Obituary of David Say, Bishop of Rochester 1961-1988
/The Rt. Revd. J. M. Bickersteth KCVO warmly remembers the life of The Right Reverend David Say, Bishop of Rochester 1961-1988. Featured in The Friends of Rochester Cathedral Annual Report for 2006-2007.
The Reverend David Say was Secretary of The Church of England Youth Council when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9th April 1945 at Hitler's express orders, only a month before the German surrender. The courageous Confessing Church pastor, pre-war friend of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, became a great hero of Say's at the latter's impressionable age. Bishop Bell had received Dietrich's last message to him of 'universal Christian brotherhood', given verbally on the morning he died to a fellow prisoner in the hope that it would reach, as it did, his great English friend. All his life Say was inspired by that deep friendship between two Christian ministers who had found themselves on opposite sides I during the major conflict of the Second World War; he had grasped that the principle of sharing the great truths of the gospel far transcended national barriers, just as they surely must also the formidable man-made divisions within the Church of God. When therefore Say went on from the Youth Council in 1947, still only 32 years old, to be General Secretary of the infant British Council of Churches, he was suddenly at the very centre in these islands of the task of promoting the brotherhood of which Bonhoeffer had spoken. From then on he saw the cause of Christian Unity as one of the major thrusts of his whole ministry.
A further factor in this lifelong passion for reconciliation may well stem from his unhappy childhood. His naval father beat him unmercifully as a small boy, and his mother even went to the lengths of telling her husband of minor misdemeanours while he was out during the day, so that he could judge whether they called for a beating too. So 'Home' for the young Say really became the local church, his school and his sailing dinghy. His London vicar had the vision to make the eight-year-old a 'boy churchwarden'; and he enjoyed University College School in Hampstead where he became head boy (and to which he several times returned later on to give away the prizes on Speech Days). But he really blossomed as a young Christian at Christ's College Cambridge, to which he went up in 1932. He was passionately devoted to the college all his life. Much influenced in the university by Professor Charles Raven, then exercising many thoughtful undergraduate minds with his radicalism, he found another role model in Archbishop William Temple, in the early nineteen thirties having moved from Manchester to the archbishopric of York. Both these men in their very different ways, products of Cambridge and Oxford respectively, were inspiring and immensely intelligent figures to the young ordinand, who by the year of Munich (1938) had arrived for twelve months (the norm at that time if you had a degree) at the evangelical Ridley Hall.
Archbishop Ramsey with Bishop Say (left) on the day in 1967 when the archbishop opened an extension to King's School Rochester, of which Canon Vicary was then the headmaster. This is a rare picture of Say wearing his DD gown.
But Say was not then nor ever became in any sense a paid-up ‘party' man, of any persuasion; he was Church of England, not high or low church in the parlance of the time. Years later, on his consecration, he wrote that he was wondering how the faithful in Rochester, where there was a long-standing rather narrow evangelical tradition, would react to a mitred product of Ridley Hall. There was no need to worry; twenty years earlier, on top of the broadening effect of university life, he had had his first and deeply formative curacy at Croydon Parish Church, where in wartime any theological niceties would have gone rapidly out of the window as he helped dig bombed Londoners out of the ruins of their homes. He stayed in the metropolis after the end of the war, having experienced during its final year both the ominous splutter of the V1s in 1944 and then the V2s equally terrifying silent arrival, in those final months before their launch pads in Holland were overrun. So although he was never in the fighting services, as the vast majority of his contemporaries were, he knew a good deal about what man's inhumanity to man can do, which must have strengthened his resolve for reconciliation after the pattern of Bonhoeffer his early hero.
Within weeks too of the final surrender of Japan, Say was on the continent making lasting contacts while he was still General Secretary of the Church of England Youth Council, and then of the British Council of Churches. The latter had only been formed in 1 942, a period half way through the war when British churchmen were realizing the debilitating effect of 'our unhappy divisions'; and there were enough senior men of the calibre of William Temple himself to drive the concept forward. Say relished the challenge of both his successive appointments (the Youth Council and the BCC), getting to know personally over twelve years, from an unrivalled central base as curate of St Martin in the Fields, such towering personalities as Visser t'Hooft, J H Oldham and many other early architects of the ecumenical movement, as it gathered momentum in those post-war years of reconstruction and mending of relationships. Under Archbishop Fisher, who took over at Canterbury after the sudden sadness of William Temple's premature death, he had much to do with the preparation in these islands of what the BCC felt it could contribute to The World Council of Churches, as it had been called in embryo since before the war. So, despite his own youthfulness, maybe because of it even, Say found himself a leading British churchman at the actual formation and First Assembly of the WCC in Amsterdam in 1948, going on six years later to be a Church of England delegate at Evanston, Illinois (by which time he was a parish priest) and for his third and last Assembly at New Delhi in 1961, soon after his consecration as a bishop.
Say's long stint in Central London came to an end in 1955 with his acceptance of the living of Hatfield Parish Church. He had become, for all his youth, quite exceptionally steeped in ecumenism; but he probably realized that for the church's and his own good that it was time he got back into the main stream of anglican life by trying his hand at a major incumbency. The succession of able curates he appointed to join his large staff soon realized that their rector was a bishop-in-waiting, but never ceased then or thereafter to value the training they were having meanwhile at Say's hands. The hallmarks were meticulous preparation for any undertaking, a high standard of pastoral care, strict punctuality in church, an efficient office, taking trouble to do even small things about the parish properly, faithful prayer, bothering about their own home life; and through all this genuinely enjoying themselves. Say got Princess Alexandra to lay the foundation stone of a new church he opened in a large housing estate, not finding it difficult to secure a member of the Royal Family for a parish occasion (although he was a very junior priest), because his patron at Hatfield was none other than the major establishment figure of the Marquess of Salisbury. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a frequent member of the congregation whenever she stayed at Hatfield House, to which indeed Say or one of his curates had to repair every morning for a twelve-minute service in the Salisburys' private chapel. There 'Boberty' sat at the front on one side and Lady Salisbury on the other, the butler and the housemaid sitting at the back on the appropriate side; if grandchildren were staying, they were similarly divided by sex. The hymn was always 'All things bright and beautiful', played on the organ by the local fishmonger who came up each day on his little pop-pop motorcycle. The standing instruction from His Grace was always to omit Mrs Alexander's third verse ('the rich man in his castle'... etc). So this anachronistic feudal setup was very different from the bombed streets of Croydon or the tall pulpit of post-war St Martin's-in-the-Fields; but the glories of the Salisburys' home and the featureless expanses of the growing Hatfield housing estates, for which Say was equally responsible, all became grist to his hard-working mill; years later when he was much in attendance on the Queen, he must often have remembered the rarified atmosphere, so attractive in its way, of 'the big house'. The diocesan bishop recognized the solid parochial work Say was doing by making him in 1957 an Honorary Canon of St Alban's Abbey.
Say was 46 when the call to the episcopate came, in a letter from Harold Macmillan who was then at Number 10; when Say retired at the age of 72 he was very proud of being the last of the Macmillan bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury, after the custom of the time, made him a Lambeth DD on his nomination to Rochester, and in fact he was the last to come in for this, as the academic Michael Ramsey stopped doing it when he succeeded Geoffrey Fisher in the archbishopric later that same year 1961. But bishops were not to move away from frock coat and gaiters as their daily attire for another five years, when Archbishop Ramsey in revolutionary mode turned up one summer's day at a Buckingham Palace Garden Party wearing his purple cassock; thereafter in quite a short time a cassock, very conveniently if much less strikingly, became the morning dress of bishops throughout the Church of England. Most of the time they began simply to wear suits on duty, the new Primate judging that it was time that bishops stopped always looking as if they had lost their horse somewhere. Nevertheless Say, a towering and maybe to some a rather intimidating figure in the standard early 1960s episcopal attire, continued as did most bishops of that generation to wear his gaiters and frock coat when he judged that the occasion called for it; furthermore the gear had cost him quite a lot of money, and for a long time (?still!) the highly traditional West Kent laity went on expecting their bishop to be 'properly dressed'.
Immersed as Say was fast becoming in Kentish life, he was a man you could not keep away from his beloved London. Belonging at once ex officio to the Church Assembly in Westminster (since the Enabling Act of 1919 the Church of England's Governing Body), he thrived from the start in his old haunts. Indeed all his life he reckoned that a mood of quiet elation came over him as soon as he got out of the train at a London railway terminus. More immediately the brand-new Paul Report's far-reaching proposals were being hotly debated, many Assembly members objecting to the way in which one man (however talented a sociologist) should be advocating the abolition both of the freehold and the entire patronage system. A characteristic anglican way forward won the day with the formation of a 20-member commission to look carefully at 'Paul' under the chairmanship of Canon Fenton Morley, then Vicar of Leeds, and Say was elected to join it, soon becoming a key member. Within another two years the Morley Report was coming under as heavy fire as Paul had, Say championing its radical stance in the opening speech, after Morley's introduction. Not untypically of how our church behaves, only some of the proposals eventually saw the light of day, but Say had emerged as a forceful advocate and negotiator, steadily on the side of reform to suit the needs of the last half of the 20th century.
When the General Synod took over from the Church Assembly in the Summer of 1970, Say's by now broad shoulders accepted the burden of chairing the working party, set up just before Synod's inauguration by The Queen, to reorganize the entire administrative structure of the Church of England; and their recommendations were broadly accepted. Say was always a defender of the virtues of good administration; it was one of the reasons why he admired Geoffrey Fisher, who was often caricatured as ‘just an administrator'. Say himself was a master of it, with a skill epitomised in many people's eyes by the state of his desk, which very rarely had more than one file on it, and that the one he needed for whatever was happening precisely then in his study.
After that baptism of fire (and he had come splendidly through it, with a good reputation much enhanced), Say became a convinced bishop-in-synod man. Over the years he had much to do with securing State Aid for Churches in Use, and often chaired the vital Standing Committee on behalf of the archbishop; similarly, as much more than the statutory Church Commissioner that every diocesan bishop is ex officio, he was deputy chairman of the Church Commissioners' Redundant Churches Committee, and many times (again on behalf of the archbishop) he chaired the Church Commissioners themselves. By the time of his retirement in 1988 there was not a bishop to touch him in understanding the workings of both of Synod and The Commissioners, what these bodies could and could not do, how they should best relate to the Bishops' Meeting (the regular unofficial and private conferring of House of Bishops' members), and to the work of bishops in the House of Lords.
Say's own entry into the Upper House was in 1969, and he was to serve Church and State as a Lord of Parliament for nineteen years, becoming every bit as admired and significant a figure there as he was over the road in Church House. He made over one hundred speeches, including several in debates on the replies to the Queen's Speeches at the opening of Parliament, a mark of distinction in itself. With his love of history he revelled in being caught up in making more of it. He was also exceptionally generous with his time in showing Rochester parishioners round the House during recesses, always making interesting points about the buildings and their use to very varied groups from his Kent parishes. Their lordships do not often continue speaking into the night, but on three occasions during the debate on the 1980 Education Bill Say was on his feet in the small hours. As far back too as 1974 he was arguing forcefully that, if there was to be reform in the membership of the Upper House, religious leaders other than the twenty-six anglican bishops should be included, the Church of England being very willing to surrender some seats for this ecumenical cause. As Say became senior there, he would make a point of stressing to a new episcopal colleague how important it was, during duty week for Prayers, to attend debates as often as he could, and only to get a substitute for Prayers themselves if it was quite essential for him to be somewhere else one afternoon; he came to realize, as few fellow old hands among the bishops did, how much the episcopal presence is valued, and by many more than the twenty or so peers who regularly come into the chamber for Prayers. He loved both the atmosphere and the work that was done there; to-day he would certainly have been a strong candidate (after nearly two decades of distinguished contribution) for the life peerage which tends now to be offered to the occasional bishop on resigning his see.
That nineteen year period (1969-1988) exactly covered also the time of his almonry duties to Her Majesty; he was not the first Bishop of Rochester to be offered this (entirely honorary) post in the personal gift of the Sovereign, but certainly no predecessor became a more loyal and ardent admirer of The Crown and all that it stands for at the centre of British life. Say's tall figure following the Queen with the purses on Maundy Thursday, along the line of recipients in a cathedral, became familiar to television viewers throughout the world every Holy Week. It was he who suggested to Her Majesty that this ancient ceremony, dating back at least to 600AD, should not be confined to London. The nowaccepted movement round cathedrals all over England gave the opportunity to Say to explain in each new place, through a much-appreciated local lecture, the historical background to this very English adaptation of the 'Mandatum' of Our Lord. The lecture Say inaugurated was an innovation gladly followed by the two holders of the office of Lord High Almoner since Say's 1 988 resignation. He surrendered his badge of office to Her Majesty in the Deanery of Lichfield after his last Royal Maundy Service in the cathedral there, and that was the moment when he received from Her Majesty his greatly-valued KCVO. Thereafter he regularly attended with delight the Victorian Order service in St George's Chapel every four years, and the Windsor Castle reception that follows it.
That 'moving out-of-London' change engineered by Say was yet another sign of his passion for historical values, and his deep conviction that all we owe to the interweaving of Church and State in these islands should be appreciated as widely as possible. This perspective of his comes out again and again in the two booklets he published privately in 2001 and 2004 entitled Kent Pilgrim. In a hundred and fifty pages (which the booklets comprise) some of the sheer breadth of Say's interests is encapsulated by the choice of his talks, sermons, speeches and reflections over a period of more than forty years. They are an inspiring read, and as they were meant to do constitute a way he would like to be remembered, preferable in his own words to 'a cradle to crematorium' story. This last he was genuinely keen to avoid, in favour of 'something Kent-orientated', though it has to be said that in this fascinating selection he has quite often strayed beyond the county boundary. Here are anniversaries (Sir Arthur Sullivan's 150th, The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy; the 1400th of St Augustine's mission to Kent, Wye Parish Church; the centenary of the Medway Yacht Club, Rochester Cathedral; the 250th of the granting of the title Royal to The Royal Engineers, St Paul's Cathedral); In Memoriam addresses (Sir William van Straubenzee MP, Second Church Estates Commissioner and President of Nobody's Friends, the London dining club of which Say relished his membership for forty years, St Margaret's Westminster; Bishop Ross Hook, once a Canon of Rochester, subsequently Bishop of Bradford and then Chief of Staff at Lambeth Palace, St Luke's Chelsea; Sir Hugh Wontner, a former Lord Mayor of London, St Clement Danes, London; Professor David Ingram, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral); and his farewell to The Pilgrims, the prestigious anglo-american friendship society on retiring from being the society's honorary Chaplain for 34 years, The Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly. These are only nine of the forty recorded in 19 Kent Pilgrim Parts One and Tivo; and they are all still a wonderful read. Yet these pages include only a fraction of his huge spoken and written output both in and out of the diocese of Rochester.
There is not a bishop I know who has ever felt that xvhen out of the diocese on duty he isas abandoning his responsibilities to the people whonn he was appointed to serve. True that he and his secretary (and Say had an outstanding one) have got to see to it that they continually watch the diary to make sure that these excursions do not, as can so easily happen, multiply too much. That safeguarded jealously, out-of-diocese engagements again and again, for the most part unconsciously, rub off on his hotne duties by widening horizons both for the bishop himself and through him for his horne congregations. That was certainly the experience of the just over two hundred Rochester clergy and their parishes; this impressive-looking bishop, increasingly a national figure, was to them simply their father-in-God. He travelled incessantly round the churches themselves of course, but the schools too, the civic or the services occasions, the big houses, and equally important the country cottages to which an incumbent told him a visit would be greatly appreciated, all these came in for his concern. He and Irene (they celebrated their Golden Wedding in the nineties) went to Sunday lunch in vicarage after vicarage over the years, played with the children (and their dogs), and really got to know the men who in more ways than one so looked up to him. Letters or postcards of thanks would arrive through the parish priest's letterbox on the Tuesday morning without fail, invariably from the bishop himself, in that small hand which with perseverance was perfectly decipherable even in old age.
A welcome to Bishopscourt was also an important part of belonging to the diocese. Depending on the event and the time of the invitation, tea, sherry, good wine (quite a hunt would dig out some soft drinks) flowed freely, and hundreds and hundreds of people in toto, belonging to the church or not, shared in that generous hospitality. David was rightly very proud of Irene's great contribution to the happiness and fulfilment of their long lives, and of her achievements in her own right as a magistrate, with the passionate concern she had (nationally recognized by an OBE) for prisoners and their welfare; older than him as she was by some years, they made together with their three children (an elder son had died in infancy) the happy home he had so signally lacked, and we all saw it and rejoiced. Well after retirement, when Irene later became ill in their house in Wye (which she had made equally welcoming and where she created a charming little garden during the decade she was fit there), his love and care for her were exemplary and endless.
A few months after Say's 90th birthday he read a lesson in his old cathedral at a Jazz Mass to which the Dean had invited men and women who had served in the diocese, and it was a thrill to see this familiar robed figure taking an active part, despite his great age, and afterwards in the crypt making a typically forward-looking speech when he cut his birthday cake. He got very cunning over concealing a walking stick inside his cassock, and thought nothing of doing this in procession up the full length of Canterbury Cathedral or when administering the sacrament from a ciborium, which he was doing regularly there up to a few months before he died. By the late nineties, ten years into his Wye retirement, it was Canterbury Cathedral that had without question become his spiritual home; and his friend the Lord Lieutenant's patch conveniently covered of course both dioceses. So after initial doubts that he might hurt the present bishop and many old Rochester friends he decided, having talked this through with a few friends, to ask the Dean of Canterbury if his funeral could in due course be there rather than at his original Kentish cathedral. In the event everyone totally agreed, with the Bishop of Rochester gladly present, a sermon by Say's former Dean, and a dear friend and neighbour singing Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Solemn Vespers.
The large congregation which on that late September day last autumn almost filled the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, a remarkable tribute in itself for the funeral of someone who was nearly 92, must have been made up of friends from many periods of Say's life, and the memories will have been far more numerous than those merely outlined in the preceding pages: for example the Mother Abbess of the Benedictine Community of St Mary's Abbey West Malling was there, a place Say loved and treasured during and after his long tenure of being its Visitor, and they delighted in him too; senior people from the University of Kent at Canterbury, of which he was the very hands-on Pro-Chancellor for ten years; Band of Brothers members and others from The Kent County Cricket Club, recalling without doubt his happy summer days watching the game on the St Lawrence ground; several women priests representing the hundreds who were grateful for his consistent championing of that cause through all the long debates on General Synod, and in private meetings with his lifelong friend the late Dame Betty Ridley and many others who were working away at it when there was much powerful opposition; a Rochester rector who will have been remembering the way there was a knock on the door around ten o'clock at night, and it was the bishop on his way home from an evening engagement calling in to see how his wife was whom he knew was poorly; at least one bishop present will have been happily recalling a Buckingham Palace lunch less than a year before, to which Her Majesty had unexpectedly invited seven or eight bishops who had been or were still in the Ecclesiastical Household, and Say (who was getting very frail) had been driven door to door and immensely enjoyed every minute of the occasion; and a Kent friend must have seen in her mind's eye Say sitting in a deckchair by the sea, driven there for a spring day out and talking about his love of sailing, with the reflection that there was 'no more beautiful sound in the world than the water lapping against the side of a boat'.
This was ‘David our bishop', prayed for as such by many thousands of faithful church-goers up and down the Rochester diocese for twenty-seven years, and they increasingly did it with genuine affection and gratitude. Say was indeed large of stature, but he was also wide of vision, an astonishing example to us all of hard and efficient work, revelling in his senior Christian and ecumenical position not for any status that brought, but because he knew he was able thereby to make some small changes for good out of his passionate concern for the Church of England as semper reformanda. Long long may this remarkable man's memory be cherished for the way in which, by what he said, by what he wrote, by what he did and by what he was, he communicated to thousands of his contemporaries the 'many-splendoured thing' that is our belief in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Throughout this pen portrait of the person I loved and was privileged to be close to, I have used the biographer's style of referring to his subject by surname only.
In compiling what I have I have gratefully drawn on the late Archdeacon Richard Mason's Episcopal Giant (Rochester Diocesan Board of Finance 1994). I have also been usefully in touch with Bishop Michael Turnbull, Dean John Arnold, Bishop David Farmbrough, The Reverend Bill Penney, Mrs Caroline Collingwood, and Canon Douglas Vicary. Many thanks to you all.
The Rt. Revd. J. M. Bickersteth KCVO
The Friends of Rochester Cathedral were founded to help finance the maintenance of the fabric and grounds. The Friends’ annual reports have become a trove of articles on the fabric and history of the cathedral.
Canons, colleagues, volunteers and staff have shared their memories and reflections in many forms over the years.
