A Painful Chapter In The History Of Lincoln Cathedral

By Christopher Laurence

A PAINFUL CHAPTER in the History of Lincoln Cathedral...In contrast with Andrew Sparke's The Magna Carta Wars of Lincoln Cathedral which offered an impartial account, this book explores what it really felt like to be trapped in the midst of a twentieth century ecclesiastical conflict, the like of which the Church of England had never previously known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393008019

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Copyright ©2016/2019 Christopher Laurence

All rights reserved.

Christopher Laurence has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover design and artwork courtesy of Daniel Edwards

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher except that brief selections may be quoted or copied without permission, provided that full credit is given.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Acknowledgements

Back cover photograph of three canons by Elizabeth Carpenter; left to right: John Nurser, Rex Davis and Christopher Laurence

Susie Orbach from ‘On Anger’ in What’s really going on here. Virago, 1994.

Owen Edwards from ‘Working for Bastards’ in the journal Office Politics, Dec 1990.

M. Scott Peck for quotations from People of the Lie, Random House, 1983.

Newspaper cuttings and quotations:

Lincolnshire Echo: ‘Group backs call for Canons resignation’, ‘Bishop probe mismanaged ...’, ‘Canon stepping down’, ‘Cathedral to may go to High Court’,

and ‘Dean says farewell’

Yorkshire Post: ‘Unholy row’

The Times: ‘Who’s afraid of human rights?’

Guardian: ‘Canons fire off defence’

Daily Telegraph: ‘Bishop attacks Dean’ and ‘Bishops back Canons’

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders.

If there are any omissions we apologise to those concerned and will include suitable acknowledgements in future editions. 

FOREWARD

That this little book appears in print is testimony to the magnanimity of two men whom it treats most unkindly. The Very Reverend Brandon Jackson, formerly Dean, and the Right Reverend Robert Hardy, formerly Bishop of Lincoln, have been good enough to read the first edition of this book in draft, and allowed it to go to print, even if perfectly justifiably Brandon Jackson questioned whether the book should have been written at all.

That question has troubled me from the beginning. None of us, who were the principal participants in this story, come out of it well. I am embarrassed by some of the things I wrote, and especially by the cartoons I drew at the time. They expose more of my failings than the mere inability to draw.

But the story is true. It happened, and so deserves to be told and recorded as a small episode in the great sweep of the cathedral’s history. I have told it, not as a history with dates, references and an index, but as it happened to me and how I saw it. My principal sources are the entries in my daily journal, supplemented by a voluminous indexed archive. I am satisfied that I have fulfilled, albeit so inadequately, what I felt to be an obligation.

I am grateful to Russell Pond, former Chapter Clerk, who patiently scrutinised the chapters as they emerged, and to my former colleagues and continuing friends, John Nurser and Rex Davis who kindly encouraged me. This account would be much less readable had it not been for the generously-given editorial expertise of Marion Goldsmith and Sarah Codrington. And it might not have got finished at all had it not been for Dilys Jones, who tirelessly relieved me of domestic responsibilities so that I could go through the pain of remembering. Now I can return to the other, much more pleasurable chapters in ‘My Song’, an old man’s self-indulgent review of a much-blessed life.

Christopher Laurence

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The original, privately circulated, edition of this book was completed with the inclusion, by their kind permission, of letters from two of the protagonists in this true-life drama, Bishop Robert Hardy and Dean Brandon Jackson. These dissenting voices helped to clarify the status of Christopher Laurence’s account. Without those letters, for which permission to use has been withdrawn by their originators, it needs to be explicitly stated that this is far from being an unbiassed and impartial observation of this human tragedy. The nearest thing that is currently available is ‘The Magna Carta Wars of Lincoln Cathedral’ by Andrew Sparke (APS Books 2019).

This is a different sort of work, less about where the truth lies between the different factions involved than an examination of the psychological and emotional effects of being caught up and forced to take sides in the conflicts from 1987 to 1997 between Dean and Chapter, Dean and Bishop, and Bishop and Chapter at Lincoln Cathedral. The fact that it cannot currently be supplemented by the undoubtedly very different recollections of Bishop Hardy and Dean Jackson is a shame indeed. Perhaps one day another scholar will be able to produce the complete, detailed and rounded account these events deserve.

Andrew Sparke

CONTENTS

One Setting the Scene

Two Under Attack: Subdean and Magna Carta Australia Expo  

Three Appeal to the Bishop  

Four Preparing for the Visitation  

Five The Admonition  

Six After the Admonition  

Seven Stay or go? The Conciliators  

Eight  Canons stand firm – but my exit  

Nine Departures, urged and actual  

Ten Reflections  

CHAPTER ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

‘In my opinion, you have been found to have been incompetent, unchristian, unco-operative and evasive. You have been requested by your bishop to consider your position. Why do you not resign? Yours sincerely, Revd A.D Procter, 13th October 1990.’ Mr Procter’s puzzlement was shared by a great many people at the time, clerical and lay, known and unknown. ‘Why don’t you just resign?’ asked an old colleague then Bishop at Lambeth, with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘If it were me, I should have resigned’, remarked the Dean who was appointed to calm the troubled waters of Lincoln Cathedral. Its reputation had been tarnished by an episode of public scandal and apparent disrespect for episcopal authority in which I had been involved, culpably it was considered.

It was indeed the case that my Bishop had told me he wanted me to go. His demand had been supported by a battery of canons of the cathedral and by a group of significant lay leaders in the cathedral community. It was thought scandalous that I, with two fellow Residential Canons under the same pressure of disapprobation, stood our ground. But the fact that I was also an archdeacon, an essential officer on his staff, apparently refusing to accede to his bishop’s wishes, seemed even more outrageous to correspondents and others who shared the sentiments of the Revd A.D Procter.

It was not until two years later, in 1992, that finally I did resign from my residential canonry at Lincoln Cathedral. I resigned with great relief, set free to enjoy my last two years before retirement doing my main job as an archdeacon in the diocese. (Until then a quarter of my time had been devoted to service of the cathedral.) It’s one of the many oddities of this story that my Bishop had been and remained enormously supportive of me in my archdiaconal role throughout the whole episode. But the memory of his judgement of my role in the cathedral, endorsed by so many colleagues some of whom were friends, still stings. This partly explains why I am writing my own account of the scandal at Lincoln Cathedral for which, along with the Dean and my fellow Residentiary Canons, I was held responsible. I have a substantial archive of the events but my principal source is my own daily journal. You will find all these entries, direct extracts from what I wrote at the time, printed in italics. There are some ‘objective’ accounts written at the time, and also a more recent, thoroughly researched account in a PhD thesis, set in the framework of the governance of cathedrals in the twentieth century. But I want to tell the story without trying to be objective, simply as it was for me at the time. Of course, after all these years I do have a theoretical understanding of what took place, but that will be only implicit in the narrative until I spell it out at the conclusion in Chapter Ten.

It’s a long time ago now. ‘The Lincoln Affair’ is never directly alluded to today. Shameful things are known to have happened: a heavy financial loss on an overseas venture with Magna Carta; a court case involving a sexual scandal. But myth now shrouds the central figures: the Subdean who was accused of being a crook, the Dean who was taken to court, the Residential Canons who refused to resign, and the Bishop who, failing their resignations, offered his own.

The myth has blurred and simplified people’s memory of these events. In the context of national and world affairs it was of course trivial, rather shabby, the shadow of a blip; but at the time ‘The Lincoln Affair’ was not negligible and certainly not painless. Several people involved suffered greatly, to the point of nervous breakdown. A local psychiatrist complained that some of his patients were being destabilised by the affair. The Press, national as well as local, devoted a great deal of newsprint to it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who got his fingers burnt when he tried to intervene, complained at a press conference, ‘Wherever I have gone in the world, people have spoken about the scandal at Lincoln. We cannot allow this to carry on being a cancer in the body of Christ.’ A friend entered a restaurant in New York, and, on hearing she was from Lincoln England, the waiter asked, ‘And how is your Dean?’ A Lincoln friend recalled how at that time he and his wife were on a beach in Queensland, along with some 500 people. They were awaiting the arrival by canoe of offshore islanders coming for the annual celebration of their conversion to Christianity. ‘But’, he wrote, ‘the buzz amongst the waiting people was the squabble in Lincoln Cathedral between Dean and Subdean ...’.

A top international firm of accountants was commissioned to investigate the financial affairs of the cathedral. The police were called in.

The public furore began when a damaging report about Lincoln Cathedral Chapter was published in the Church Times. A specialist journalist had been hired to investigate a loss-making venture in the exposition of Magna Carta at the Brisbane World Expo, 1988. In many respects it was a fair report, illustrating the uncontroversial premise that cathedral chapters were not designed for competent business management. But it was grossly unfair in portraying the Subdean as a gung-ho adventurer, using the Magna Carta exposition as a gravy-train for his family. The report was picked up by the Press and TV, national and local. Later the Church Times devoted a special printing to the Bishop’s review of the case, published in his Admonition, which called upon the four Residentiary Canons to ‘consider their position’. The General Synod initiated an investigation into the governance of cathedrals, which resulted in the Howe Report and a change in the legal constitution of cathedrals. Sadly, in my view, the lessons drawn from the Lincoln Affair were conceived in terms of management, with no attempt at a deeper theological critique. A system of tighter control and accountability was put in place. In the cathedral itself I think I see a legacy from that time in a fear of disagreement. This would help to create a culture of uncritical deference not conducive to the lively conflicts of opinion which are necessary to healthy democratic community life.

At the time I thought the Lincoln Affair was a painful collective mistake, a corporate dereliction of the Church’s most precious spiritual resource in a rush to quick superficial solutions in the face of embarrassing publicity. I likened it to a massive pile-up in fog on a motorway. A simple accident was compounded by a succession of drivers driving too fast in fog, who applied their brakes too late and piled on the damage. I thought then as I think now, that here was an opportunity to draw upon the Gospel resource of reconciliation. We, that is the three active Canons, did in fact attempt to initiate a reconciliation process under the guidance of a distinguished counsellor, but sadly this failed when two of the protagonists, the Dean and the Bishop, decided that the processes of institutional governance should take priority.

The story could begin with the moment when the newly-appointed Dean, Brandon Jackson, set off from Bradford for Lincoln ‘like a piece of unlit blue touch-paper’, as an archdeacon in Bradford Diocese at the time described it. Jackson had set off a number of explosions in Bradford, leaving behind him much unresolved distress. He had displayed a penchant for dismissing volunteers and sacking employees, three of whom had sought redress through industrial tribunals. Those who knew this could have predicted that history was about to be repeated in Lincoln. Here, in fact, mines were already laid, waiting to be touched off. It’s worth locating these before relating how Jackson’s arrival set off the sequence of explosions, one of which failed to dislodge his colleagues and the last of which blew him away.

I had arrived three years earlier in 1985, with very ambivalent feelings about the cathedral and the job of a residential canon. As Archdeacon of Lindsey, three-quarters of my time belonged to archdeaconry and diocese and one-quarter to cathedral duties. I was never cut out to be a ‘cathedral-shaped’ clergyman. The previous eleven years of my ministry had involved no ritual duties, being concerned with continuing ministerial education and mission. I was used to having responsibility for my own department, but in the cathedral found myself having no responsibilities, only duties of attendance at, and performance of, rituals. Though I respected the importance of these, especially in a cathedral, it all felt like a complete waste of my time.

But the meetings of the Dean and Chapter were far from being rituals. The administrative Chapter consisted of the Dean, Precentor, Chancellor, Subdean, myself and the Chapter Clerk, with a minutes secretary. Institutionally the Dean had overall oversight, but as primus inter pares (first among equals) very little power. He shared with the Subdean special administrative responsibility as coMaster of the Fabric, but beyond that the management of the departments belonged to the three Residentiary Canons: the music department and the worship to the Precentor, the Library to the Chancellor, and the finances to the Subdean as Treasurer. For myself, having no handle on the activities inclined me to a certain detachment from many items of the agenda, such as the travels of Magna Carta, a stance which I would come to rue.

At the time of my arrival Dean Oliver Fiennes was still energetically pursuing his great work, opening up the cathedral to the diocese, county and beyond. Most of the things now taken for granted, such as the training of guides, the stewards, the shop, the refectory, the Fabric Council, the Community Association, were his initiatives. These last two were expressions of his belief that the Dean and Chapter should make themselves more accountable; he was moving, against a wall of inertia, towards a more democratic form of accountability, a direction which was subsequently weakened by the General Synod. Oliver was not an easy man to work with or for. Though he had great charm and could be a delightful companion, he was also moody and liable to truly frightening outbursts of temper. He was a lateral thinker who could have a dozen new ideas before breakfast, most of them crazy but one of which would be a good one. The problem was to discern which was the good one and then to work out how to give it legs. Oliver was not strong on these last two elements but in Rex Davis, his Subdean, he found a sympathetic colleague who knew how to make things happen. The two made an effective combination, not always appreciated by their colleagues lay and clerical, who could find themselves occasionally by-passed, out-run or over-run.

One example of this celerity would be the brilliant, prize-winning Magna Carta pavilion at the Australian Expo 1988, negotiated, designed, manufactured, shipped out and set up at amazing speed. More of this later. Another example would be the installation of an internal communications system. The Dean’s Verger was tipped out of his office to give place to a communications office, internal switchboard and staff. At the time the innovation caused considerable resentment as an unnecessary extravagance, but it was not long before this office became the nerve centre of the cathedral, and unimaginable to be without it. Even so it helped to establish Rex’s reputation as an incautious spender, which made the cathedral’s fund-raisers nervous. As Cathedral Treasurer he appeared to enjoy the business of managing the investments, moving substantial sums of money about, though he did set up a panel of experts to advise him. He was not frightened of taking creative risks (in earlier days he had edited the World Council of Churches’ youth magazine: it was called Risk). He was comfortable with deficit-budgeting, which troubled the more cautious among us, including myself. I wrote to him about this: ‘The difficulty I have with you is that I don’t always immediately have confidence in your confidence, and you find it difficult to wait for people who move more slowly. The result is a credibility gap which needs watching because it extends more widely than you appear to be aware.’ My doubts were not allayed by a bank manager friend who remarked that, though Rex loved to talk the language, he didn’t actually understand finance. This lack of confidence in his financial management was shared by the chairman of the Preservation Council, the organisation which at the time raised funds for the cathedral throughout the county. Many of the great and the good of the county were involved in this work and so had some sensitivity about the financial management of cathedral affairs. Thus, in the field of fundraising it was a serious matter when the chairman of this council expressed doubts about Rex’s handling of the financial affairs. Those of us who were accustomed to more conservative principles in handling church resources also found his approach slightly alarming. At a crowded Shrove Tuesday party, our gentle Dean’s Verger, Roy Macdonald, elegantly dressed in drag, sat on Rex’s knee to sing, ‘Hey, big spender, come spend a little time with me’. It raised the roof.

The Dean, with his Subdean