65 Years of Friendship: Bennett – Thomas – Beck by Geoffrey Beck (Theology 1942-46)
John Harrison Bennett B: Ipswich, Suffolk, D: Canberra, Australia 2007 Congregational Minister, Headgate, Colchester 1950-55 Sydney, Australia 1955-59; Adelaide 1959-71, Canberra 1971-85.
Vernon Lloyd Thomas B: Pencoed, South Wales, 1916, D: Pencoed, 2007 Further Education teacher, Banbury Tech. Lecturer in Department of Overseas Management and Administration Studies, Manchester University. Adviser to the International Labour Organisation, and other bodies.
Geoffrey Beck B: Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 1918 Congregational Minister, Eccleston St. Helens 1946-50; Summertown, Oxford 1950-65; Warden, Chapel of Unity, Coventry Cathedral 1965-71; Central Free, Brighton (URC) 1971-84. This article is about three Mansfield men who, aged 18, 24, and 26, in the academic year 1942-43, shared lodgings in 20 Osberton Road, Summertown, and whose friendship lasted 65 years. Vernon (26), our senior, was a Cardiff Philosophy Graduate, the youngest of eleven sisters and brothers, a lifelong socialist, born and bred in South Wales, with English his native tongue. Despite this fact, as a “theolog” he was a Calvinistic Methodist, the mainly Welsh-speaking Presbyterian Church of Wales. The SCM (Student Christian Movement) coupled with Mansfield made him ecumenical (ecumenism is the promotion of unity or cooperation between distinct religious groups or denominations of Christianity). In 1945 he went to study in Switzerland under the psychiatrist Carl Jung. John (18) was the youngest of four, a cheerful, energetic, overgrown schoolboy, launching on his wartime History degree at St. Catherine’s (before Mansfield gained status as a Permanent Private Hall, students had to matriculate through the non-residential St. Catherine’s Society, which later became St. Catherine’s College) – at first rather missing his home, school and church in the Suffolk market town of Framlingham. In 1949-50, when JCR President, he did a thesis on “Congregationalism in Suffolk from 18701940”. Writing in 1996 for our Golden Wedding album, John recalled “the rigours of wartime rations and the pangs of hunger”. Mrs Lupton, our Baptist landlady, strictly divided everything into three portions to ensure fair shares. It was a greatly matured young man indeed who returned to Mansfield after his 1943-46 service as a Royal artillery officer latterly in India, Burma, Thailand and Malaysia.
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In contrast I was a conscientious objector, the only child of 1914-18 Christian pacifist parents whose stance then had been costly in many ways: in comparison my 1939-42 saga of nine frustrating C.O.Tribunals was as nothing. (Conscientious Objector trials were set up when conscription was introduced in 1916 and again in 1939. A committee chaired by a County Court judge assessed each application.) At brief notice I was “allowed” to sit my Sociology Finals at LSE-in-Cambridge. I had also met SCM member and Anglican Joy Crookshank, my wife-to-be, in Cambridge. She was training to be a psychiatric social worker, ending with a placement in an Oxford clinic near our lodgings. She brightened our lives with spring-time visits. For our 1996 Golden Wedding Album Vernon wrote: “She and I talked Psychology a lot, and I recall cycling along together to the digs talking about the nervous system – we wobbled along!”. I returned after a long illness in 1944 to find that he had a close Medical student friend, Elisabeth Browne, who became a psychiatrist. Lifelong friends, but they never married. Vernon also reminisced in 1996, “Geoffrey and I were keen members of the SCM”. Our weekly meetings were in the Old Library of the University Church, and there were stimulating sermons in the Church on Sunday evenings – from Archbishop William Temple onwards. Thus the Church of St Mary the Virgin in the High came to have rich memories for all of us. In March 1952 John was married there to Dorothy Burgmann, daughter of the Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn. By then the vicar was Roy Lee, an Australian, so he and his wife were a friendly home-fromhome for Dorothy during her research studies. She and John had met during his final Mansfield year, and five months later he proposed marriage to her at Framlingham Castle. John had promised to visit Australia “for two years at least”. In 1955 the young minister, plus wife and two children (two more to come) sailed for £5 on a boat for emigrants – the “New Australians” of the 1950’s. The two years became fifty-two, with seven return visits, always by boat, to spend time with family and old friends. As for Vernon, I know that his work took him around the world, from parts of Africa, to Bangladesh, Chicago, and Czechoslovakia, for example – but telephoning, rather than his inscrutable handwriting, kept us in touch, especially when he retired to his Welsh birthplace, and up to a few days before the end. And now I quote from two excellent Thanksgiving services dedicated to John last November in Tuggeranong United Church, Canberra and Pilgrim Church, Adelaide, in part by his family. “From his arrival in Australia Dad was part of the movement towards Church Union [for he] was both a denominational and an ecumenical leader [who] loved his own dissenting tradition.” From 1959 to 1971 in central Adelaide and similarly in Canberra, “apart from his pastoral care, for him a city church and city pulpit was how he addressed issues of state and national concern. But … once Dad retired … he took other ways of making his views known on many ➥ M A NS FIEL D CO L L EGE M AG A Z I N E