Round the Church in 50 Years: A personal journey
Trevor Beeson
SCM Press £19.99
(978-0-334-04148-1)
Church Times Bookshop £18
TREVOR BEESON is a priest of radical views who, as a canon of Westminster Abbey, and later as Dean of Winchester, became very much an Establishment figure — though without abandoning his radicalism. For most of his active ministry he was heavily involved in journalism and broadcasting (he edited New Christian throughout its brief life), and so was able to exert con-siderable influence in the Church at large.
In two earlier books he described in fascinating detail his ministry at the Abbey and at Winchester. His latest volume is wider-ranging in both time and space. It covers the second half of the 20th century, and the Church of England as a whole.
Beeson’s “personal journey” is a mixture of biographical snippets of information about his own career; summaries of major (and minor) church events during the past 50 years; and vignettes of notable clerics who hit the headlines during this period, which corresponds with the period of his own active minis-try. There are 299 such snippets in all, each occupying about a page.
The period itself is divided into its five decades: the Confident Fifties, the Rebellious Sixties, the Reactionary Seventies, the Con-frontational Eighties, and the Dispiriting Nineties.
Beeson is a born journalist, and his histories-in-miniature and potted biographies are a delight to read. He is objective and fair-minded throughout, only very occasionally adding an editorial aside when he feels it is called for. Thus the 1975 “Call to the Nation” by Archbishops Coggan and Blanch is dismissed as a “futile exercise”, and George Carey’s primacy as “less than inspiring”.
As a priest associated with both Parish and People and Christian Action, Beeson includes plenty of radicals among his chief characters: people of the calibre of Mervyn Stockwod, Monica Furlong, John Collins, and Eric James. But many others more traditionally inclined also receive favourable mention: Cuthbert Bardsley, for instance, and W. V. (Thomas the Tank Engine) Awdry. There is even a selection of quotes from Bishop Douglas Feaver (“said to be the rudest man in the Church of England” and briefly a Church Times leader-writer) — such as, of the ASB: “Taste it and spit it out.”
The historical snippets range from developments concerning women priests, visits by Archbishops of Canterbury to Rome, and the 1987 Crockford affair, to pets’ services, thefts from church bookstalls, and the abandonment under Michael Ramsey of episcopal aprons and gaiters. To anyone who wants an entertaining bird’s-eye view of the Church of England from 1950 to 2000, Round the Church in 50 Years could hardly be bettered.
I could spot only one notable omission. Although the Church Times is mentioned seven times (I think: the book, surprisingly, lacks an index), each reference is to a report in the paper about some notable event or utterance; there is no discussion of the church press as such (apart from New Christian and its predecessor, Prism). This is sur-prising, because at one time Beeson had a fairly low opinion of it. In An Eye for an Ear (1972), he wrote: “No one who has not been required to devote every Friday morning to reading the weekly church papers can begin to understand how appalling they are.”
Maybe he is simply too polite to repeat his criticisms 35 years later — or maybe he is beginning to change his mind.
Dr Bernard Palmer is a former editor of the Church Times.
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