Dr Phillip Rice writes:

“IT’S forestry or nothing.” And it was forestry. This prescient remark from Sir Andreas Wittam Smith (Gazette, 5 December) was made to me in the margins of the committee overseeing the Church Growth Research Programme from 2011 to 2013.

Andreas was keen to improve the investment case thinking and practice in spending the Church Commissioners’ money. He chaired and brought a financial journalist training and editorial skill to the Spending Plans Task Group. The seminal report From Anecdote to Evidence, published in 2014, bore his mark of pushing through the ambition to be spending money to achieve growth, drawing up a background of good practice justifying expenditure, and demonstrating how best practice in social analysis could be applied. He wanted good arguments to help him as the First Church Commissioner. The fruits of this were seen in the succeeding years when he set the pattern that successful bids for strategic investment funds would have a strong research base.

Andreas should not be remembered solely for his disciplined spending of money, but also for his contribution to the step change in controls and his expertise in running a big investment fund, which generated the financial returns from the pot of funds controlled by the Commissioners. The words “It is forestry or nothing” he said to me at a crucial point in his post when he was repositioning the church-investment pot from a run-of-the-mill performance to a new asset class to invest in “forestry”.

In the next decade, the Commissioners’ funds performed exceptionally well (an £11.1-billion headline at end of 2024); this followed a decade in which the endowment had grown by about ten per cent annually. This is exceptional when viewed against the world standards. Another notable contribution that he made was to steer strongly the Commissioners’ funds away from being invested in euro banks.

It was a personal pleasure to observe him at work and his maturity and faith commitment in what he brought to the post.

Canon John Rankin writes: I grew up in the same town as Dame Patricia Routledge (Gazette, 21 November), where she was something of a legend and a person who quickly put you at ease. Throughout her life, she maintained a close link with Birkenhead.

Her brother, Graham, a barrister, was a friend of mine, and stood as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Birkenhead in the 1959 General Election. After his defeat, he felt a vocation to ordained ministry. He served his title in Stockport, was Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a Residentiary Canon of Peterborough and St Paul’s Cathedrals, and Chancellor of several dioceses.

During the middle years of Patricia’s career, Graham was something of a confidant and mentor to her. He would have been delighted by the way in which her career blossomed and she was known internationally for her character Hyacinth Bucket. Among her many friends was Frank Field, the former Labour MP for Birkenhead.