The Bickersteth family has performed its Levi-like role in the Church of England for several generations, providing it with some of its best traditional pastors. Rectories, vicarages, deaneries, palaces have homed them and parish churches and cathedrals have long witnessed their work. And work it still is, as this autobiography of a 20th-century bishop proves, although the word in any put-upon or compulsive sense never seems to have entered his head. His chief motivation has been Christ’s brief instruction ‘Do this.’ John Bickersteth is candid, some might think to the point of naivety at times, and his book reads like an opened-up diary, a free view of himself in which he shows pleasure rather than vanity. He knows that he has had a good time. If any member of the Church of England wants to read a hands-on and wonderfully readable account of the manifold changes which have overtaken its classic structure in a single lifetime, then they need go no further than this buoyant confession.
A decade ago John Bickersteth, now late Bishop of Bath and Wells, edited one of the most moving accounts of life in the trenches, The Bickersteth Diaries, written by a military chaplain. They reflected a Church of England which would hardly be recognisable today, one which the war decimated and which had to be repaired. John Bickersteth was born into this faulty yet seemingly unchangeable structure soon after the war. It was the middle-class world of comparative poverty with servants and this straightforward account of it manages to surprise with its cold attics and Evensongs. Two contrasting lives of service ran side by side in the Canterbury house. At the Deanery George Bell was raising funds by the novel method of making donors ‘Friends of the Cathedral’.
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