Canon Nicholas Cranfield writes:
RICHARD HARRIES, who died on 29 April, at the age of 89, was elected the 42nd Bishop of Oxford in May 1987, the only Dean of King’s College, London, to be raised to the purple while in office. He entered the House of Lords in 1993 a year after his diocese marked its 450th anniversary with a royal visit, sitting until his retirement at his 70th birthday (2 June 2006).
Within a month, he returned, gazetted as Baron Harries of Pentregarth. Rid of the rochet and chimere, the Parliamentary robes beloved by some Lords Spiritual, he cut a senatorial figure on the crossbenches, making loyal and lasting friendships across the House.
As a diocesan bishop, he tried to spend one day a week in the Lords, and he was grateful to learn that his illustrious 19th-century predecessor Samuel Wilberforce kept a diary recording how many days in any one year he had worked in the diocese, how many he had spent outside his see on diocesan business, and how many days he had spent on government business.
From Cuddesdon, Wilberforce would take a pony and trap to the nearby station at Wheatley to reach London for breakfast, returning that same evening. Bishop Harries had the benefit of a car, and in retirement, when he would often sit four days a week, he took London buses from Barnes to Westminster.
Lord Hailsham might have observed that “Bishops blow in, blow off, and blow out again,” but reckoned without the dedication that Harries brought to being a working peer. He leaves behind an impressive voting record and valuable speeches. Until the last few months, he attended assiduously, debating the assisted-dying Bill.
He was chair of the Lords’ Select Committee on stem-cell research, which led to his serving on the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, and he sat under Lord Wakeham on the Royal Commission for the reform of the Lords. He was frustrated that the unwritten protocol of “One in, two out” had proved inoperable, given the increased number of peerages doled out by recent Prime Ministers.
Beyond the Lords, his voice, with its rich sonorities, was often heard on the BBC. He contributed to Thought for the Day (originally Prayer for the Day) from its inception in 1972, taking advantage of a larger auditory than any church or cathedral could offer. Providing a moral commentary on topical issues was serious.
During one diocesan clergy conference at Swanwick, he had an early-morning car fetch him to the BBC studios at Derby. The organising team listened to the broadcast to hear how discussions from the staff meeting the previous day had borne fruit. At his return, Bishop Richard found that the daily Conference newspaper was supplemented with a spoof article, “Second-hand Thoughts for the Day”.
He was not pleased. Whether he ever knew that a priest whom he later appointed as one of his suffragans had been behind this jest is not known.
Bishop Richard was not instinctively at ease with small talk (Sandhurst and Selwyn may have seen to that). On one occasion, after he had been introduced to a lady at a reception after a licensing, conversation guttered to a halt. Breaking the silence, he asked, ‘Do you ever listen to Thought for the Day?” “Oh, yes,” she replied brightly. “But my son said I should not talk about that.” He turned and left her alone with her glass of wine.
Richard Harries as a Junior Under Officer at Sandhurst in 1955
He said: “I regard myself as a Christian by religion, Welsh by nationality, British by citizenship, and European by culture.” By his own admission, he stumbled into Christianity as an adult; school and the Army had been largely free of churchgoing. and he set about learning Welsh only halfway through his ninth decade. His father had served in the British Army, in Singapore and in Washington, DC, and had ended up as Commandant of the Signals Training Brigade at Catterick.
Encountering Europe came from driving across the Continent with friends in university long vacations. He and Jo drove down to Greece for their honeymoon in 1963, and he said later that of all the places that he had been privileged to visit, whether with the Interparliamentary Union or lecturing for Swan Hellenic or at foreign universities, he would most want to return to Greece and its islands.
As a junior officer in the Royal Signals, he had planned to go on to Cambridge to read Engineering. He forfeited that place when he was accepted for ordination training and had to find a college to study theology. Selwyn College, where a former chaplain, Owen Chadwick, from his old school (Wellington) was the Master, took him. Years later, he was put up as an honorary Fellow.
He might have done rather better in his Finals, obtaining “only a dull 2. II”, which would have raised questions for his scholarship at McGill University, but he had taken a Girton medical student, Josephine Bottomley, to a college ball. They were engaged within weeks and married two years later, after his ordination training at Cuddesdon, under the new Principal, Robert Runcie. Life would not be in Canada.
He served his title at St John’s, Hampstead, while his wife completed her medical training at the Whittington. After three years, he combined his curacy with a chaplaincy at Westfield College, where he began to organise Marxist-Christian Dialogues to try to engage students with the issues of the day. Although he did not much enjoy Westfield, he had found an interest in teaching.
Instead of going to a second curacy, he applied for a tutor’s post at Wells Theological College. With his young family (Mark was born in 1966, Clare in 1969), he moved to Somerset in 1969 and lectured on doctrine and ethics. He helped to devise a new curriculum for teaching ethics to ordinands. In 1971, he became the first Warden of the amalgamated theological college of Salisbury and Wells, but he left soon after to return as a parish priest to the diocese of London, at the age of 36.
His ministry at All Saints’, Fulham, was rewarding, although he inherited a divided PCC. David Wilson (later Lord Wilson of Tillyorn) reckoned that being Governor of Hong Kong (1987-92) was a “doddle” after surviving the gun battles in that PCC. Richard came through nine years with new liturgies, small groups flourishing, and a parish more broadly capable of ministering to young professional families.
He applied to be Dean of King’s, London, in succession to Professor Ulrich Simon and found himself with two full-time secretaries. This allowed him to spend time studying and writing more than many other senior posts could sustain, and books, about ethics and the appreciation of art and poetry within a Christian framework, ensued, as well as a long association with the Church Times, whose readers initially became familiar with him through a series of weekly devotional columns. He was at pains to make himself widely understood, for which his years as a broadcaster stood him in good stead. He had a knack for finding out, and encouraging, new and interesting artists.
Whether tackling issues raised by the nuclear-arms race, the ethical investment of charitable funds, or the inequalities faced by women and then by gay clergy in the Church of England, he played hard on a field that was by no means level. His seeming confidence was rarely brooked. Although he did not always win the argument (as in the legal case that he was he was involved in against the Church Commissioners over ethical investment), he ensured that later discussions would take attention of the shift that he had mooted.
Richard HarriesThe young Richard Harries ice-skaing with his mother and brother Charles
In 1982, he worried whether nuclear weapons could be used in a way that could be regarded as both discriminate and proportionate. Forty years later, he thought the British Government misguided in increasing the number of nuclear warheads at the expense of recognising that cyber warfare now posed the more immediate threat.
As an early advocate of the ordination of women, he came late to see that gay clergy were also discriminated against. Although he chaired the commission that produced the study document Issues in Human Sexuality, he never expected that it should set doctrinal and disciplinary standards. After the profound divisions of the Lambeth Conference in 1988, this should have been obvious to him from the start, but he still worked within the binary world-view of “Us” and “Them” which cannot embrace the apologetic “I don’t mean people like you.”
Without a particular Damascene conversion, he came to see where issues of justice should have first led his thinking, thanks to the ministries of his then chaplain and of junior clergy in his diocese who were willing to tell their own stories; but he burned his fingers badly over the nomination of the Revd Dr Jeffrey John to be his suffragan bishop in 2003. If he sat uncomfortably as a guest at the civil partnership of a former priest of his making to his male partner in the House of Commons in 2010, he said that it was only because he did not know many people there in the Speaker’s Lodgings.
Most recently in this paper, he questioned whether life was worth prolonging (Analysis, 23 January 2026), and, in his powerful theological reflection, he was reminded of a passage from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that might serve for us all as we pause in thankfulness: “At the still point of the turning world”.
He was a devoted husband and father and was never happier than when talking about Wales and his grandchildren. May he rest in peace.