Today is the 37th anniversary of the death of Rev. Dr Gareth Bennett. He was 58. He took his own life as the result of a tragic and unnecessary scandal.
Bizarrely, it all started when he agreed to write the Preface of the forthcoming edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory.
Crockford's is the definitive catalogue of the Anglican clergy - the Who's Who of the Church of England. It has a kind of official status, as it is published through a church publishing house. For much of the twentieth century, there was a tradition of printing an anoymous Preface in each edition. The Prefaces would sometimes have an element of controversy: one of the previous 1980s Prefaces, for example, had called for the resignation of David Jenkins, the liberal Bishop of Durham. But they were largely anodyne.
Dr Bennett was a critic of the direction that the Church of England had taken in the late twentieth century. He was a conservative Anglo-Catholic - a member of a wing of the church that he felt had been almost entirely frozen out of its governance. He was known in particular for his opposition to women priests. The Preface reflected his concerns about the functioning of modern Anglicanism. The most explosive parts of the text related to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Bennett presented Runcie as a weak, ineffectual figure. He quoted with approval Frank Field MP's description of him as "nailing his colours to the fence" - a quote that the press later attributed to Bennett himself. Bennett also alleged that Runcie had a corrupt habit of appointing his liberal chums to church offices.
The Preface is no longer available free online, although a discussion of some of its contents can be found here.
There was a personal angle to all this. Dr Bennett's career in the church had stalled. At the time that he wrote the Preface, he was still in the same position in which he had begun his career: he was a fellow of New College, Oxford specialising in church history. He chances of becoming Bishop Bennett or Dean Bennett had ebbed away as others were promoted over his head. There were good reasons for this, besides Runcie's alleged nepotism. Bennett was not a bad man; but he could be a difficult man. He could be perceived as cold and unfriendly - and, while Christian teaching does not require everyone to be a clubbable extrovert, his personality was incompatible with senior pastoral responsibilities. Runcie probably realised that. It made sense to leave Dr Bennett at Oxford, where he is said to have taught his students well while serving the church with his scholarship.
The Crockford's Preface was not normally national news. But when Dr Bennett's Preface for the new edition was circulated before publication, a journalist at the Press Association spotted the criticisms of Runcie. He realised that they raised the stakes considerably. Bennett's reproval of church governance was not just part of an internal fight within the Church of England: it was a matter of wider public interest. Archbishop Runcie was a major national figure, and he had been no stranger to political controversy. He was associated with the progressive wing of the church that had come into public conflict with the Thatcher government. Journalists smelt blood.
On Thursday 3 December 1987, every British daily newspaper led with the story, with the sole exception of the Mirror. Even the Sun discovered that it had a 'Religious Affairs Correspondent'. After this public attack from one of his own in the church's house directory, would Runcie have to resign? There was a sad irony here insofar as Bennett did not personally dislike Runcie. But this was no longer about Dr Bennett and what he wanted.
By this time, a hunt had started for the author of the Preface. Various names came up, including the great Cambridge theologian Henry Chadwick. Garry Bennett's name was one of the first to attract suspicion. He repeatedly denied that he was the author. The Press Association journalist who was the first to break the story had taken his denial on trust: he later said that he didn't believe that a clergyman would tell a lie. (If one is looking for an ethical loophole here, Bennett's contract with Crockford's prevented him from identifying himself as the author.) Oddly enough, one reason why Bennett's denials were initially believed was that the Preface spoke favourably of Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, whom Bennett was known to have fallen out with.
The situation deteriorated rapidly. Bishops publicly denounced the Preface. It was only a matter of time before Dr Bennett was identified as the author. It became clear that he was headed for a monstering by the great British press, and that he had nuked his career and social standing. He confided to his diary: "I shall be lucky to weather this business through without disaster and some kind of public exposure. The more I think about it, the more I know how bloody foolish I have been."
Dr Bennett was dead within a week of the press getting hold of the story. His suicide ran contrary to his conservative Anglo-Catholic beliefs, which forbid taking one's own life. But it did not come out of nowhere. There was some suggestion that he had depressive tendencies, and his diary entries over the previous year confirmed that he was not a contented man. He had grown more lonely than ever after the death of his mother. It may also be that he was tipped over the edge by the sudden death of his cat, Tibby, on Saturday 5 December. He loved his cat.
Dr Bennett was also an actor in a wider drama: he was a cleric in a church in which classical Anglican theology had been defeated by a 1960s generation that believed more strongly in women's ordination than it did in the Nicene Creed. Viewed from a sympathetic perspective, Bennett was a man of principle who wrote a serious-minded critique of flaws in the church and was left to the wolves by his Christian brethren. From another perspective, he was a divisive figure who was clinging on to a narrow and regressive version of Christianity and was let down by his own character flaws. He was in any event unequipped to face the savage animal that was Fleet Street in the 1980s. The ruthless men and women of the press who daily tore into the royal family, politicians and celebrities were not going to pull their punches with a vulnerable nobody like Garry Bennett if that was the price of getting a story. The Coroner said: "I think it is quite clear that he had come to realise he was really no match for the sort of pressure likely to be imposed upon him by [the press]".
The whole affair ended up being an exercise in futility, albeit one for which Dr Bennett paid with his life. Nothing in the church changed, save that Crockford's stopped publishing anonymous Prefaces.
May Dr Bennett rest in peace, wherever he is now.
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