Back in 2021 I picked up a used copy of Alan Ecclestone: Priest As Revolutionary, by Tim Gorringe, and read it front to back twice. It was a revelation.
I had the chance to interview the author, Tim Gorringe, and post that interview as a podcast on my blog. That was a fun conversation.
This past summer, as a wonderful surprise, I received an e-mail from Alan's son Jacob, who had listened to the podcast. We've opened up a kind of slow correspondence back and forth over these past couple of months.
The relationship between Ecclestone’s politics and his religion was often a heated topic, both during his time as a priest and later in his retirement as an author. He was, famously, a Communist priest.
At one point a colleague asked Ecclestone:
‘Still a member of the Communist Party, Alan ?’
His response was: ‘Yes, and I am still a member of the Church of England.’
I'm drawn to the stories of pastors who have an integrated sense of politics and faith. I’m always on the look-out for comrades.
One part of Jacob's reflection on his father (in a letter written back in 2013 to a professor writing a book about left-wing clergy in the Church of England in the 20th century) really stood out for me, so I share it at length:
"Once, much later in life, I asked my father what it was that led him to be ordained. His outlook on life was so different from the conventional C of E clergy that I wondered why on earth he had given up the life of a university don to become a priest. Slightly facetiously I asked him if he had been "called". I don't remember his exact reply, but the substance of it was "No - it was a decision driven by the Catholic Crusade's view that for a committed Christian it was a political duty to be ordained."
The point being - if I understand it correctly - that Christianity is about changing the world, making the lives of ordinary people fuller, richer, healthier; about expanding the intellectual and artistic and literary gifts of men and women; of helping and educating and leading people to the full flowering of their potential...."that they may have life and have it more abundantly" as it says somewhere in the Gospels. It was certainly one of the Biblical phrases that was hugely important to him.The key to understanding him - and writing this is quite helpful to me as I try to tease out various strands - lies, I think, in not (NOT) trying to distinguish between the religious and the secular, the belief in God (or god) and the belief in man. They were one and the same - woven together, complementary rather than separate and different. It was this, I think, that gave him such enormous moral courage."
I asked Jacob if he might be able to find a copy of a specific booklet he mentioned in particular, a description of “the parish meeting” that was a centerpiece of Ecclestone’s ministry. About a week later, I received a lengthy e-mail from Ecclestone’s grandson with multiple links to resources.
Because there is so little available online currently about Ecclestone, and because these letters from Jacob and Andrew are so wonderful composed, I’m including them here in this blog, in the hopes that at least a few readers will enjoy going down the Alan Ecclestone rabbit hole with me.
Dear Clint (if I may ?)
I was delighted by your reply. Isn’t life strange…. and wonderful ?
A couple of days after I wrote to you, our eldest son (in New Zealand) emailed to say that he was interested in a little booklet which my father wrote in 1953. It was called “The Parish Meeting at Work”. Andrew was more interested in the deliberative democracy aspect than the religious, but I thought it was an odd coincidence coming just after listening to you talking with Tim Gorringe about the meeting.
…. and then another oddity. I was looking for something in the computer and by chance came across a document I wrote 10 years ago. I attach a copy of what I wrote to a Mr Poole, an academic at Manchester University. You may find it interesting, if only because it puts into a more personal context some of what Tim was talking about.
As I recall, Tim only got to know my father after he retired (in 1969) and went to live in a tiny cottage with my mother in the north-west of England - only a few miles from Frizington where he had his first parish. There were a few minor points on which I think Tim was wrong: Alan did have a television for a few years after he retired - but got rid of it because, rather typically, he felt he was wasting time. However, he greatly enjoyed some of the childrens’ cartoon programmes, one in particular being “The Magic Roundabout” which is now regarded as a classic in British tv.
Also, I think Tim possibly exaggerated the number of people who attended the parish meeting. I would have put the figure at 25 to 40
The remark which really made me sit up, however, was Tim’s description of my father as a “martinet”. That would have been the very last word I would have chosen - though, as Tim commented, Alan could be sharp for example with other clergy who he felt were not taking their job seriously. On one occasion, years after he had retired, he exchanged a goodbye handshake with the village priest after taking communion and said quite gently, “Do you realise that the only person we prayed for by name this morning is the richest woman in England?” He was referring to Queen Elizabeth !
No, I would never describe him as a martinet, for the term denotes discipline and punishment. He was hugely self-disciplined, and certainly demanded high standards of other clergy, but for 99 per cent of the time he was gentle, courteous, interested in what people had to say, a good listener and would easily break into a smile or laughter.
I also came across recently a copy of a letter published in the “Church Times” (the Church of England weekly newspaper) - a letter which I had never read before and it made me burst into laughter.
The letter, published in May 2013 read:
“Sir, Canon Alan Wilkinson’s mention of Alan Ecclestone (Books, 19 April) reminds me that, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, a friend said:
‘Still a member of the Communist Party, Alan ?’
His response was: ‘Yes, and I am still a member of the Church of England.’ !!
I have already had you attention for too long. Write when you have a moment.
Here is the text of my email to mr Poole. All good wishes,
Jacob
This is the text of an email which I sent to Edward Poole on 5 June 2013. As I recall, Mr Poole was working at Manchester University at the time and writing a book about left-wing clergy in the Church of England in the 20th century.
Dear Mr Poole,
Sorry to have been so slow in responding. There's always so much to do when one is "retired".
I should say at the outset that I find it quite difficult to answer your questions - not because I don't like them but because they require sensitive and nuanced replies.
There are no easy responses.
A contributing difficulty concerns the parent-child relationship, my age at the time you are interested in, etc.
Let me give you a brief timeline: I was born in 1939, the youngest of three sons. Just before the outbreak of war, my parents took in an Austrian boy who came to Britain as a five-year-old on the Kindertransport. He was, in effect, my eldest "brother". My father left Frizington, in west Cumbria, and became vicar of Holy Trinity church, Darnall, in 1942. I therefore spent all but the first three years of my life growing up in the east end of Sheffield. The strongest memory I have is the smoke - the steelworks pumping out dirt. I feel I can still taste it - smell it - a layer of grit on every surface, window cills, clothes, gutters. Sheffield was an incredibly smoky, dirty, blackened city - later transformed by the Clean Air Act of 1957
I was eight years old when my parents joined the Communist Party, too young to be aware of such a huge decision when the cold war was being stoked up.
Life at home seemed to be one, long semi-continuous discussion about everything imaginable: politics, art, science, international events and so on and so on.It was an endless conversation - lively, funny, serious, puzzling. For a child, sitting listening to all this at mealtimes and wanting to join in, it was a constant puzzle. It became a small family joke that I, as the youngest, would sometimes ask (plaintively) "But which side are we on?"
Growing up in a poor, working-class part of Sheffield, being the son of the local vicar was difficult enough (torn between wanting to be completely ordinary, like all the other boys, and yet being conscious that I was part of a family where books and pictures and poetry and constant discussion infused everyday life)....... but being the son of a vicar who was also a communist, that made it much harder.
I left grammar school in 1957 and - unlike my two older brothers - did not go to university. (Herbert Neuwalder had rejoined his parents after the war and had gone to live in the United States). I got a job on a weekly newspaper as a trainee journalist - working in Rotherham, Mexborough and the fringes of Sheffield. In 1961 I moved up the ladder a bit, going to work on the Yorkshire Evening News in Doncaster.
That meant leaving home and going to live in digs. I remember the excruciating embarassment I felt when the chief sub-editor called me into the subs' room and showed me the Press Association copy about my fatherbeing a communist candidate in the forthcoming elections.
The following year I moved to London when I got a job on The Times (where, of course, all the more senior staff were well aware of who my father was - though they were too well-bred ever to mention it to me)
Looking back on my father's life, I realise that one of the most significant experiences in the first part of his life - something which I think helped to shape the rest of it – was coming into contact with the Catholic Crusade. Jim Wilson - a brother of the Antarctic explorer, Edward Wilson, who died with Scott - was the Church of England priest in the parish of Sneyd in the Potteries.
Tim Gorringe writes about how my father started going to this church.
Once, much later in life, I asked my father what it was that led him to be ordained. His outlook on life was so different from the conventional C of E clergy that I wondered why on earth he had given up the life of a university don to become a priest. Slightly facetiously I asked him if he had been "called". I don't remember his exact reply, but the substance of it was "No - it was a decision driven by the Catholic Crusade's view that for a committed Christian it was a political duty to be ordained."
The point being - if I understand it correctly - that Christianity is about changing the world, making the lives of ordinary people fuller, richer, healthier; about expanding the intellectual and artistic and literary gifts of men and women; of helping and educating and leading people to the full flowering of their potential...."that they may have life and have it more abundantly" as it says somewhere in the Gospels. It was certainly one of the Biblical phrases that was hugely important to him
The key to understanding him - and writing this is quite helpful to me as I try to tease out various strands - lies, I think, in not (NOT) trying to distinguish between between the religious and the secular, the belief in God (or god) and the belief in man. They were one and the same - woven together, complementary rather than separate and different. It was this, I think, that gave him such enormous moral courage - allied to anoutstanding intellect and a profound love of history and literature.
He was an open, friendly, gentle person who smiled a lot, saw humour everywhere, took a childlike pleasure in the new and the unusual........ and he was also, on occasion, steely; capable of demolishing pomposity and political stupidity with astonishing precision and cold anger. This was rare and almost invariably directed at those who talked with the casual ignorance of the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph reader !
He was the most disciplined person one can imagine. I don't mean that in the sense of being dour, because he was the opposite of dour, but he took his life and work with great seriousness. He talked to Tim Gorringe, I think, about how - as a young man - he had a fear of failure and this lead him to try to be rigorously well-prepared. This applied to his WEA lectures, to his sermons, to his reading and preparation for the weekly "Parish Meeting"(the parish meeting every Wednesday evening for 27 years was the point at which he brought Christianity into the world and the world into the congregation).
His day fell into three parts - morning reading; afternoon visiting house to house round the parish quite methodically (calling on people who mostly had no use for the church) and hearing about and getting to know and understand the minutiae of peoples' lives; evenings out at WEA or the Wednesday parish meeting. On Saturdays, if he did not have weddings, he would sometimes take me to see Sheffield Wednesday and we would stand on the terraces !
I can't remember when it was, but at some stage (probably in the 1950s) he decided that speaking from a pulpit was not the most effective way of communicating with the (almost entirely) working class congregation. The very idea of talking "down" to people he found offensive. So he took the pulpit out - he physically removed it - and simply stood at the front of the congregation when he preached .
The reason I began this email with some account of my childhood is that teenage boys don't pay much attention to sermons, even if they are being given by a much-loved parent. It is very hard, therefore, for me to give you a serious and accurate description of the content of his sermons. He spoke clearly, he used words with care, he had the gift of all great teachers of being able to explain difficult ideas, to light up peoples' minds, to challenge and provoke without being aggressive....... and the sad thing is that, as far as I know, there is no written record of any of them. Well, with one exception. I will send you a copy - if I can still find it - of the sermons he preached at St.Paul's Cathedral on Good Friday in 1988/89??. It would not have been typical of the sermons he gave, Sunday by Sunday in the 27 years he was in Darnall, but it may give you some flavour of the density and richness of his thought.
What I can tell you about the sermons he gave in Darnall is that they attracted people from outside the parish. I am thinking of a regular "visitors" -people like Michael Jackson, the head of Sheffield Industrial Mission (a parson, but without a parish to run), Pamela Keilly, a woman who for many years in the 1940s and 50s was responsible in the Sheffield diocese for religious drama (sounds gruesome, but she was ahead of her time, I think), and John Peil and his wife. He was an unusual man - a factory owner who at one stage was made "Master Cutler" of Sheffield but a person who took his Christianity seriously and presumably came across the city from his home in the leafier suburbs of Fullwood to listen to someone who, on the face of it, was poles apart politically but who he felt had something relevant to say.
Were his sermons "political"? Depends on what is meant by "political". I doubt very much whether words such as "Soviet Union" "Communism", "Marx" or "Cold War" ever crossed his lips during a sermon. There was nothing overtly political at all ..... but of course Christianity and the Gospels are about politics - about social justice, about health, about feeding people, about the relationships between people and between people and the state. At a period in our history when Britain was fighting to hold on to its colonies, there were obvious connections with the Roman Empire. It may at times have been a fine line, but I can honestly say that I have no memory of anyone at any time complaining that he had misused or abused his position to preach "politics". It may have been, of course, that people did not recognise what they were hearing as politics, but - as I have tried to suggest earlier - the political and the religious were spun from the same thread and there was no unpicking them.
You are understandably interested in what parishioners thought about Alan standing as a Communist Party candidate in Sheffield city council elections. It's important to remember the context. He had been in Darnall for almost 20 years by that time, and the fact that he was a member of the CP had long been known. He never made any secret of it. But he was doing his job year in, year out -baptising babies, marrying young couples, burying people in the local cemetery or on duty at the city crematorium, visiting four or five afternoons a week, visiting sick people, dealing with the constant problems of running a church, looking after a family, waiting for buses on winter nights to bring him home from Barnsley or Doncaster where he had been giving WEA talks on literature or history (young Arthur Scargill attended one course, apparently).
I find it almost impossible to give you a truthful answer as to what members of the congregation thought about his candidature because I simply don't know. But I have no memory of anyone within the congregation denouncing him, walking out, protesting or making any other public response.
I also have no memory of him talking about anyone who had been hurt or angry at his decision to accept nomination - accepted by him as part of his duty as a member of the CP, rather than something he sought for himself.
At more than 50 years' remove, it is difficult to be certain that there was no hostile response locally - but my memory is reasonably good and if there had been any groundswell of opposition I am pretty sure that I would remember it.
Within the congregation - the regulars, as it were - I think there were probably three broad responses: those (a few) who had come to share some or most of his political views; those (probably a majority) who appreciated his work as a dedicated priest and simply accepted that he was acting according to strongly held beliefs even if they did not understand it, and those who may have been privately troubled - and possibly even in some cases have raised their anxieties with him. I do not remember him ever talking about how members of the church reacted.
The wider public did, of course, react. Local and national media frothed and harrumphed and there were lots of letters to the national and local press. To be fair, the Sheffield Telegraph, a long deceased provincial morning paper, did invite him to respond and gave him space which he used. Most of the reaction was, I suppose, entirely predictable - especially from those who had no interest or commitment to Christianity but who nevertheless were able to denounce someone from a standpoint of towering ignorance of both Marxism and Christianity. I don't think those sort of letter and comments troubled him - partly because his deep sense of history gave him parallels and a depth of perspective.
I will, in the next few days, make photocopies of the letters which he received personally from people all over the country. A few were abusive, many were puzzled and some genuinely pleased and supportive of his actions. You can judge.
Two other ideas come to mind.
There can be very few people still alive who knew Alan well in the 40s and 50s. One such person - who was alive last December - is Richard Saunders who, as a young priest, worked with Alan as his curate in Darnall in the mid-1940s. When we last spoke he was clear and sharp though well into his 90s. I will ask him, by email, if he would be agreeable to you contacting him.
The second thought is that the Diocese of Sheffield would have kept records on all clergy and I assume that there is an archive somewhere with a file marked : "Alan Ecclestone - Personal" or something like that.
I have no doubt that MI5 also kept a file on him dating from the 1940s - or possibly even earlier.
Apologies if this has seemed rather long-winded for little tangible reward. Do come back to me with any questions you may have and I will be happy to try to answer them.
With good wishes, Jacob Ecclestone
On 20 May 2013, at 16:31, Edward Poole wrote:
Dear Mr Ecclestone,
Many thanks for your letter of 15 May, and apologies for the delay in my reply. I have been travelling for my research, and picked up your letter on my return.
Thank you for sending to me the photocopies of the obituaries in the press. I had not yet found those from the Daily Telegraph and the Church Times, and so thanks for these especially.
If you are happy for me to see the letters that you mention, I would be very interested in reading them. If it is not possible to photocopy them, would you be happy to send them to me, and then I will return them to you? If so, please let me know and I will send a postage-paid envelope to you. Of course, I understand if they are too delicate to be posted. I am particularly interested to know more about your father's candidature for the Communist Party in the 1960s, especially how people reacted to a clergyman standing as a communist.
I also keen to know more about your father's ministry in Darnall. I understand he was a dedicated parish priest and that he took his duties very seriously, regularly visiting parishioners and preparing diligently for his preaching, and I have heard from a handful of parishioners who remember a "genuine" and "attentive" priest.
I hope this email finds its way to you. I have been told before that some email servers do not seem to like my email address!
Many thanks,
Edward Poole
Dear Clint,
I’m Jacob Ecclestone’s son - and Alan Ecclestone’s grandson.
A few weeks ago I saw that an acquaintance of mine, Ruby Quantson Davies, had co-authored a new book, On the Significance of Religion for Deliberative Democracy (details at the link below).
In the first year of the pandemic I was invited to join a new organisation that works to strengthen democracy, and explore and advocate around ideas of deliberative democracy (https://trustdemocracy.nz). Several of the founders had connections to the Kettering Foundation, based in Dayton Ohio, which is how I was introduced to Ruby (she’s been a fellow there). After reading the ‘About us’ page for your church in Arkansas, I think you’d find the work of the Foundation interesting.
Because I knew about my grandfather’s Parish Meetings, I searched online for some material about them, in order to send to Ruby. Amongst the search results was your podcast with Tim Gorringe last year (which I also sent on to my dad, which is how he came to listen to it). I listened to it this morning, and enjoyed your discussion with Tim.
One of the other links that turned up was to a second-hand bookseller, who had a copy of Alan’s 1953 booklet ’The Parish Meeting At Work’. I bought it and after my parents had kindly posted it out to me in New Zealand, I scanned it in and cleaned up the typos etc. Reading it made me realise that some of the language used by Alan had dated quite a bit, since in 1953 there weren’t any women ordained as priests in the Church of England, and he also used the academic habit of referring to humanity and people as ‘men’ or ‘man’.
So, I’ve produced a very lightly edited second edition of the booklet, which aside from changing some pronouns amends only one sentence at the end of the booklet which seemed to be garbled either by the original publishers or by Alan’s occasional use of overly long and complicated sentence structures.
Attached is a copy of this second edition, which has been laid out for printing double-sided (flipped on the short edge of the paper) on US Letter size paper. If you’d like the first edition, a differently formatted version, or an ePUB file of the booklet, please let me know.
You may well have done your own searching online for other material about the Parish Meeting, and Alan’s work, but in case you’ve not already found them, I thought you’d be interested in the material below
https://repository.globethics.net/bitstream/handle/20.500.12424/159878/n286-4_Part_1.pdf?sequence=1 - clicking on the image snippet will download the PDF of the full article
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0040571X4604931703 - partially out from behind a paywall
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0040571X5305639909 - sadly this is behind a paywall that my library doesn’t have access to, but is a contemporary review of The Parish Meeting At Work.
https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/54554107/FULL_TEXT.PDF - a Master’s thesis entitled 'Troublesome Priests: Christianity and Marxism in the Church of England, 1906-1969'
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=NmumDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=%22alan+ecclestone%22+%22parish+meeting%22&source=bl&ots=SOO7KbGXpi&sig=ACfU3U3bG5kt7f6tMqY2o-Xk9L1vjKaThg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiajMmgvsCAAxXTqFYBHQLcAXE4FBDoAXoECAYQAw#v=onepage&q=%22alan%20ecclestone%22%20%22parish%20meeting%22&f=false - an extract from this book: https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/multi-congregation-ministry/23323295
An obituary of Alan by one of his former curates, Alan Webster (who went on to be Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London) also mentions the Parish Meetings: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-the-rev-alan-ecclestone-1563770.html
If you’ve not found copies of other writing by Alan, they’re listed here on Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/author/alan-ecclestone/
I realised after producing this new version of ’The Parish Meeting At Work’ that one of those books on the page above, ‘Firing The Clay’ apparently reproduces it too: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30296347204&searchurl=an%3Dalan%2Becclestone%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title8
I’ve also discovered that it was reproduced in a large compendium entitled ‘Radical Christian Writings’, compiled by Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland. The entire book is available to download as a free PDF here: https://vdoc.pub/documents/radical-christian-writings-a-reader-5ipj873anpj0 Alan would have been happy to see his writing alongside that of the Diggers and Levellers of the English Revolution, since he studied that period of history closely (I have some of his collection of history books).
All good wishes from Wellington,
Andrew Ecclestone
Dear Clint,
I must apologise for being so slow to reply. It’s a curious aspect of getting old: everything takes far longer to accomplish (or even address !) than a few years ago.
The excitement in our little town in the last week has been the news that the Home Office (our Interior Ministry) has placed a number of asylum seekers in our only hotel. Indeed, it seems the government has effectively bought every room for the next year. Diss is pretty old (the parish church of St Mary’s is 12th century, and the royal charter for a weekly market is almost as old) and, as you might imagine, fairly reactionary. Margaret and I and a few friends have spent much of the last week trying to organise a support group and to counter the awful smears and alarm stories on social media. So we have been usefully busy - which isn’t always the case. This morning I went to the hotel and talked with several teenage boys from Afghanistan in the car park: I was not allowed in ! The boys and their parents are able to speak English reasonably well - I expect the father was an interpreter for the British or American military. They lived in Kabul and were probably well off by local standards.
What an irony, I thought: Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1840, 1876, 1920s and then with the US this century……. and, just like Alexander the Great, we lost every time. Having wrecked their country, it’s hardly surprising that some Afghans want to live here. Or, rather, they want to live in peace - and people here object !!
You asked if you could make use of the letter I sent you. Yes, by all means. At my age there is virtually nothing that could embarrass or damage no matter how it was twisted.
I hope that by now you will have received a digital copy of “The Parish Meeting at Work” from our eldest son, Andrew, in New Zealand. He went to some pains to change the gender pronouns without altering the text in any other way. I hope you find it interesting. I suppose that I must be the last person alive who ever attended the weekly meetings.
As a teenager I didn’t take part very much - there were too many other attractions - and of course now, looking back, I regret it. For the first 15 years, between 1942 and 1957, the meeting always took place in the vicarage, the old house in which we lived. It was built around 1720, with a later addition - probably a farmhouse for most of its life until the mid 19th century. About 20 to 30 people squeezed into the “living room” - the only room with a coal fire (there was no central heating and in winter the house was perishing cold).
My father sat to one side of the fire in a low, very battered little armchair. I was thinking about this a few days ago, and realised that he probably chose that chair deliberately because it meant that he was looking up to everyone else - if only slightly. - rather than looking down.
Thank you for mentioning the DSA in your last email. I was completely ignorant of such a body or movement, so I was pleased when I found out what the initials stood for. Yes, I can well imagine that Fayetteville is a difficult place in which to get across political ideas which are even faintly socialist, but I get the sense that the US is (a) well over the hump in terms of its world “leadership” and that (b) there are currents stirring socially……currents which haven’t been seen in America for several generations.
Good wishes,
Jacob
PS When you have the time, I would like to learn a little about the Lutheran Church’s attitude to Palestine/Israel, something which I have got quite involved in here in the UK.