Broken by the Church he loved

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

THE CROCKFORD'S FILE: GARETH BENNETT AND THE DEATH OF THE ANGLICAN MIND by William Oddie

Hamish Hamilton, f14.95, pp. 232

Why did he do it'? The Revd Preben- dary G. V. Bennett was a Fellow of New College, a Wiccamical Prebendary of Chichester, and a distinguished historian of the 17th and 18th centuries. Two years ago, on 5 December 1987, he asphyxiated himself in the garage of his house in New Marston on the outskirts of Oxford. Why?

Everyone knows the proximate answer. Garry Bennett had written the anonymous Preface to Crockford's Clerical Directory, which had been published that week. The Preface was highly critical of the direction which the Church was taking under the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Runcie. The press picked up the story and chased it for all it was worth, or rather more. Bennett's Preface was denounced in unusually violent terms, by the Archbishop of York, Dr Habgood, among others, and

its authorship was widely speculated on. Bennett denied having written it, but the papers did not let up and he was offered sums of money to explain himself if he wanted. On the morning of his death, he

found his photograph in the Daily Mail

illustrating an article which suggested that he was the likely author. He said to a friend, one of the few who knew that he had written it, 'I don't know if I can take much more of this, you know. It's getting pretty close and pretty nasty.' In the event, he did not take much more of it.

So one culprit is 'the media', who hound- ed Bennett to his death. That was the view subsequently advanced by Dr Habgood, embroidered by an inaccurate account of the inducements made to Bennett by the Mail. Not so, says the Revd Mr Oddie. He comes to the story as counsel for the defence of his old friend and fellow eccle- siastical conservative Garry Bennett — and for the prosecution. Having lucidly retold the story of Bennett's life and death, he points a finger: 'Broken by the Church he loved.' The real guilty men, he asserts, were the 'liberal establishment' of the Church, intolerant and exclusive.

Thanks to them, Bennett's career was already over by the time he came to write the notorious Preface. For the best part of a quarter of a century he had been waiting ever more desperately for promotion, to bishopric or deanery or chair of history. None came. Whatever Bennett's personal qualities or shortcomings, this neglect of a man of conspicuous intellectual distinction suggested that there really was an exclusive new ecclesiastical order in the Church and that there was no longer room, or hope, for a conservative High Churchman in a Church dominated by semi-agnostic prog- ressives. The venom with which several prelates attacked the Preface was not only vindictive but by implication tyrannical.

All of this Mr Oddie sets out effectively. He then takes his barrister's brief too far. His loyalty to Garry Bennett's memory does him credit, but the portrait he paints of a gentle, saintly recluse and martyr destroyed by the savagery of the world and the worldly Church will not easily be recognised by those who knew Garry. He was a very gifted and a very difficult man, waspish and frustrated. The Preface is a remarkable piece of writing, and a most curious one. It is not enough to say that it expressed no criticism of Dr Runcie that Garry had not expressed before, though Dr Runcie himself has been charitable enough to say so. To say that Dr Runcie is a decent man but conspicuously indecisive and unheroic at a time when, observers both inside and outside might think, the Church of England requires heroism and decision if it is to survive at all, is no more than to state the obvious. But there is such a thing as tone of voice and, as Mr Ferdinand Mount said when he reviewed To the Church of England, Bennett's post- humous collection of articles and sermons,

including the Preface, here last year, the passage on Dr Runcie is strikingly bitchy in tone. It was a cry of pain, personal as well as principled — the pain of disappoint- ment, Garry's enemies said, or simply of rejection.

A good many people guessed the identi- ty of the author. Dr Habgood and others hinted that it was a 'disappointed clergy- man', and Mr Oddie makes the very serious charge that Lambeth Palace told the press that Bennett was their man. I do not know whether that is true. Mr Oddie also repeats the story that Dr Runcie rang Bennett shortly before his death but that Bennett ptit the telephone down without speaking. Having myself given that story currency, I have since been reliably assured that it did not happen. But in any case, Garry had, albeit unconsciously, left so many clues. He had once written of another clergyman two and half centuries earlier who had been 'bitterly disappointed at his neglect by the new regime after his considerable efforts', one of the many passages in his historical writings where he seems eerily to be writing about himself. He had known Robert Runcie for more than 30 years and had naturally hoped for something when Dr Runcie went to Can- terbury. The Preface is, among other things, an explanation of his own failure to be rescued from New College. The descrip- tion of those who had been preferred under the new primate as 'men of liberal disposition with a moderately Catholic style which is not taken io the point of having firm principles', who were articu- late broadcasters and had a 'good appear- ance' was so obviously written with person- al resentment that one can only think that Garry had wilfully blinded himself. Like- wise, he had repressed in advance any inkling of the furore the Preface was likely to have, or of the intensity of likely speculation as to its authorship. That was all the odder as his own description of Atterbury's anonymous pamphletering should have reminded him.

Nor does Mr Oddie see the further tragedy of Garry Bennett's career. Bennett took a starred First at Cambridge, wrote his brilliant dissertation — prize-winning and published — on White Kennett, and on the strength of these was elected Fellow and Dean of Divinity of New College in 1959, when he was not yet 30. He was a catch: college chaplaincies were increasing- ly difficult to fill with clergymen of any kind of academic distinction.

In the almost 30 years which remained to him, Bennett published just one more book, his admirable life of Atterbury, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688-1730. The excellence of his posthumous collec- tion only emphasises its exiguity. Dons like to whine about how hard they work, yes all day long, from ten to four, for half the year or even more. Garry was notably plaintive in this vein. He disliked teaching and did not conceal the fact (though he was a very

good teacher, if one was prepared to put up with a degree of tetchiness and to concentrate), did less and less of the history tutoring for which he had not strictly been appointed to New College, and eventually eased himself out of the duties of chaplaincy for which he had. What on earth did he do with his time?

One answer is that he occupied himself with intrigue of a footling but obsessive and sometimes unusually malign character. A full portrait of Garry should give some hint of his ceaseless mischief-making, which caused much trouble for others and in the end brought Garry himself no joy. Would the world have been a less happy place if Garry had never set foot in a college meeting, and would he have been a less happy man? As Mr Eric Christiansen has said, those who knew him were at first unable to take Garry's involvement in ecclesiastical politics seriously — when serious he was — because they had seen him at work in Oxford. Garry exemplified what Sir Isaiah Berlin has called 'those two notorious occupational "complexes" of dons — a repressed yearning for spectacu- lar worldly success and influence, and a resentful odium academicum of those who aspire to it'. His career at Oxford illus- trated even better Mr Kissinger's saying that academic politics are so much more savage than any other kind because there is so little at stake. And, incidentally, if Garry had got round to writing two or three more proper books, his claim on a chair would have been completely unassail- able.

Mr Oddie, I have suggested, exaggerates his case. His subtitle 'Gareth Bennett and the Death of the Anglican Mind' is no exaggeration at all. Quite apart from the personal tragedy of Garry's life and death, there is a broader disaster here. For several centuries the Church of England was the English intelligentsia, or at least a very real part of it. It was not only the Church of scheming or corrupt prelates and indolent parsons. It was the Church of Hooker and Donne, Vaughan and Swift, Berkeley and Malthus, Crabbe and Stubbs. Though Gar- rY Bennett was sometimes his own worst enemy, it is preposterous that any institu- tion should not have found scope for a man of his ability, and would be preposterous even without the numbing mediocrity which is the present bench of bishops. Garry may have been chippy, awkward and resentful, but how was he meant to feel when an obvious clown like the Bishop of Durham was preferred ahead of him? My first question 'why' is perhaps point- less and cannot be answered without deep- er speculation about Garry's personality. Both the 'Daily Beast' and Dr Spacely- Trellis could reasonably say from the dock that stable and confident men do not take their lives because they are caught up in a nine days' wonder like the Crockford's affair. Garry was always potentially . un- balanced, as well as lonely and joyless. He

still had more to say and more to contri- bute when he was caught up in a farce which turned into a tragedy which he did not understand. He was not a very restful or peaceful man in his lifetime. I hope he rests in peace.