Annual Review 2011
damaging to the Church’s mission and hostile to the inclusiveness which it ought to practise. Although a close friend of Rowan Williams, Slee was appalled by the Archbishop’s decision in 2003 to persuade Canon Jeffrey John, a celibate homosexual and a member of the Southwark Chapter, to ask for his nomination as suffragan Bishop of Reading to be withdrawn. A campaign against Canon John’s nomination had been mounted by Evangelicals in the Oxford diocese. Announcing the outcome during a Sunday morning service in the Cathedral was painful for the Dean. Colin Slee’s outspoken and combative radicalism (which no doubt cost him a bishopric) was combined with whole-hearted orthodoxy in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. He insisted on following liturgical forms of prayer, and required the cathedral clergy to wear black shirts. This, he said, was ‘a statement of history and origin, a uniform deeply rooted in tradition and monastic antecedents […] not the floral extravaganzas more symptomatic of a photocollage of the Chelsea Flower Show than the hard work of saving souls.’ His activities in Southwark extended beyond the cathedral: he was chaplain to Shakespeare’s Globe, two doors along from his house, and a trustee of both the Millennium Bridge and the Borough Market. Colin’s wife Edith Tryon was born in New Zealand. They married in 1971, during Colin’s first curacy, and had two daughters and a son, as well as fostering a brother and sister whom they later adopted.
Dorothy Thompson 1923‒2011 A communist sympathiser from her schooldays, Dorothy Thompson was possessed of a passionate radicalism and a lifelong sympathy for the underdog. It was the combination of these sentiments that must have drawn her to devote her historical research and writing to the nineteenth-century Chartist movement, and her political life to socialism, feminism and the peace movement. She saw the Chartists as having been overlooked by modern historians and even disparaged by Marxists as naive peasant romantics who had stood in the way of revolution. Thus her two major books The Early Chartists (1971) and The Chartists (1984) sought to emphasise the present relevance of their proposals: reform of land tenure, an accessible press, and ‘the kind of control which [they] sought over their work, over the education of their children, and over the way in which they spent their leisure.’ Brought up in suburban Bromley, she joined a communist youth group that awakened in her early a realisation that the struggle for workers’ and women’s rights was ongoing. This must have ill-suited her for much of the conventional life of the local Kent girls’ schools, and she moved between three of them before coming up to Girton in 1942 as an Exhibitioner to read History. In common with so many, her College career was interrupted by the demands of the War. After two years she left for Government work as an engineering draftsman and met and married Gilbert Sale – an Army officer. The marriage was very brief. She went back to College to complete her degree and met Edward (EP) Thompson, who had recently returned from war service in North Africa. He was at Corpus Christi and also reading History. She and Edward travelled together to Yugoslavia to help with repairing the war-damaged railway network and they finally married when
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