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| ISBN-13: | 9780232530346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Darton, Longman & Todd LTD |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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ARCHBISHOP JUSTIN WELBY
The Road to Canterbury
By ANDREW ATHERSTONE
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2013 Andrew AtherstoneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2912-0
CHAPTER 1
A Silver Spoon and a Broken Home
Justin Welby is a scion of Britain's political, military and educational establishment in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The family tree on his mother's side boasts an array of civil servants, academics, soldiers and clergymen. One great-grandfather was Sir Montagu Butler, who made his name in India as Governor of the Central Provinces 1925–33, and was afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Two of Welby's great-uncles were Knights of the Garter, England's highest Order of Chivalry, which is limited to the monarch, the Prince of Wales, and 24 companions. One of them, Viscount Portal of Hungerford, was Chief of the Air Staff during the Second World War overseeing the strategic operations of the Royal Air Force. The other, R.A. ('Rab') Butler, later Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, held three of Britain's great offices of state as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary in the 1950s and 1960s. Only the premiership eluded him.
Welby's mother, Jane Portal, was born in India and sent to boarding school in England. She was employed from December 1949, aged 20, by Sir Winston Churchill as one of his personal secretaries, initially as a telephonist and in typing his six-volume history of The Second World War. Her family connections were an asset and Churchill later told her, 'I took you because of your uncles.' Although Churchill was in his mid-seventies, he remained Leader of the Opposition and soon Jane was assisting him at the House of Commons, taking dictation of his speeches, and at Chartwell, his home in Kent. In October 1951 the Labour government fell and Churchill was re-elected as Prime Minister, which brought a move to Downing Street and Chequers. Jane travelled with the premier to summit meetings with President Eisenhower in Bermuda and at the White House during 1953–4, though she recalled that for Churchill's young staff it was 'one long party', including midnight bathing at the beach. When Churchill stood down in April 1955 in favour of his Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, he asked Jane to go with him to help finish his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, but she flew instead to the United States to be married to Gavin Welby.
Jane Portal was introduced to Gavin Welby, a wealthy businessman and aspiring politician, through her cousin Adam Butler (later a Tory MP and Permanent Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher). Although Welby was well-connected, his background remained mysterious for many decades even to his new family, and his son recalled:
He told lots of stories but one was never really sure what was true and what wasn't ... He was a great keeper of secrets. I think he told people the stories that he wanted them to believe and kept the rest quietly to himself ... He was a great raconteur ... There is no hiding the fact that he was a complicated man.
Only after Justin Welby's nomination as Archbishop of Canterbury in November 2012 was light shed on Gavin Welby's origins, romantic liaisons and business career, chiefly through the investigations of The Sunday Telegraph which described him as 'a man of mystery, with a flair for reinvention and a story to rival that of the Great Gatsby'.
Gavin Welby was born Bernard Gavin Weiler at Ruislip on the outskirts of London in November 1910. His father, Bernard Weiler, was a Jewish émigré from Germany in the 1880s and an ostrich feather merchant, importing plumage from South Africa as luxury accessories for the European market. In September 1914, seven weeks after Britain declared war on Germany, the family abandoned the surname Weiler in favour of the anglicised Welby. Gavin was sent as a teenager to Sedbergh School in Cumbria but left in 1927 when his parents split up after his father had an affair. This pattern of family breakdown was to be repeated in the next generation. Gavin sailed to New York after his father's death in 1930, and in later life enjoyed telling stories of how he had run alcohol with his 'Italian friends', the mafia, as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He became import manager in 1933 for the National Distillers Products Corporation and was married the next year to Doris Sturzenegger, a factory owner's daughter, though the relationship did not last. In New York he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle amongst the business elite, residing in hotels, organising debutante balls and attending dinner parties for ambassadors. He dated a string of beautiful and rich young women. According to the gossip columns, during 1937 Welby and Wimbledon tennis champion Kay Stammers were 'volleying letters across the Atlantic'. By 1942 he was a rival with Errol Flynn for the attentions of millionaire heiress Doris Duke. Ten years later Welby and the young socialite Patricia Kennedy (daughter of Joseph Kennedy, former American ambassador to Britain) were said to be 'intoxicated about each other'. He also introduced Patricia's older brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, to 21-year-old Swedish aristocrat Gunilla von Post on the French Riviera in August 1953. Kennedy and von Post became lovers. The future president told her that Welby 'looks like a playboy, but he's conservative underneath'. In a love-letter he wrote in some amusement about 'our friend – the cold, frozen Mr Gavin Welby'.
During the 1950s Welby settled back in Britain, invested his wealth and became a 'name' at Lloyd's, the London insurance market. He was eager to secure a seat in the House of Commons and stood as a Conservative Party candidate for Coventry East in the general election of October 1951, but was defeated by the sitting Labour MP, Richard Crossman. Then he was introduced to Jane Portal, who happened to be both the Prime Minister's secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's niece. Perhaps for Welby romance and political ambition were intertwined. Her parents were unimpressed by the match but the couple eloped to America and were married on 4 April 1955 at Towson Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland. Gavin kept his first marriage a secret from his new wife. A reception was held in London at 11 Downing Street, courtesy of Rab Butler, and the Welbys settled into married life at 17 Onslow Square in Kensington. Gavin fought the general election of May 1955 at Goole in Yorkshire but was again defeated, marking the end of his political aspirations.
Justin Portal Welby was a honeymoon baby. He was born at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in Hammersmith on 6 January 1956, almost exactly nine months to the day after his parents' wedding. He was baptised at Holy Trinity, off the Brompton Road, a society church in Kensington with a broad evangelical tradition. Adam Butler and Susan Batten (his aunt) were godparents, as were two members of the minor aristocracy, Robin Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone (later Baron Derwent), a foreign office diplomat, and Flora Fraser (later Lady Saltoun). Major Bill Batt, a Norfolk landowner and passionate evangelist, also committed privately to pray for the boy every week. However, it was quickly apparent that the Welbys' relationship was in turmoil and within three years their marriage had collapsed. By the autumn of 1958 Jane had packed her bags and retreated to her parents' home at Blakeney on the north Norfolk coast, along with two-year-old Justin and his Swiss nanny. They tried to keep their relationship difficulties out of the public gaze and at first denied it, but the tabloid press soon sniffed out the story, even sending a reporter from London to Blakeney. The Daily Mail broke the news in its gossip columns, and Jane complained: 'It makes me feel absolutely sick, but there is nothing to be done & now everybody knows, so there we are.' They were divorced in February 1959.
Justin was placed formally in his father's custody, partly because he was the main provider, but before long Gavin was again engaged to be married – this time to Vanessa Redgrave, a 23-year-old budding actress, less than half his age. She was on the cusp of stardom following in the footsteps of her parents, Sir Michael and Lady Redgrave, as a celebrity of stage and screen. In June 1960 the Welbys, father and son, spent a weekend at The George Hotel in Odiham, Hampshire, so that Gavin could court Vanessa at the Redgraves' home nearby. Vanessa, according to her mother, was 'completely infatuated',' absolutely radiant, over the moon with joy'. She told her parents of her determination to wed this 'sweet darling man ... I love Gavin very much and am so happy!' At first Lady Redgrave was not sure what to make of Welby: 'Gavin looks 40 [actually he was 49], kind of mysterious, attractive. He has money & doesn't work.' But within a few days, intrigue had been replaced by alarm, as she wrote in distress to her husband: 'But he is a real horror.... He strikes everyone as a no-good type with God knows what sort of background. You know I'd not mind about class, money, anything if he wasn't patently a pretty rotten piece of work.' She admitted that Welby was 'very attractive physically', albeit that he adored his own bronzed body, but it was difficult 'to pierce the façade' of small talk. Vanessa's younger sister agreed, declaring that their marriage would be 'wrong and disastrous ... though he is attractive he is not the sort of person anyone could live with for more than a month or two.' A family friend gave a similarly damning verdict, telling Michael Redgrave that Welby
strikes me as quite a pleasant casual drinking acquaintance whom one might encounter in the South of France amongst the idle gad-abouts. But as soon as you go beyond the casual drink you find him very self-opinionated and hard with albeit the occasional softer touches that are temporarily endearing. He is not of Vanessa's world & I can't see how, at his age, he could ever become part of it. I cannot see how their marriage could ever be successful & it could only be detrimental to her career. He is physically attractive & she is completely bowled over by him ... I only hope she will see him in his true perspective in time.
The Redgraves were especially concerned that marriage to Welby might put an end to Vanessa's acting career, and that he was looking not only for a new wife but also a new stay-at-home mother for Justin, attracted both by Vanessa's beauty and her ' maternal sweetness'. Her mother urged: 'I only pray we can prevent marriage. I'd give it a few months if that, once her eyes are opened after the first flush is over.' Vanessa was not besotted for long and called off the engagement 'for many many reasons'. To her parents it brought 'great relief' and they were glad to see the back of Gavin Welby. Unlike his father, however, young Justin left a good impression on the Redgrave clan: 'His child is angelic. We all loved him.'
Justin spent his early years shuttling between different relatives, principally in London and Norfolk, as his father, mother and grandparents took turns to look after him. Adam Butler was made his legal guardian in case of Gavin's death. The arrangements were generally amicable, and Jane recalled that childcare was divided '50/50', but the strains of being raised in a broken family inevitably took their emotional toll. In an article in December 2000 on the redemption of painful memories, Justin wrote: 'Christmas comes with lots of memories. My recent ones have been very happy, since I was married and part of a family. My childhood ones were the reverse.' Of life with his father, he said: 'It wasn't an easy upbringing.... He was very affectionate, brilliant intellectually but quite demanding.... I lived with him but I didn't know him very well.'
Welby's early education was at Gibbs pre-preparatory school in Kensington. In 1964, at the age of eight, he was sent away to boarding school, to St Peter's, an Edwardian preparatory school for boys in Seaford on the Sussex coast. He left little impression upon the school record, apart from a star performance as Nerissa, the waiting-maid in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, in his final year. Most vacations he spent at Blakeney with his widowed grandmother, Iris Portal, an especially significant early influence in Welby's life. She was a daughter of the Raj, wife of a lieutenant-colonel in the Indian Army, younger sister of Rab Butler, a biographer in her later years and lived until the grand age of 97 in 2002. It was during these frequent visits to the Norfolk coast that Welby developed his life-long love for sailing.
In 1969 Welby moved to Eton College near Windsor, England's premier public school. The school was at a low ebb, with a dip in numbers, and the controversial headmaster Anthony Chenevix-Trench was dismissed in July 1970 amidst allegations about his administrative incompetence, heavy drinking and a Private Eye exposé of his pleasure at beating the boys. He was replaced by Michael McCrum (later Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) who set about restoring Eton's reputation and raising its academic standards. Welby boarded in South Lawn (one of 26 houses at Eton), with about 50 other boys. Many of his housemates were rich, unlike Welby, and went on to careers as investment bankers, stockbrokers, property developers, scientists, surgeons, and army officers. They included minor nobility and members of the Rothschild and Hambro banking dynasties. Welby observed: 'I know I didn't have much money, but I don't ever remember thinking everyone else has got so much more. It was clear other people were wealthier than we were. I probably was at the bottom end. But you know, school is school, you just get on with life.' Years after leaving Eton he discovered that his father had left the last two years of bills unpaid. With typical self-deprecation, Welby recalled: 'At school I was so obviously average that competitiveness (except in my imagination) was pointless.' His housemaster, Francis Gardner, remembered him as 'a model boy, though not one of great distinction'. He studied for A levels in English, French and History and stayed on at school for an extra term to sit the Cambridge entrance examination in December 1973.
After bidding farewell to Eton, Welby flew to East Africa for a short 'gap year', his first introduction to a continent he would grow to love. At a cocktail party in Chiswick he had met Simon Barrington-Ward, General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), an Anglican evangelical mission agency. As a result he found himself working in Kenya for six months as a teacher at Kiburu Secondary School, about 30 miles from Mount Kenya, as part of the Youth Service Abroad scheme run by CMS. A mission placement was an intriguing choice for a teenager who professed no Christian faith. Although he occasionally attended church as a child, usually at Christmas, even that habit had died out by the time he was at Eton. Obligatory school chapel was Welby's main connection with organised religion. Yet in Kenya, the Christians he met provoked him to begin to think more deeply about questions of faith and he started to read the Bible. He 'sensed there was a God and that he was somewhere around', but was unsure what to do about it. Healso experienced new trauma, required to go out in the middle of the night and cut down the body of a pupil who had hanged himself in the woods. By autumn 1974 he was launched into the world of Cambridge University, a new circle of friends and opportunities, and life-changing decisions.
CHAPTER 2
Conversion and Calling
Trinity College was the largest and wealthiest college within the University of Cambridge, boasting royal connections and a fist-full of Nobel Prize winners. Prince Charles was a student there until 1970 and the vast majority of the student body was drawn from public schools. Of the 206 undergraduates admitted in Michaelmas Term 1974, fourteen were from Eton. Like many other colleges it remained a male-only preserve, admitting women undergraduates for the first time in 1978. For Justin Welby, Trinity College was an obvious choice because of his family connections. Baron Butler, his great-uncle, had been elected as Master in 1965 when he retired from the House of Commons. Here Welby began a degree in law.
Student Evangelism
Student Christianity in Cambridge was vibrant. The largest of all the student societies was the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), an evangelical movement which connected Christian groups in all the colleges and was affiliated to the Inter-Varsity Fellowship. The CICCU celebrated its centenary in 1977 and its official history is the tale of enthusiastic student witness in the face of secularism and the threat of liberal theology. During the fundamentalist controversies of the 1910s, the CICCU seceded from the Student Christian Movement and its evangelical doctrinal basis continued to affirm the supreme authority and 'infallibility' of Scripture, the wrath of God at human sinfulness, the sacrificial and substitutionary death of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit in granting repentance and faith, and the expectation of Christ's 'personal return'. Within each of the colleges there were Bible study groups, prayer meetings and evangelistic events. Each weekend the CICCU invited one of Britain's leading evangelical preachers to deliver a Bible exposition on Saturday evening in the Union Society debating chamber, followed by an evangelistic address on Sunday evening at Holy Trinity Church. In the mid-1970s these were typically attended by 400 students each Saturday and 200–300 each Sunday.
In the months before Welby's arrival in Cambridge there was a flurry of Christian conversions amongst the undergraduates. When David Watson (vicar of St Michael-le-Belfrey in York) preached in November 1973 two dozen students professed faith in a single day. Particularly significant was the CICCU mission week in February 1974, called 'Christ Alive', led by David MacInnes, an Anglican clergyman and evangelist. Among the new converts at Trinity College were two Old Etonians a year ahead of Welby, Nicky Lee and Nicky Gumbel, best friends and roommates. Lee and his girlfriend, Sila Callander, were deeply struck by MacInnes' address on the cross of Christ, as she later testified:
It was a revelation to me. I kept saying to myself, 'Why did nobody ever tell me before why Jesus died on the cross?' It was as if everything I had ever known fitted together, not just intellectually, but also emotionally and spiritually. Everything made sense when the cross was explained.
When they informed Gumbel they had become Christians he was horrified, though he did agree to meet over lunch the next day with MacInnes who spoke of the transforming power of 'a personal relationship with Jesus'. Gumbel began to read through the New Testament in his old school Bible:
I was completely gripped by what I read. I had read it before and it had meant virtually nothing to me. This time it came alive and I could not put it down. It had a ring of truth about it. I knew as I read it that I had to respond because it spoke so powerfully to me. Very shortly afterwards I came to put my faith in Jesus Christ.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ARCHBISHOP JUSTIN WELBY by ANDREW ATHERSTONE. Copyright © 2013 Andrew Atherstone. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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