The bishop and the chestnut seller

Posted in Blog, Royal family

One day, in the year 1901, when Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was visiting King Edward VII at Sandringham, the PM asked the King, ‘Who is the young clergyman sitting at the far end of the table?’

‘That is the man you have just nominated as Bishop of London,’ the King replied.

The young man in question was Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, who had been Bishop of Stepney since 1897. Although Winnington-Ingram had been educated at Marlborough College and Keble College, Oxford, it is said that he preached in a cockney accent. He was an Evangelical – that is, he stressed redemption through the death of Christ on the cross, the need for personal conversion and the urgency of evangelism.

And Winnington-Ingram was certainly an evangelist. Towards the end of his life he told a group of clergy, ‘My brothers, I have been preaching the Gospel for 50 years, and even now I never go up the pulpit stairs without a thrill of eagerness to proclaim the Good News.’

As Bishop of Stepney he had become much-loved in the East End of London and, when it was announced that he was to become Bishop of London, he received 3000 letters of congratulation and a huge crowd assembled outside St Paul’s to cheer him on. And, at the end of his long 38 years as Bishop (he resigned when he was past his 80th birthday), most Londoners couldn’t remember when he was not their

Bshop.

His sermons were always popular – full of illustrations and anecdotes. Preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, he spoke about what he saw as her remarkable kindness: ‘… that one so strong should be so kind; that one so fearless should have so much sympathy; that one whose moral standard was so high should be full of mercy and gentleness.  It was that which gave a force to those many stories which came to us about the visits to the little lonely cottages in the Highlands; the telegrams to the women huddled by the pit-mouth in their misery; the letter to the mother of the young officer who had died for his country – what gave force to it all was its strength, the fact that it was no passing impulse, but the deep beating of a true mother’s heart, that it was the outcome of character; and that, as is so beautifully said in this description of the virtuous woman in the Book of Proverbs: “In her tongue was the law of kindness”.’

But we have to admit that, by all accounts, Winnington-Ingram was not a good administrator of his huge diocese. During his time in charge in London, discipline was poor and an unfortunate dispute arose between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals. However, during his episcopate, 79 new churches were built and another 38 rebuilt or enlarged. He didn’t deny his failings and, on his retirement, he admitted ‘I am much too kind to be a good Bishop’.On the plus side, however, he was always available to people in trouble and spent many hours visiting the sick. A friend remembered how, ‘Dr Ingram was walking along the Mile End Road to a meeting on a very wet night when he saw an old woman sitting in the gutter selling chestnuts. She was ill-clad and much exposed to the rain. The Bishop took off his mackintosh and put it around the shoulder of the old woman and then proceeded on his journey, arriving at the meeting all wet.’

Perhaps we should forgive the Bishop his other failings.