Canon Christopher Hall writes:

CANON Brian Cordingley (Gazette, 17 September) had been a member of the Sheffield Industrial Mission for only a year when, in 1960, a group of steelworkers gave up their evening to be at one of his meetings. In a city-centre pub, they gathered to learn about incarnation using the opening chapter of St John’s Gospel. (A shop steward apologised that he had left his teeth at home; he had taken them out, put them down, and they had “kept jabbering”.) That illustrates the take-up of the Industrial Mission’s shop-floor ministry in which Brian played his part. A few years later, a Firth Browns shop steward, who kept in touch with me, wrote that the biggest disappointment of his life was the demise of the Sheffield Industrial Mission — not its failure, but the new diocesan’s change of policy. In 1976, at an international consultation at the Bossey Ecumenical Institute near Geneva, I was asked where I was from: “Manchester.” “Ah, Manchester! The city of Brian Cordingley!”

Ian Downing writes:

MANY thanks to the Rt Revd Stephen Lowe, a former Archdeacon of Sheffield, for an excellent obituary for Bishop David Lunn (Gazette, 24 September). I first met Bishop Lunn at his consecration at York Minster, on 25 January 1980, and still look at the photo of my welcoming him to the diocese. Bishop David had a gift of finding priests with certain gifts and placing them in the right parish. Every year, he led a pilgrimage by charter train to places such as Jarrow, Lindisfarne, St Albans, and Canterbury. Once we were having a picnic in the grounds in Canterbury, when the fire brigade arrived, owing to the candles. Bishop David’s comment: “That ruins me out of Archbishop” — such was his humour.