The Very Revd Trevor Beeson would have made a great Archbishop of Canterbury

Over the past few weeks, I have read the Telegraph‘s obituary of the Very Reverend Trevor Beeson, a former Dean of Winchester, several times.

It occurs to me that he would have made a fine Archbishop of Canterbury. Sadly, his name was never in the frame.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Early years

Trevor Beeson was born on March 2, 1926:

The son of a grocer, Trevor Randall Beeson was born on St Chad’s Day, March 2 1926, and educated locally at Gedling, Nottinghamshire. There, in 1950, he married Josephine Cope, the daughter of the local butcher. Thus, as Beeson often remarked, the family was assured of meat and two veg for Sunday lunch.

Beeson grew up in the days where one could leave school and still have good career prospects:

He left school aged 14 and went to work as a clerk in a Nottingham firm of accountants.

The Second World War was just beginning at that time, and Beeson began tracking Royal Air Force (RAF) activities:

… he started keeping a diary recording the aircraft losses on both sides during the Battle of Britain, and he applied to the Air Ministry to join the RAF as soon as he was old enough.

At the age of 18, he was called up to the RAF:

… a wartime shortage of bank staff saw him move, at the age of 16, to employment as a counter clerk with the Westminster Bank. He was eventually called up to the RAF in 1944, serving as ground crew at Bomber Command airfields in Lincolnshire. When the war ended, he was posted to the RAF meteorological office, flying out of Gibraltar as a weather observer in converted Halifax Bombers. He was fortunate to survive the occasion his plane ditched in the Mediterranean.

While he was in the RAF, he felt the call to ministry:

During his time in the RAF, Beeson made his first visit to Westminster Abbey, which impressed him by the splendour of its evensong and the grime of its interior. He resolved to take Holy Orders and, on demobilisation, he went immediately to train for the priesthood at King’s College, London, and St Boniface, Warminster.

Newly married in 1950 and newly ordained in 1951, Beeson took up his first two assignments in the northeast of England, where he upset some of the residents:

… he spent three years as a curate at Leadgate, Co Durham, then was given a new parish on a seedy Stockton-on-Tees housing estate. There, with characteristic energy and good intentions, he demonstrated his go-ahead qualities by inviting parishioners to a bottle party. This attracted 200 bottles (to be sold for parish funds) and a protest from the pulpit by the president of the local Free Church Council. Beeson later upset his parishioners by offering to attend a Roman Catholic Mass.

Journalism career

The postwar years were a time of new trends in the Anglican Church. One of these was the Parish and People movement.

Beeson was involved in that and began editing one of its magazines. From there, more journalism assignments followed, including television. Beeson continued his ministry throughout with greater church postings during the decades that followed:

His skill in editing a magazine for the “Parish and People” movement led to him being invited by the future Reverend Lord Beaumont of Whitley to edit The New Christian, a fortnightly emulating the style of the political weeklies. To enable him to pursue his writing more easily Beeson was made a curate at St Martin-in-the-Fields and in 1971 Vicar of Ware, Hertfordshire, as a friend of Robert Runcie, the Bishop of St Albans.

He became a columnist for The Guardian and the Chicago-based Christian Century. His growing reputation as a journalist and writer led to the British Council of Churches commissioning him to write a book reporting and reflecting on material gathered by a team of experts about religious conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe. The resulting volume, Discretion and Valour, was published in 1974.

After his move to Westminster Abbey, Beeson undertook a similar task in partnership with Jenny Pearce at the Latin America Bureau in London. Dipping a sizeable big toe into the controversial waters of liberation theology, the book, A Vision of Hope (1984), describes the dangerous life and witness of Latin-American Christians who, in the face of oppressive regimes, took sides with the poor and gave a voice to the cry for justice and basic human rights.

Further output during his time in Westminster included the book Britain Today and Tomorrow (1978) and a television series, The Controversialists. He was also chairman of SCM Press for nine years.

Amazing.

Canon of Westminster Abbey

As a Canon of Westminster Abbey, he continued writing but had a full schedule with the various responsibilities at one of the world’s most famous houses of worship:

… he particularly relished the beauty of the liturgy and, as Treasurer, had his first taste of the desperate search for revenue experienced by all great churches in the late 20th century.

With a staff of 170, he had to accommodate not only worshippers but those who saw the Abbey as a national monument and foreign tourists who regarded it as a wondrous and incomprehensible spectacle.

Although Robert Runcie was one of his friends, he gave him a lukewarm endorsement as Archbishop of Canterbury:

Despite the ever-expanding workload there were times when he seemed a little too able to criticise colleagues, as when he rang up the BBC advising them to run an interview recorded some days earlier in which he said that Runcie, just named as Archbishop of Canterbury, was “the best of a mediocre bunch”.

He got that right.

Beeson also wrote a controversial book about his time at the Abbey, based on the diaries he kept:

In the excerpts from his diaries, published in Window on Westminster (1998), he wittily and deftly recorded not only the quarrels between his colleagues and a long-running boundary dispute with Westminster School but the quirkiness of everyday life at the Abbey. The first edition was hastily withdrawn and amended after a character featured in it, although unnamed, sued for libel. The case was settled out of court.

The obituary has more eye-opening vignettes from the book, but this one is just as relevant today as it would have been when it happened:

Beeson also described his capture of a man stealing his television. Marching the thief to a colleague’s house, he then went to the local police station, where he pointed out that he had been burgled three times in 10 months and had caught the miscreants twice – a better clear-up rate than the Metropolitan Police could boast.

Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons

In 1982, Beeson’s next assignment was that of Rector at St Margaret’s, the church next to the Abbey.

St Margaret’s hosts weekly church services for MPs and is considered the main house of worship for the House of Commons when it is in session.

In that post, Beeson became Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. This was during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the Speaker at the time was Labour MP George Thomas. It is customary for the Speaker to be from the opposite party to the one in government at the time.

The Speaker’s Chaplain offers daily prayers in the Commons before each day’s session. These brief prayers are never televised or broadcast elsewhere.

During his time as Chaplain, Beeson was able to:

observe Margaret Thatcher at her shrillest in the chamber and at her most motherly and compassionate outside; to run a course on Liberation Theology for the Parliamentary Christian Wives Group; and to address the question of whether Jesus would vote Tory or Labour in the St Margaret’s Newsletter. He concluded that the parliamentary community was in many ways more charitable than some of his brethren in the Abbey.

When Mrs Thatcher nominated him for the Deanery of Winchester, she remarked that he would be free again from the restrictions imposed on his writing as Speaker’s Chaplain. In fact, there was so much work to be done at the Cathedral that he did not write another book until he retired 10 years later.

Dean of Winchester Cathedral — and Telegraph obituaries

We do not know too much about Beeson’s time as Dean of Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, a post he took up in 1987.

What has appeared to be of greater interest is his time as an obituarist for The Telegraph under the leadership of the extraordinary journalist and bon viveur Hugh Massingberd. Massingberd transformed the style and content of The Telegraph‘s obituaries from the 1980s through to the present day. His 2007 obituary in The New York Times provides an example:

One Daily Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”

Even then, Beeson was committed to his work at the cathedral. That said, his obituaries garnered an appreciative audience:

Beeson was a highly valued, amusing, judicious and punctual contributor, always prepared to rally round, though many a phone call had to end when it was time for Evensong. He often had to do his writing late into the night and, on one occasion, he came off a cricket pitch to produce a hasty piece on a bishop of Bermuda.

A Beeson obit was never sensationalised, but readers were left in no doubt that his subjects had a full set of strengths and weaknesses, which would occasionally be emphasised with a waspish turn of phrase. Bland phrases, such as “pastoral gifts” and “keen and determined intellect”, would hint whether a subject was short on theological interests or too intelligent to get on with colleagues.

Making attendance at daily worship his highest priority, he resolved to walk around the Cathedral in his cassock every day … Apart from the routine complications connected with general administration and the occasional distractions of a snuffling journalist or hedonistic television crew, there were decisions to be taken on floodlighting the Cathedral and the running of the bookshop.

To his credit, Beeson was not a man of the world, as was proven by what happened to him when professional fundraisers helped him at Winchester by sending him to a film premiere in London. The action-packed blockbuster films of the 1980s bewildered him:

When a serious financial problem was unexpectedly revealed, Beeson immediately recognised the need to employ professional fundraisers. Nevertheless he was distinctly uneasy about where the search for £7 million would lead. He found himself in a dinner jacket at a London film premiere introducing guests, whom he had never seen before, to the Duke and Duchess of York. The chosen film, Slipstream, was a space age adventure featuring a series of crashes which each time made the Duchess, sitting on his left, leap into the air.

“What the story was about I could not even begin to fathom,” Beeson recorded in his memoir, A Dean’s Diary (1997). “There seemed no thread of continuity; only a sequence of unrelated, albeit dramatic events. In desperation, I ventured to ask my right-hand neighbour, a small man, if he made anything of it. He assured me he did, which was perhaps not surprising for I learned later that he was Mark Hamill, the film’s leading actor. Since I had not been to the cinema for about a quarter of a century I came to the conclusion that film, as an art form, had advanced well beyond my comprehension.”

Beeson’s time at Winchester was not without controversy:

While taking a keen interest in beautifying his Cathedral there were rumbles of disapproval, which became serious on occasion. A proposal to commission new vestments and altar cloths from the Japanese Buddhist clothes designer Issey Miyake raised the spectre of costs of a colossal £2 million. The headline in a magazine, “The Cathedral of the Rising Sun”, soon stirred survivors of the Burma campaign to demonstrate that, although dismissed as “The Forgotten Army”, they had not forgotten the war.

A more serious problem exploded when Beeson agreed to a young people’s service with rock bands in the Cathedral, which was denounced in the Daily Mail as “a rave in the nave”. The Dean’s remark – “The main thing is that the young people have a good time” – drove the journalist Paul Johnson [a devout, traditional Catholic] to apocalyptic prose that was not to be assuaged by Beeson’s belief that the event was “no more than an updated version of the old diocesan youth rally”.

The reaction to the ‘rave in the nave’ caused Beeson’s health to suffer:

As hundreds of enraged letters poured in to the deanery, Hugh Massingberd, the obituaries editor of the Telegraph, eventually had to send Johnson the message that his articles were affecting Beeson’s work for the paper. The Dean was taking a break from work on his doctor’s advice when the event finally took place.

In the end, the event was a damp squib:

The Mail’s headline was “No sex, no drugs, just rock’n’roll”, and the Telegraph reported one angry participant as saying: “It wasn’t anything like a rave. It was just full of born-again Christians. We’d have had more fun at McDonald’s.”

Beeson also supported the ordination of women, which also did not go down well in certain quarters:

Beeson approvingly witnessed the introduction of women priests despite his bishop’s disapproval and the resignation of the Vice-Dean …

Later years

Beeson retired from Winchester after nine years as the Cathedral’s dean. He and his wife moved to nearby Romsey:

in 1996 as his wife’s health seriously declined. But as well as maintaining a wide circle of friends, whom he visited regularly, he remained active in ministry, taking Sunday services in local churches past his 90th birthday.

He continued writing obituaries:

and in 2002 published Priests and Prelates: The Daily Telegraph Clerical Obituaries, which contained an ecumenical sprinkling of Methodists and Catholics as well as Anglicans. His skill as a writer of biographical sketches was also displayed in a series of popular volumes on Anglican bishops, deans and canons …

Trevor Beeson was appointed OBE in 1997, just before the death of his wife, Josephine. He was also awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Southampton.

Conclusion

This is why I think he should have been an Archbishop of Canterbury:

Beeson reckoned that he had been fortunate to minister during some of the best years for the Church of England. In retirement he was not afraid to comment on what he saw as the increasingly bland and lacklustre leadership of the Church of England. When churches were ordered to close during the early months of Covid, Beeson said in a letter to The Times: “I find it deeply disturbing that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, yielding to government pressure, have suspended until further notice the offering of public worship in the Church of England. This is unprecedented and was not considered necessary even in the darkest days of our national history.”

He also contributed to a debate in the media as to whether it was necessary to re-order ancient churches in order to accommodate demands for a built-in toilet. Beeson proffered a simple solution to alleviate the need: “Shorter sermons.”

My commiserations go to his and Josephine’s two daughters Jean and Catherine. May the Triune God grant them grace, peace and comfort in the months ahead.