Newcastle

Newcastle

We moved to Newcastle in April 1978. I was appointed as Diocesan Social Responsibility Officer and Adviser to the Bishop and Priest in Charge of St Andrew’s, the oldest of Newcastle’s City churches.

In time I became established in the role once famously characterised in Synod as The Board for Socialist Irresponsibility, praise indeed!

We lived in a wonderful Georgian terraced house in a suburb of Newcastle, Gosforth. In fact the house had been the key to my applying for the job. Our Vicarage in Manchester had literally fallen down. Differential settlement in the long, hot summer of 1976 had effectively snapped the concrete raft on which the house stood and a foundation to roof height crack had appeared, at its widest you could look through and see the interior of the house.

When I saw the job advertised my spirits were low. Janet had been unwell, later we recognised this as the classic early symptoms of the MS. The house was literally falling down round our ears. We were trying to raise three lively daughters in a building site for months whilst the diocese failed to deal with the problem. I had threatened to resign and more or less been told that I had no choice but to stay and put up with the situation.

The advert rang some bells. I had become a member of the Board for Social Responsibility in Manchester and was interested in this kind of work. So I suggested to Janet that we had a day out in Newcastle. We called in to St Andrew’s which had an ancient mysterious feel to it, situated as it is on Gallowgate in the City centre within cheering sound of St James’s Park and its famed Gallowgate End.

Then following the clues and after checking in the phone book we drove out to Gosforth and found the Vicarage. We approached the house via an alley way off the main A1. It was the peace and quiet of the garden, its proximity to The Northumberland Cricket Club ground and the Tennis Courts and the solidity of a Georgian terrace that clearly was unlikely to fall down unless it was pushed, that made us both smile. On my return to Manchester I wrote my application in long hand to the rhythm of a pneumatic drill cutting through the concrete raft outside my study where the entrance hall and downstairs toilet had once stood.

As a family we loved Newcastle and as we began to explore further afield, Northumberland and the North East Coast. My eldest daughter once expressed her feelings when she described it as a county of castles and beaches.

The job involved advising the Bishop and Diocesan Synod and where practicable the parishes, on matters of social concern, of public policy and to identify matters to which the Church should respond and to enable that response.

Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979 and it was the devastating impact of her Governments policies on the economy of the North East which dominated the nine years that I spent in Newcastle.

Towards the end of my time in the Diocese I was asked to prepare a document from the Diocese to be submitted to the Archbishop’s Commission. I wrote the document by inviting comments from all the parishes and then taking away a raft of material to Shallowford House Nr Stone in Staffordshire where I had my selection conference for Ordination training.

I met an old friend from Stoke, Syd Clewlow and his wife Rose in the local pub, had a few pints and talked over the old days then went back to Shallowford House and sat up all night writing.

The Document was accepted by The Bishop’s Council and submitted to the Commission. Later when the Commission visited the North East Bishop David Shepherd complimented the document I had prepared and commented, ‘hard writing makes easy reading’, he also said that it was one of the better submissions received by the Commission.

I later learned that the Bishop had written separately to the Commission disassociating himself from the document on theological grounds!

The main thesis of the document was summed up at a meeting of the Commission in the Civic Centre in Newcastle, symbol of T Dan Smith’s the ‘Brazillia of the North’ as a direct consequence of the Government’s economic policy, it was stated by a senior member of the Local Authority staff, the North East suffered from three problems, ‘Poverty, Poverty, Poverty’.

Whilst in Newcastle I had been attending various meetings of a network of Social Responsibility Officers. One such meeting in London had been addressed by Professor Peter Townsend, who spoke to his recently published book on Poverty in the United Kingdom.

A number of us were scandalised by the irrefutable findings so clearly documented in Professor Townsend’s book and so late into the evening as we discussed how we should and could respond to the challenges that the book presented the idea of a National Church Campaign was born. Church Action on Poverty was the direct result of that conference and I became a leading member of the campaign along with other key individuals including the Revd. Professor John Atherton, The Revd. John Austin, The Revd.Tony Addy and after funding was made available, the campaign was strengthened enormously by the appointment of John Battle who later became MP for Leeds North.

I stayed in Newcastle for nine years, the longest time that I remained in any single job, although Newcastle was never a single job.

There was a parish, St Andrew’s in Newgate Street was the oldest church in the city. It was the home of the City Centre Chaplain, a semi-independent Chaplaincy that reported to the Council of Churches group. There was a gathered congregation drawn from a wide area including across the River in Gateshead.

I tried to make St Andrew’s a laboratory for Social Responsibility in the City centre and a lot of interesting work was undertaken from drop in sessions for people with emotional problems to a telephone support service for people with HIV and Aids.

The most challenging project which divided the congregation and caused a flurry of resignations was the opening of a Youth Group for Gay Teenagers.

HIV and Aids impacted on the North East in the years after 1985. I had by then enjoyed a sabbatical in the USA with my family.

I had been appointed a Proctor fellow at The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was here that I re-discovered a vocation as a poet writing my first poem after seeing a bus driven through Harvard Square by a driver who was a doppelganger for George C Scott in The New Centurions.

It was also in the intensive atmosphere of Cambridge that I discovered the power of the Churches movement towards the Ordination of Women. Three women in particular impressed and challenged me, Carter Haywood, Sue Hiatt and Katy Cannon. The college was a mixed community of women and men in training, with an emphasis within the college on gender difference, as a family we were in a minority as a heterosexual couple in a stable and monogamous relationship.

The atmosphere was challenging and stimulating and I managed to generate extra income by serving in an interim ministry at Christ Church, Somerville, this included Sunday services and taking the Eucharist to members of the congregation no longer able to attend through infirmity, (known in the States as shut-ins).

I was also invited to be an assistant Eucharistic minister at Trinity Church in Boston. They paid $50, there were usually four teams of two, taking the elements around a circular sanctuary rail with up to a thousand communicants.

At Easter in 1985 the two services attracted around a thousand worshippers at each service and during the service I noticed a Brinks Security van arrive to take the collection directly to the bank which had opened especially for the purpose of receiving it. There was just too much money to leave in the Vestry whilst the second service was happening.

I have had three significant periods in my life, theological college liberated the young, working class boy, Newcastle helped me discover the truth of my vocation but Cambridge, Massachusetts was where I began to sense that wonder which makes life truly transformative.

The experience came at a particularly significant time or me. In 1980 two major events occurred which affected me deeply. In July 1980 my son William was born and in the November of the same year my Mother died.

I recall visiting her at what turned out to be the final time I saw her alive. She in bed and I sat on the bed next to her. My son was wrapped in a blanket, lying on the bed asleep. Janet and the girls were downstairs occupying themselves and my Mother shared with me in a small voice weakened by her illness, by then the Cancer had spread into her lungs and vital organs, memories of her early life and her parents.

She knew that she was dying. But like so many important matters throughout her life she preferred not to face that fact head on. So she reminisced. She spoke about her Mother, Henrietta who was known as Flo, and the mystery surrounding her early years. Her birth records could not be traced and it seemed that she had been adopted by a farming family in Yorkshire and raised partly as family and partly as an extra pair of hands on the farm and around the house. She spoke about her father Frank Oswald Wilde and how I reminded her so much of him. She spoke about his kindness and generosity, of his temper, and of how he had found her marriage to my Father difficult both because, as the eldest of three girls she was the first to marry, but also because my Father was a Roman Catholic and he was anxious about what would happen in a mixed marriage.

Eventually William stirred and she tired and the conversation came to an end with photographs scattered across the counterpane of the bed. As I carried William downstairs I knew that it was the last time that I would see her and I wanted to go back and embrace her, but I also knew that I couldn’t and she wouldn’t want me to, so I left.

She died two weeks later as I was in the car heading towards Manchester for a visit which had been arranged under the pretext of a meeting. I left the Hospital Mortuary and walked back to my car. I was thirty five years of age, married with four children of my own, but I felt simply orphaned, the moral centre of my life had gone, I was like a boat that had slipped its mooring, adrift and aimless.

My children and especially my wife Janet came to my rescue and as a family we were able to grow together more closely. It was during the days immediate following my Mothers’ death that I saw more of my Father and we grew closer than we had ever been, before or since.

It is one of the legacies of the Second World War that men were away from home and family for extended and in today’s context almost impossible lengths of time. Janet’s Father had been in India with the RAF and when he returned his wife and eldest child were almost a separate family from the two children born after the war had ended and he had returned to his wife.

My Mother and father had married during the War and my Father, who was in a reserved occupation as a skilled engineer with AVRO in Manchester had volunteered for the RAF.

His first posting was to Gourock on the Clyde and here he had arranged for my Mother to join him. She had a job inspecting Aircraft engines which were being imported from America, disassembled, inspected, mu Mothers’ job and re-assembled, my Father’s job before being fitted into British Fighter planes.

Some time in early 1945 my Father was posted to Melton Mowbray and my Mother, by then pregnant with me, returned home to Manchester where I was born on the 29th April. That day Dachau was liberated and the war was almost at an end. For years my Mother insisted that I was born on Victory in Europe day although given the length of time that Mothers and newly born Children remained in Hospital in those days, she was quite probably still in hospital on May 8th which was officially the day when Victory in Europe was declared.

After our return from America the family settled back into school but I couldn’t settle as readily into my old routines. I had been quite changed by the experience and felt that it was not possible to return. I am the kind of person who hates retracing his steps whether it is a country walk or a trip to the coast, I prefer to return a different way. My boredom threshold is quite low.

So I began to think about what might come next. Colleagues with whom I had worked closely were beginning to feel that it was time to seek a move themselves and so the possibility of change was in the air.

I began by looking back at our American experience and candidated, to use an American term, for three jobs, Rector of Christ Church, Cambridge, impossibly ambitious but sometimes aiming for the heights is the right thing to do. I was shortlisted into the last sixteen, itself something of an achievement, but despite friends being convinced that my accent would have got me the job of I had been interviewed, I was not invited.

Then came an Assistant Priest’s position in Baltimore, on this occasion I was invited, but at my own expense and for a preliminary interview. I felt that the risks associated with this were too great and so I withdrew my name from consideration.

My final application was for the position of Urban Ministries Co-ordinator for the Diocese of New Jersey. I made excellent progress in pursuing this application, I made the final shortlist of three and believed that I was to be invited for interview. Then I took a telephone call from the Chairman of the Search Committee apologising and reassuring me that they wanted to offer me an interview.

Apparently of the three one was Californian, one was from Massachusetts and there was me from England. The Bishop ruled out the Californian and decided to interview the candidate from Massachusetts and offered him the job.

I decided that I couldn’t keep coming second and so turned my attention to Jobs in the UK.

Meanwhile the work continued to press in on me with its demand. Unemployment continued to be a major issue on Tyneside and the Board ran a couple of advice centres set on Estates outside the City Centre. Our community work scheme funded by the manpower Services Commission continued until the Commission itself was wound up. There were reports to be written and various issues to be highlighted and debated in Synod. A pioneering partnership was negotiated with the Children’s Society. But AIDS and HIV were a dominant theme during this period of time.

I had been approached by the wife of a friend of mine whose Brother had died of an AIDS related illness in London. His memorial in Carlisle had been a difficult affair because the central focus of his life, as a Gay man had been denied.

I was challenged to address the ignorance and fear and to ensure that such a thing might not happen in Newcastle. Out of this initiative a number of important things happened with support from Brian Roycroft the then Director of Social Services in Newcastle.

Links were built with the Hospital and the work being undertaken with Haemophilia sufferers infected with contaminated blood. AIDS North, a telephone counselling service was started, with support from the PCC of St Andrews Church. But perhaps the most interesting initiative was a training session which I offered personally to each deanery in the Diocese via the Rural Deans.

There was a 100% take up of the offer which in itself was an indication of the fear which AIDS and HIV had engendered amongst people generally. The training consisted of me inviting before hand one of the Clergy to be involved in a role play.

The brief that I gave them was that there had been a request from the husband of a parishioner to talk about a personal matter.

They had no other indication of subject or of what was being asked of them in terms of advice or practical help.

I developed three scenarios. On one occasion I visited one of the three City deaneries and in the counselling session I introduced a character who was the bi-sexual partner of the PCC Secretary who had become infected during un-protected sex with someone he had met at a Gay Club in Leeds.

The session went well and I thought that I had got the point over really well and the ‘volunteer’ cleric, a smart, bright, young female deacon had excelled.

It was only after the session was over and we were leaving the meeting that one of the Clergy came up to me and asked after Janet and then enquired whether Janet knew what had happened.

The dangers of role-play!

When the time came to leave Newcastle for a new home and job in Birmingham my actions were subject to the fullest of feminist scrutiny. Maybe as a result of their American experience, maybe because they were becoming more aware of the issues involved, the three girls challenged me over the decision to move away from all that they held dear and to embark on yet another new adventure.

As we followed the furniture van down the M6 my eldest girl wept over the City she was leaving behind, the friends and a significant part of her life up until that point. Ironically the real victim of that move turned out to be our youngest William whose transition to his new school was disastrous. Our middle daughter took matters into her own hands when she returned to Newcastle two years later, to University.

Of course the real reason for our moving was the Church. Initially I had hoped to stay at St Andrew’s and to develop a new role in the City centre, perhaps combining the City chaplaincy with the role of Vicar. But the Bishop argued, first that he needed the stipend to pay for the Social Responsibility Adviser, second that I would be a threat to any possible successor and third that there were no jobs he could offer me. I was invited to consider the possibility of discussing my future with the Archbishop’s Appointments Adviser, Canon Ian Hardaker.

The pastoral consequences of our move to a new City, the girls and William to new schools, Janet’s MS which was becoming more obvious with time, the fact that we had to buy our own house with a 100% Mortgage at 11% interest, that we left Newcastle with considerable accumulated debts. None of that was given any consideration by the Bishop or any one else, although on a personal level but unofficially, the Archdeacon dropped by on a Sunday morning and asked how we were managing. How different from our arrival nine years before when nothing was too much trouble and the previous bishop’s wife arrived with Fish and Chips.

Despite this, however, I believed that I was being called forward and that if we moved forward in faith our faith would be rewarded, God would not fail us or desert us. It was a tenet of my earliest conviction that I had a vocation that I would always seek to discern God’s call and act faithfully.