Who was Trevor Huddleston? Eric James
It is remarkable that it was a white bishop whom the African National Congress asked to open their first conference in freedom in 1991. His return to South Africa as a hero, after an absence of 35 years, was the measure of the stature of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, who has died aged 84.
After all that Huddleston had achieved in South Africa, when he was recalled to England by the Community of the Resurrection in 1956 at only 43, that might have been the end of his story. It proved to be just the beginning.
He grew in stature as bishop of Masasi, of Stepney, of Mauritius and finally archbishop of the Indian Ocean. From 1983, in so-called retirement, he was president of the Anti- Apartheid Movement and chair of the International Defence and Aid Fund.
If a man is known by the company he keeps, there were those Huddleston knew as promising young men – Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu – who grew to be great men, of the stature of his friend Julius Nyerere. But most of his company never became names. His priority each day was to “keep company” with God in prayer.
Huddleston was born in Bedford, the son of Captain Sir Ernest Whiteside Huddleston, eventually commander of the Indian Navy. Father and son did not meet until he was seven. Huddleston’s mother, too, was often absent in India and he was brought up in Hampstead by a wealthy widowed aunt.
Early in his childhood, he began to think he was called to the priesthood. Later, Lancing College was a huge influence. At Christ Church, Oxford, Huddleston felt the call to be a monk as well as a priest.
After Oxford, he spent an invaluable year in Ceylon, up the Irrawaddy river, in India, and in Palestine, in the steps of Charles de Foucauld. He returned for two years at Wells Theological College and, in 1936, was ordained to a curacy in the railway town of Swindon.
In 1939 Huddleston went to Mirfield, to test his vocation to join the Community of the Resurrection. None of his fellow novices saw in him a future leader. He was the last person they could imagine defying authority.
When Raymond Raynes returned from South Africa to be superior of the community, Huddleston happened to be on kitchen and front-door duty. Raynes was sick and put to bed. Huddleston took Raynes’s meals up for a week and was ordered to stay and talk.
Raynes soon decided that Huddleston should succeed him as priest-in-charge of the Sophiatown and Orlando Anglican missions. His ship sailed for Cape Town in 1943.
Within days of his arrival, Huddleston was immersed in the beginnings of his onslaught on apartheid, in church as well as state, the story of which he would eventually recount in his best-seller Naught for Your Comfort.
His outstanding gifts of leadership and courage were soon apparent. He learned to communicate powerfully both as a speaker and a writer. He worked not only with like-minded Anglicans, but with Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and agnostics.
Where apartheid was concerned, he was totally uncompromising, which led him into conflict with his church, especially with Geoffrey Clayton, the bishop of Johannesburg, later archbishop of Cape Town. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, told him: “You are entirely wrong in the methods you are using to fight this situation.”
Huddleston was provincial of his community in South Africa from 1949 to 1955. He was given the African National Congress’s highest award, the title Isithwalandwe, the courageous warrior.
When his community recalled him in 1955, only his vow of obedience made him comply. He would almost certainly otherwise have been arrested, and his superior judged that a South African prison was no place for a diabetic like Huddleston.
There followed four unhappy years. Huddleston, coping with his bereavement of Africa and with correspondence and invitations to speak that flowed from his book, was for a time guardian of novices at Mirfield and then prior at Notting Hill Gate.
People close to Huddleston were certain he should return to Africa. Evelyn Baring, in his days as high commissioner to South Africa, had come to know Huddleston well. Baring, in 1960, was chair of the Universities Mission to Central Africa, and agreed that Huddleston was just the man to be bishop of a diocese in Tanganyika. Huddleston was Bishop of Masasi from 1960 to 1968. Nyerere, a Roman Catholic, called him “our bishop”. They worked together as partners.
In 1963, Huddleston returned to Oxford to conduct a memorable mission to the university, delivering addresses published as The True and Living God.
It was Robert Stopford, Bishop of London, who, in 1968, invited Huddleston to be bishop suffragan of Stepney. Huddleston often found priorities like pastoral reorganisation frustrating. Yet, at a time when east London was witnessing a growing mass hysteria against the Pakistanis, there could hardly have been a wiser appointment.
It was Gerald Ellison, Bishop of London, who realised that, at 65, Huddleston still had it in him to be a very considerable bishop overseas, and caused him to become both bishop of Mauritius and archbishop of the Indian Ocean from 1978 to 1983.
If anyone thought the septuagenarian Huddleston would sit back they were much mistaken. When he retired, he became provost of the Selly Oak colleges; president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement; chair of the International Defence and Aid Fund; and a trustee of the Runnymede Trust.
He remained to the end, in a rather old- fashioned sense, a man of God. Living his last years in a few rooms at the top of the vicarage of St James’s, Piccadilly, there was still much of the monk about him. Prayer remained the very centre of his life.
But close to Piccadilly Circus – he undoubtedly liked being “at the centre” – he was available to the media and leaders like Nyerere, Mandela, Abdul Minty, Sonny Ramphal. Not only important people sought him out. It was as often the unknown and, very often, young children.
When one asks why Huddleston remained such a hero, Tutu probably provides the best answer: “I was in hospital for 20 months with tuberculosis, and, if Father Huddleston was in Johannesburg, he made it a point to visit me at least once a week. I was just a nonentity, 13 years old, and yet he paid so much attention to me.”
He adds: “You could have knocked me down with a feather, when this man doffed his hat to my mother. I couldn’t understand a white man doffing his hat to a black woman, an uneducated black woman.”
If Huddleston seemed sometimes a man with a cause – to the point of obsession – it was only because he was, first, a man with compassion for individual children of God.