SCM Press £19.99
978-1-85311-756-5
Church Times Bookshop £18
“METHODISM’S most famous daughter” is how the blurb describes the author of this autobiography, Pauline Webb. After 230 pages of breathless activity, sermons preached, conferences and councils attended, programmes promoted, famous people met, and broadcasts made, one is hard pressed to deny it. If Methodism had somewhere a more famous daughter, she would surely have died of exhaustion.
Autobiography is a strange art, and most people get only one go at it. What Pauline Webb offers, from a life crammed with activity and event, falls commendably between a diary of people and places, and a personal memoir. There are, perhaps, too many names and places to please general readers; but she also offers them intriguing insights into the character and personality of a remarkable woman.
An Evangelical conversion that she underwent while at King’s College, London, established a bedrock of faith for the rest of her life. One might say that she had three conversions: to Christ, to the Church (in the broadest sense), and to the world.
She lists four themes that have shaped her life and ministry, and to which she devoted her enormous gifts of eloquence, enthusiasm, and energy. The first was poverty, which she saw in Africa, India, and Burma in her days on the staff of the Methodist Missionary Society. The second was apartheid, which stirred her to anger from the first time she encountered it in South Africa — she was once expelled from the country as persona non grata. The third was the position of women in the Church, and in life in general.
Her fourth theme is church unity, that great cause of the last decades of the 20th century. Pauline Webb writes with such enthusiasm about WCC Conferences — “Up-psala ahoy!” — that one wonders whether she had some unique inoculation against boredom and scepticism.
In her fifties she found a new area of work in broadcasting, as the organiser of religious broadcasting on the BBC World Service. Those of us who were her colleagues were astonished at the speed with which she picked up the arcane skills of radio production. She brought to the airwaves for the first time a number of distinguished broadcasters — people such as Rabbi Hugo Gryn and the Sikh journalist Indarjit Singh. She also became a consummate broadcaster herself, being for many years a regular contributor to Pause for Thought on Radio 2 and Thought for the Day on Radio 4.
Now an octogenarian, she completes her story with a touching chapter on “the departure lounge”. It’s hard to think of this gifted woman taking her ease and simply waiting for her “flight” to be called. I hope the other passengers don’t expect a quiet journey.
The Revd David Winter is a retired cleric in the diocese of Oxford.
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