Abstract
A study conducted by David Morgan in 1963 revealed that while a public school education was common in the junior ministry of the prewar Church of England, it was practically a requirement for ordination as a bishop. Of the 50 bishops consecrated between 1900 and 1919, 35 attended public schools and five were privately educated. Forty-one of these future church leaders went on to take degrees at either Oxford or Cambridge and, until the end of the 1950s, the proportion of Anglican diocesan bishops who graduated from an Oxbridge college never fell below 90 per cent. Morgan’s study also highlights a significant link between Church of England bishops and the secular social elites. Of 31 bishops surveyed for the year 1900, no fewer than 29 were related, either by birth or by marriage, to the landed gentry or peerage.1 Some of the most senior figures in the Church were also closely associated with the political and military figures that conducted the war. The Bishop of Winchester was the brother-in-law of General Sir Neville Lyttleton. Archbishop Davidson, an old Harrovian and graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, prided himself on being personally acquainted with all seven prime ministers who served during his primacy and was particularly close to Herbert Asquith. The viscount and Liberal Peer, Lord Bryce, was a close friend of Davidson and of the Talbots.
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Notes
Morgan’s original study was not published but its findings were summarised in Leslie Paul (1964) Deployment and Payment of Clergy (London: Church Information Office), p. 283.
See also David Morgan (1969) ‘The Social and Educational Background of Anglican Bishops — Continuities and Changes’, British Journal of Sociology, 20(3), p. 298.
F. W. B. Bullock (1976) A History of Training for the Ministry, 1875–1974 (London: Home Words), p. 21.
T. Elliot (1976) ‘Review of the Period 1875–1974’, in F. W. B. Bullock, A History, p. xvii.
Robert Lee (2006) ‘Class, Industrialization and the Church of England’, p. 169.
A. Tindal Hart (1970) The Curate’s Lot — the Story of the Unbeneficed Clergy (London: John Baker), p. 172. See also A Marrin, The Last Crusade, p. 68.
Stewart Mews (2004) ‘Clergymen, Gentlemen and Men: World War I and the Requirements, Recruitment and Training of the Anglican Ministry’, Pastor Bonus, 83, p. 442.
Adrian Hastings (1986) A History of English Christianity (London: Collins), p. 68.
F. R. Barry (1964) Mervyn Haigh (London: SPCK), pp. 57–8.
William Purcell (1971) ‘Birth of A Rebel’, in Kenneth Brill (ed.), John Groser (London: Mowbray), p. 4.
J. R. de S. Honey (1977) Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School (London: Millington), p. 264.
Paul Deslandes (2005) Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 40.
F. W. Dillistone (1975) Charles Raven (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 59. The ‘sheltered’ nature of the undergraduate experience was reinforced by the fact that women played virtually no role in student life. Cambridge from 1881 and Oxford from 1884 permitted female students to avail of much of the same teaching and to sit some of the examinations provided for male students. Yet female undergraduates resided and received much of their instruction in separate women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham in Cambridge and Somerville and three other colleges in Oxford. When female students did attend lectures in other colleges they were expected, during this period, to be accompanied by a chaperone. Women were not placed on an equal footing with men in Oxford until 1920 and in Cambridge not until 1947. In this respect Trinity College, Dublin, was ahead of its English counterparts, allowing female students to take degrees from 1904 on.
See J. V. Luce (1992) Trinity College Dublin, The First 400 years (Dublin: TCD Press), p. 117.
J. A. R. Pimlott (1935) Toynbee Hall, Fifty Years of Social Progress 1884–1934 (London: Dent), p. 11.
John Oliver (1968) The Church and Social Order (London: Mowbray), p. 21.
Hugh McLeod (2000) ‘Anticlericalism in Later Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe (eds), Anticlericalism: 1500–1914 (Sutton: Stroud), p. 207.
Pat Thane (1996) Foundations of the Welfare State (London: Longman), p. 23.
Tresham Lever (1971) Clayton of Toc. H. (London: J. Murray), p. 20.
For an account of the development of the Oxford Movement and an examination of the output of some of its key figures, see Rune Imberg (1987) In Quest of Authority: The ‘Tracts for the Times’ and the development of the Tractarian leaders, 1833–1841, (Bromley: Chartwell-Bratt).
Balliol College, for example, enjoyed a reputation for producing brilliant intellectuals. In the years before 1914, however, it was also known as a college where ‘drunkenness and rowdiness were prevalent’. F. H. Brabant (1949) Neville Stewart Talbot (London: SCM), p. 47.
For an account of the influence that some these theologians exerted on Trinity College and the wider University, see Christopher N. L. Brooke (ed.) (2004) A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. IV (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 134–41.
Accounts of the rise and influence of the Christian Socialist Movement in the modern Church, and varied analyses of the movement’s appeal, can be found in E. R. Norman(1976) Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 221–78; John Oliver, The Church and the Social Order, pp. 1–22;
and Stephen Mayor (1967) The Churches and the Labour Movement (London: Independent Press), pp. 165–241. For an absorbing narrative history of Christian Socialism from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s,
see Alan Wilkinson (1998) Christian Socialism: Scott Holland to Tony Blair (London: SCM).
W. Eager (1953) Making Men, the History of Boys Clubs and Related Institutions in Great Britain (London: University of London Press), p. 382. Eager was a resident of the Oxford and Bermondsey Club before the Great War and became Warden of the Club in the inter-war period.
Charles Gore (1913) Property: Its Duties and Rights, Historically, Philosophically and Religiously Regarded (London: Macmillan), p. vii.
W. Cunningham (1910) Christianity and Social Questions (London: Duckworth), p. x.
W. Temple (1918) The Chronicle of Convocation (London) p. 350.
F. A. Iremonger (1948) William Temple (Oxford: OUP), p. 87.
H. H. Henson (1942) Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (London: OUP), p. 155.
H. Maynard Smith (1926) Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar (London: SPCK), p. 10.
Stephen Sykes (2003) ‘The Basis of Anglican Fellowship’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 1, 2, p. 10.
F. B. Macnutt (ed.) (1917) The Church in The Furnace, Essays by Seventeen Temporary Church of England Chaplains on Active Service in France and Flanders (London: Macmillan), pp. 175–212.
P. Pare and D. Harris (1965) Eric Milner-White 1884–1963, A Memoir (London: SPCK), p. 12.
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© 2011 Edward Madigan
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Madigan, E. (2011). A Portrait of the Edwardian Clergy. In: Faith under Fire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_3
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