The Cost of Being a Bishop
Article featured in Picture Post, 1 October 1949
Written by Caryl Brahms
Photographs by Raymond S. Kleboe
What are the expenses of his customary, and indeed due, pomp and circumstance? How does he spend his working day? What kind of human being might he be?
What’s a bishop? Before meeting the Bishop of Bath and Wells, I would have said that a bishop is probably the successful son of a well-bred, well-fed father, prone to obesity, bound to be urbane, who lives in his palace on the fat of the land, surrounded by a flurry of assistant clerics, professionally applying the standards of the past to behaviour in the present, and crying woe unto sinners in beautifully rounded periods.
I should have been wrong. For the income tax has altered all that—if, indeed, it ever existed. Moreover, the church is vitally aware that times have changed since the days when a bishop was a prelate with a plurality of palaces, in one of which he would reside until the yield of the pastures had been eaten up.
A bishop, I now find, is just as likely to be a slightly-built man, who speaks commonsense in the plainest and simplest of terms, who rents his palace, because he cannot afford the architectural upkeep of accepting it, or returns a part of it to the church for use as clerical offices, or, as at Farnham Castle, traditional seat of the Bishops of Winchester, as a retreat for tired clergymen, to lessen domestic expenditure. He works a 14-hour day, and he meets a very fair cross-section of the community.
Every bishop has to pay income tax upon a salary fixed when tax was fivepence in the pound. Now he has to pay up to thirteen shillings in the pound. So there is a considerable modification of pomp in the circumstances. As to the well-bred father-British bishoprics are state appointments, made without regard to birth and, though at present in no way political, they are made by the Prime Minister, who consults the Archbishop of Canterbury, before conferring the appointment.
The reason that ability has become more important than birth in the election of a bishop, is easy to understand. The church needs the right man in the right job just as much as any other employer. A bishop must be an expert administrator as well as a leader of pastors. He should have an understanding of the causes of social problems in his see, be it metropolitan, rural, maritime or, as so often, all three. Indeed, I am persuaded that a bishop is a skilled worker, professionally engaged in doing good for hours that would make a union man blanch.
Let us narrow the scope to Wells, that sleeping of ancient houses ringed round by immemorial hills presided over by its mighty cathedral. Compared to Canterbury, the cathedral at Wells is a smaller, blunter more forthright statement of the glory of God in stone. Viewed with the spiritual detachment of a Semitic Gulliver, the great difference between the two cathedrals is that at Canterbury I am aware that I stand in the presence of hallowed history; at Wells I know I am a sinner.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells whose throne is set up at Wells (and I have it on very high authority that a bishop’s stool or throne is sorely lacking in creature comfort) has a see of 504 parishes in the immediate charge of 600 parish and cathedral priests, all of whom the bishop must know personally. The Bishop of Bath and Wells has the hereditary privilege of supporting the left hand of the Sovereign at the Coronation. The Bishop of Durham is, as it were, the Sovereign’s right-hand man on one of those happy occasions when it can be predicted with confidence that the left hand will know what the right is doing.
Bath and Wells is largely a rural see, and income tax and geography appear to be the two main forces that condition the bishop’s temporal life. Instead of the gift of a palace and a taxable salary of £5,000 a year to run it on, he has arranged to receive £2,700 taxable salary, and for his semi-Saxon palace he now pays an annual rental to the church, which looks after its structural upkeep.
The bishop receives income tax allowances of £750 for office expenses including secretary’s salary; £750 for travelling; and the ludicrously small sum of £100 a year for official entertaining, for, in the words of the Bishop of Chelmsford, “Bishops should be given to hospitality.” Note, also, the Bishop of Chelmsford’s £3,000 a year, with an income tax allowance of £1,000.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells has to heat, light and clean the 50-room palace, for which fortunately the rates are negligible.
In addition to his secretary, an efficient young woman (for that imagined flurry of clerics are all in the parishes, doing, as the bishop puts it, the job they were ordained to do) and the gardener, the domestic staff of Wells Palace numbers three-two resident and one daily. The bishop’s daughter, Alyson Bradfield, is his chauffeur. The bishop has a wife, two sons and two daughters. A minimum of eleven sit down to lunch each day, exclusive of visitors, it is clear then that a bishop is unlikely to die a rich man on what he can put by from his earnings. Not only do the claims of the state make it impossible for him to give much more than his time to the many charities that come his way, but they make it extremely difficult for him to be able to afford to become a bishop at all.
Has a prelate ever been forced to decline a bishopric because, having no private income, he could not afford to accept it?
Of the two bishops to whom I put this point, Bishop A said that the only known grounds for declining the appointment were where a man felt himself to be happier performing his pastoral duties in his parish than engaged in what must be largely administration. Bishop B said with some candour that if he’d had only one son at an age for professional education he might have had to decline the bishopric.
As for the second bugbear, geography, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, with the long distances between the parishes of his largely rural see, can officiate at fewer services than the bishop of a more metropolitan see, whose parishes are closer together. He has one suffragan bishop, the Bishop of Taunton, to assist him, for, to quote again that pithy prelate, the Bishop of Chelmsford, “There is an impression that nothing can be done properly unless the bishop does it.”
The Bishop of Bath and Wells has so organized his diocesan office that administrative work takes up a minimum of his time, which leaves him free to go out among his five hundred parishes, which is what he considers his job primarily to be.
The selection and delegation of the bishop’s engagements will depend upon two things: first, his engagement book, already determined five months ahead. Second, the single consideration of where his presence will serve the most useful purpose. A tiny rural parish that has not been visited by its bishop for a decade or more might well receive precedence over some more grandiose occasion. For instance, the bishop told me with particular pleasure of his visit to Podimore, a little village of 25 houses which produced a churchful of people in spite of the haymaking.
To take a single day of the bishop’s calendar. The Bishop of Bath and Wells rose, as is his invariable habit, at 7 o’clock (the Bishop of Trinidad rises at half-past five, but the difference in climate accounts for the difference in reveille) and at eight went into his private chapel. At 8.45, he breakfasted. Some 60 letters came by the first post.
At 9.30 the bishop went to his study and dealt with his correspondence, reading every letter himself, and dictating or personally writing replies. From 10.45 till luncheon at 1, the bishop grants interviews to, at random, his clergy, candidates who hope to be ordained, his suffragan bishop, archdeacons, heads of committees, perhaps a journalist. This period is used, too, for the preparation of sermons and speeches. There is never enough time for a bishop to write out his sermons, but there is Gospel justification for a certain amount of repetition as the seasons return, as the domestic chaplain to the Bishop of Trinidad told me: “Which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” Matt. 13, 52.
At 1 the Bishop of Bath and Wells lunched with his family and a guest. Then he went out into the parishes until 10 p.m. “That’s early,” he told me. He fulfilled three engagements, in addition. to being entertained to tea and dinner-“You eat where you are,” said the Bishop of Chelmsford. The Bishop of Bath and Wells delights in meeting people, and this widespread form of hospitality enables him to get to know pastors and parishioners. At 11p.m. the bishop goes to bed and reads for half-an-hour, for a bishop must try to keep abreast with new works of theosophy as well as refresh himself from old. And there are other books that are of the first interest to him. Of the books on his table I noted Mr. Churchill’s new volume, Their Finest Hour, a new book on philosophy, and a large and wonderfully illustrated book on aesthetics. If there was a novel I did not see it. Habitually he looks through The Times, Daily Mail, Wells Journal, Spectator, Church Times, Church of England Newspaper, and Illustrated. Sketch, The Queen, Harpers, Blackwoods and Picture Post also find their way into the house.
At midnight the bishop turns out his light.
Apart from the routine of confirmation, dedications of war memorials, blessing of bells, dedications of windows, pews and all forms of church furnishings, hallowing of new graveyards, restorations, and blessing of harvest fields—to name but a few of the ceremonies in far-flung parishes each bishopric has its own distinctive function. The Bishop of Chelmsford, with the sea on two sides of his diocese, used formerly to take a Michaelmas goose out to a lightship on which he held a service a custom he hopes to revive when circumstances permit. The Bishop of Truro is hoist every year by ropes, from boat to light-house, where he holds a service. The Bishop of Bath and Wells leads the Glastonbury Pilgrims.
I asked the Bishop of Bath and Wells, with a cathedral at either hand, which ceremony he enjoyed most. The answer was prompt. “I most love my parish confirmations,” he said. The bishop has confirmed 1,800 communicants so far this year.
The bishop strives to keep one day a week free from parochial engagements, and this he uses for catching up with arrears of administrational work. He takes a fortnight’s holiday after Easter, and three to four weeks in September, when he can wear tweeds and dispense with gaiters (relics of the horseback age) and even dog-collars, and meets humanity off its guard-which must be highly educational
In addition to diocesan duties, the Bishop of Bath and Wells takes the two-change train that ambles so pleasantly through the deep Somerset meadows, before panting in to Paddington, to attend the meetings of the Church Assembly, which is the Church’s Parliament. He is not one of the 23 bishops, who, together with the Big Five, attend the House of Lords.
The finance of its bishoprics and indeed of its entire establishment rests, not upon the state, but at the charge of the church, whose funds are invested and applied by a lay commission. No little criticism has been levelled on the grounds that the church is ground landlord to some pretty dubious property, and that it owns armament shares.
Ought the church to hold property at all? If it did not, either it would have to lose ten thousand of its sixteen thousand ministers, or the voluntary lay contributor would have to donate four times as much to church funds. Christ and his disciples had their common fund and Judas held the bag. The trouble with Judas, says the Bishop of Bath and Wells, in a clear and lively pamphlet-on church finance, was not that he held the bag at all, but that he had a wrong attitude to it.
The church inherits much of its property. Some portion of the bequests left to it are in the form of ground rents. Until the leases run out, nothing can be done about already existing tenancies. But as the lease falls in, the church is able to exercise some control over the kind of premises that shall stand on its ground, and their purposes. Should armament shares form any part of the church’s legacies, they will certainly be the first to be sold, the bishop assured me. And by and large and agriculturally, I have been told the church is considered to be a good landlord—as landlords go.
Just now battle rages between Wells and Silkin. For the Minister of Town and Country Planning has decided to permit a quarry at Dulcote-you can see it, set within its immemorial circle, from the window of the bishop’s study. This would leave a gap in the green hills that ring the city. The people of Wells are protesting in print and broadcast. There is, after all, another quarry in the neighbourhood to serve the road-makers.
And certainly, chancing to be awake at daybreak (a journalist, too, can have her income tax difficulties) on the night that I spent at Wells, and looking out over the close, to the cathedral, riding the sunrise in the safe protection of its ring of hills, I must say I could see their point of view.