‘HHH’
as he was often known was born in 1863. A Londoner, his childhood was unhappy,
and left him with a lifelong sense of being an outsider. He went to Oxford as
an unattached undergraduate: his father who was badly in debt could not afford
to support him at one of the colleges. This strongly reinforced the awareness
that he did not belong to the mainstream of the talented and intelligent, for
all his intellectual ability. He took a first in modern history and was soon
elected a fellow of All Souls. Having discerned early on a vocation to
priesthood, he was ordained in 1887 and appointed Vicar of Barking the
following year. Here his talents made him one of London’s most popular clergy,
increasing the congregation, it is said, from 250 to over a thousand. In 1895
he became chaplain of an Ilford hospital, and in 1900, a canon of Westminster
and Vicar of St Margaret’s. This great public platform gained him widespread
admiration for the brilliance of his preaching. He was noticed in high places. Asquith
had planned to make him Dean of Lincoln, but Henson’s wayward behaviour led to
a change of mind: he said it would be ‘like sending a destroyer into a
landlocked pool’.[3] The issue concerned his advocacy of union
with non-conformists. He had defied his old friend Bishop Charles Gore in
preaching in a congregational church in Birmingham. So Henson became Dean of
Durham instead.
His
arrival in Durham was heralded by a dramatic development in the Deanery. Like Spencer Cowper before him, Henson, or
rather Ella his wife whom he had married in 1902, took a dislike to the great
house which she thought gloomy and colourless.
Her opinion was perhaps not altogether without ground. The photographs in his predecessor Dean Kitchin’s
history of the Deanery[4],
an incomparable record not only of its past, but also how it was inhabited in
Edwardian times, show that the house was decorated and furnished in a heavy
Victorian style that did not do justice to its elegant 17th and 18th
century architecture. So Ella set about
putting colour back into Spencer Cowper’s solarium, and the Chinese silk
wallpapers, as brilliant now as they were in 1912, show how well she
succeeded. It was a metaphor of a new
era in the Deanery, both the house and the office. The 20th century had arrived.
As
I have said, Henson had already gained a reputation as a brilliant preacher and
controversialist before he arrived at Durham.
He was a passionate defender of the establishment of the Church of
England but had moved away from the high church position he had occupied as a
younger man. In the year of his appointment, he published a book arguing that
clergy should be free to air their doubts about the virgin birth and bodily
resurrection in the pulpit. This led to the legendary controversy surrounding
his preferment to Hereford in 1917. He
was appointed by Lloyd-George against the advice of Randall Davidson, the
Archbishop of Canterbury. A number of bishops refused to attend his
consecration, an act that wounded Henson deeply. In 1920, he was appointed
Bishop of Durham. This time, his reception in his diocese where of course he
was already well-known was uncontroversial and warm.
Back
in Durham, it was not long before he ran into trouble. The Durham coalfield was
seething with discontent and unrest under the economic and industrial strains
all England was experiencing, and the recalcitrant attitudes of local pit
owners. Conflict was rife, with both miners’ and employers’ attitudes coloured
by the Russian Revolution four years earlier. On Labour Day, 1 May 1921, Henson
was invited to speak to a gathering of mine workers and employers at Hartlepool
to try to achieve understanding and avert a damaging strike. The memory of an
earlier episcopal intervention in a mining dispute in County Durham was still
green: the great Bishop Westcott had been widely admired during the coal strike
of 1892 for bringing miners and employers to Auckland Castle and successfully
mediating between the two groups. It was not that Henson misjudged the occasion.
He praised the miners, and pleaded to everyone’s better nature for an end to
class war. But he unwisely included as a throwaway remark, a reference to the few, not the many, who were ‘shirkers’. This was mistaken to be a denigration of
them all. For a while, the mood that year was ugly. Henson was able to redeem
it by never failing in his conscientious care for miners and their families and
his often generous financial provision for them, despite his dislike of
organised labour and the trade unions.
But
things soon turned sour again. This time, it came down to a difference of
opinion between the Bishop and the Dean and it tells us quite a lot about
Henson. Welldon took an exalted view of the office of Dean. Once, he was
speaking to a meeting of railwaymen at Stockton and one of them asked, ‘Who is
worth more to the country – a Dean or an engine-driver? He replied: ‘A Dean is worth more than an
engine-driver, if only because the engine-driver would take people from
Stockton to Newcastle, but a Dean would take them from Stockton to heaven’.[5]
His
relations with Henson were notoriously bad, and the Bishop found in him exactly
the right target for his acid wit. When preaching at Court and lunching
afterwards at Buckingham Palace, King George V happened to ask his
granddaughter Princess Elizabeth what she had liked best at the zoo on their
visit the previous day. ‘The
rhinobottomus’ she replied. Henson at
once said: ‘Thank you, my dear Princess, for giving me a word which so
adequately describes my Dean’. When a
lady asked him at a dinner-party if he had seen the play Pigs in Clover, he replied: ‘No, but I have seen the Dean of Durham
in bed’. Welldon was suspicious of the
telephone, and would only allow a single appliance to be installed in the
Porters’ Lodge to serve the entire College.
(That however was more advanced than Henson, who refused to have a
telephone at Auckland Castle at all, so his chaplain had to make daily trips to
a public phone in the market place in order to transact the business of the
diocese)[6].
Relations
came to a head. This time, it was another matter entirely that proved the
trigger. Welldon was a leader of the temperance movement while Henson thought
the whole idea of prohibition both absurd in itself and damaging (as he looked
across the Atlantic) politically and socially. The brewers regarded Henson as
their champion and liked the implication that the ‘liquor bishop’ would ‘rather
see England free than England sober’.[7]
The Dean decided to brief against his Bishop. He addressed the annual Miners’
Gala in July 1825 appealing to the Labour Party to ‘solve the nation’s drink
problem’ and dissenting from Henson’s well-known views. Unfortunately, Henson
had written a newspaper article a few days earlier on ‘The Coal Crisis: an
explanation and a warning’. The topic was the miners’ demand to be paid a
‘living wage’.
Henson
argued that this act of folly would put their very industry at risk. They were
furious. A banner was processed on the racecourse proclaiming ‘to hell with
bishops and deans! We want a living wage!’ There were mutterings about the vast
stipends enjoyed by church dignitaries, and the Cathedral’s ownership of a
well-known colliery, the Dean and Chapter pit at Ferryhill. Then a large man
attired in an episcopal habit was seen amid the throng. This was not the Bishop
but the Dean who had been a colonial bishop in East India. ‘Here he comes’ the
crowd shouted, ‘throw him in the river!’. After a beating, they almost succeeded
but for the intervention of the police. Who knows if the miners were intent on
throwing a church dignitary into the river, not caring whom, or whether they
mistook Welldon for Henson? But from then on, Henson paid attention to his
personal security.
In
the national church, the issue that long preoccupied him was that of
disestablishment. I have said that he began as a fervent advocate of the
established church. This was to change dramatically with the debacle over
Parliament’s refusal to endorse the revised Book
of Common Prayer twice over, first in 1927 and then again in 1928. This
requires a lecture in itself, but briefly, the reasons for Parliament’s dislike
of the draft text were based on a lingering protestant suspicion, fanned by a
successful public campaign headed by well-known evangelicals, that the book
conceded the historic Reformation position of the Church of England by
countenancing such practices as eucharistic sacrifice and prayers for the dead.
It is salutary to be reminded that what was called anti-Romanism was in some
circles a live issue well into the 20th century, and is still not
yet put to rest.
Because
the revised Prayer Book had been unambiguously endorsed by the bishops, clergy
and laity of the Church Assembly acting under its legal mandate of 1919, Henson
regarded Parliament’s rejection as an unwarranted interference in the internal
affairs of the church. He now began to clamour loudly for disestablishment to
which he gave the title of a notorious book he published in 1929. In it, he
argued (presciently, many think today), that as the nation could no longer be
said to profess the Christian faith, the church should be given the freedom to
govern itself. His cry fell on deaf ears and made him more enemies. However,
his public role in the coronation of 1937 seems to have moderated his position.
He began to talk about the ‘residual’ Christianity held by the English as
compared with the outright paganism that was sweeping across Nazi Germany.
And
this observation of what was happening across the North Sea brought out what
some consider as the very best in Henson. His stepmother, whom his father had
met late in Henson’s adolescence, was a German widow. Henson always retained
his affection for her, and her memory probably influenced him when, late in
life, he observed the capitulation of a nation he admired to the forces of
totalitarianism. He was one of only a few in public life vocally to criticise
Nazi anti-Semitism, and support the German Confessing Church and its imprisoned
pastor Martin Niemöller. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936, he was quick
to condemn Britain’s lack of concern, and when it came to the Munich crisis of
1938, he was forthright in speaking against an act of appeasement that he
regarded as a ‘grievous injury’to the Czechs and a shameful capitulation to
Germany’.[8]
He had opposed spending on re-armament as he believed it promoted war. But he
saw in 1938 that war was inevitable, a ‘holy war against pagan barbarism’ to
end which there must be unambiguous victory, not a ‘compromise or patched-up
peace’.[9]
This
pleased Churchill who in 1940 invited Henson to forsake retirement and return
to Westminster as a canon who would preach fervently in support of the war. It
was not a success because of his failing health, and he resigned in 1941. He
died in Suffolk on 27 September 1947. His ashes are buried in this Cathedral in
the Chapel of the Nine Altars, near Bishop Anthony Bek and the memorial to the
last of the prince-bishops, William van Mildert. Ella lived on for two more
years.
Short
men are often pugnacious, and this is true of Hensley Henson. This is evident
from the best of his huge literary output, his letters and his long memoirs entitled
Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. It
is hard to tell whether there is an intended irony in the title, or whether he
believed, as an outsider who had never attended public school and had been an
impoverished ‘unattached’ student at Oxford, that he was a nobody like the
famous diarist whose title he was perhaps echoing. One writer thinks the book is ‘by turns
snobbish, self-regarding, and self-dramatizing’[10]. But Owen Chadwick’s enjoyable biography[11]
takes a more sympathetic view of this conflicted, inconsistent and troublesome
man. It demonstrates his
far-sightedness, his passion for justice, his hatred of hypocrisy and
cant. He was perhaps one of the few
prophets to occupy the Deanery. His
tenure as a wartime dean here in Durham came before he had made his lasting
mark on the Church of England. Yet I like to think that some of his enduring insights about church and society were nurtured
in the room he and Ella made so beautiful for future Deans and their families
to enjoy.
[1] Henson, Herbert
Hensley, Retrospect of an Unimportant
Life, London
[2] Complete
list of books and papers in Peart-Binns, J. S., Herbert Hensley Henson, Cambridge, 2013, 192ff.
[3] Grimley, Matthew in ODNB, online source, citing The Times.
[4] Kitchin, G. W., The Story of the Deanery, Durham Durham
[5] Beeson, op cit.
[6] Gibby, C. W., ‘Some
Deans and Canons of Durham’, unpublished reminiscences, 1979.
[7] Chadwick, Owen, Hensley Henson: a study in the friction
between Church and State, Norwich 1983, 165.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Chadwick, ibid.
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