Turbulent priest
A.N. Wilson
Ahead of his Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham John Barnes (Collins 2.95)
Mr Prendergast's return to clerical life from his exile as an assistant master at Llanabba Castle happened after he had been reading a series of articles by a popular bishop and • . . discovered that there is this species of person called a "Modern Churchman" who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief'.
Four years before the publication of Waugh's Decline and Fall, Ramsay Macdonald had made E.W. Barnes the Bishop of Birmingham. It was one of the most grotesque appointments in the history of the Church, comparable with that of the Red Dean' of Canterbury. Everyone would be surprised if Willie Hamilton were to become a Royal Equerry, or if Lord Soper devoted his retirement to advertising Whisky. But, since Barnes's day, it has been Common to watch bishoprics and chairs of divinity being handed out to men who have no discernible sympathy with the Christian• orthodoxies. Barnes himself felt assured, according to his son and biographer, that Ramsay Macdonald had `no regret that he appointed so troublesome a bishop'.. In Point of fact, five years after the Birmmgham appointment, when he was offering Duncan-Jones the Deanery of Chichester, Macdonald said, 'Don't let us down, as Barnes has done'.
Until the first World war, Barnes was a maths don at Trinity., Cambridge, but he Moreover, the race should be kept pure. As his old tutor had told him long before in Cambridge, 'a little Jewish blood is a good thing, too much is a mistake'. Scarcely 500 West Indians had arrived in Birmingham in 1951 before Barnes had voiced the fear that 'in districts where there is a considerable foreign element in the population, neither moral standards nor social behaviour are satisfactory'. He was also urging the Government to introduce euthanasia for defective children and lunatics.
He retired to Sussex in 1953, happy to be near 'the Piltdown Man', in whom he put more faith than in Adam. As the year progressed he was too ga-ga to take any notice of the discovery that 'the Piltdown Man' was a fake.
Vulgar old publicist that Barnes was, it would cause him purgatorial torment to know that Birmingham is now scattered with churches full of negroes gorgeously assisting at the Mass and that 25 years after his death, the vast majority of educated young people are not even aware that he existed.
Previous page
