March 10th, 2020,
marks the centenary of the birth of my late father Arthur John Long. He died at the age
of 86 in December 2006, so sadly didn’t live to see his 100th
birthday. I am re-editing and re-posting this tribute on what would have been the eve of that birthday - a landmark worthy of some
reflection.
 |
| My father in 1983, at about the age I am now |
To the wider world, Arthur was a much
loved and respected elder statesman of the Unitarian movement, and a leading
expert on the history of liberal Christian theology, but to me and my brother
Chris, he was Dad. To my wife Sue and
Chris’s wife Michelle, he was a caring father-in-law Arthur and to his four grandchildren, Felicity, Nick, Rosie and
Natalie he was just Grandpa. However,
what struck me at the time of his death, when I read and heard public tributes
to him, is that unlike many people with a public persona, the public and the private man were no
different. And as the years roll on, I am increasingly aware of the extent to
which I inherited from him far more than a striking physical resemblance.
Born in 1920, Arthur was one of four
children of the Revd. Walter Long - my grandpa - himself an eminent Unitarian minister in
London, who was President of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free
Christian Churches in 1963. Walter was a teetotal, firebrand socialist nonconformist
of the old school, and having recently uncovered some hitherto forgotten documents
and archives relating to his life and work, I am even more struck by his work
and achievements. Walter was in effect a social worker in a dog collar, whose
work for the people, especially the children, who attended Bell Street Mission
in Marylebone, reflected his values and ideals. Chris and I knew him as a
cheery, benign old man, like a cliché grandad from a Ladybird book - he looked
about 90 when he was around 50 - but a glance at the press cuttings from his
life reveal a man of deep commitment to improving the lot of the poor through
putting Christian principles into action. Accounts of the holidays he and his
wife Amy ran for deprived London children at Bruce Cottage in Bognor Regis are
a joy to read.
Last year, it was a huge pleasure and
privilege to organise a family reunion to celebrate the centenary of Walter and
Amy’s marriage, at which we gathered virtually all their surviving descendants
and their families, including their surviving son, Peter. I wrote an account of
it here:
Arthur added to these qualities and
values which he inherited from his father the scholarly mind and conciliatory
instincts which made him a lifelong ecumenist, who strove throughout his long
and distinguished career to bridge the gap between Unitarianism’s more radical
tendencies and the mainstream Christian churches. The Unitarian Christian
Association is very much part of his legacy.
Here, briefly, are the factual
details of his life: Arthur was born in Loughborough, while his father was
Minister to that congregation, but he grew up in Wembley, living much of his
childhood in the shadow of the old Empire Stadium. I remember seeing those towering
white walls over the railway line which ran past the end of their garden. He
was the first of four children, with two younger brothers, Ronald and
Peter, and a younger sister, Joyce.
Arthur was educated at Wembley County
School and won a place at Exeter College, Oxford in the days when county
grammar school boys were still a rarity at Oxford Colleges. Although he himself
always admitted to having felt somewhat out of place at Oxford, he in fact
blazed a trail at Exeter College which was followed by his younger brother, and
then by his son (myself), granddaughter and two nephews. Few families can claim
such broad and prolonged association with a single college.
He trained for the Ministry at
Manchester (now Harris-Manchester) College, and took up a Hibbert Scholarship
at New College, Edinburgh, then served long and effective ministries in London
and Lancashire. His lengthy ministry at Unity Church, Bolton coincided with a
period of great social and economic upheaval and hardship in the Lancashire cotton
towns, but he kept the church there in its traditional place at the heart of
the community. In those days in industrial Lancashire, the local church of
whatever denomination was in effect the parish church to those who lived in its
shadow and that of the Lowryesque cotton mills. We lived our childhood in a
real-life Lowry painting.
The locals just thought of him as
“the Vicar”, and Chris and I were known as “the Vicar’s boys”, especially if we
did anything naughty - heinous crimes like riding a go-kart down the street in
a reckless manner.
He may not have been the Vicar as
such, but our childhood was awash with vicars, priests and nuns. Always an
enthusiast for ecumenism (an “ecumaniac”, to use a term coined at his funeral
by one of his protégés Revd. Jeff Gould), Arthur was for thirteen years Secretary of the Bolton
Council of Churches, in which role he enjoyed warm and active relationships
with all shades of the Christian community in Bolton. Our childhood memories
are of incessantly answering the door or the telephone to clergy of all shades
of Christianity, and it was only in later life that I came to realise how
unusual and precious such inter-denominational cooperation was.
Whilst ministering among the people
of a working class Lancashire community, presiding over a church which was very
much a social centre as well as a place of worship, he was like his father a
social worker in a very poor part of the town. He wrote and produced an annual
pantomime, starring members of the congregation - very much a highlight of the
social calendar, and loved organising social events. He once organised a
complete “mock wedding”, at which members of the congregation took all the
parts of a traditional wedding, took vows in church, then enjoyed a reception
and party in the Church Hall. He took the congregation away for a fun weekend
at Hucklow, and in every way cared deeply about their welfare. More than once,
he interrupted family holidays to return home to conduct a funeral of a loyal
member of the congregation.
Yet he was also an awesomely erudite
thinker and writer. Arthur developed a career in theological academia alongside
his day job in Bolton, firstly as a tutor, then as Principal of Unitarian
College, Manchester, a training college for the Unitarian Ministry. In this
role, which he took up in 1975, his ecumenical instincts again came to the fore
when he brought the College into the inter-denominational Northern Federation
for Training in Ministry in 1984. Through his broad outlook, he brought a
Unitarian perspective into the wider theological community, and was appointed
as an Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Religions and Theology at
Manchester University.
He enjoyed the academic phase of his
career every bit as much as he has enjoyed ministering to working class folk in
Bolton. He was honoured with the Presidency of the General Assembly of
Unitarian and Free Christian Churches in 1983, twenty years after his father
had held the same post, and in 1995, he was awarded a Doctor of Theology degree
by the United Protestant Theological Institute at Kolozsvar (Cluj) in Romania.
His warm relations with the
flourishing Unitarian communities of Eastern Europe predated the fall of
Communism, and were another manifestation of his outward-looking and tolerant
approach: he drove, would you
believe, to Romania in his little Vauxhall Chevette in 1979 for a conference
and preaching engagement. Lord knows what those surly border guards must have
thought of the Englishman in a dog collar driving through the then very real Iron
Curtain.
Arthur loved writing and public
speaking. In this respect I have followed in his footsteps. He was a prolific
writer of sermons and articles, whose style always mixed scholarly erudition
with down-to-earth wit. He was founding Editor of the Unitarian Christian Herald and a regular contributor to The Inquirer and Faith and Freedom. He continued to preach well into his eighties,
and conducted services until shortly before his death. As late as 2004, he
appeared twice in ITV’s now sadly defunct “My Favourite Hymns”, and took great
delight in the venue for filming being the magnificent St Walburga’s Roman Catholic
Church in Preston.
But what was he like as a private person,
as a family man? Well, as I said earlier, really no different! He was
absolutely dedicated to his family, and doted on his wife, our mother Margaret,
whom he met when she acted as temporary organist at Stamford Street Chapel,
where he was Minister. The story goes that she reluctantly agreed to stand in
for her then boyfriend, who was organist there, when he went on holiday. The
said boyfriend must have regretted that request!
Arthur was a real softie, a true
romantic - a quality I have singularly failed to inherit! He would write acrostic
love poems to his wife for every wedding anniversary and birthday. Margaret was
rather more cynical and hard-headed, and I never saw any reciprocal poetry! He
illustrated Christmas cakes with poetry and words from Scripture written in
icing, and his tastes in music, theatre and literature were as catholic as his
theology. Indeed, I always feel he was somewhat constrained by his wife’s
refined and narrow tastes in the arts, especially music. She abhorred popular
music in any form, which must have been difficult as that art form blossomed in
the swinging sixties. He secretly rather liked it, and I remember her horror
when he preached a sermon extolling the lyrics and music of Elvis Presley’s The Wonder of You when it topped the
singles chart in 1970. I remember him furtively asking me and Chris to take a
recording of it off the radio onto the reel-to-reel tape recorder that he had
bought for use in church.
So perhaps it is fitting that I
conclude with some words not from the Scriptures, not from one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets, but from David Gates, of the 70s soft-rock band Bread. His song Everything I Own is a lament for his
father, who died young, but it has always spoken to me about Arthur’s paternal
love which was so closely aligned to his love and concern for those to whom he
ministered:
You taught me how to love
What it's of, what it's of
You never said too much
But still you showed the way
And I knew from watching you.
God bless him.
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