robert Runcie, said he wanted to ordain me anyway.

So my ministry was controversial from the start. They said I had a problem with authority, I thought authority had a problem with me.

At about that time a book came out called the Little Red School Book. It was an anarchic view of school and gave advice on how to avoid too much work, as well as controversial chapters on drugs and sex. At the time there was little or no sex education and schools certainly didn’t mention drugs. Avoiding the sex and drug issues, although it was at theological college that I discovered drugs and sex, Alan Caldwell and I adapted the education chapters as a guide on how to survive theological college and circulated it around the college and to a few other colleges as well. 

Read more »

Poly filler

I was having sherry with the Bishop of Hertford, as you do, when the phone rang. He answered and then turned to me and asked if I wanted to be the chaplain at Hatfield Polytechnic. They had interviewed and appointed but the candidate had withdrawn. The Poly insisted another set of interviews but I was told I had the job. I felt a little sorry for the candidate who travelled from Durham.

Richard Chartres, later Bishop of London – then Bishop’s Chaplain in St Albans to Robert Runcie, later Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested that I get as much experience in different forms of ministry as possible. As he already seemed destined for higher things, I thought I should take note so I accepted.

So I moved off to Hatfield Polytechnic as Chaplain for four years.There was no chapel or Chaplaincy Society so I was free to do what I wanted, filling in the jobs no one else would do. I was based in the counselling unit and trained with the Clinical Theology Association as a counsellor. That meant that when there were too many clients for the established counsellors to see, the students were sent in to me. On the hour, every hour, together with a mug of Gold Blend. By the end of the day I was shaking, and haven’t really drunk coffee since. There were the usual anxieties about relationships and exams but we developed a technique for supporting students through exam appeals by turning the interview and suggesting that it was the Polytechnic that had failed in not getting the teaching across. We rarely lost appeals.

As I was living over the shop in the halls of residence, I also tended to be the first port of call for students whose crisis hit them at 3.00am. Just as the alcohol was wearing off and the toast was setting off the fire alarm; so a string of students came through the flat. Including one who had come to see me when we were out and had been let in by the baby sitter to use the loo where he promptly fell into a drunken coma until we came back two hours later. I also discovered that if I needed to close down parties that were getting out of hand all I needed to do was turn up with my dog collar on and everyone mysteriously began to drift away.

I became involved in a lot of student activities and for three years broadcast a weekly radio show to the campus. To start with I tried to be topical and vaguely religious but discovered that no-one listened, so I changed to a folk and blues format which was then relayed to the bar and I could reach far more people. I also performed with the Poly drama group in Hatfield and on the fringe in Edinburgh. (See Dramatic Events for details)

Together with a couple of the students, Nic Wincott and John Mendes, I put on a number of events – usually one a term, to bring the students together. These usually took the form of Ceilidhs and luckily Sue and the band were never too particular about how the dancing was going so that everyone could enjoy themselves. To start with the caller would attempt to teach the dances and talk people through them, but in the end it became a free for all.

There was always something going on. Peter Gabriel had his first solo concert at Hatfield as a try out for his stadium tour. I was invited to be there together with only 100 other people. The Poly music department had a full programme as well and we could introduce Alison and David to classical music through Peter and the Wolf and the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. At parties in the music centre David would sit at the drums and keep up a steady rhythm most of the evening.

Howard Burrell the music tutor (the Poly didn’t have professors) became a personal friend and would come round for dinner with his wife and split a bottle of malt with me after the meal.

ATV, one of the London stations at the time, wanted to film a series on clergy working outside the parishes, so they came to the Poly and filmed me for a day. I took them around and they filmed me with some students and the family at home in the flat. And then I went to the studios to do the voiceover which was really an interview except they edited out the questions. So I came to get my seven minutes of fame in a programme called “Saints Alive”. I thought I would never be able to afford a VHS recorder and so turned down the Poly offer to record it for me!

As chaplain I was on the diocesan education committee and wrote a report for them on multicultural education; twenty years before it became fashionable. Amongst other things I suggested that ethnic minorities should be represented on school governing bodies. My survey suggested that there weren’t any. I made the mistake of sending the Director of Education an advance copy; by the time of the meeting he could claim that I was wrong – there were five. I found out later that they had been appointed the previous week to pre-empt my report. Other themes which developed at the time were spiritual development and world development for schools. As part of the Diocesan Education Committee I argued against the elitism of church schools trying to get them to see church schools as beacons of academic excellence reaching out to the poorest in the community. Naturally most of the diocese wanted to keep them as hothouses for little Anglicans and were determined they should retain their “Church of England ethos”. Whatever that is.

The diocesan race relations group were asked to go to Luton to help the West Indian community make sense of the problems they faced with their young people. They had come over with very strong family ties and a firm sense of values, yet within a generation some of their children had adopted the worst of British youth culture. So a few of us went off to the First Church of Christ Calvary and met with the elders. But before we could begin our meeting we must pray. And prayer, of course, was extempore and long and included singing, dancing and praying in tongues – not the usual lifestyle of the average British Christian-Marxist. But we joined in as best we could. And that was followed by lunch. Over lunch I asked one of the congregation, How was it that if I went to a white Pentecostal church I would be singled out as a sinner and invited to confess my sins in front of the people; yet here we were received with so much hospitality. “I can see you got the spirit brother,” she replied. I’m not sure if we were any help with their problems, but it certainly opened me up to a new experience of faith and a love for gospel music.

And I began a series of overseas visits. Firstly to Sweden as part of a chaplain’s group.We spent a week in Uppsala meeting Swedish chaplains and looking at the Lutheran churches which were then in talks about partnerships with other European denominations. These produced the interesting result that as a Church of England priest I cannot take services in the Church of Scotland – which is Presbyterian. But I can take services in the German Lutheran churches and a German Lutheran can take services in the Scandinavian Lutheran churches and a Scandinavian Lutheran can take services in the Church of Scotland. So by working my way round Europe I can take services in the Church of Scotland.

I was anyway an ecumenical chaplain, appointed by eight denominations. I represented everyone from Russian Orthodox to Baptist. This had its interesting moments, especially when a Baptist from the Cameroons wanted to marry an Irish Roman Catholic. He had to prove he had been baptised and that he had never been married. Since the Cameroons had neither baptism certificates nor much formal marriage both were impossible. There were no registers to consult as there would be in the UK. Eventually the Irish Bishop accepted an affidavit sworn in front of the Poly legal team.

Then I became chair of the Mid-Herts Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. This was a loose confederation of groups opposed to the rise of neo-fascist groups in the UK which were then getting up to 27% of the votes in elections. A mixture of churches, trade unions and leftist political groups, my job as chair was to try to direct their thinking into positive action to counter the negative propaganda of the far right. So we held meetings and campaigned in the press and culminated in a fair where all the groups laid out their policies and a parallel set of seminars allowed discussion of the issues. This also had the advantage of bringing together a variety of leftist groups who were largely suspicious of each other. Later Margaret Thatcher simply adopted most of the far-right policies and support fro the smaller parties faded away.

As a result of the anti fascist work I was invited to visit the then East Germany as part of the first delegation of British church leaders to that country. We visited schools and clinics and the compulsory trip to a concentration camp, but also contacted church people and took services.

We stayed in Ehrfurt where Martin Luther had lived and one evening went to see the church. We couldn’t find the verger but found a way in and with only the lights of the street lamps to guide us, each found their own space and in silence for about half an hour we soaked up the atmosphere of 500 years of prayer.

One of the most meaningful communion services I ever took part in took place in what was then East Berlin. In a room in one of those anonymous hotels that the Eastern block pioneered but which are now universal. Devoid of character or decoration. We had no service books so Judy Robinson, a communist from Manchester, led us. As we were not in church and the service had no form, the Stasi minders stayed in the room. Prayers were said, we were reminded of the Lord's command, bread was broken, wine shared. No one noticed till the end that everyone had prayed, all had received. It was for them their first communion in a long time. A point of contact across barriers of ideology.Being part of a world wide faith seemed an important statement in a divided world and certainly more important than what denomination we were or what sex the celebrant was.

With the threat of a conservative government and the consequent mass unemployment which always follows, I developed some work with the counselling centre on approaches to unemployment for new graduates. Within three years of the election there were 4 million unemployed as the Tories stripped out the manufacturing base from Britain and sold off the land to their supporters. In opposition to the monetarist theories, where everything is subsumed to profit, which were being promoted, I organised a conference on alternative ways of working. About fifty staff and students came together with speakers from the common ownership movement and businesses that were worked on those lines.

At a meeting just before the 1979 election I said that if Margaret Thatcher was elected I would leave the country. In the end it took another three years to organise.

Also a part of my role as chair of MHCARAF I spent a lot of time writing to the local papers counteracting the usual racist and homophobic letter writers that the regional press is full of. As a result I used to get visits from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelical groups trying to convert me to conservative Christianity. But I also developed a relationship with the editors where they would notify me in advance of any scandalous letters coming in and I could write a rejoinder to appear in the same issue.

When Bob Dylan came on tour and was to appear at Blackbush Aerodrome I was included in a group going from the Poly which also included a reporter from the local paper. The event had 250000 people sitting in a field in front of the stage with Dylan, Clapton, Joan Armatrading and others on stage. As usual there was a lot of dope being smoked and I didn’t notice that all my photographs were being shot on the same frame until they were developed. It was also interesting that at the end as we took five hours to get out of the car park I didn’t lose my temper once. Usually I lose it if the lights fail to change within ten seconds of my getting to them. What I didn’t think about until I got home was that I had just spent a day smoking pot with a local reporter who could have filed a “priest in drug binge” story. But it didn’t appear and we continued friends.

But my main job was to meet the students and staff where they were.In the first year it seemed sensible to focus on the bar. So each lunchtime and some evenings I was there meeting the students. I began on my first night meeting the student union exec. The first one asked what I was drinking and I asked for a pint of draught Guinness. Then I looked up and there were seven pints of the stuff lined up in front of me. I passed the test. I became such a regular that I was later invited to join the bar staff on a visit to the Guinness brewery at Park Royal where we were treated to a five course lunch and as much Guinness as we could drink, after a fifteen minute tour of the brewery – it was all stainless steel vats so there was nothing to see. Luckily the group photo was taken at the start of the visit and not the end.

By the end of the year I was being described as an alcoholic.

The next year I decided to move away from the bar a bit and concentrated on student politics. I was returning officer for Student Union elections and it was a year of debate about free speech, even for overtly racist groups. So I made a few speeches at meetings suggesting that there were limits to what could be said. During the year Christian Aid asked me to help supply minibuses for the annual charity walk. To pick up stragglers and move marshals around. The only people I could find to help were the President of the Student Union and prominent Socialist Workers party member, and the Secretary to the Student Union who belonged to the Workers Revolutionary Party.

By the end of the year I was being called a Marxist.

The third year drugs seemed to become more of an issue than usual. On the religious TV programme I had appeared in, I had said that drugs were a normal part of student ; and the NYPD had visited the UK to look at how the Uk handled drug issues and came to the Poly and met me as partof their tour (sadly they never invited me to visit them). Towards the end of the year Sue had been doing the shopping and only when she got to the checkout discovered that she had no money. The person behind her offered to pay, saying that I could give him the money back that night in the Poly bar And so it was that I was seen in front of the whole bar giving £20 to the main drug dealer for the Polytechnic.

Naturally by the end of the year I was being called a drug user.

I had been ordained at around the same time as Richard Kirker who went on to found the Gay Christian Movement, and had studied with Jim Cotter who had written prayers and meditations on gay themes. At my first ever clergy conference, after Jack Dominion had spoken for an hour of marriage; about fidelity, partnership, mutuality and faithfulness; I raised the point that all that he had said was true, but he hadn’t mentioned whether one partner needed to me male and the other female. All he had said could apply to same sex couples. And he had to agree. Bishop Robert turned to me and winked. So when the gays at the Poly wanted to form a society, I was naturally supportive. For some strange reason the Poly Council decided that the Gay Society could hold discos – but only if the chaplain was present.

Of course by the end of the year I was said to be gay.

But interestingly the people doing the labeling all the way through my time there were the Christian Union. They had taken against me at the start when I refused to sign their narrow fundamentalist declaration of belief. I have consistently worked for a post-doctrinal non-dogmatic approach to church. Which was anathema to them. They had refused to help with the Christian Aid walk on the basis that the poor were not Christian and if they “gave their lives to Jesus” he would feed them. After I had supported the formation of the Gay Soc, they got a letter from the national UCCF to say that on no account was I to be allowed to speak to the Christian Union.

It was time to leave.

And to show how much they appreciated me, five people came to the leaving do and I was presented with a cheque for £17. Robert Runcie said it showed I had done my job. I wasn’t paid to be popular, if they stopped complaining about me he would know I had stopped working.

Released into the community

When I was due to leave the Poly, the diocese couldn’t work out what to do with me. There had been talk of a new chaplaincy set up in Bedford among the various FE colleges. But they could never agree how to share the job out or how to pay for it and negotiations dragged dangerously close to the end of my poly contract.

I had looked at other chaplaincy jobs, but the only one Humphrey Taylor (then secretary for C of E chaplain’s work) could offer was the University of Zimbabwe in Harare .

So I said to Robert Runcie I would be prepared to go back into a parish, as long as it wasn’t an old building with roof problems and so he sent me to a new building with roof problems. And a problem with the congregation.

They had had a vicar who kept telling them they should be shut down. An old traditionalist who did little outside the services. But a new team ministry was being set up joining Bennett’s End with Leverstock Green and Apsley. Bennett’s End the infill council estate between two villages.

Having got the old vicar out of their hair and with support from the neighbouring churches I set about building back the congregations confidence.

At Hatfield I had got to know the music tutor – Howard Burrell – very well, we used to split a bottle of malt between us on occasion. So I asked him to come over with the polytechnic choir and orchestra. And we performed Mozart’s Coronation Mass liturgically with a string quartet from the orchestra playing Borodin quartets as we shared communion.

Read more »