Uncommon Partners: The Winchester College Mission and
Portsmouth
Paul de N. Lucas and Richard Eckersley
Paul de N. Lucas £14.95 (plus £2.50
p&p)*
(978-0-9525270-2-2)
TO STUDENTS of Victorian church history, the Winchester College
Mission is associated primarily with the ministry of Robert Dolling
at St Agatha's, Landport, from 1885 to 1896 - a ministry
immortalised in Dolling's Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum.
He was one of the "Reverend Rebels" who crossed swords with
episcopal authority and whose exploits I described in my book of
that title, published in 1993. It is, therefore, surprising that
Dolling's work should have been relegated to an appendix in the
book under review rather than to an invigorating opening
chapter.
Although the Lucas/Eckersley book claims to be a history of the
Winchester College link with Portsmouth, it concentrates on the
period 1908 to 1924, when the missioner was Bertie Lucas ("Lucky
Lucas"), who worked in the district of Rudmore. The pre-Dolling
history is assigned to a second appendix by Lady Laura Ridding,
whose husband was Headmaster of Winchester at the time the mission
was established. Its later history is summarised in a few pages
after Lucas's departure in 1924. The brevity of the account of his
successors - Guy Hanbury and Norman Coley ("Holy Coley") - is
ascribed to inadequate sources of information.
Lucas was an Oxford college chaplain when he moved to Rudmore;
and, from the accounts given in the Winchester College magazine and
in letters to his brothers, he appears to have made a success of
his new job - though not perhaps to quite the same extent as
Dolling. He certainly succeeded in getting to know the senior boys,
inviting them down to Portsmouth for the weekend and enlisting
their support in innumerable ways. The result was to draw the
school as a whole into understanding of, and sympathy with,
Rudmore's parishioners. Of course, class differences were never
glossed over. At one point, we find Lucas referring to the ways in
which "the feelings and opinions of the lower classes differ from
those of our own."
The character of Rudmore changed over the years. Its capacious
church was built only at the beginning of the First World War, was
hit by incendiary bombs in the Second, and was restored and
rededicated in 1951. Two years after Coley's retirement in 1959,
the church was closed after the demolition of many houses in the
parish to clear the decks for a motorway and ferry-port. The
mission was transferred to a large new housing estate on the
outskirts of Portsmouth.
With its vivid contemporary descriptions, this book is very much
a period piece. Its format is unusual, with two columns of print to
a page. The book has plenty of illustrations, but would have been
improved by being split into chapters and given an index. Moreover,
with the earlier years consigned to appendices, the later years
dismissed in brief summaries, and only the Lucas ministry covered
in any detail, it cannot really be described as a history of the
Winchester College Mission. That is a task awaiting some future
historian.
Dr Palmer is a former editor of the Church
Times.
*This title is available from the publisher, Paul de N.
Lucas, 11 Fisherton Island, Salisbury SP2 7TG; email
plucas@mybroadbandmail.com.