Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945–1961 (review)

Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury, presided over the Anglican communion during a momentous transition in modern British culture and society: from deference, dependence, and duty to indifference, insecurity, and mass individualism. The end of empire was fast approaching as India and then African nations gained independence while the masses at home enjoyed the welfare state. Revolutions in higher education, health, and consumer spending gradually gathered pace. The end of National Service in 1960, emerging feminism, and comparative affluence further eroded the old order: money did not smell. The Anglican Church and all Western Christian churches faced a new intractable problem, wealthier leisured classes rather than poverty: it was a shock.

David Hein’s fine book shows Fisher facing these shifts with headmasterly composure, if not creative flair. Like Cardinal Griffin, his Roman Catholic counterpart, he remained in his safe haven: both were benign authoritarians. Fisher’s businesslike administration proved far more valuable in the long term than popular headlines.

Hein shows Fisher as a traditional, gentlemanly vicar, comfortable in the small village of his youth and dotage. An unimpressive public speaker, perhaps surprisingly for a public school headmaster, he proved more a rigid upholder of the Law of God than the spirit of the Gospel. In balancing competing wings of the Anglican Church, he was suspicious of intellectuals and uncomfortable in a Britain “that never had it so good.” After evading the morality of using A-bombs against Japan, he became a cold war realist in accepting nuclear weapons. To him, adultery was always a sin, and so he opposed Princess Margaret’s possible marriage to an innocent divorced man. Similarly, he found Premium Bonds unacceptable gambling. He refused to countenance the representation of the Church of Scotland in the House of Lords and enjoyed his Masonic membership. By establishing the Church Commissioners within the Anglican Church he was able to improve clerical stipends. Stability and order were his key ideas.

A disappointment as successor to the short-lived William Temple, Fisher proved a safe pair of hands. Less intellectual than Bishop Barnes, J. A. T. Robinson, and their ilk, he felt their academic concerns unhelpful in the public arena. Although he steadied the ship with his much criticized and protracted work on canon law, he reached out to the World Council of Churches and appreciated the emerging world in visits to Africa, where he laid the groundwork for the postcolonial church, to North America, and to Australia. The televised Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 brought both royal splendor and Anglican liturgy to a wider public in a bland postwar world. His visit to Pope John XXIII paved the way for ecumenical advances. Like the less than charismatic Labour premier Clement (Richard) Attlee, founder of the welfare state, he proved an effective bridge to the modern world. Within shorter confines than Edward Carpenter’s 820-page biography (1991), Hein gives us an excellent, balanced overview.