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 They had interviewed and appointed but the candidate had withdrawn.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.