SIXTY years ago, the Revd Jimmie Song was a pioneer, the first Chinese incumbent in the Church of England’s history. Today, Chinese-heritage clergy make up just 0.1 per cent of all stipendiary clergy in the Church of England. His story deserves to be better known.
Song’s was one of the most remarkable lives I encountered when researching my biography of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He was incumbent of St John’s, Woking, in the late 1970s, when the teenage Sarah Bowser (as she was then) was a member of the congregation and its lively youth ministry. It was a crucial period in her life, encompassing her Christian conversion in 1978, aged 16.
Song Guan Huat (his original Chinese name) was born in Singapore in 1932. His grandfather had immigrated to the British colony at the turn of the century from the city of Xiamen, in south-east China. The family spoke Hokkien dialect, and were devout Buddhists, attending the local temple several times a week and burning joss sticks in worship every day.
A happy childhood was shattered by the Second World War. Song’s father, a civil servant, died from a heart attack in September 1941, aged 50, three months before the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour and Malaya. Their home was destroyed in a Japanese air raid, and, in February 1942, the British army in Singapore capitulated.
Song’s first experience of Japanese brutality was being forced to watch the beheading of a Chinese man for theft, whose head was put on display as a warning. He witnessed torture and executions, saw men digging their own graves, and corpses floating in the sea. “The stink of the bodies was appalling,” he recalled in his unpublished memoir.
Song’s uncle and cousin were abducted by the invaders and never seen again, probably shot. His sisters, Song Kim Lian (Florence) and Song Kim Juan (Molly), cut their hair and disguised themselves as boys, to avoid being raped by the soldiers.
Their mother died in November 1942, aged 47, unable to obtain the vital supplies of insulin to combat her diabetes. Suddenly, Song found himself a homeless orphan, facing starvation. Food was so scarce that friends scavenged for snails from the trees. Parallel experiences in China are depicted in J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun (1984), which Steven Spielberg turned into a hit film.
IN ORDER to survive, Song’s only option, aged ten, was to join the Imperial Japanese Army as a boy soldier, swapping his rags for a khaki uniform and rifle. He loathed the work — he was forced to clean aeroplane engines all day in return for a cup of rice. He tried to sabotage the Zero fighter-bombers by placing sugar in the fuel tanks.
He quickly learnt rudimentary Japanese, and was conscripted by the thuggish paymaster, Sergeant Tojo, as an interpreter. Tojo had a side hustle, selling stolen rice and pork on the black market, and Song had to travel everywhere with him. They dodged ambushes by Communist guerrillas on the jungle roads, and were shot at by Japanese checkpoints.
Later, Song stressed that he “remained a patriotic Chinese, and knew the Japanese were the real enemy who had to be vanquished”, but, at the time, he had had to serve the oppressors to stay alive. He was deeply traumatised by these wartime experiences, feeling that his childhood was stolen away. As he later wrote: “I experienced things a child should never have seen which robbed me of my innocence.”
Song was an intelligent boy, and, when peace returned, he won a place at Raffles Institution, Singapore’s elite public school. He became a King’s Scout, and was sent in 1948 to the Pan-Pacific Scout Jamboree in Australia. His scoutmaster, Walter Steven, was a British customs officer who had been interred at Changi Prison, in Singapore, a notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. When Steven heard Song’s story, he promised to fund his further education at University High School, Melbourne.
Robert SongThe Revd Jimmie Song riding Jumbo the elephant during the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition
During five years in Australia, Song embraced western culture. He attended the symphony orchestra at Melbourne town hall, and enjoyed visits to the National Gallery of Victoria, which sparked a lifelong passion for art collecting. He taught himself Received Pronunciation, reducing his Singaporean accent.
At school, Song immersed himself in biographies of heroic Britons, which spurred his ambitions, seeking to imitate their values. One was the Antarctic explorer Edward Wilson, who froze to death alongside Captain Scott on their return from the South Pole in 1912. Wilson was courageous and popular, and Song wrote: “I decided I wanted to be like him. I had no father and wanted a role model.”
Song tried to discover the secret of Wilson’s life. After reading George Seaver’s The Faith of Edward Wilson (1948), he converted to Christianity. Song prayed: “I don’t know who you are, Jesus Christ, but if you can take me to God, can I get to know you?” At his baptism, he took a new Christian name, James, and was known thereafter as Jimmie.
Christianity attracted Song because it taught that God loved him unconditionally, a feeling he had never experienced before. “I felt at last that I belonged somewhere,” he remembered. He was filled with evangelistic zeal: “I wanted to share the experience I’d had of finding God through Jesus Christ.”
WHEN Song arrived in London in 1954, aged 22, his plans to train as a doctor were soon eclipsed by his passion for Christian mission. He joined St Paul’s, Onslow Square, an Evangelical congregation in Kensington, and went with a small team each Sunday to South Kensington Tube Station to invite passersby to church.
Song applied to the London College of Divinity, one of the Church of England’s oldest theological colleges, but they turned him down until he had learnt more about Christianity. He therefore enrolled with the Lee Abbey community in Devon for three months, working on a local farm, and spent a year at All Nations Bible College at Taplow, Buckinghamshire, studying alongside missionaries.
Eventually, the London College of Divinity accepted Song for ordination training in 1957, on the understanding that he would return to south-east Asia, not to a Church of England parish. He was one of the first Chinese ordinands to train in England. But Song’s intention “to return to the Far East and work among his own people”, as one London newspaper put it, evaporated when he met Shirley Tigg, a trainee architect. They discovered a common interest in art, music, and Christianity, and were soon married.
During his penultimate summer as an ordinand, in July 1959, Song’s next adventure was the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition, which captured the public imagination. For generations, historians had been intrigued by the story of Hannibal’s Carthaginian army’s crossing of the Alps with elephants during the Second Punic War in 218 BC.
Rather than make do with book theories, two young Cambridge graduates decided to retrace Hannibal’s steps, and recruited Song as the team’s official photographer. They borrowed a young Indian elephant, called Jumbo, from a zoo in Milan, and walked her across the Alps from France into Italy. Armed with three cameras — a Leica, an Agfa Silette, and a Ciné — Song recorded every step of the journey. The quest generated considerable media excitement, and a profile in Life magazine.
After ordination, Song served curacies at Christ Church, Virginia Water, where he took up golf, and at St Paul’s, Portman Square, where he was chaplain to Selfridges department store, on Oxford Street. In 1966, aged 34, he became vicar of Holy Trinity, Matlock Bath, a picturesque Derbyshire village, and was trumpeted by the Church Times as “the first Chinese to be appointed incumbent of a parish in England”.
The local press were fascinated by a former Buddhist ministering in the heart of rural Anglicanism. Some wondered whether their new vicar would be wearing Chinese “pigtails”. At the induction service, Geoffrey Allen, Bishop of Derby, told the congregation that “the Chinese were a cultured people long before the British”, and there was much that English parishioners could still learn from them. Racial prejudices clearly lay under the surface, but Song took them in his stride.
Song’s ministry in Derbyshire flourished, and, in 1976, he moved to a much larger congregation, St John’s, Woking, part of the Evangelical Bible-belt in the Surrey suburbs. There he was Sarah Bowser’s vicar for four years, until she moved to London to train as a nurse. It was an almost entirely white congregation, led by a Chinese immigrant, something that was still a novelty in the Church of England by the time Song retired in 1994.
Song’s traumatic childhood shaped his Christian leadership. He was known for his pastoral sympathy and kindness, born out of his experience of personal suffering. He also had a firm belief in the transformative power of Christian conversion. “Jesus is at the very heart of our message,” he insisted. “I like helping people to find Christ.”
But the trauma remained deep. Before his death in 2016, aged 84, Song stayed briefly in a Surrey care home. During a period of confusion, he imagined the nurses were Japanese prison guards, and suddenly stood bolt upright, declaring in a loud voice: “I am not Japanese, I am Chinese.”
Andrew Atherstone is Professor of Modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford, and author of Archbishop Sarah Mullally, published by Hodder & Stoughton