The Rt Revd Graham James writes:

WILLIAM IND (known as Bill to everyone), who died on 22 April, was born on 26 March 1942. His father was a soldier in the First World War, and this family military background enabled Bill to gain a scholarship to the Duke of York’s Royal Military School at Dover. Arriving as a boarder when only nine, he learned how to live in institutions without allowing his individualism to be crushed. He became the school cricket captain (he was a crafty leg-spin bowler) and played rugby, too, as a chunky scrum half.

The influence of his school chaplain was considerable, and his vocation to the priesthood developed during his teens. While reading English and history at Leeds, he lived in the Hostel of the Resurrection, run by the Mirfield Fathers, before transferring to Mirfield itself for his theological training. An exact contemporary was John Flack, later Bishop of Huntingdon, and they became lifelong friends, known in the college as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”.

Bill met Frances Bramald while in Leeds. She trained as a teacher and went to West Africa for a couple of years before returning to London and marrying Bill, who was by then one of five curates at St Dunstan’s, Feltham. At Feltham, after morning prayer and the eucharist each day, Bill’s training incumbent, John Perry, took his curates, all suitably dressed in cassocks, to roam Feltham High Street. Theirs was a visible pastoral presence. Wherever Bill ministered thereafter, he was always visible, giving priority to pastoral engagement with “all sorts and conditions”.

After a brief period at St Joseph the Worker, Northolt, Bill and Frances moved to Basingstoke. As Team Vicar responsible for the Popley district, Bill had no church building. The Anglican congregation was given hospitality by the local Roman Catholics before St Gabriel’s Church was built in 1991. Bill and Frances lived in one of the larger council houses, and they became immersed in the lives of those around them, along with their three sons, Michael, Martin, and Philip.

Various other ministries came Bill’s way, and he was never good at saying “no”. Along with being a Team Vicar, Bill became the Director of Ordinands for the diocese of Winchester as well as Vice-Principal of the Aston Training Scheme, which provided foundational training before candidates went to theological colleges. Bill thought that his diocesan bishop, John V. Taylor, was an inspiration. The admiration was mutual.

Few team vicars move directly to the episcopate, but in 1987 Bill received an invitation to be Bishop of Grantham. I first met Bill, Frances, and the family when, in my early months as chaplain to Archbishop Robert Runcie, I looked after the arrangements for their overnight stay at Lambeth Palace before Bill’s consecration.

Rural Lincolnshire was a new experience, but Bill loved the characters he met in the parishes, and on one occasion, arriving unrecognised and unusually early for a service, he was asked to move chairs “because the Bishop was coming”. He did so before revealing himself, and, of course, won hearts as a result. The lady who asked for his help said in her defence, “You don’t look like a bishop from behind.”

A decade in Grantham was followed by 11 years as Bishop of Truro. Bill was loved throughout Cornwall, especially by lay people within and beyond the Church, who appreciated his unforced delight in all things Cornish. If bishops of Bill’s generation were expected to be more bureaucratic and managerial, Bill failed to get the memo. It wasn’t that he had no strategy, but it was realised more in engagement and encounter than in policy papers. Nowhere was this better reflected than in the two BBC series, A Seaside Parish and An Island Parish, about daily life in the Boscastle group of parishes and the Isles of Scilly respectively.

Bill featured strongly in the series on the Scillies, being entirely himself on camera. His unfailing interest in the people he met, along with his sense of humour, was compelling. He was awarded the Trelawny Plate in 2007 “for his outstanding contribution to Cornish life”.

He inherited me as his suffragan bishop before I moved to Norwich. We travelled to say the morning office with each other regularly, a reminder of the firm disciplines that Bill followed in his devotional life. He was spiritually grounded in the Catholic tradition without ever being fussy leading worship. His mind was full of curiosity, and he was always sharing what he had just discovered. He knew a lot about wild orchids and birds. He had a wide hinterland. He never lost his fascination for God, as his witty and yet serious sermons illustrated; for he saw God everywhere.

Bill was excited by language and used words creatively, which is why it was so tragic that he could not express his thoughts clearly in recent years, owing to dementia. In retirement in Melksham, Bill and Frances made new friends, and he was well cared for in his final weeks and months, dying peacefully on 22 April. I have noticed since his death how frequently Cornish people smile with gratitude when they speak of Bill Ind. May he find rest and joy in eternal life.