A Minister's Minutes

By Bernard Thorogood

After 60 years in Christian ministry, Bernard Thorogood reports on significant meetings, travels, and issues met along the way. Beginning his ministry in the islands of the South Pacific at the end of the colonial period, he describes Polynesia before the tourist rush as a paradise with deep scars. Called to take responsibility for the world work of the mission society, he needed to meet other parts of the world church in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Here Bernard Thorogood faces some key issues for Christian mission today.

The third part of his ministry was in the United Reformed Church in Britain, involving much ecumenical activity, as the movement for unity shifted from the central organs of the churches to the congregations.

Thorogood also tells of personal joys and heartaches. From Sussex to Polynesia, from London to Sydney, this is a spiritual as well as a global journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499019865

Bernard Thorogood

Bernard Thorogood is a retired minister in the Uniting Church in Australia. His first ministry was in the islands of Polynesia from 1953 to 1970, with emphasis on the training of pastors. From 1970 to 1980 he was General Secretary of the London Missionary Society/ Council for World Mission, and from 1980 to 1992 he served as General Secretary of the United Reformed Church in the UK. He was awarded OBE and DD (Lambeth) in 1992. He lives in a suburb of Sydney

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1

TO SCOTLAND

It was one of those serendipitous moments that led me to Scotland. We were living in Sussex, in the old market town of East Grinstead, where my parents were deeply engaged in the local Congregational Church. My father, who was a serious, careful and weighty man, took a weekly religious paper called the Christian World. Among the small notices I read that there was a Dr Williams Bursary for candidates for the ministry who could do a university course at Glasgow University. I was right at the start of my process towards ministry, a 17 year old just leaving school, but this sounded a possible way ahead.

I discovered that the sainted Dr Williams was one of those enlightened nonconformists who left his estate to found a theological library and this bursary system at a time when Dissenters were unable to work for a degree at Oxford or Cambridge. So try for Scotland which had its own educational system well in advance of the English. I applied for the bursary at the Trust office near Euston station and after all the requirements were met, I was awarded 70 pounds a year for three years to take an arts degree.

It was a major challenge for me, swaddled as I was in lovely Sussex countryside, to face the transition to a great industrial city in 1944. Everything was war weary, the trains and the busses, the troops and the porters, the Clydeside shipbuilders and the Gorbals housewives. My father decided to accompany me on the first trip north and had booked us a room at the YMCA in Bothwell Street, just a short walk from Central Station. It was a dingy, drab, rather dirty building, suffering from the war years and the staff were tired. But there was porridge for breakfast and a bap—what was that? Yes a bap was a bread roll and there might be a kipper.

So we took the number 3 tram to see the university, and that was a good deal more impressive, sitting on its hill to the west of the city, overlooking the Clyde valley, built in the Scottish Baronial style of the 19th century, when it had moved from cramped accommodation near the city centre. I was booked into one of the halls of residence just across Kelvingrove Park where one of Scotland’s shipping magnates had donated his residence for the university. It all seemed very workable in the mild weather but I was to find these old buildings frigid through the long winter.

The arts course was designed to offer a wide range of subjects as a foundation course for later specialisation. So I did English Lit. and Modern History, Political Economy and Geography, Latin and Moral Philosophy, a good mix. The economics owed much to Adam Smith, the famed Glasgow teacher who shaped much of the European understanding of capitalism. In English Lit. the star was Peter Alexander whose Shakespeare lectures were modestly done but full of insight. The Geography seemed to me straightforward and mostly just common sense. But my downfall was the Latin. The professor was Dr Forsyth who took a pessimistic view of his poorer students, writing up on the blackboard, Abandon Hope all ye who enter here. It was not long before I gave up hope in his teaching. These subjects were spread over the three years.

It was old style teaching with big numbers in tiered lecture rooms, essays to be delivered and little chance of small group work or face to face with a tutor. But it was how the institution coped with the war years and the loss of many younger staff. The campus had escaped the bombing of the Clyde shipyards and had its glories. The Bute Hall was cavernous, and there the holders of bursaries had to parade to collect their notices from the Clerk of the Senate, who was the gloomy Dr Forsyth. The names were called out alphabetically, so we got through Macpherson from Gourock, MacPhail from Blantyre, McTavish from Inverness until we came to Thorogood from East Grinstead, a false note in the orchestra. We then had to take these notes to the Factor in the city office who produced the cash. It was all a bit Dickensian.

It seemed to me a foreign land. A real Glasgow accent can be baffling to a visitor, and was perhaps intentionally so. Student interest was growing in Lallans, or Lowland Scots, the dialect of Robert Burns, which was being used by the poets and essayists of the day, along with Scottish nationalism as its political manifestation. The dramatic evidence was at the Citizen’s Theatre in the Gorbals where both comedy and tragedy had a strong nationalist bias. It has taken from the 1940s to the present for this radicalism to become worthy of a referendum on independence, but the sense of being a distinct people has never wavered.

One of the great glories of Glasgow is the easy access to the Clyde estuary, with cheap tickets on the old steamers to Rothesay on Bute, Brodick on Arran, Loch Fyne toward the north and Campbeltown to the south. It is splendid country, where Buchan’s Hannay should be trekking, and it is where, a little later, I did my courting. My room at the student residence was shared with Archie Rankin, a Scot from Cumbria who was heading for medicine and then with Ernst Honigmann, from a German refugee family, who was to continue his Shakespeare studies with great success and become a professor of English Literature at Newcastle. His edition of Othello is a treasure house of clarity in erudition. But after that first year I reached my 18th birthday and that meant call-up papers for national service, so it was three years later that I was able to return and complete the course.

The plan had been that I would then go to Mansfield College in Oxford to do my theology, but romance intervened. The city church where I worshipped, Elgin Place, was a grand galleried space with high central pulpit backed by the choir and the organ. Outside it had a Greek temple frontage but inside was pure Victorian preaching place. I came to see, as later on I had to preach in a great variety of churches, that the square, galleried, timbered building was the finest auditorium for a speaker, who was easily heard long before the microphone intruded. There, when I returned from National Service, I spotted a lovely girl in the front line of the choir. I quickly applied to join the choir, solely to have the chance to take her home after choir practice. It was one of the best moves of my life.

Glasgow was also blessed at that time with the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Concerts were in the St Andrew’s Hall with cheap season tickets for students, so a regular weekend event could be planned, an education for me as I learned some of the delights of the classics.

Jannett was an Australian from Sydney, from a Scottish family. She had come to Glasgow to be with her aunt and uncle who were mourning the death of their only son on a Normandy beach on D Day. She came from a family that was as surely connected with the Congregational Church as my own, and with the London Missionary Society. Her father was the office manager and accountant in the Society’s Sydney office and Jannett was familiar with the missionaries who passed through on their way to Papua. It seemed than—as it seems now—to have been a wonderful meeting of backgrounds, pleasures and intentions.

So, as I drew towards the end of my Glasgow years, the thought of the distances—Oxford, Glasgow and East Grinstead—was daunting and I visited the theological college in Edinburgh to see if I could transfer there. The Principal, Charles Duthie, could not have been more helpful. He had been a chaplain with the Eighth Army in North Africa and was a pastor as well as a theologian, so perhaps he could see that I would do better work if not too distant from Jannett. It was arranged quite easily, so that I moved in 1950 to lodgings in Grange Road, not far from the Salisbury Crags on the south side of the city.

For two years I soaked up the biblical and theological studies as readily as a sponge. The great names in theology at that time were Barth, Bultmann, Brunner and John Baillie, and in Biblical study, C H Dodd and James Stewart, who was the finest preacher in Edinburgh. We had a wonderful elderly lecturer in pastoral psychology who carried a black box hearing aid of ancient vintage, who warned us of all hasty judgements of other people. He once startled the married men among us by declaring, ‘Each of you has already selected his second wife.’ Was he a realist or a cynic?

Going by bus to Glasgow for a weekend, I would try to take something for the table as rationing was still with us. Often it was a rabbit or a haggis, off the ration. With Jannett’s wholehearted support, I applied to the Missionary Society as a candidate for overseas service, we tramped Loch Lomondside at weekends, and I knew that I had found the partner for my life in whatever ministry might come my way.

2

NATIONAL SERVICE

There was a feeling of futility as I was called up, for the war was over, the celebrations were over, and we wondered what was the need for such service. I had opted for the Air Force, perhaps because I thought it offered more varied service or better uniforms than the army, and found myself commanded to do the initial training at Padgate in Cheshire. It was as rough a shock as diving into a winter sea, for I had no experience of being yelled at and cursed from dawn to dusk. This very normal recruit experience was probably intended to instil discipline, fear of sergeants, and ingenuity in finding ways of escape. I happened to be the tallest man in the squad so had to be the right marker on parade, far too exposed a position to evade the critical eye.

But it was soon over. I knew something of the drill manual and a little about the 303 rifle but not much more. As the list of postings came up, I found that I was scheduled for being a ‘Clerk, General Purpose’ overseas, with immediate location at Blackpool to await the shipping timetable. This was a strange month, living in a boarding house, reporting each morning at 9.0, then having the rest of the day to wander and find amusement. It so happened that the Carl Rosa opera company was playing at the Winter Gardens theatre, so I became a regular patron and had my first taste of Puccini, played by a company that would be called melodramatic, over-the-top, today, but which excited my musical tastebuds.

Embarkation was at Liverpool, the ship anonymous, the accommodation in hammocks, the first call Gibraltar, and I do not remember any seasickness or storms. But I have a vivid memory of waking early a day later, going on deck, to see the snow-capped peak of Etna shining in the dawn sun, a magical sight. Port Said brought magic of another sort, the gulli-gulli man with his tricks involving day old chicks. It was the disembarkation point. We were marched to the rail station and onto the train for the Canal Zone camps.

This large area alongside the canal was an Aldershot in the desert, a whole series of camps for the thousands of servicemen and women who were slowly being repatriated to Britain. There was a good deal of impatience and loads of boredom, thriving NAAFI canteens, chaplains and chapels, and a total disregard of any danger from sunburn. It is interesting as we look back that all service people in Egypt wore shorts and went bareheaded through the blazing days, and were issued with a free tin of cigarettes each week.

I was sent to a RAF station called 107MU to do one of the most boring jobs, collating the documents of those personnel scheduled to board a ship at Port Said. It was just a matter of ensuring that in the envelope there was a complete set—medical record, promotion record, pay details, discipline record, skills and training completed, decorations if any, next of kin details. The pile of perhaps 200 of these packets was tied up and I was detailed to get a small truck with a driver to speed up the road to the dock and personally hand the whole bundle to the Commanding Officer. Those days were the relief from the routine.

But I soon realised that there could be more interesting postings. I applied for a transfer to the Education Branch. Back there in the 1940s it was still a little unusual to find a university student doing such a clerical job, so I was readily released to work with what was adult education. It meant organising programmes of classes which might engage some of the people awaiting repatriation and help them towards a civilian life. I was mainly engaged at Deversoir, a pleasant spot where the canal enters the Great Bitter Lake. Soon I was made a sergeant, in charge of a little facility, and able to use some initiative. I looked for qualified people in various trades and offices on the camp, asking them to undertake weekly classes. So we had dressmaking for the WAAFs, home budgets and accounts, civics, history, family health, and, the most popular, driving lessons. We had some German prisoners near the station, so I was able to add German language and later Russian to the list of subjects. I was also part of a team which presented a recorded classical music evening, with the multiple 78 discs of a symphony needing sleight of hand to prevent gaps in the music.

The brightest bit of serving in Egypt was to take a week’s leave and catch the train to Luxor and Aswan, where accommodation was cheap and the sights authentically and forever impressive. It was a profound contrast of the ancient wonders and the modern poverty of imagination in the structures we leave behind.

Then I was able to do a short period of service in Palestine, which, for an ordinand, was solid food for the journey ahead. Being a British serviceman was an inconvenience, since the incoming Jewish migrants regarded us as the enemy, and were adopting the violent tactics which today we call terrorism. It was a time of upheaval. The Jewish emigres from the defeated Nazi empire were flooding into Haifa on dangerous old ships, which the British sought to turn back to Cyprus. But there was no stopping the flood, and morally who could resist the plea after the holocaust?

Yet the injustice was also a reality as the Jews, in ever greater numbers, dislodged the Arab population from the lands they had held for a thousand years. The British tried to hold the ring but, worn down by the war, could not muster the will or the resources. We were tail-enders on the losing side.

After nearly three years my name came up for a sailing back to Liverpool and demobilisation, the ill-fitting suit and the return to Glasgow. I hope I was